Tag: education

US Historical Hypocrisy

The Chinese diplomats are well-educated in US history, which is a real problem for US diplomats.

BLOOMBERG: The US said on Tuesday that it will impose visa limits on some officials in China for their part in allegedly forcing Tibetan children to assimilate into mainstream Chinese society. What is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ response?

Wang Wenbin: The US imposed those illegal sanctions on Chinese officials under the pretext of Tibet-related issues and in disregard of the facts. This move gravely interferes in China’s internal affairs, harms China’s interests, and violates basic norms governing international relations. We firmly oppose and strongly condemn it.

The human rights conditions in Tibet are at their historical best, as witnessed by the international community. The region has long enjoyed a booming economy, harmonious and stable society, and effective protection and promotion of cultural heritage. The rights and freedoms of all ethnic groups, including the freedom of religious belief and the freedom to use and develop their ethnic groups’ spoken and written languages, are fully protected. As is commonly seen around the world, there are boarding schools across Chinese provinces and regions to meet the need of the local students. In the case of China’s Tibet, this is a region of high altitude and highly scattered population in many areas. For children from herding families in particular, they have to travel long distances to get to school. If schools were to be built in every place the students live, it would be very difficult to ensure adequate teachers and quality of teaching in each school. That is why boarding schools have been set up as a practical way to ensure all children’s equal right to education. It is entirely up to the students and their parents whether to go to boarding schools or not. Students can choose to go home on every weekend, holiday and festival (including traditional Tibetan festivals such as the Tibetan New Year and the Shoton Festival), as well as during the winter and summer breaks. Parents can visit their children at school any time and take their children home whenever needed. Courses of traditional culture, such as Tibetan language and literature and folk dance, are widely available, traditional food unique to the Tibet Plateau is provided, and students are allowed to wear traditional dresses at these schools. The boarding schools in Tibet are examples of human rights and cultural heritage protection. The so-called “forced assimilation” is pure fabrication.

In contrast, throughout the US history, more than 4.7 million Native Americans were slaughtered, and people of Asian and African descent and other ethnic communities suffer daily from the scourge of racial discrimination. In recent years, the US’s armed invasion has led to millions of casualties in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. The US needs to reflect on itself, instead of styling itself as a judge and wantonly meddling in other countries’ internal affairs by wielding the big stick of “human rights”.

I need to stress that Tibet-related affairs are purely China’s internal affairs that brook no foreign interference. The US needs to respect facts, fulfill its commitment on Tibet, stop using Tibet-related issues to meddle in China’s internal affairs and undermine China’s interests, and immediately withdraw its wrong decision. Otherwise, there will be a resolute response from China.

To say that the USA is badly losing the battle for global hearts and minds would be an understatement. All the USA really had going for it once the rest of the world industrialized in the aftermath of WWII was a) its military and b) the dollar. And international confidence in both are rapidly falling.

What makes the Chinese so formidable on the global stage is the fact that unlike Europeans, they understand the influence of word magic. And unlike Clown World, they understand that power trumps influence.

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College is for Morons

It’s not just you. You’re not imagining things. College graduates are rapidly getting measurably dumber on average.

In a longitudinal sample of 2593 individuals from Minnesota, we investigated whether individuals with IQs ≤ 90 who completed college experienced the same social and economic benefits higher-IQ college graduates did. Although most individuals with IQs ≤ 90 did not have a college degree, the rate at which they completed college had increased approximately 6-fold in men and 10-fold in women relative to rates in the previous generation.

The benefits of a college education among individuals with low levels of general cognitive ability, INTELLIGENCE, May-June 2022

Now that they’ve successfully eliminated the SATs, it won’t be long before the majority of college graduates have sub-90 IQs. Because the smart people of the sort who used to be college attendees will have figured out that there is no piece of paper that is worth being saddled with more than $100,000 in debt.

Unless it’s a winning lottery ticket, of course. And we used to call playing the lottery “the stupid tax”.

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Confidence in the Profession

The inversion is complete in UK education:

A Christian teacher has been banned from the profession after “misgendering” a pupil. It is believed to be the first case of its kind in the UK.

The Teaching Regulation Authority (TRA) ruled that Joshua Sutcliffe, 33, failed to treat a pupil with “dignity and respect” when he did not protect the pupil’s wellbeing by not using the preferred pronouns of a girl who identified as a boy. Mr Sutcliffe taught maths at The Cherwell School, a state secondary in Oxford’

Alan Meyrick, the TRA’s Chief Executive, has the responsibility of deciding whether or not to impose the ban on behalf of Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary. He said: “In my view, it is necessary to impose a prohibition order in order to maintain public confidence in the profession.”

This news comes with schools awaiting the first detailed government guidance on how to respond to transgender pupils, which is due to be published this term. It is anticipated that the guidance will advise school leaders to refuse to use different pronouns asked by pupils.

In Clown World, it’s not enough to fire those who insist that there are four lights and two sexes, they must be banned entirely due to their devotion to objective reality. Of course, an inability to distinguish between male and female does not maintain public confidence in teachers, but rather, achieves the complete opposite.

This is why freedom of speech and freedom of expression are pure satanic evils. Because if the wicked inverts are not outlawed, they will outlaw reality.

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The End of Affirmative Action

The Supreme Court rules college admissions cannot take race into account:

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the affirmative action admission policies of Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional.

The ruling is a massive blow to decades-old efforts to boost enrollment of minorities at American universities through policies that took into account applicants’ race.

“Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion, which all five of his fellow conservative justices joined in.

Conservatives will celebrate this as a great legal victory, and perhaps it is. But the reality is that the damage has already been done, as university educations and the lifelong debt they entail are best avoided by everyone of any color.

However, if the ruling can be successfully applied to an employment context, that could be significant indeed.

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Phonics are the Only Way

Mississippi is no longer the uneducated laughing stock of the US public school system:

It’s a cliché that Kymyona Burk heard a little too often: “Thank God for Mississippi.”

As the state’s literacy director, she knew politicians in other states would say it when their reading test scores were down — because at least they weren’t ranked as low as Mississippi. Or Louisiana. Or Alabama.

Lately, the way people talk about those states has started to change. Instead of looking down on the Gulf South, they’re seeing it as a model.

Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.

The turnaround in these three states has grabbed the attention of educators nationally, showing rapid progress is possible anywhere, even in areas that have struggled for decades with poverty and dismal literacy rates. The states have passed laws adopting similar reforms that emphasize phonics and early screenings for struggling kids.

We utilized phonics to teach our children and all of them were reading simple sentences before they were four years old. Originally, with a Powerpoint slideshow, and later with a homemade Android app, then followed by the Bob Books. Any child can learn to read before the age of five if provided with a daily phonics run, first through the alphabet, then through the randomized phonemes.

Phonics vs whole language is the precisely akin to the difference between learning to read Japanese through kana and through kanji. The former is easy and can be accomplished in a matter of months. The latter is incredibly difficult and requires years of study for even basic literacy.

Don’t ever take any teacher, professional educator, or scientist seriously if they oppose phonics for any reason. At best, they are ignorant and maleducated. At worst, they are malevolent and seeking to intellectually lobotomize children.

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The Rape Factories

If, at this point, you are still putting your children in public schools, you are committing child abuse by proxy:

US public school employees who sexually abuse children are typically moved to different schools three times before they are finally arrested, preying on as many as 73 victims before they are eventually punished, according to a new report by a conservative think tank.

Published last week by the Defense of Freedom Institute, the report details hundreds of cases in which teachers in public school districts were accused of abuse, but had their records scrubbed before being moved to new positions, where the abuse continued.

Citing earlier research by the Government Accountability Office, the report noted that firing teachers can be a costly process for school districts. As such, the districts often negotiate confidentiality agreements with unions whereby a teacher can resign or be demoted to avoid disciplinary action, before being transferred to another school with a clean slate.

The average employee accused of abuse is passed to three different school districts before facing legal consequences, and can abuse up to 73 children in this time.

This system has allowed sexual assault to proliferate, the report claimed. According to the most recent Department of Education data, 13,799 cases of sexual violence and 685 cases of rape or attempted rape were recorded in schools during the 2017-2018 school year, up from 9,649 and 394 in 2015-2016.

Homeschooling your children should be your #1 first priority. It doesn’t matter if you have to move, add a side-hustle on top of your primary job, or lower your standard of living. Just do it! Neither your nor your children will ever regret it.

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Revisit Your Assumptions

College attendance and university degrees have long been defended on the basis of higher earnings prospects. But what was a great deal in the 1950s and 1960s, and still made some degree of sense in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. But for the average college student in the United States, a university degree can no longer be justified on economic grounds.

When it comes to wages, fortunes flipped last year for college and high-school graduates.

In 2022, median annual pay was $52,000 for Americans with a bachelor’s degree, according to data released by the New York Federal Reserve Friday. That’s a 7.4% decline in inflation-adjusted terms — the steepest plunge since 2004, erasing nearly all of the pandemic-era gains. It was sharpest for those earning the most.

Meanwhile, wages accelerated 6% in real terms to $34,320 for those with only a high-school diploma — the biggest gain in more than two decades.

While secondary-degree holders are still paid more, those who didn’t attend college are catching up. Americans with only a high school diploma made 93% of what recent graduates with a bachelor’s degree in the bottom quarter of wages made.

While average degree-holder wages are still higher, the wage comparisons are meaningless when they fail to take into account a) the cost of college debt and debt service as well as b) the opportunity cost of not working for five years.

The cost of college debt service is the real killer. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, only “37% of all borrowers saw their student loan balance shrink” as a result of making their payments in 2022.

So with an average student loan debt of $39,351, plus an estimated average $7,870 in lifetime debt service costs, plus an average $205,920 in lost wages, the college student pursuing a university degree in 2023 is $253,141 in the hole versus the high-school diploma holder from the start of his professional career.

Which means, if he is one of the fortunate 59 percent that manages to finish his degree in six years, it will take him 14 years just to reach economic parity with the less-educated members of his high school graduating class, just in time for their 20th high school reunion. And that is the positive outcome; don’t forget there is a forty-percent chance that all of that time and expense will be wasted by a failure to obtain a degree.

The fact is that college in the United States only made sense as a means of elevating members of the lower and working classes for a few decades. Now, it has become something more akin to what it historically was, which is a means of establishing class norms for the administers of empire. This is not to say that no young American should waste his time and money on university, only that he should sit down with his parents, and if necessary, a trusted friend who understands mathematics and statistics, and seriously consider the question of whether going to college is likely to prove advantageous to him or not.

Because it can no longer be reasonably assumed that, on average, it is.

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When Rhetoric Becomes Reality

Homeschool or die was supposed to be rhetoric, not dialectic.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday updated its schedule of recommended immunizations to include COVID-19 shots and boosters for children, adolescents and adults.

The schedule was recommended by the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, then approved by the CDC and other health care organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics.

The CDC can issue guidance, but does not have the authority to mandate vaccines for schools or work settings. Such mandates can only be put in place by the states.

Fortunately, most states will not mandate the vaxx for schoolchildren. But those that do will see depopulation.

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We’re Not Obsessed

The younger generations don’t understand why most Generation X Americans know precisely how smart they are in terms of IQ because of another aspect of society that has been lost. Further to yesterday’s discussion of IQ on SG, allow me to explain the reason.

GenX was repeatedly intelligence-tested with the IOWA Assessment tests in elementary school, but neither we nor our parents were given the results. However, the results were utilized by the public school systems to put those who tested at the highest levels in various accelerated “gifted” programs. Six years later, most of us were tested again with the PSAT in 11th grade and the SAT in 12th grade. All of these examinations were IQ tests, but we were only privy to the results of the PSAT and SAT.

The US educational establishment stopped IQ testing schoolchildren in the 1993-1994 timeframe. That’s why the post-May 1993 PSAT scores and the post-1994 SAT scores no longer suffice to provide qualification for MENSA membership. Both tests are now exercises in memorization akin to the “achievement” testing of the ACT or the IOWA Basic Skills tests.

This is why most GenX know how smart they are, and why most Millennials and Zoomers don’t.

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Mailvox: Intellectual Stimulation

I have a number of friends who struggle to find some kind of intellectual fulfillment outside of their work. They were raised loving school, pursuing growing their mind, etc., and are stuck in this lie that the only way to continue that stimulation and that growth is by having a job. Do you have any advice for those (women especially) who have this deep drive to keep learning, but want to be moms and are worried that their intellectual side won’t be stimulated in the home?

Yes. Read a fucking book. Then, once you’ve finished it, read another one. If you’re intellectually fulfilled by sitting in an office or a classroom, you’re literally retarded.

It’s probably not an accident that no one ever asked me to write an advice column.

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