Tag: education

Education and the pretense of excellence

This is an example of why the much-ballyhooed predominance of women in education is not translating to meaningful real world success and why the disappearance of men from higher education is not tantamount to either their replacement by women or an inevitable decline into technological stagnation:

My best students were guys who weren’t really paying attention in class, they were doing the stuff on their own, and called me only for help. They were ahead of the program. I was ok with putting zero grades (F-) to the ones who didn’t care about learning the stuff. My take: if you can’t do this stuff, you ain’t gonna be making money with it on the real world, so why do you want a grade on it? Go do something else.

Nonetheless I got the “best teacher award” from the students four times in a row.

So. A couple of women protested and wanted to pass my course, on the basis that they had been attending to class and had done most of the assignments. Were they able to do the stuff? No. But they wanted recognition for their efforts. I got pushed by the directive board so I gave an A+ to everyone.

That’s some quality black-knighting there. It’s based on agreeing and amplifying. If pushed to delink genuine achievement and grades, then delink it entirely, don’t permit the retention of a convincing appearance of a nonexistent link. Education that recognizes efforts rather than results is not education, it is selling paper.

Remember, fraud is always based on deceit. Exposing the deceit to all and sundry is very nearly as effective as preventing the fraud from taking place.  And it is important to expose it, because allowing false excellence to be substituted for the real thing can have significant consequences, as the UK is discovering to its detriment.

The country’s top woman civil servant is clinging to her £180,000-a-year job after being accused by MPs of a ‘catastrophic failure of leadership’ on securing Britain’s borders. Lin Homer’s disastrous tenure in charge of the UK Border Agency lead to a huge backlog of hundreds of thousands of immigration cases. But astonishingly she emerged unscathed and was rewarded with promotion through the civil service and is now in charge of HM Revenue and Customs. The powerful home affairs committee today said they were ‘astounded’ she was considered suitable for the job of collecting the nation’s taxes.

It is hardly astonishing that the UK’s top woman civil servant wasn’t held accountable for her catastrophic failure, given the Prime Minister’s mandate to promote women at all costs.  As was the case in the class that Yohami mentioned, Lin Homer was rewarded with bonuses and promoted for her effort rather than her results… and now she is in charge of the nation’s tax revenues.

The lobotomy factories

One has to wonder what the argument for public school is supposed to be when four out of five of the GRADUATES of a major public school system can’t read, write, or do math:

It’s an education bombshell. Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system.

This doesn’t even account for the dropouts, who account for at least 12.1 percent of the city’s students even if we take the more generous “current methodology” at face value.   “Since 2005, when the State began using its current methodology to
calculate graduation rates, New York City’s graduation rate has risen by
40.9 percent. In that same period, the dropout rate has fallen nearly
10 points from 22 percent to 12.1 percent.”

If we assume that the dropouts have similarly failed to learn the basic skills, that means that about 17.6% of the students in the New York City public school system are learning basic skills.

The public schools aren’t useless, they are worse than useless.  Forget online education and homeschooling, children would probably learn more from playing video games all day for 12 years.  And it would cost a lot less to provide every “student” with a PlayStation and a new game delivered every month.

UPDATE: It’s not just New York City and its vibrant community that are failing.  Consider Minnesota, which spends $12,966 per year per public school student

  • 23% of Minnesota students are not proficient in reading
  • 38% of Minnesota students are not proficient in math
  • 52% of Minnesota students are not proficient in science

By the way, the Minneapolis public schools spend $23,020 per student and 42.6% are not proficient in reading and 60.4% are not proficient in math.

    The consequences of democratization

    It is itself indicative of an educational failure that the inevitable consequence of democratizing anything leads inevitably to mediocrity should prove surprising:

    Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life.

    Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican population that is literate is going up, but in absolute numbers, there are more illiterate people in Mexico now than there were 12 years ago. Even if baseline literacy, the ability to read a street sign or news bulletin, is rising, the practice of reading an actual book is not. Once a reasonably well-educated country, Mexico took the penultimate spot, out of 108 countries, in a Unesco assessment of reading habits a few years ago.

    One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

    The concept of group schooling is fundamentally flawed from the start.  But throw in the expansion of the number of students attending as well as the elements of entrenched, self-interested administrative and teaching bureaucracies, and you have a perfect recipe for teaching absolutely nothing of import, regardless of whether you are considering American college students or Mexican elementary schoolers.  It should be readily apparent that the more children attend school, the more mediocre the education that ALL of those children will receive.

    It’s not exactly a zero-sum game, but it might as well be.  The more resources that are committed to education, the more the parasite class is drawn to it and the more resources will be diverted away from its primary purpose.

    Now lets contemplate the consequences of importing tens of millions of these uneducated quasi-illiterates with zero familiarity knowledge of the Western political tradition and giving them citizenship and the right to vote.  On what planet does anyone possibly think this is going to lead to any sort of improvement in the national well-being?  What is the case for believing this is going to do anything but hasten the decline and fall of the United States?

    People sometimes wonder how I can be an open and avowed anti-equalitarian elitist.  To which my response is: precisely how mediocre do you believe yourself to be that you are not?

    Intergenerational war

    As if the younger generations don’t already have a strong casus belli given the debt with which their great-grandparents and grandparents have saddled them, Karl Denninger points out yet another reason today’s children will have just cause to hate their parents:

    We all have the right to consent to our data being used and even sold in exchange for something.  Today you consent to a lot of that, even though you may not be paying attention to your granting of that consent.

    But children are not of age.  They thus cannot consent.  And it is a long-standing principle that a bargain must include something of at least putative value to both parties as consideration, or it’s no contract at all.

    There is no benefit to the kids in this paradigm — only costs that are intentionally hidden from them but which, mark my words, will screw them in the future.

    Mark this post and wait 10 years. 

    Those kids who are being “tracked” now will find that they’ve been violated repeatedly by this data collection and sharing.

    If your state is involved in this, and there are a lot that are, you need to get every last one of your state legislators out of office and all of the local school board members must be instantly ejected and shunned to the point of literal starvation.

    If you’re in a state that is not participating, make damn sure they don’t now or in the future.

    If you’re a parent and don’t do those two things then prepare for your kids to throw you into the wood chipper feet-first when they figure out how badly you allowed them to be screwed.

    I utterly guarantee that you will deserve it.

    On a related note, don’t put pictures of your kids on Facebook or Instagram.  It’s stupid.  It’s obnoxious.  It’s thoughtless and self-centered.  And it’s their life, not yours, that you’re putting on public display.

    Scientists are stupidshort-sighted

    And biologists are the dumbest of the lot.  Seriously, given their constant yammering about how America so desperately needs “moar science edification”, it is abundantly clear that the sort of individuals who go into the life sciences don’t even understand the most simple basics of supply and demand.  Keep that in mind the next time you’re hearing someone wax eloquent about the supposed brilliance of Richard Dawkins or, for crying out loud, the Fowl Atheist, PZ Myers:

    How seriously can you possibly take people who are dumb enough to spend more than seven years and go into serious student loan debt in order to have a less than one in five chance at getting a job doing what they’ve studied for?  And since the chart goes back to 1991, these scientific geniuses don’t even have the excuse of claiming that they had no way of knowing that there was no significant employment demand for their highly educated services.

    If you ever wondered why the Pharyngulans seemed unusually bitter for a blog readership, even a heavily atheist one, the chart above explains why.  They put their faith in an education god, who proved to be a false and unreliable idol.

    The fact of the matter is that America needs LESS science education.  I’ve pointed out that it is ridiculous to teach evolution to kids who can’t read and write properly, but it is even more absurd to give out PhDs to people who, despite nearly 20 years of formal schooling, remain entirely innocent of the concepts of supply and demand.

    Societal devolution

    The anti-suffragettes of 100 years ago have been proven correct:

    When a smart young man receives a big salary it is a good thing for the race. He can marry and transmit his smartness to posterity.  When a young woman receives a big salary it means disaster for the race, and the wiser, handsomer, more efficient the woman is to-day the more likely she is to have a salary instead of a husband.  You couldn’t run a chicken farm on those principles. Suppose you took all the best hens and set them aside to go to college or run a feather factory for the other hens.  It’s a tragedy!

    It has taken the race millions of years to produce the high salaried women of to-day, and now those qualities are allowed to perish. The spark carried through the centuries is snuffed out by a salary!

    On the plus side, Powerpoint slideshows have never been prettier and filing clerks now have bachelor’s degrees and $100,000 in student loan debt.

    Another feminist myth exploded

    The notion that equal access to higher education was going to cause a flowering of female intellectual achievement was always false, because it observably didn’t happen the first time around.

    Although the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female
    undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to
    1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments
    in the 1930s and later as GIs returned from World War II. A highpoint of
    gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when
    undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. But starting then and
    continuing until the present in an almost unbroken trend, female college
    enrollments have increased relative to male enrollments. 

    In other words, elite women were attending university in equal numbers to elite men, but more middle-class and working-class men going to college threw the balance out of whack.  Middle-class women followed suit, and the consequent collapse in national demographics caused the replacement of 60 million aborted natives with 60 million alien immigrants.

    Brilliant.  Just brilliant.  Short of poisoning the water supply or dropping a large quantity of nuclear weapons on the major cities, it would be hard to concoct a more efficient means of crippling a nation.

    Apparently education is not the answer

    Paging Dr. Reynolds, Dr. Reynolds, cleanup on aisle 3

    Nearly half of working Americans with college degrees are in jobs for
    which they’re overqualified, a new study out Monday suggests.  The
    study, released by the non-profit Center for College Affordability and
    Productivity, says the trend is likely to continue for newly minted
    college graduates over the next decade.

    Fortunately, these overqualified degree holders can be patient and don’t need to make a lot of money right away, because being so intelligent and educated, they would have known better than to go into debt to pay for a useless degree… wait a minute….

    If you’re still on the mindless college track because you think education is priceless, you might want to stop and do the math first.  And ask yourself why, if it is priceless, it has a price tag attached.

    This should also put some perspective on the value of the opinion of those who seriously believed – in some cases, still believe – that education is the answer to anything.

    Why girls get better grades

    It isn’t because they actually know the material better, but because they don’t annoy the teacher:

    Despite having higher scores on standardized tests, boys get lower
    grades than girls. Why? Because teachers are basing grades at least
    partly on classroom behavior, and the standards are very much geared to
    female norms….

    “Boys in all racial categories across all subject areas are not
    represented in grade distributions where their test scores would
    predict. Even those boys who perform equally as well as girls on
    reading, math and science tests are nevertheless graded less favorably
    by their teachers.”

    In summary, girls are able to substitute apple-polishing and classroom etiquette for an amount of knowing the material, and they are being rewarded for it, beginning in kindergarten.  Their better grades are eventually used to give them priority of place in college, thereby leading observers to erroneously conclude that they are “outperforming” men. 

    Unsurprisingly, the boys who are smart enough to figure out the deck is stacked against them lose all respect for the system and opt out in varying degrees.

    It’s worse than that

    It is belatedly dawning on everyone that not everyone should go to college:

    Richard Meeusen, chairman, president and CEO of Racine Federated’s parent company, Badger Meter. “We have presidents and leaders who say every child should have the opportunity to go to college.

    “Unfortunately, it sends the message to parents that if they don’t send their kids to college, they’re failing.”

    “Now we’re saying, ‘Where are our electricians, auto mechanics, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning) workers and CNC (computer numeric control) operators?’” Meeusen said.

    He added, “We’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replace them with calculus.”

    The problem isn’t that we’ve ripped out all the shop classes and replaced them with calculus.  It’s that we’ve ripped them out and replaced them with diversity classes that teach how Harriet Tubman won the civil war, “science” classes about outmoded evolutionary theory and nonexistent global warming, and “sex-ed” classes about Heather’s two mommies and Cho Fong’s two daddies.

    What we’re seeing is nothing less than a complete divorce of education and academic accreditation.  All an academic degree now assures is that the individual has been extensively immersed in the expected ideological and socio-sexual propaganda.