Tag: education

Correia on the moral imperative of public school attendance

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outdated philosophies dating back to the industrial revolution over the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.

Welcome to the real world

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.

Torturing vibrants

Good intentions or not, that’s what collegiate affirmative action does:

Mismatch theory, most recently expounded by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, is the most powerful critique of affirmative action yet developed, demonstrating empirically that students admitted to academic environments for which they are ill prepared learn less, and are less likely to pursue rigorous majors, than had they been enrolled in schools where their peers shared their level of academic preparation.

But the Times story conveys a subtler point as well: Racial preferences are not just ill advised, they are positively sadistic. Only the preening self-regard of University of California administrators and faculty is served by such an admissions travesty. Preference practitioners are willing to set their “beneficiaries” up to fail and to subject them to possible emotional distress, simply so that the preference dispensers can look out upon their “diverse” realm and know that they are morally superior to the rest of society.

It’s really quite ugly.  I saw this sort of thing with regards to around one-third of my black teammates.  Some were perfectly qualified for the university’s academics and did well, others probably should have been somewhere that covered material at a slower pace.  But there were some who shouldn’t have been permitted within ten miles of the campus, as they had absolutely no business being there and it was immediately obvious to everyone who tried to help them.

“His writing often didn’t make sense. He struggled to
comprehend the readings for [College Writing] and think critically about
the text….. ‘He would revise his papers and each
time he would turn his work back in having complicated it. The paper
would be full of words he thought were academic, writing the way he
thought a college student should write, using big words he didn’t have
command of.'”

There is nothing more obvious, or pathetic, than a five-cent mind attempting to make use of a fifty-cent word. The problem is that this sort of “assistance” will probably not be abandoned so long as the official mantra remains “education is the answer”.  The idea that many individuals are simply ineducable beyond certain levels is just too frightening to be contemplated by everyone who subscribes to the mantra.

Explaining the Flynn Effect

I think this philosophy of testing may explain the dichotomy between the fact that people are getting progressively more intelligent according to IQ tests while becoming observably more stupid in terms of their behavior:

In a pretty amazing YouTube video, Amanda August, a curriculum
coordinator in a suburb of Chicago called Grayslake, explains that
getting the right answer in math just doesn’t matter as long as kids can
explain the necessarily faulty reasoning they used to get to that wrong
answer.

“Even if they said, ’3 x 4 was 11,’ if they were able to explain
their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really
in, umm, words and oral explanation, and they showed it in the picture
but they just got the final number wrong, we’re really more focused on
the how,” August says in the video.

Mailvox: open homeschool thread

HHS asks for curriculum advice:

Would you mind putting up a homeschool open thread? My wee one is
finally getting to that age, and while she’s learning to read now, we’re
looking for our first well-rounded curriculum.

Have at it.  SB uses Saxon math, Trivium Pursuit, and the Well-Trained Mind, which has met with some very good results.  I don’t have much to offer in this regard, as my only responsibilities in this regard fall in the very important areas of Video Game History and Philosophy of Gaming.

That being said, I generally prefer starting a child off on Spacewar rather than Pong.  And one can only truly appreciate the Intellivision if one has first been thoroughly exposed to the Atari 2600.

But I congratulate HHS and his wife on their decision.  After all, America’s best educated kids don’t go to school.

Offended by reality

It took more than eight years for Gavin McInnes to shake off the diversity with which he was infected at university:

I first noticed I was brainwashed while on vacation in Jamaica. We went into a souvenir shop and I caught myself being offended by fridge magnets portraying black soccer players with huge grins. They had bugged-out eyes and exaggerated lips and it reminded me of the Golliwogs I had been taught are evil. Who was allowing this magnetic minstrel show of a soccer game to appear before my eyes? Why, Jamaicans, of course. They are allowed to create cartoon sculptures of themselves. As this basic truth seeped into my cranium I could feel the liberal-arts professor in my head say blacks can make these magnets because they’re not coming from a place of privilege…or something…but that feels like a Band-Aid solution to a hemorrhaging gash in the logic. Now we have to research who created what image before we deem it unacceptable? Former University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill tells us the Cleveland Indians logo is offensive. Is that because a white guy drew it? What if they hired an Indian to draw it? Is that OK? I thought my diploma would provide tools for the real world, but it was nothing more than a Ph.D. in Shit for Brains.

Racism doesn’t pervade every part of modern life, but when you have a liberal-arts education, anti-racism sure does. The fridge-magnet incident was disturbing because I felt myself having an emotion that wasn’t mine.

The second time this happened I almost pulled my brain out and threw it in the garbage. We were watching a movie at an old-timey theater and I saw a black man who worked there taking out the garbage. He was black as coal and was wearing an attendant’s uniform that included white gloves. His lips were very red and enormous. He also had big eyes. I feel racist even describing this guy. When I caught this human being wearing the skin in which he was born, I was not amused. I had been so brainwashed into finding that kind of depiction of a black person offensive, I even got offended when it was the guy’s actual face! I felt like politely sauntering over to him and asking him if he would kindly take it down a notch. Thanks, college.

That’s the beauty of the modern collegiate brainwashing.  It leaves the victim in a state of permanent offense, because he – or as now much more often the case, she – is programmed to be offended by reality.  It is a literally delusional state which leads the brainwashed victim to lunacies such as declaring, with a straight face, that Margaret Thatcher is not a woman.

Keep this in mind when you are contemplating where to send your children to university.

Less equal than others

 It’s official: blacks in 27 states are less academically able than Asians in those states.

Beginning this fall, Alabama public schools will be under a new
state-created academic accountability system that sets different goals
for students in math and reading based on their race, economic status,
ability to speak English and disabilities.” Alabama’s Plan 2020 “sets a
different standard for students in each of several subgroups — American
Indian, Asian/Pacific islander, black, English language learners,
Hispanic, multirace, poverty, special education and white.” Of the 33 states granted a waiver last year, 27 now have different achievement goals for different groups of students.

Now, according to those who support “marriage equality”, the state goverments have the right and ability to define marriage.  Marriage, they assert, is solely defined by what the government declares it to be.  But this is no less true of equality. Based on this logic, blacks must be academically inferior to Asians because the state governments have established their position on the matter.  Ergo, it is so.

Leftists never seem to understand that government is a sword that cuts equally well either way, and sometimes irrespective of who happens to be holding at the moment.

A failure to comprehend

I’m sure you recall the various academics and would-be academics at Pharyngula crying about what PZ Myers described as the “depressing” state of reality in American academia.  The accomplished genetic scientist writes in Woe is us academics:

Yeah, that’s the reward for earning a Ph.D. Most of you won’t get employed in academia, and most of you who do will get the terrifyingly fragile job of adjunct. And if you do manage to get a real tenure-track position, after 4-6 years of graduate school and a post-doc or two, you’ll get paid $40-50K/year, and be damned grateful for it.

The comments to these posts are full of the lamentations of angry, highly credentialed, but unemployed Obama-voting progressives who consider any limitation on immigration to be racist, bigoted, and overtly evil.  Which is why, despite opposing the administration-endorsed Senate bill on “immigration reform”, I found myself laughing when reading this description of the bill by Bill Keller at the New York Times.

Any foreigner who gets a graduate degree from an American university in
science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM in the vernacular)
and has a job offer can apply for a green card — even if he or she
studied for a field that is already crowded with native job applicants.
The bill would award permanent residence to anyone with a Ph.D. in any
subject from any university in the world, if he or she has a job offer
in that field.

If the credentialed geniuses in academia think things are difficult for them now, just wait until they have to start competing with PhDs from Bangladesh and Zimbabwe who are willing to work for $5k per year and a green card.  It is ironic that the only thing standing between them and the complete economic devaluation of the credentials they so treasure is the Republican House that they so despise.

The immigration bill multiplies the blessings of diversity with the blessings of free trade.  Imagine how much USA will benefit if wages for PhDs are reduced by 90 percent!

Anti-scholastic diversity

One wonders what it will take for the West to realize that while it is at war with terror, the global jihad is at war with it? Apparently beheadings on the street in London are not enough.  I tend to doubt this sort of thing will convince anyone either:

Islamic militants attacked a boarding school before dawn Saturday, dousing a dormitory in fuel and lighting it ablaze as students slept, survivors said. At least 30 people were killed in the deadliest attack yet on schools in Nigeria’s embattled northeast.

Authorities blamed the violence on Boko Haram, a radical group whose name means “Western education is sacrilege.” The militants have been behind a series of recent attacks on schools in the region, including one in which gunmen opened fire on children taking exams in a classroom.

Perhaps once dozens of American or British children are murdered in a public school by vibrantly anti-scholastic immigrants, a leader will be found who is willing to openly admit that the problem isn’t a few bad apples ruining diversity, but excess diversity.

Teachers are substandard

I have previously calculated, on the basis of their SAT scores, that school teachers today have an average IQ of approximately 95.  And based on this email posted at Chaos Manor, it is clear that education majors have been the absolute dregs of academia for quite some time now:

I worked my way through college. The university I attended generously
provided jobs to many students. One job I held was that of Computer
Operator on the IBM 360/70 in the university computer center.

After my first semester working in the computer center, I worked the
wake-up shift, 0600 – 0900. Many of the universities administrative
computational jobs came to me to run because things were quiet at that
time, and, thus, the demands on the CPU were less.

The university faculty senate had expressed some concerns about the
school’s reputation, or rather the lack of it. They wanted to know why
this was. So they compiled years of grades, punched them onto 80-column
cards, and toted those cards down to the computer center where they
spilled those data onto a tape. That took the better part of a day and
all that evening which meant they did not have time to run the
statistics on those data and print them out. Problem was that the
computer center had promised Dr R, the president of the faculty senate,
the report the following morning.

Charlie, my boss, left it to me on the morning shift to run the stats
and print out the results. As soon as I woke the Beast, I ran the job.
It printed out half a box of fanfold paper. I tore off the last page,
picked up the printout, and took it to the counter to look through it.

Of course, I knew what this was and what it meant. I scanned to the
math department. As, Bs, Cs, Ds, Fs, a few incompletes ― all the grades
in the table. The distribution was normal but the mean was shifted
slightly toward the lower end; that is, the department gave fewer As
than expected and more Fs than expected.  I scanned to the physics department. Much the same story as with the
math department but shifted even more toward the lower end.

I scanned to the department of education, and I said to myself, said
I, “Oh, the shit’s gonna hit the fan.” ED gave 80% As, 20% Bs, and
nothing below a B.

This report exploded like a bomb in the faculty senate. Dr R, the
president of the senate, made a motion his own self to sever the
Department of Education from the rest of the university and another that
admission to the School of Education would not give admission to the
rest of the university. The recriminations were many and bitter. I heard
that the President of the University called in the campus cops to
restore order and prevent the threatened assaults.

I ran this report when I was a sophomore. When I graduated, the war was still on. So if you are an education major and you think I have no respect for you . . . you’re right. I don’t. Moreover, I won’t.

This also serves as a fitting response to those who ask how a mother can homeschool without a degree in physics, math, or womyn’s studies.  The correct answer is: why do you think your children can be adequately educated by a collection of women with a sub-normal IQs whose only education is in what is quite literally the easiest possible course of collegiate study.