Tag: education

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.

Homeschool and social awkwardness

LH asks a serious question about socialization and homeschool:

My observations are this. Academically, homeschoolers are just pure genius. But the world does not work based on your grade point average. In the business world, it all also depends on who you know and how well you get along with people. And I’ve noticed that homeschooled adults–people in their twenties and thirties–often seem to struggle with the rest of the working world.

Now, I am asking for opinions on these observations. I’m not drawing a line in the sand, making any declarations against homeschooling, or anything like that. I’m looking for other people’s observations and testimonies that might prove hopeful.

I think it is a genuine issue.  I have observed the phenomenon on numerous occasions myself.  For example, at my eldest son’s first soccer practice with a new team, all of the other players sat down and listened to the coach when he started addressing them.  My son continued to stand, bouncing a ball, and was observably paying no attention to the coach.

Now, obviously I explained that his behavior was unacceptable after the practice and likely to lead to a lack of playing time.  But the fact that I had to explain this to him, when he had been playing soccer for years, was indicative of what can either be seen as a feature or a bug.  That is to say, he simply does not appear to feel any peer pressure.  The fact that everyone else is doing X not only does not instill in him any need to do X, he doesn’t appear to assign any significance to it whatsoever.

This isn’t necessarily the result of homeschooling, of course.  I am a socio-sexual Sigma and a lone wolf.  Spacebunny is also, by female standards, a lone wolf.  Both of us were public-schooled.  So, it should not be at all surprising that our son would tend to be highly independent regardless of how he was schooled, and yet, there is still a material difference between his perception of the significance of the behavior of others to him, and ours.

On the other hand, once a parent is aware of this lack of awareness, it is quite easily dealt with.  The incident at practice was two years ago.  It has not happened since; once the team begins to line up in front of the coach, he recognizes the signal and not infrequently is among the first to sit down and pay attention.  However, it appears to remain a conscious behavior and not an unconscious one.  I happen to think this will serve him well in time, as unlike the others, he has the option to go along with the crowd or not, as he consciously chooses.  Independence and auto-conformity are mutually exclusive; the parent who fears the occasional social awkwardness later in life would do well to consider what sort of problems are more likely to occur with an auto-conforming child.

However, the most significant testimony I have ever heard concerning socialization and homeschool was from the children’s pediatrician, who is a doctor of no little international repute.  We were the only homeschooling family in his practice at the start and he initially harbored some reservations about it.  However, after ten years, he mentioned that he was now fully supportive of it, in part because he had observed that our children were not only advanced intellectually, they were also the happiest children in his practice.

I think one should step back and consider what the working world presently is before concluding that those who struggle with it are somehow deficient.  What is natural or normal about spending 8-10 hours per day in a small grey cubicle, living like a rat in a cage and shuffling virtual papers while attempting to avoid conflict with various unproductive individuals of varying degrees of medication and reflexive hostility?  Considering how much the average worker has to modify his normal behavior just to avoid getting in trouble with HR these days, can one reasonably conclude that it is the homeschooled individual and not the increasingly outdated working world that is the problem?

The experts tell us that to succeed in the working world of tomorrow, it will be increasingly necessary to be independent, free of reliance upon the corporate patterns of the past, flexible, and agile.  To me, it sounds as if much of the “awkwardness” of the homeschooled individual in the eyes of the more conventionally schooled is akin to the strangeness of the mammal when viewed from the perspective of the dinosaur.

My suspicion is that the socially awkward homeschooler primarily represents a failure of the homeschooling parent to address socio-sexual issues with the child, and is little different from the tendency of most conventionally schooled men to be sexually awkward due to the maleducations they receive on the topic.  The fact that the homeschooled child is likely to automatically receive less socio-sexual education than the crude mindless one received by the conventionally schooled child does not mean that he is necessarily uneducable in the subject.

Fueling the death spiral

Glenn Reynolds notes that homeschools are putting one of America’s most enervating evils at risk, the public school:

For “notoriously inadequate” public school systems, as I argue in a new “Broadside” from Encounter Books, The K-12 Implosion, the risk is that the outflow of kids will turn from a trickle into a flood. At some point, it’s a death-spiral: As kids (often the best students) leave because schools are “notoriously inadequate,” the schools become even more notoriously inadequate, and funding — which is computed on a per-pupil basis — dries up. This, of course, encourages more parents to move their kids elsewhere, in a vicious cycle.

Does this mean the end of public education? No. But it does mean that the old model — which dates to the 19th Century, when schools were explicitly compared to factories — is at risk. Smarter educators will start thinking about how to update a 19th Century product to suit 21st Century realities. Less-smart educators will hunker down and fight change tooth and nail.
Who will win out in the end? Well, how many 19th Century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?

The risk is to be embraced with enthusiasm.  I’ve been arguing for years that the very concept of “school” is completely and utterly outdated.  It’s inefficient, ineffective, and intellectually crippling.  Although there are many ominous signs on the horizon, there are a few bright rays of light shining as well, and one of them is the continued rapid growth of parents deciding to homeschool their children.