Tag: education

Put off the career, girls

Stickwick lays the smack down with all the doctoral authority that only a female physics PhD can wield:

I am a highly intellectual woman with a successful professional career, and I realize now what a mistake I’ve made by not settling down and having children early. I married 12 years ago, but put off having children in order to finish graduate school and establish my scientific career. Last December, at the age of 42, I had a baby daughter. I realize now that this would’ve been MUCH easier 10 or 20 years ago. It’s not only a struggle to care for a newborn at my age, but making the sudden shift from a woman who has, for decades, been very busy with intellectual pursuits and relatively unencumbered by responsibility to a stay-at-home mom has been unexpectedly difficult.

Read the rest at Alpha Game. However, I think she seriously underrates her intellectual activities as a stay-at-home mother, as will become readily apparent in a few months.

Solving the teacher problem

Dave Eggers has the solution: pay them more!

McKinsey polled 900 top-tier American college students and found that 68 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $65,000 and rose to a minimum of $150,000. Could we do this? If we’re committed to “winning the future,” we should. If any administration is capable of tackling this, it’s the current one. President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan understand the centrality of teachers and have said that improving our education system begins and ends with great teachers. But world-class education costs money.

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Well, I can trump Mr. Eggers’s brilliant plan. I’ll bet 100 percent would consider teaching if salaries started at $1 million and rose to a minimum of $1.5 million.As for how we’ll pay for it, the answer is obvious: we’ll find a way!  Translation: borrow the money and pay it back with all the new wealth generated by the taxes paid by a much better-educated generation of public school students.

Note that this brilliant plan, which ignores a few small things such as supply and demand, as well as the ramifications of debt, is the product of the founders of 826 tutoring centers. One can only presume that the tutoring centers are sponsored by Brawndo, because it’s got electrolytes that students need.

It’s fascinating that Eggers and company look at the global test results and fail to observe one more thing that Finland, Singapore, and Korea all have in common: very few Africans and Hispanics. That may not have much impact on teacher retention, but I’m guessing it has more than a little to do with the USA’s lower global ranking with regards to student performance.

Pretending to teach, pretending to learn

Jerry Pournelle reflects on the failure of the California State College system:

Back about 1970 I was involved with the Council that was to draw up
the Master Plan for the University of California system. The program was
very structured: the University System would have a limited number of
campuses, and would do all the graduate school education. There would be
a limited number of undergraduates at each of those campuses, and they
would be the elite applicants. Tuition would be low for state residents,
and very high for out of state and foreign students. This would be the
University system, and it would be for the best and the brightest.
Salaries would be high for an elite faculty.

In addition, there would be the California State Colleges, which
would not be permitted to award graduate degrees. They would do
undergraduate education, and send their best and brightest to compete
for places in the University system graduate schools. Their primary
purpose was teaching, and it was on their ability to teach that faculty
members would be chosen and retained: no publish or perish, because
their purpose was to teach, not to do “research”. They were not to
discover knowledge, but to convey it to most of the undergraduates in
the state. A small number would go to the University undergraduate
system, but about 90% of all undergraduates enrolled in state higher
education would be in the California State Colleges. This would include
colleges of education and teacher. Again the focus would not be on
‘research’ or anything else other than producing great teachers for the
California schools.

Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the
California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into
universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate
schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it;
and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate
copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order
to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least
to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges
became California State Universities, their commitment to actual
undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate
schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had
been designed to be very low, began to climb.

Everyone always wants elite status without being required to provide elite performance or assume elite responsibility. Unless your system specifically accounts for and prepares for the inevitable push to degrade status, it is doomed to fall in precisely the same way the California State College system did.

The irony, of course, is that by democratizing the elite status, it is destroyed. That is why university degrees, and increasingly, advanced degrees, are literally worthless these days. Once everyone has the credential, it ceases to mean anything anymore.

Big predators devouring the little ones

I simply can’t find it in my heart to feel any sympathy for the larval lawyers who are belatedly discovering that they, and not the common people upon whom they thought to feed parasitically, are the prey:

Law schools will lie to you. Do not believe a word that comes from law schools, law deans, or law professors. They are salesmen and they want you to hand them $200,000 in non-dischargeable law school loans. That’s all they are interested in. They will tell you about a glorious career that awaits you. They will tell you lawyers are in demand and new technology will open the gates for prosperous new practice areas (3d printing, drones, etc.).

It’s all a bunch of hogwash. They will tell you that society needs lawyers and tell you stories about saving the poor and doing public interest work. This is also hogwash. Because public interest jobs are eligible for a 10-year government repayment plan, the jobs have become intensely competitive – as have JAG jobs [jobs in the Army]. You will compete against students from top 5 schools for these jobs and unless you go to a top 5 school, it’s going to be difficult to land these jobs. The main point to take away is to appreciate the reality that law schools are trying to sell you a product (the law degree). Law degrees are not in demand in the market so they’re trying new tricks to lure in more consumers….

I think most people are hapless fools to attend law school today, except in extremely narrow circumstances…. If you go to law school, it’s not a remote possibility that you’ll end up
back with your parents, in huge debt, desperately searching for work,
and angry at yourself for wearing horse blinders and ignoring this
information.

Then again, this is merely a window into the much larger college education scam, as Karl Denninger notes a recent report from the St. Louis Fed:

If you elect to go to college there is only a one in four chance that (1) you will finish and (2) you will work in a job that actually renumerates you for having done so. In other words there is a three in four chance that you’d be better off not having gone to college at all, because (1) your earnings power is not enhanced by having attended and (2) you wouldn’t have the debt — or spent the funds — to go.

What this paper actually appears to argue is that a huge percentage — three in four — of people who go to college shouldn’t, because they don’t get economic benefit from doing so.  That the outcome for someone who doesn’t have a college degree is on-balance worse than for someone who does isn’t the question.  We know that to be true and it’s always been true.  The question is what are the money odds of going to school in improvement of your life.  That’s all that matters; potential outcome is immaterial if you don’t achieve it just as is the fact that you can win the lottery does not mean that, on a money odds basis, you should buy a ticket!

As such if you’re contemplating as a young person whether or not to go to college the decision point isn’t whether you will earn more money with a degree than not.  You will; that is a known factor.

Instead you need to make an honest personal assessment of both the odds you will complete the course of study you undertake and the odds of finding employment that uses that course of study and degree to enhance your earnings power.

Everyone thinks that they can beat the odds. Because Most People Are Idiots. The other problem is that even for the winners, college can come at a tremendous opportunity cost. Suppose Bill Gates had finished his degree at Harvard instead of starting Microsoft? That’s essentially the mistake I made; I went back to school for three semesters instead of selling my working stereo 16-channel 44Khz sound board at a time when Ad Lib was the dominant technology. By the time I finished, the engineer was gone and the VP of engineering wouldn’t give me any of the layout engineer’s time required to put it into production. But hey, they managed to crank out one trivial modification to their existing graphics cards after another instead! So I started a band….

Now, there are no guarantees. Maybe my sound board would have flopped. And even if it hadn’t, the sound board company that exploded onto the scene two years later with a board inferior to the one I’d had built managed to collapse entirely by 1995. On the other hand, it’s hard to argue that my expensive degrees were worth it. After all, my BS in Economics and BA in East Asian Studies don’t even permit me to win Internet arguments because bachelor’s degree in Philosophy of Language.

The cost of superficial metrics

It’s no wonder that academia has been on the intellectual decline for decades. Publish or perish is a ludicrous way to judge people, especially when there is absolutely no quality control for publishing other than a mutual back-scratching system.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Furthermore, think about what sort of people are perfectly happy to spend their time jumping through stupid, irrelevant hoops in the place of doing anything substantial.  Credentialism and monolithic left-wing bias are not the only problems plaguing the intellectual world today.

On the other hand, Higgs does sound rather like a lazy, nasty old man, so perhaps getting rid of him after he published in 1964 paper wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

Wine and arrogance stop ADHD

It would appear that my descendants will never suffer from ADHD:

In the United States, at least 9% of school-aged children have been diagnosed with ADHD, and are taking pharmaceutical medications. In France, the percentage of kids diagnosed and medicated for ADHD is less than .5%. How come the epidemic of ADHD—which has become firmly established in the United States—has almost completely passed over children in France?

Is ADHD a biological-neurological disorder? Surprisingly, the answer to this question depends on whether you live in France or in the United States. In the United States, child psychiatrists consider ADHD to be a biological disorder with biological causes. The preferred treatment is also biological–psycho stimulant medications such as Ritalin and Adderall.

French child psychiatrists, on the other hand, view ADHD as a medical condition that has psycho-social and situational causes. Instead of treating children’s focusing and behavioral problems with drugs, French doctors prefer to look for the underlying issue that is causing the child distress—not in the child’s brain but in the child’s social context. They then choose to treat the underlying social context problem with psychotherapy or family counseling. This is a very different way of seeing things from the American tendency to attribute all symptoms to a biological dysfunction such as a chemical imbalance in the child’s brain.

I suspect that another major difference is that the European schools are far less feminized than the American schools.  Most “ADHD” is little more than mothers and female teachers drugging little boys due to their inability to behave like little girls.

It’s not so much that the French schools are doing it right as the American schools are at war with human nature and the male sex. The lesson, as always, is this: sending children to a public school in America is child abuse.

Karl Denninger notes that all this drugging of young boys comes at a very real price to society as well: “The problem with our approach is that it not only doesn’t work it creates monsters.  Yes, statistically, it doesn’t create very many monsters.  But it does create some of
them and in fact the clinical trial data discloses quite-clearly that
these risks and their percentage of outcome numbers are known.”

Of course, from the perspective of society’s would-be masters, this is a bonus. Not only are the troublemakers turned into zombies, but the occasional pharma-psychological mishap creates political pressure for gun control. If they’re willing to see more than 9 percent of the school population chemically lobotomized, they’re obviously not going to lose any sleep over a much smaller number of cherubic kindergarteners or cheerleaders being gunned down.

Explaining the college bubble

Richard Cantillon explains some of the effects of the college bubble in An Essay on Economic Theory… in 1730.

The Labor of the Plowman is of Less Value than that of the Artisan

A LABORER’S SON, AT SEVEN to twelve years of age, begins to help his father either in keeping the herds, digging the ground, or in other sorts of country labor that require no art or skill.

If his father has him taught a trade, he loses his assistance during the time of his apprenticeship and is obligated to clothe him and to pay the expenses of his apprenticeship for many years. The son is thus dependent on his father and his labor brings in no advantage for several years. The [working] life of man is estimated at only 10 or 12 years, and as several are lost in learning a trade, most of which in England require seven years of apprenticeship, a plowman would never be willing to have a trade taught to his son if the artisans did not earn more than the plowmen.

Therefore, those who employ artisans or professionals must pay for their labor at a higher rate than for that of a plowman or common laborer. Their labor will necessarily be expensive in proportion to the time lost in learning the trade, and the cost and risk incurred in becoming proficient.

The professionals themselves do not make all their children learn their own trade: there would be too many of them for the needs of a city or a state and many would not find enough work. However, the work is naturally better paid than that of plowmen.

The key is in the second to last sentence. The problem that the USA and many other countries are facing is that they have encouraged too many young men, and far too many young women, to pursue college degrees, so there is now a massive surplus of degree-holders for the needs of the various nations where academic credentials have been subsidized and fetishized.

In a free and sustainable economy, the number of college students would be significantly reduced due to the combination of the cost and opportunity cost of a college education. But because demand has been artificially inflated by student loans, government grants, and the willingness of parents to go into debt on behalf of their children, the level of current malinvestment  in college education is extraordinarily high. The fact that student loan debt can no longer be legally discharged was the first indication that the education bubble had reached its terminal point of expansion.

Longer lifespans and longer working lives justify spending more time and money in acquiring professional skills than in Cantillon’s day, but not indefinite amounts of either. And unless the student acquires skills that increase the value of his labor during that time, the entire process is a waste of both.

The irony is that the average college student is probably less valuable than the unskilled plowman now, because while he still lacks any useful skills, he also is unwilling to work hard at anything he is actually capable of doing.

UPDATE: “In 2008 there was $730 billion of student loan debt outstanding, of
which the Federal government was responsible for $120 billion. Five
short years later there is $1.2 trillion of student loan debt outstanding
and the Federal government (aka YOU the taxpayer) is responsible for
$716 billion. Using my top notch math skills, I’ve determined that
student loan debt has risen by $470 billion, while Federal government
issuance of student loan debt has expanded by $600 billion.”

Women Ruin Everything: schoolboy edition

Fred Reed explains why women need to be removed from the business of publicly schooling boys and education should be segregated on the basis of sex:

The thrust of current social propaganda is that the sexes are identical in all important respects. They are not. The differences are great. It is time we stopped pretending otherwise.

First: By their nature, females are far more interested in social relationships than in academic substance. If you are a man, ask yourself how often you have serious intellectual discussions of politics, science, history, or society with women as compared to men. Seldom. Degrees and exceptions, yes. Still, seldom.

Second: Women are totalitarian. Men are happy to let boys be boys and girls be girls. Women want all children to be girls. In school this means emphasizing diligence—neat homework done on time, no matter how silly or academically vacuous—over performance, meaning material learned. Women favor docility, orderliness, cooperation in groups, not making waves, niceness and comity. For boys this is asphyxiating.

Third: Women prefer security to freedom, males freedom to security. In politics, this has ominous implications for civil liberties. In the schools this means that wrestling and dodge ball are violence, that tag might lead to a fall and scraped knees, that a little boy who draws a soldier with a rifle is a dangerous psychopath in the making. This is hysteria.

Fourth: “Therapy.” This disguised witchcraft is very much a subset of the female fascination with emotional relations. It allows them to talk endlessly about their feelings. Men would rather be crucified. Thus everything becomes a “disorder.” Among these absurdities are things ilke Intermittent Explosive Disorder (appropriately, IED), and Temper Irregulation Disorder. These disorders have only been discovered since women took over the schools….

Fifth: In the United States, women simply dislike men. Saying this causes eruptions of denials. If you believe these, I´d like you to meet my friend Daisy Lou the Tooth Fairy. Check the ranting of feminists, the endless portrayal on television of men as fools and swine, the punitive political correctness and the silly anti-rape fantasies on campus.

In the schools this hostility takes the form of the passive aggression behind the predatory niceness. “We´re boring him to death, keeping him miseable, and sending him for psychiatric reprogramming because we care so much about him.” Uh, yeah.

Now, I do believe women can effectively educate boys in one particular circumstance, which is homeschooling. A mother has a very different relationship with her son than a random 30 year-old woman who wants nothing more than for him to sit there in silence not disturbing her for 6 hours every day. I would personally favor a Federal ban on public education and tearing down the school buildings. But in the meantime, Fred’s recommendation is a rational step in the right direction.

The soft tyranny of the feminized public schools will come to an end sooner or later. And the sooner, the better. As for the lack of male teachers, men would be a lot more interested in teaching boys if they didn’t have to put up with a bureaucratic system that is built around union benefits, teaching credentials and insane theories of education that can’t match the results of methods that were used more than 2,400 years ago.

Mailvox: the wages of public school

MY writes about the problems her family is having with her niece:

I’m writing this on behalf of my sister, whom I’m very close to.  I have a niece who is giving her parents a great deal of grief lately. I debated writing this but I don’t think we could get a perspective like yours from anywhere else, if you would be so kind. X is 13 and on a fast track to making some very bad choices. She is very dependent on her friends and bends to peer pressure to a ridiculous degree. She does not socialize with her siblings unless forced to and is rude and distant.

A few weeks ago her dad asked to look through her iPad, something they randomly do from time to time. X refused and ran out of the room with it. When they finally got it from her my sister says she couldn’t figure out why X wanted to hide it as there was nothing incriminating on it. I told her I thought she erased things. We know this to be true now.

As punishment her parents took the iPad away. They caught X sneaking into their room at 3am, stealing it back. She is now indefinitely banned from her iPad.

A few nights ago my sister noticed her phone missing. On a hunch she decided to check X’s room after X fell asleep. She found the phone and a series of texts from a instant messenger site on it. The texts were to a couple people. One was a boy and of course, the text had a vulgar sexual nature to them. The boy was asking her if she twerked and X was flirting back with him. The other texts were to a girl, making plans to hang, and X noted that she had to make sure to call the friend on a land line so her parents wouldn’t get suspicious about her texting.  Another text was from a high school boy. I’m not sure what he said to her but this particular boy is known to have fathered a child by another middle school girl. So my sister puts the phone on her night stand and waits. X sneaks back in and takes the phone again back to her room. At this point mom and dad both get up to confront her. They go take the phone back and find not only has X erased the texts but she also took the app off the phone.

-My sister substitutes at the school X attends. Another mom who works there, mother of one of X’s friends, showed my sister a series of texts on her daughter’s phone from X. The texts were loaded with crude song lyrics, f-bombs, and the word “bitch” in all its uses.  The girlfriend did not use the vulgarities that X used.

-X has, obviously not taken any responsibility for her behavior. She claims the texts to the middle school boy about twerking were just jokes and she has never met the high school boy, etc. She can’t explain how the high school boy knows who she is. She is sulky, short-tempered, self-obsessed, entitled, and generally lazy at home.

My sister and her husband have gone through some major financial upheavals in the last 5 years. My brother-in-law now works for my dad but is not making enough yet for my sister to quit her job again. My sister is thinking of pulling them all out of school next year. I note this because my first response was to suggest pulling X out of school among other things. They have removed all the electronic toys from the house and store them at my dad’s office. They also took the door completely off her room.

They are a traditional family that regularly attends Latin mass and my sis is just stunned by this behavior. I am too honestly. None of the other three kids are like this. Her behavior is very self-destructive for her age. Short of pulling her out of school, how to you change a 13 year old’s character? How can they provide consequences in a way that will get a positive response instead of this nasty, passive aggressive sulking? How do you get a child this self-obsessed to stop focusing on herself and show empathy and affection for her family? What resources would you recommend?

It’s important to note that this sort of thing is always a possible consequence when children are abandoned to a public school environment. It’s not an inevitable consequence, to be sure, but there are always going to be those children who are, by character, more susceptible to it than others, regardless of their upbringing. I strongly favor homeschooling for all children, but especially for those with weak, easily-influenced characters.

My recommendation would be to pull X out of school immediately. The nature of the problem exhibited is serious enough to justify drastic action, especially in light of her blatant lying, stealing, and other Machiavellian actions. The other children can probably wait until next year if they are not showing any signs of similar behavior. But the school year has barely begun and there is a very good chance that X will get herself into trouble of one sort or another in the next eight months.

As SB pointed out, these problems aren’t something that started overnight. They are character problems, they are firmly implanted, and they will require a long period of boot camp-style attitude readjustment.So, in addition to pulling her out of school and the solid steps the parents have taken to deny her communications and privacy, they should rely upon the method proven to work by various militaries throughout the world. For the next six weeks, they should put her to work until she is too exhausted to find trouble.

By Christmastime, X should be an expert in grouting, deep-cleaning, and every surface in the house should be sparkling. And then there is a credible threat hanging over her head when the strictures are gradually relaxed; every time she is tempted, she’ll be weighing whether it is worth another six weeks of hard manual labor.

All socialization outside the house and parental supervision should be barred until further notice. X is a child, she is a dependent, and as long as her parents are legally liable for her actions, they have the right and the responsibility to prevent her from indulging in her short-sighted, self-destructive tendencies.

There are no guarantees, of course. Despite her parents’ best efforts, X may become an overweight mudshark with a meth habit and two abortions under her belt by the time she is 18. Or she may turn it around completely. Regardless, the probability is that if her parents don’t directly and forthrightly address the situation with consistency and resolve, she will destroy her life in one way or another. Unfortunately, some people are just naturally self-destructive.

One of the hardest things to accept as a parent is that we cannot make our children’s choices for them. What we can do is decide upon the primary influences upon them. In the case of the child who is greatly susceptible to peer pressure, the answer is straightforward: take care to ensure that her peers are positive influences rather than negative ones.

Homeschool Nazis

Matt Walsh points out the historical reality to anti-homeschoolers:

I’d like to treat you to a look at a few snippets of some emails I received yesterday, after a certain “controversial” segment on my show:

“I never realized you were so anti-education…”

“It figures that a teabagger would hate education so much…”

“….so it seems you would rather have a nation full of illiterates…”

“….I get tired of your anarchist propaganda…”

“I’m sure Hitler would be very proud of you…”

That last one — the obligatory “you’re as bad as Hitler!” charge — is especially ironic, considering the subject that prompted these responses: public education. Specifically, my belief that government education is an unmitigated disaster, and can only be remedied by more and more families deciding to remove government from the equation and educate their children themselves. That last emailer is, predictably, a proud product of public school. But you already knew that, in light of his hilarious historical ignorance.

Contrary to his claims, Hitler would not have been very “proud” of my pro-home school rhetoric. In fact, he would have been quite displeased. In fact, he probably would have expressed that displeasure in a manner which would have left no room for interpretation. That’s because Hitler actually outlawed home schooling (a law that’s still enforced in Germany today, and passionately endorsed by our own Justice Department). The Fuehrer was a huge proponent of public schooling — and that’s not an attempt to compare modern public school proponents to Nazis.

But, you know, if anyone comes close to mirroring the National Socialist Party on this particular subject, it obviously isn’t the home schooling folks…

The whole article is pretty good, as Matt goes on to explain how the public school system is working precisely as designed. The fact is that if you believe in public education, you are every bit as much a Nazi as someone who believes Jews should be oven-baked and every bit as much a Communist as someone who believes in the abolition of private property. Adolf Hitler and Karl Marx were both absolutely avid advocates of public education, in fact, “Free education for all children in government schools” is the tenth plank of the Communist Manifesto.

Public school is systematic child abuse. It is that simple. Don’t ever be defensive about home schooling. When someone asks you why you homeschool, just tell them “public school is child abuse” and give them the opportunity to explain how and why that statement is incorrect. They will not be able to do so.