Tag: education

From AEI: The chart above shows the huge college degree gap by gender for the class of 2013. Based on Department of Education estimates, women will earn a disproportionate share of college degrees at every level of higher education this year, and overall, women in the class of 2013 will earn 140 college degrees at all levels for every 100 men. Over the next decade, the gender disparity for college degrees is expected to increase, so that by 2022, women will earn 148 college degrees for every 100 degrees earned by men, with especially huge gender imbalances for associate’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men) and master’s degrees (162 women for every 100 men).

It’s actually likely to be considerably worse than projected. Associates and Masters degrees are already hitting the 60/40 female-male ratio that college admissions officers have observed tends to accelerate the process of men declining to attend colleges.  The media, with its myopic focus on the female imperative, generally reports this “dangerous ground” as being a problem due to the inability of women to be happy with the amount of male attention they are receiving, but the real problem is that most men simply don’t want to be in a predominantly female environment even if it theoretically improves their chances with women.

The class of 2022 estimate assumes that the rate of change will slow, but rom 1960 to 2013, the undergraduate gender ratio increased by 1.3 women per 100 men per year, as the ratio went from 77 per 100 to 145. However, if the admissions officers are correct and young men respond to imbalanced college sex ratios en masse the way they have to individual schools and the rate of change increases by 50 percent, the class of 2022 can be expected to look more like this.

Associate’s: 179
Bachelor’s: 150
Master’s: 168
Doctor’s: 127
All Degrees: 159

If this comes to pass, we can safely expect the New York Times to be lamenting the fact that fewer women are receiving PhDs compared to the number of women graduating from college, and Jezebel publishing one angry diatribe after another about the emergence of superplayers establishing open harems on campus.

And meanwhile, the college degree will become almost entirely irrelevant to employment anywhere but government and large corporations with female-run HR departments.

A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison rejects the university’s right to subject him to mandatory re-education sessions. It’s encouraging to note that more and more people are becoming inured to being labeled by the Left and are no longer bothering to engage in the popular conservative appeasement dance of “but I’m not, I’m really not!”

    Dear Graduate Director Prof. Kantrowitz,

    Please forgive this sudden e-mail. I am writing to you today about the “diversity” training that new teaching assistants (TAs) are required to undergo. In keeping with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea, I am also blind-copying on this e-mail several journalistic outlets and state government officials, because the taxpayers who support this university deserve to know how their money is being spent.

    As you are probably aware, all new TAs in the History Department are required to attend one orientation session, two TA training sessions, and two diversity sessions. Yesterday (Friday, September 20th), we new TAs attended the first of the diversity sessions. To be quite blunt, I was appalled. What we were given, under the rubric of “diversity,” was an avalanche of insinuations, outright accusations, and suffocating political indoctrination (or, as some of the worksheets revealingly put it, “re-education”) entirely unbecoming a university of our stature.

    Students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and students at probably every other public institution of higher education in this country, have long since grown accustomed to incessant leftism. It is in the very air that we breathe. Bascom Hill, for example, is roped off and the university is shut down so that Barack Obama (D), Mark Pocan (D), and Tammy Baldwin (D) can deliver campaign speeches before election day. (The university kindly helped direct student traffic to these campaign events by sending out a mass e-mail encouraging the student body to go to the Barack Obama for President website and click “I’m In for Barack!” in order to attend.) Marxist diatribes denouncing Christianity, Christians, the United States, and conservatives (I am happy to provide as many examples of this as might be required) are assigned as serious scholarship in seminars. The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA)–which sent out mass e-mails, using History Department list-servs, during the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker, accusing Gov. Walker of, among other things, being “Nero”–is allowed to address TA and graduate student sessions as a “non-partisan organization”. The History Department sponsors a leftist political rally, along with the Socialist Party of Wisconsin, and advertises for the rally via a departmental e-mail (sent, one presumes, using state computers by employees drawing salaries from a state institution). In short, this university finds it convenient to pretend that it is an apolitical entity, but one need not be particularly astute to perceive that the Madison campus is little more than a think tank for the hard left. Even those who wholeheartedly support this political agenda might in all candor admit that the contours of the leftism here are somewhat less than subtle.

    At the “diversity” training yesterday, though, even this fig leaf of apoliticism was discarded. In an utterly unprofessional way, the overriding presumption of the session was that the people whom the History Department has chosen to employ as teaching assistants are probably racists. In true “diversity” style, the language in which the presentation was couched was marbled with words like “inclusive”, “respect”, and “justice”. But the tone was unmistakably accusatory and radical. Our facilitator spoke openly of politicizing her classrooms in order to right (take revenge for?) past wrongs. We opened the session with chapter-and-verse quotes from diversity theorists who rehearsed the same tired “power and privilege” cant that so dominates seminar readings and official university hand-wringing over unmet race quotas. Indeed, one mild-mannered Korean woman yesterday felt compelled to insist that she wasn’t a racist. I never imagined that she was, but the atmosphere of the meeting had been so poisoned that even we traditional quarries of the diversity Furies were forced to share our collective guilt with those from continents far across the wine-dark sea.

    It is hardly surprising that any of us hectorees would feel thusly. For example, in one of the handouts that our facilitator asked us to read (“Detour-Spotting: for white anti-racists,” by joan olsson [sic]), we learned things like, “As white infants we were fed a pabulum of racist propaganda,” “…there was no escaping the daily racist propaganda,” and, perhaps most even-handed of all, “Racism continues in the name of all white people.” Perhaps the Korean woman did not read carefully enough to realize that only white people (all of them, in fact) are racist. Nevertheless, in a manner stunningly redolent of “self-criticism” during the Cultural Revolution in communist China, the implication of the entire session was that everyone was suspect, and everyone had some explaining to do.

    You have always been very kind to me, Prof. Kantrowitz, so it pains me to ask you this, but is this really what the History Department thinks of me? Is this what you think of me? I am not sure who selected the readings or crafted the itinerary for the diversity session, but, as they must have done so with the full sanction of the History Department, one can only conclude that the Department agrees with such wild accusations, and supports them. Am I to understand that this is how the white people who work in this Department are viewed? If so, I cannot help but wonder why in the world the Department hired any of us in the first place. Would not anyone be better?

    There is one further issue. At the end of yesterday’s diversity “re-education,” we were told that our next session would include a presentation on “Trans Students”. At that coming session, according to the handout we were given, we will learn how to let students ‘choose their own pronouns’, how to correct other students who mistakenly use the wrong pronouns, and how to ask people which pronouns they prefer (“I use the pronouns he/him/his. I want to make sure I address you correctly. What pronouns do you use?”). Also on the agenda for next week are “important trans struggles, as well as those of the intersexed and other gender-variant communities,” “stand[ing] up to the rules of gender,” and a very helpful glossary of related terms and acronyms, to wit: “Trans”: for those who “identify along the gender-variant spectrum,” and “Genderqueer”: “for those who consider their gender outside the binary gender system”. I hasten to reiterate that I am quoting from diversity handouts; I am not making any of this up.

    Please allow me to be quite frank. My job, which I love, is to teach students Japanese history. This week, for example, I have been busy explaining the intricacies of the Genpei War (1180-1185), during which time Japan underwent a transition from an earlier, imperial-rule system under regents and cloistered emperors to a medieval, feudal system run by warriors and estate managers. It is an honor and a great joy to teach students the history of Japan. I take my job very seriously, and I look forward to coming to work each day.

    It is most certainly not my job, though, to cheer along anyone, student or otherwise, in their psychological confusion. I am not in graduate school to learn how to encourage poor souls in their sexual experimentation, nor am I receiving generous stipends of taxpayer monies from the good people of the Great State of Wisconsin to play along with fantasies or accommodate public cross-dressing. To all and sundry alike I explicate, as best I can, such things as the clash between the Taira and the Minamoto, the rise of the Kamakura shogunate, and the decline of the imperial house in twelfth-century Japan. Everyone is welcome in my classroom, but, whether directly or indirectly, I will not implicate myself in my students’ fetishes, whatever those might be. What they do on their own t
ime is their business; I will not be a party to it. I am exercising my right here to say, “Enough is enough.” One grows used to being thought a snarling racist–after all, others’ opinions are not my affair–but one draws the line at assisting students in their private proclivities. That is a bridge too far, and one that I, at least, will not cross.

    I regret that this leaves us in an awkward situation. After having been accused of virulent racism and, now, assured that I will next learn how to parse the taxonomy of “Genderqueers”, I am afraid that I will disappoint those who expect me to attend any further diversity sessions. When a Virginia-based research firm came to campus a couple of years ago to present findings from their study of campus diversity, then-Diversity Officer Damon Williams sent a gaggle of shouting, sign-waving undergraduates to the meeting, disrupting the proceedings so badly that the meeting was cancelled. In a final break with such so-called “diversity”, I will not be storming your office or shouting into a megaphone outside your window. Instead, I respectfully inform you hereby that I am disinclined to join in any more mandatory radicalism. I have, thank God, many more important things to do. I also request that diversity training be made optional for all TAs, effective immediately. In my humble opinion, neither the Department nor the university has any right to subject anyone to such intellectual tyranny.

    Thank you for your patience in reading this long e-mail.

    Sincerely,

    Jason Morgan

Badger considers two means of addressing bullies:

I was in elementary school when the educational ministers began
preaching that fighting back against bullies was not to be tolerated. It
was insisted that responsive violence only begat more violence and that
the way to stop bullying was to “not respond” and to “demand the bully
respect you,” or some horseshit like this. This went along with a bunch
of programming about creating an “inclusive environment” and a bunch of
other malarkey that imagined if we could all listen to “Free To Be You And Me” together nobody would get picked on when we went out for recess.

To this day, I want to know what they were smoking. These folks spent
their entire adult careers allegedly studying the social behavior of
young children and yet never realized that “Lord of the Flies” was a lot
more than a fictional fantasy novella. They went about fighting
bullying in exactly the wrong way – by criminalizing the physical
aspects rather than disincentivizing the psychological aspects of
bullying, they ensured the “negotiating” between bully and victim took
place in the psychosocial realm where the bully had already secured an
advantage, and imposed a moral equivalence that shamed victim for daring
to fight back. The establishment seems to want to think of bullies as
the fat stupid kid who has no other way than his fists to express
himself (a la Moe from Calvin & Hobbes), however the bullies I dealt
with had great social savvy and were able to bamboozle the teachers
into believing they were the victim instead of me. Thus, any one-on-one
verbal discussions that were supposed to “resolve conflict” were simply
an extension of the bullying process – just as, for example, a
negotiation with a corrupt businessman is itself structurally corrupted….

The frame I’ve come to believe in with regard to bullying is that,
yes, a bully is trying to exploit a power differential, and that the
faster you demonstrate strength to close the differential, the more
quickly the bully will leave you alone and find someone else to
victimize (if the demonstration of strength wasn’t enough to humiliate
them entirely). Generally speaking, that means you’re going to have to
get physical at the middle or high school level. Once you’ve shown
you’re not going to be fucked with, the spell of dominance is broken and
the bully no longer sees you as someone to victimize.

As the smallest and smartest kid in my grade most years, I had to put up with a fair amount of bullying from first through eighth grade. My first pair of glasses were broken on the playground by getting punched off my face; I got in a shot or two but was whipped pretty conclusively by a kid nearly twice my size. I was a good athlete, so as I reached junior high age, I was protected to a certain extent by my teammates, but I still had to deal with the occasional hallway attack as well as the incessant shoving and verbal threats. The other thing that helped was my ready willingness to stand up for myself; in both seventh and eighth grade I accepted challenges from bigger guys more than capable of beating me up and “went outside”; on both occasions, the other boy decided it wasn’t worth the risk of losing once we were out there with the usual circle of boys and girls around us.

But the low-grade stuff didn’t stop until I broke one boy’s ribs after he shoved me into a locker, and smashed another boy’s face into the floor when he tried to tackle me.  After that, only one kid, a persistent troublemaker, was ever a problem, and he gave up after he saw me go through the open window of a moving bus to break the nose of a kid from another school who tried to spit at me. After that, he wouldn’t even try to pick on other kids in front of me since I made it clear that I was more than ready to pay him back for cracking one of my ribs after soccer practice one year.

Ender has had to deal with some attempted tormentors over the years, but no one even tries to mess with him anymore, not since he put down the star of the soccer club and the kid’s best friend at the same time when they tried to play dominance games with him. Of course, he’s been doing judo for years and he plays outside defender with a controlled fury that his coach and all the other dads appreciate, so even the biggest kids are openly respectful despite him being the weird smart kid.

Badger is right. Negotiation and seeking to understand bullies is irrelevant or even counterproductive. There is only one answer: hit back and hit back harder.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t turn the other cheek, I’m saying you can’t choose to turn the other cheek if violence is not even an option. I forgo retaliation on the soccer field on a regular basis. But it’s my choice to do so, it’s not a necessary consequence of either cowardice or an inability to respond.

WK has a problem getting his boy to listen and obey:

 I have a 5 year old boy in a private Montessori school
because I failed to produce results at home.  I and my wife worked with
him using a montessori type home method. We spent quite a bit of time
and money getting the tools and setup right for him.  What is obvious to
me now is that he listens and pays more attention to other teachers in
his life other than us, the parents.  For example, I had been trying all
summer last year and this year to teach hold his breath underwater.  I
signed him up for swimming lessons with the schools in August.  He met
his teacher, an 18 year old girl, for about a minute.  She jumped in and
had my son jumping in the pool and holding his breath underwater in
about 10 seconds.  Talking with other parents I know, what I experienced
appears to be fairly common.  I am not sure if there is word for what I
described above, but there should be for this concept.  I quick search
through the homeschool blogs looking for answers and the most common
answer appears to be a shaming of the parent that they can’t get their
child to listen to them.

I quote: “You are the parent and it is your responsibility to
train your children to listen to you. Whether you homeschool or not,
they should be respectful and attentive to you.”

That’s
all fine and dandy, but I can’t be accused of not putting enough time,
research, love and effort into getting my child to listen to me and
homeschool.  I don’t have results from my work with my son.  You can’t
help but notice that at his montessori school he listens to his teacher
and does his work great.  (The school has an open door policy with
parents to come and see how their kids are doing).  I think that the
above must be a common problem for homoeschooled kids based on my limited experience.  How am I to get my kids to homeschool effectively? 
Otherwise I am going to be school poor sending my kids to private
school to avoid the slaughter at public school.  Quite honestly, a
private montessori school will still have its problems too.

I’m going to have to turn it over to the Dread Ilk on this one. I have no problem getting my kids to listen to me and neither does Spacebunny. Of course, I never had any problem getting 35 kids between 6-8 to do exactly what I told them to do at soccer practice either.
Since the kid is only five, it seems unlikely that rebellion is the issue.  My guess is that the boy knows his parents love him and he has reason to believe that he has veto on anything they tell him. For example, if my kids had resisted jumping in the pool, I’d simply have thrown them in. I don’t know if WK tried that or not, but I find it hard to imagine that anyone could spend months trying, and failing, to get a kid to jump in the pool unless he never just threw the kid in.

In most cases, a parental inability to command obedience is a parental failure to demand it.  I say this, not to shame, but to point out that the problem is likely related to expectations and communication. As long as the father offers the child a choice, he can’t fault the kid for choosing the option that the father doesn’t want. If it’s not your intention to let the child choose, then don’t pretend to give him an option.

And the correct response to “But I don’t want to” is “I didn’t ask for your opinion, I told you what to do.  Now do it.”

Prediction: having embraced the “success is defined by female participation” metric, Harvard Business School will lose its elevated cachet within a decade:

Of all the ceremonies and receptions during graduation week, the most
venerated was the George F. Baker Scholar Luncheon, for the top 5
percent of the class, held in a sunny dining room crowded with parents
who looked alternately thrilled and intimidated by what their offspring
had achieved. 

In recent years, the glory of the luncheon had been dimmed by discomfort
at the low number of female honorees. But this year, almost 40 percent
of the Baker scholars were women. It was a remarkable rise that no one
could precisely explain. Had the professors rid themselves of
unconscious biases? Were the women performing better because of the
improved environment? Or was the faculty easing up in grading women
because they knew the desired outcome? 

“To my head, all three happened,” Professor Piskorski said. But Mr.
Nohria said he had no cause to think the professors had used the new
software, and the subjective participation scores, to avoid gender gaps.
“Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” he said, a phrase that he said had
guided him throughout his project.

Consider how fast the question of “is college worth it” has rapidly followed the rise of women with college degrees. Credentialists never understand that pieces of paper are only indicative of an ability to sit in class and follow orders and that no amount of degrees will ever be an adequate substitute for intellectual horsepower, curiosity, and testosterone-fueled risk-taking.

The primary female psychological objective is risk-reduction.  This is why societies with too much female influence rapidly become not only static, but anti-dynamic, and rapidly begin to decline. It’s also why an amount of female influence is a societal survival trait.

In which he responds to the much-discussed Slate article concerning it being evil to send children to private school:

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A Manifesto

No kidding. It is actually subtitled “A Manifesto”. We’re off to a great start. 

By Allison Benedikt
You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—

Wait… Are we talking actual bad murderer bad, or murderers that
liberals have the hots for bad, like Che Guevara? Or murderers that
liberals don’t like to own up to like Kermit Gosnell bad? Because you
know, liberals are into nuance and stuff. 

but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. 

So using a lot of unnecessary hyphens bad. 

So, pretty bad.

Apparently. But please, Allison, educate us poor knuckle draggers
why we should put the future of failing liberal institutions based on
outdated philosophies dating back to the industrial revolution over the
welfare of our children. 

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. 

Well you’re a liberal, so that goes without saying. 

But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. 

And I can’t wait to hear how you figured this part out. Especially
since everybody is always whining about overcrowded classrooms, so when
a kid gets pulled out and sent to private school, you just freed up
more public school resources, and *gasp* the parent paying for private
school is still paying taxes which pay for the dumpy public school… but
hey, I’m getting ahead of myself. 

This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your
children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the
meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. 

Wait… Let me get this right… I need to needlessly screw up my
children and grandchildren’s chances in the hope that maybe, just maybe,
our shitty public schools might be decent in forty or fifty years. And
this is the high note she picked to open her essay with. Holy shit.

I have to admit, I find it a bit difficult to get worked up over something this obviously stupid.  In addition to the fact that argumentum ad sensum is so logically fallacious that it isn’t even listed as a formal logical fallacy because so few people are dumb enough to try making it, there is a fundamental flaw in the idea that increased patronage will improve a failing product.

Think about it.  When a restaurant’s food or service is sub-par, does expanding the size of its clientele tend to improve either or make them worse? When a retail store doesn’t have anything people want to buy, does an increase in customers tend to improve what is found on offer? When a government is corrupt and awful, does its governance tend to improve with the number of citizens over which it holds authority?

We can readily observe that the opposite is reliably true.  Therefore, by her own dubious measure, the moral imperative of improving the quality of the public schools, we can only conclude that it is evil to send one’s child to a public school.  In fact, since positive change tends to be inspired by people abandoning an institution and thereby forcing the institution to respond, there is a moral imperative for parents to improve the public schools by taking their children out of them.

It’s a pretty hapless argument when, by one’s own self-selected metric, one somehow manages to make the case for the exact opposite.  While the article may be little more than Slate attempting to troll the sane public for linkbait, remember that there are no shortage of white progressives who genuinely believe what this woman is writing.

However, while I very much disagree with the idea that private school attendance is evil, I will say that it is suboptimal. Private school is still subject to the group education speed limit on learning, and while there is more accountability than with public schools, the parent is still putting primary responsibility for the child’s education into the hands of strangers. Homeschooling offers more of the positive benefits of private education while being subject to none of the disadvantages.

You cretinous, foolish young woman:

Readers will recall that Andria has an “Honors BA in Social Justice and Peace Studies” and is pursuing a Master’s degree in Gender Studies. So . . . how’s that going?

“I have a honors BA and I’m defending my MA thesis in two weeks. I am also apply for jobs and I can only find stuff in the service industry. I applied for a Hotel Front Desk Clerk job today.

My degrees mean NOTHING.

I am at the end of my rope.“

And she just figured this out NOW?  She has a degree in “Social Justice and Peace Studies”.  She will soon have a second degree in “Gender Studies”.  She’s very lucky the service industry will consider hiring anyone with a pulse, because any employer looking at those degrees has to knows she is a walking, talking, sexual harassment and/or discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen.

In fact, a Gender Studies degree actually has negative value, given that credentialed feminists are considerably more likely to cause disruption in the workplace.

It’s bad enough to acquire garbage degrees in economic boom times.  It’s even worse to do so in the middle of a five-year depression.