Tag: education

Castalia House Store

Ladies and gentlemen, Dread Ilk, casual fans, rubberneckers, anklebiters, and fellow Hugo Award nominees, I am very pleased indeed to announce to you that the Castalia House online store is now open for business.

Our selection is somewhat scanty at present, as the participation of certain books in Amazon’s Kindle Select program precludes them from being offered at the Castalia store for now. You will look in vain for Lt. Col Tom Kratman. You will offer no sacrifices on any Altars of Hate. Der Verstand werden Sie nicht finden. E li, i ragazzi piangono mai.

What you will find in the Fantasy section is four fine works of fiction, including AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C. Wright. All of them are also DRM-free, in EPUB format. What you will find in the Science Fiction section are two tales of the future, both involving Chief Warrant Officer Graven Tower, MCID-XAR. And, most importantly, what you will find in the Homeschool section are the four books that make up the ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS curriculum by Dr. Sarah Salviander. They are also DRM-free, but are in PDF format for easy printing.

While we have not yet officially announced the curriculum, as we are in the process of having the curriculum reviewed by a number of homeschool sites, I wanted to make it available to VP readers as soon as possible, as I know that there are many homeschoolers here who are presently preparing their coursework for the autumn. It has been declared to be “a top-notch astronomy
curriculum” by Laurie Bluedorn of Trivium Pursuit fame, and is literally serving as the model for other Castalia House curricula, including Physics, Economics, and Military History.

And don’t forget that the Castalia House blog is active too. Today Mascaro reviews Fearless, the second book in the Lost Fleet series.

Pro-slavery Republicans

As if the student loan scandal was not bad enough:

U.S. Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a possible 2016 White House contender, unveiled legislation on Wednesday to broaden the use of financial vehicles known as “income share agreements” that students can use to fund their higher education costs. Under the agreements, which are marketed as an alternative to traditional student loans, private investors or organizations provide students with financing for their education costs in exchange for a percentage of their future earnings.

Any Republican who dreams about a Rubio presidency is a fool. Rubio may actually be a worse candidate than John McCain was. This is nothing more than permitting young people to sell themselves into indentured servitude in exchange for a college degree.

While he’s at it, why not let men buy a percentage of a woman’s future sexual services in return for financing her education costs? If we’re going to let students peddle their futures, the least we can do is permit them to sell their bodies as well.

I wouldn’t have a problem with this if we lived in a genuine libertarian society. But in a bankster-ruled world where student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, it is an EXCEPTIONALLY bad idea.

The abuse-lottery of public school

This is a useful statistic about sexual harassment in junior high to keep in your pocket the next time you are asked about homeschooling:

An alarming number of instances of inappropriate sexual behavior among middle school students appear to be going unnoticed by teachers and other adults, a new study concludes. The study, written by three University of Illinois researchers, found that 21 percent of the students in the survey experienced some form of physical sexual harassment.

The students reported instances like being slapped on the buttocks, being rubbed against their bodies sexually or being forced to kiss another student. Much of the behavior happened in open areas, most commonly in the hallways, classrooms or gymnasiums.

And that’s just in junior high. Combine it with four more years high school and the fact that “9.6 percent of students in a national survey reported experiencing
educator sexual abuse at some point
in their previous k-12 school years”, and there is at least a one-in-three chance that your public school-attending child will be either sexually harassed or sexually abused at school.

The irony, of course, is that many of the same people who go nuclear over minor sexual harassment in the workplace will attempt to minimize the significance of sexual harassment at school, as if pre-teen children are more capable of dealing with it than adults.

One-in-five schoolchildren sexually harassed by other kids by the time they finish junior high. One-in-three schoolchildren sexually harassed or sexually abused by the time they graduate from high school. How little does a mother care about her children that she would voluntarily subject them to that abuse-lottery?

Dumbing down tech

An old school programmer points out the way in which even programmers are being taught to be glorified power users rather than actual computer engineers:

If I may be so brash, it has been my humble experience that there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion.

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn’t handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. I’ve seen all kinds of figures for drop-out rates in CS and they’re usually between 40% and 70%. The universities tend to see this as a waste; I think it’s just a necessary culling of the people who aren’t going to be happy or successful in programming careers.

The other hard course for many young CS students was the course where you learned functional programming, including recursive programming. MIT set the bar very high for these courses, creating a required course (6.001) and a textbook (Abelson & Sussman’s Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs) which were used at dozens or even hundreds of top CS schools as the de facto introduction to computer science. (You can, and should, watch an older version of the lectures online.)

The difficulty of these courses is astonishing. In the first lecture you’ve learned pretty much all of Scheme, and you’re already being introduced to a fixed-point function that takes another function as its input. When I struggled through such a course, CSE121 at Penn, I watched as many if not most of the students just didn’t make it. The material was too hard. I wrote a long sob email to the professor saying It Just Wasn’t Fair. Somebody at Penn must have listened to me (or one of the other complainers), because that course is now taught in Java.

I wish they hadn’t listened.

The real reason the courses are being dumbed down, of course, is so that women can pass them. But they’re not only being dumbed down, they are being prettied-up and sparkle-ponied in an attempt to make the girls feel as if they’re actually able to do something meaningful. This isn’t the case, of course, but the programs are being designed in such a way that the young women won’t figure out that they’ve been sold a very expensive course in self-esteem until after they graduate and realize they can’t actually do any real programming.

This isn’t good for anyone, not for the girls who should be majoring in something else, the girls who could handle the traditional programming curriculum, or the young men who would be better off teaching themselves to program instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to not learn the more rigorous aspects of the discipline.

I started out as a CompSci Engineering major myself. In the first semester, I realized that I didn’t enjoy the level of detail required to succeed and immediately switched to Economics. I am very, very glad that my university didn’t make the course more to my liking, as I now know that I would not have made for a good programmer, much less a great one. This isn’t a case of old school guys rhapsodizing about the good old days either, the situation is materially detrimental to practically everyone concerned except the universities and the banks profiting from the student loan system.

As an employer, I’ve seen that the 100% Java schools have started churning out quite a few CS graduates who are simply not smart enough to work as programmers on anything more sophisticated than Yet Another Java Accounting Application, although they did manage to squeak through the newly-dumbed-down coursework. These students would never survive 6.001 at MIT, or CS 323 at Yale, and frankly, that is one reason why, as an employer, a CS degree from MIT or Yale carries more weight than a CS degree from Duke, which recently went All-Java, or U. Penn, which replaced Scheme and ML with Java in trying to teach the class that nearly killed me and my friends, CSE121. Not that I don’t want to hire smart kids from Duke and Penn — I do — it’s just a lot harder for me to figure out who they are.

Universities should be making the entry STEM courses harder, not easier, but as it stands, both their financial and their PR incentives run in precisely the opposite direction.

What shall we feel?

Fred Reed asks an honest question:

What am I, and people my age, supposed to feel other than raw contempt for pig-ignorant, self-righteous, utterly useless illiterates whom society will have to feed and house like barnyard animals for the next fifty years?

I suspect that in another two decades, this will be the moderate position. There is nothing to salvage them. “Education”, the progressive answer to all social evils? Education is what turned them into utterly useless illiterates in the first place.

Women Ruin Everything: Academic edition

This open argument in favor of abanoning the Doctrine of Academic Freedom in favor of a Doctrine of Academic Justice is an excellent example of why women were not allowed into the universities in the first place. This is why they were not permitted to vote. We ignore the great minds of the past at our peril, and we have no right to complain about having to suffer the obvious consequences of entirely predictable actions:

In its oft-cited Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, the American Association of University Professors declares that “Teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results.” In principle, this policy seems sound: It would not do for academics to have their research restricted by the political whims of the moment.

Yet the liberal obsession with “academic freedom” seems a bit misplaced to me. After all, no one ever has “full freedom” in research and publication. Which research proposals receive funding and what papers are accepted for publication are always contingent on political priorities. The words used to articulate a research question can have implications for its outcome. No academic question is ever “free” from political realities. If our university community opposes racism, sexism, and heterosexism, why should we put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of “academic freedom”?

Instead, I would like to propose a more rigorous standard: one of “academic justice.” When an academic community observes research promoting or justifying oppression, it should ensure that this research does not continue.

The power to enforce academic justice comes from students, faculty, and workers organizing together to make our universities look as we want them to do. Two years ago, when former summer school instructor Subramanian Swamy published hateful commentary about Muslims in India, the Harvard community organized to ensure that he would not return to teach on campus. I consider that sort of organizing both appropriate and commendable. Perhaps it should even be applied more broadly.

Women are, and have always been, intrinsically fascist at heart. With a small minority of exceptions, they hate freedom and will always trade it for the promise of security, physical and emotional. The Fascists understood this. The medieval philosophers understood this. The Founding Fathers understood this. The West rejected the idea in favor of sexual equality and the myth of progress, and now the university has abandoned its centuries-old tradition of academic freedom.

Yes, there are exceptions. Yes, not all women are the same. Yes, there are brilliant and sensible women. But the salient point is that the price of female involvement is reliably too high across the board. How much more destruction can Western Civilization be expected to survive before women of sense are willing to admit that the price of female participation in matters of governance is too great? Do we really need to undergo the Great Collapse before the ancient truths can be accepted once more?

“The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.”
– Bill Simmons

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.