Tag: education

Homeschooling hits critical mass

Even as a strong advocate of homeschooling, I’m a little surprised to see how rapidly it is growing:

As dissatisfaction with the U.S. public school system grows, apparently so has the appeal of homeschooling. Educational researchers, in fact, are expecting a surge in the number of students educated at home by their parents over the next ten years, as more parents reject public schools.

A recent report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75%. Though homeschooled children represent only 4% of all school-age children nationwide, the number of children whose parents choose to educate them at home rather than a traditional academic setting is growing seven times faster than the number of children enrolling in grades K-12 every year.

It can be almost amusing how easy it is to derail an outspoken critic homeschooling.  Asking them how old they were when they took calculus usually does the trick… it’s a rhetorical tactic that is particularly effective on adults who never made it that far in mathematics.

Mailvox: writing back to a young female engineer

AA inquires concerning some inexplicable views that she finds both contradictory and insulting:

Dear Sir,

I don’t think you’ll answer me, or read my message… But this is worth a try. I will try very hard to keep polite about all this. It will be difficult, but I’ll try.

See, I’m a young woman. I’m currently 20 years old and a student in environmental engineering in one of the best engineering schools in the world. I got in fair and square. I didn’t get a special grant for being female or any favors. I have to work my butt off to get good grades in fluid mechanics, calculus, environmental chemistry…

I have had the opportunity to read some of the posts you’ve written in your blog and I feel very insulted by them. What happened to you that made your brain go this wrong? How can you claim that women’s rights are wrong? You defend forbidding abortion by claiming unborn children of rape merit all “the legal protections and rights afforded all other human beings”, yet claim that women shouldn’t have those same rights because we “ruin everything”?

I am working hard to be an engineer. My goal in life isn’t to get married or to stay at home and take care of the children. I am not here on this planet to serve a man and raise his children. I have my own goals and my own motivations.

I would continue, but I have finals to prepare and I’ve lost enough of my time on you already.

I would wish you a nice day, but it would be a lie.

Dear AA,

First of all, as a young woman studying engineering, you have very
likely been granted special favors whether you know it or not.  All
those programs designed to encourage young women like you to pursue a
career in engineering exist for a reason.  And the reason is that most
women just don’t enjoy engineering the way men do.  You’re obviously
smart, you can do the schoolwork, but it is unlikely that you will want
to do the real thing for very long.  Assuming you don’t drop out in
favor of an easier discipline before you graduate, the probabilities indicate that you won’t spend much time actually working as an engineer; you’ll
soon be moved into some sort of management or marketing position. 
Whether you have been told as much or not, that is the conventional path
for smart, educated women like you in the corporate world.

There is no shame in that.  I started out in engineering myself.  I had
the ability, but not the aptitude, and quickly switched to a field I
vastly preferred.  If you’re smart enough, you’ll likely figure that out
before long. Whatever you do, don’t waste your life doing something you
don’t really enjoy simply because you are capable of doing it. 
Remember that actual engineering is very, very different than studying
engineering, and being very good at the latter is not necessarily
indicative of real interest in the former.

Now I’m going to teach you a hard, but very important lesson.  You see, I
don’t care you how feel.  I really don’t.  More importantly, neither
does anyone else.  Only about 200 people on a planet of 7 billion
actually care about your feelings, and that’s if you’re lucky.  The
sooner you grasp this lesson, the better off you will be.  And since
almost no one gives a damn what you do, say, think, or feel, appealing
to your feelings when you encounter differences of opinion is not only
illogical, but useless.

What happened to me to make my brain go this wrong?  The short answer is: living life with my eyes open.  Keep in mind
that I’m more intelligent than you are.  The fact that you can’t
understand the way I think doesn’t make my brain wrong, it merely means
you aren’t keeping up.  But more important is the fact that I’m
considerably more experienced than you are.  I’ve had three decades to
observe the differences between all those school lessons about valuing
equality, diversity, and vibrancy and the way human beings actually
behave.  Equality is a myth; it doesn’t exist anymore than fairies and
unicorns do.  As for women’s rights, well, a young woman as intelligent
as you should be able to handle the math that dictates what happens to a
society when an insufficient number of young women marry and have
children.  Since women’s rights are very strongly correlated with
demographic decline, they are not sustainable and are, in fact,
societally deleterious.  They are not so much wrong as fatal when viewed
from the macro perspective.

I do believe women should have the same legal rights and protections
afforded to unborn children.  There is no contradiction there.  You see,
I don’t believe that unborn children should be given the right to vote
or permitted to murder other unborn children either.

I understand you have your own goals.  That’s fine. The problem is that
women are not only valuable to society, they are invaluable.  They are
necessary. The one and only thing both society and the human race
actually need from you is for you to marry and raise children.  If
you’re not going to do that, then it really doesn’t matter if you’re
going to become a human resources manager with an engineering degree or
drop out of school and become a stripper.  If you’re only  going to do
what any man of similar capabilities can do, then you are an
evolutionary dead end and as unimportant to society as the average man
is.

In the entire history of the human race, the actions of a few thousand men have actually made much of a difference one way or the other.  If that. But without women deciding to marry and have children, the species would die out.  Do you really want to limit yourself to the same sort of irrelevance as the average man?

Another thing you have no reason to know is that young women are
reliably bad at foreseeing what they will want to do in the near
future.  I graduated with a number of women like you.  None of them
thought they were interested in marriage and children until they were
about 27.  Then they suddenly changed their minds and some of them were
very upset that they had spent the previous ten years pursuing goals
that were now unimportant to them.  I even wrote a column about it
called Spiting Their Pretty Faces back in 2003, you can google it. 
Think about 2003.  You were ten.  Are your goals the same now as they
were then?  If not, then how can you be certain that your goals, and
your opinion about marriage and children, will be the same when you are
30?

In any event, I wish you good fortune regardless of what path you eventually choose.

Regards, etc.
Vox

Academia needs women!

Or the survival of the university system is at risk!  Although I don’t quite see how either more or less female professors is going to stop universities from being able to overcharge indebted young men and women for useless degrees.  Stickwick, who is herself a female academic with a PhD, has a few thoughts:

Thought you might find this interesting, if only for the way people are trying to spin this old news.

Truth: Few PhD candidates, male or female, want to pursue an academic career once they get a taste of the life in graduate school.

Spin: Women are being driven out of academia!! The survival of academia is threatened!!!

By their third year in grad school, only 21% of men in grad school say they want to pursue an academic career. The number drops to 12% for
women, and it’s for the usual reasons — women see academia as very competitive and requiring a lot of personal sacrifice. There’s nothing
new here; but the spin is very silly. What I find preposterous, besides the notion that academia cannot survive without women, is the claim th academia is in any way threatened by the fact that relatively few people want academic careers. The last thing we need right now is more PhDs. I have friends who are on their third post-docs, because they can’t even find jobs at small liberal arts universities.

For every job offered at a halfway good institution, there are literally hundreds of applicants. On top of this, there is very little grant money available; soft-money people everywhere are scrambling to find any funding at all. Universities are cutting every position they possibly can. It makes no sense for the author of this article to claim that academia is in any way threatened by a smaller applicant pool.

What I find amusing is this claim by the author of the article: “We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest.”  But the fact is that the universities stopped doing that the moment they openly announced their intention to employ more women and minorities while at the same time blackballing Christians and political conservatives.  The best and the brightest at my university’s economics department were me and the White Buffalo.  He was the departmental award winner while I was permitted to do three independent studies with my professors rather than bothering with classes. And I’ve now published more books on economics than most of my professors had.  But neither of us ever considered, for a moment, an academic career, nor were we ever encouraged to pursue one.

The fundamental problem for the Left is that it is not possible to simultaneously pursue both equality and excellence.

Homeschool or Die vol. XXXLVI

I can’t help but notice the difference between the way fatalities are treated depending upon whether the children killed are being educated at home or at public school.  If seven children were killed by a demented homeschool mother, this would spark a national media outcry and demands for more restrictions on homeschooling.

And yet, in the past four months, we have seen multiple incidences of multiple fatalities due to acts of Man and Nature, but the thought that perhaps it is not wise to congregate large numbers of vulnerable children together never seems to enter the national discourse.

According to Wikipedia, there have been 278 tornado-related deaths at school since 1885.  That is nearly 2.2 deaths per year, which is a trivial percentage of the 48 million or so children attending the public schools.  And yet, they are entirely avoidable deaths; under the oft-cited “if just one life can be saved” metric, it cannot be denied that children who are not forced to congregate en masse at school cannot be killed by tornadoes there.

Two tornado-inflicted deaths per year isn’t much, but add to them the 26 schoolbus deaths per year, the 600 school-automotive deaths per year, and the 34 violence-related deaths, and it soon becomes readily apparent that school cannot reasonably be considered a safe place for children.

Forget the superior education received by homeschooled children.  Doesn’t saving the lives of more than 662 children every year make banning school a moral imperative?

Especially in light of the fact that 119 children under the age of twelve, (and 565 under the age of 18), were killed by guns.  School is literally more lethally dangerous than guns; something you might want to remind your average pro-public school, pro-gun control left-liberal.

Guns secure freedom at a lower cost in children’s lives than the public schools manage to deliver inferior educations. We don’t need gun control, we need school control.

The decline of entrepreneurialism

Glenn Reynolds observes the current lack of startups with appropriate concern:

[T]he latest data indicate that start-ups are becoming rarer, not more common. A new report from JPMorgan economist Mike Feroli indicates that employment in start-ups is plunging. New jobs in the economy tend to come from new businesses, but we’re getting fewer new businesses. That doesn’t bode well.

In fact, it is yet another sign of a United States that is looking more like Europe: A society in which big businesses have cozy relationships with big government, while unemployment remains comparatively high. If you’re fortunate enough to have a job at one of those government-connected businesses, GE, for example, your situation is pretty good. If you’re a recent college graduate looking for work, your situation is not so great. If you’re a low-skilled worker, your situation is dreadful.

So what’s to blame for this change? A lot of things, probably. One reason, I suspect, for a job market that looks more like Europe is a regulatory and legal environment that looks more like Europe’s. High regulatory loads — the product of ObamaCare and numerous other laws — systematically harm small businesses, which can’t afford the personnel needed for compliance, to the benefit of large corporations, which can.

Likewise, higher taxes reduce the rewards for success, making people less likely to invest their money (or time) into new businesses. And local regulatory bodies, too, make starting new businesses harder.

But I wonder if the biggest problem isn’t cultural.

Reynolds is right to be concerned.  Entrepreneurialism is the engine of economic growth, technological advancement, and scientific progress. I suspect he is not only right, but that the cultural problem can be narrowed down considerably and connected to another recent phenomenon.  And, to be honest, I’m a little surprised that Reynolds didn’t make the connection, because that phenomenon is one of his primary bugaboos: the education bubble.

I started my first company when I was 23. It did rather well. But I would probably have been much more successful if I had followed the lead of Bill Gates, Michael Dell, and others and dropped out of school midway through my sophomore year.  With the considerable help of one of my father’s engineers, I’d designed an Ad Lib-compatible, stereo, CD-quality 16-bit, 16-channel sound board at a time when Ad Lib reigned supreme in the game’s industry with its MIDI card and Creative Labs had just introduced its first 8-bit, mono, 22 KHz Soundblaster.

We got two of the cards working over Christmas break, then I went back to school like a good little upper middle class worker bee and the project languished in a corporate bureaucracy that had no interest in game-related hardware until it died completely when the engineer who had worked on it left for another company before the summer.  Four and a half years later, Media Vision introduced its hugely successful Pro Audio Spectrum, which was almost exactly the same card we had built in the lab.

I’m not blaming anyone else for my failure to follow through on my ideas. It was my fault, no one else’s.  Let’s face it, if there is a theme to my life, that is it: once I have something working to my satisfaction, I tend to lose at least an amount of interest in it. But far from being encouraged to take advantage of the window of opportunity, I was actively discouraged from even the thought of dropping out of college.  I’d tentatively mentioned the possibility once we got the card working and it was greeted with what can only be described as unmitigated horror.  The idea that an intelligent individual from a good family would not be “educated” was simply not to be countenanced, and besides, I could always pursue the opportunity after I finished my degree in another two and a half years.

That seemed to make sense to me.  And indeed, it would have even been possible considering the timeline.  But opportunity doesn’t follow a nice orderly schedule, and as it happened, I never even looked at that sound card again.

The cult of the college degree is now even more widespread than it was back in the late 1980s, more people than ever are attending college, they are attending longer, and they are going into significant debt to do so.  This means that not only are more young men putting off their entrepreneurial activity for four to eight years during the most risk-friendly and most creative period of their lives, but they are far less able to afford to take risks once they graduate.

As a result, what we have now is young lawyers and MBAs in debt instead of young CEOs running their own startups.  Fortunately, the feminization of the university is beginning to cause young men to question the value of a college degree, so there may be a silver lining in the devolution of the academy.

The taxes and regulations aren’t helping either, of course. My father, for example, started three companies that employed hundreds of people and paid tens of millions in taxes.  He has spent the last six years living off the public dime, and in addition to the huge opportunity cost of locking him up, (which amounts to millions of dollars and scores of jobs), the actual cost of keeping him locked up in a Federal minimum-security prison amounts to about one-third of the amount he was charged with failing to pay.  Even if one is convinced he is the worst, most evil criminal of all time, from the macrosocietal perspective this is observably a case of society shooting itself in the foot.

So why should potential entrepreneurs bother?  It’s too much work combined with too much risk… and success only comes with even more risk. (My father’s imprisonment was the culmination of a battle with the IRS over an Irish subsidiary that began in 1992.) The younger versions of the best and brightest who once started companies are the most likely to see that it is now a better-paying, lower-risk option to get a glamor degree, join the parasitical class, and work up the hierarchy until reaching a position where one is able to use someone else’s organization to direct someone else’s money to one’s own pocket.  Why be an entrepreneur spending the next 10 years building a company when in the same amount of time you can expect to be an executive, or better yet, a consultant?

Why build when you can more easily and safely leech?

Education is important

But degrees, particularly advanced degrees, are increasingly less so thanks to the magic of technology and the Law of Supply and Demand.  Dr. Helen points us to Slate:

I deeply regret going to graduate school, but not, Ron Rosenbaum, because my doctorate ruined books and made me obnoxious. (Granted, maybe it did: My dissertation involved subjecting the work of Franz Kafka to first-order logic.) No, I now realize graduate school was a terrible idea because the full-time, tenure-track literature professorship is extinct. After four years of trying, I’ve finally gotten it through my thick head that I will not get a job—and if you go to graduate school, neither will you.

You might think your circumstances will be different. So did I. There’s a little fable from Kafka, appropriately called “A Little Fable,” that speaks to why this was very stupid:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run.”

“But you’ve only got to run the other way,” said the cat, and ate it.

The mouse wasn’t going in the wrong direction so much as it was walking cat food the entire time. A graduate career is just like this, only worse, because “A Little Fable” lasts three sentences and is made up, while graduate school lasts at least six years and will ruin your life in a very real way.

Staying in school in order to avoid facing the economic environment isn’t merely cowardly, it is self-defeating. It shouldn’t be as hard as it seems to be for people with 16+ years of “education” to figure out that the more there is of something, the less everyone else tends to value it.  And just because a decision made sense in your parents’ day, or your grandparents’ day, doesn’t mean that it still makes sense now.

The frightening thing is that far from learning from all the warnings, young Americans are going ever more heavily into student loan debt.

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.