Tag: education

Homeschool or die, part 562

I imagine the latest school shooting will launch the Obama administration’s push for more useless gun control.  And yet, if they genuinely wanted to reduce the likelihood of the mass murder of schoolchildren, they would ban mass schooling.

CBS News is reporting that 27 people are dead, including 1420 students,
after a shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. The
gunman is among the dead.

Say what you will about homeschooling, but if your child is taught at home, he’s not going to be shot there by some disgruntled school employee, student, or parent.  And the idea that gun control laws will make any difference whatsoever with regards to this sort of thing is risible, given that it is already illegal to carry guns onto school property, to say nothing of shooting people there.

And this may be worth keeping in mind when the inevitable push for gun control begins: “The worst mass school murder in American history took place on May
18,1927 in Bath Township, Mich., when a former school board member set
off three bombs that killed 45 people.”

Obamateach and the post-college tax

After all, you didn’t build that university degree:

Student Loan debt in the U.S. recently crossed the $1 trillion mark,
with a good chunk of that owed to the U.S. government. In an attempt to
streamline the whole process, a soon-to-be-introduced bill would replace
the current system of debt collection with automatic payroll deductions
tied to the borrower’s income.

I wonder how long it will be before it will become illegal to pay for your own college, thus allowing Washington to tap directly into your paycheck perpetuity as compensation for the government investment in your K-16+ education.  We already have a working model for free education with the Obamacare model.  Obamateach is the obvious next step educational for a society moving rapidly Forward! into the 21st century.

The importance of IQ

As much as people slaver to denigrate and discredit it, the statistical fact of the matter is that IQ is actually more important than most people believe when it comes to certain types of success.  While it’s not necessarily a surprise that college grades and years of education strongly correlate with IQ, (which may be the cause of the common confusion of academic credentials with intelligence), it may be a surprise to learn that IQ is a better predictor of successful job performance than openness, extraversion, agreeableness, confidence, or even conscientiousness.

IQ surpasses any single Big Five personality factor in the prediction
of the two academic outcomes, college grades (r = .45) and years of
education (r = .55). Big Five conscientiousness is by far the best
personality predictor of grades (r = .22).…Conscientiousness predicts
job performance (r = .13; corrected r = .22) better than does any other
Big Five factor, but not as well as IQ does (r = .21; corrected r =
.55). The importance of IQ increases with job complexity, defined as the
information processing requirements of the job: cognitive skills are
more important for professors, scientists, and senior managers than for
semiskilled or unskilled laborers.…In contrast, the importance of
conscientiousness does not vary much with job complexity….

Now, we all know the brilliant guy who has wasted his 175 IQ by spending twenty years in search of the eternal buzz.  I do, anyhow, he used to live in my basement.  But such individuals are complete outliers, what matters more is the advantage that the moderately intelligent man with the 115 IQ has over the even more moderately intelligent 105 IQ guy.

For some reason, the discussion of IQ differences makes people uncomfortable; it doesn’t matter how obviously intelligent one is, people still find it offensive in a way that they never find a tall man being straightforward about his height is.  This is strange, because one can’t do much more about one’s intelligence than one can about one’s height.  One can, perhaps, attempt to make more efficient use of it, but then, a tall man can strive to avoid slouching as well.  Is it because we value IQ more than height, is it because it seems a more intrinsic element of ourselves, or is it merely that height is more readily observed by the average individual?

Regardless, the reality is that the more everyone realizes that intelligence, as measured by IQ, is merely a tool and a natural advantage little different than any other genetic gift, the better off everyone will be.  Being smart doesn’t make one any morally better or intrinsically wiser; the myopic foolishness of the cognitive elite is one of the greatest dangers that face humanity today.  But pretending that a potential danger does not exist is stupid and short-sighted, especially when one necessarily has to pretend that the antidote to that danger doesn’t exist as well.

If you don’t think it makes sense to treat a normal individual like a retard, then it should not be hard to understand that you cannot communicate with a brilliant individual as if he were a normal one.  And on the societal level, the goal should not be to try to make the retards normal or the normals brilliant, (such efforts are futile), but rather, to endeavor to teach each group of individuals wisdom and strong moral character to the best of their capacity to understand and apply it.  Even one conscientious and confident normal individual of good character can do wonders for correcting the ills caused by a gaggle of highly intelligent, evil-minded fools.

My question for Richard Dawkins

Slashdot is inviting interview questions.  Here is mine:  Given that a) a statistically significant minority of students cannot read or write at their grade levels, b) only a very small number of graduating high school students will ever go on to study science in college, and, c) there are already more science majors graduating than there are science-related jobs to employ them, why do you insist it is so important to teach evolution in schools?

Seeds of societal destruction

Desiderius, a commenter at HUS, draws an interesting connection between Rome’s destructive foreign policy and the U.S. university system:

The empire/Unis identify the best and brightest of the
tribes/flyover communities. They wow the parents with the grandeur of
Rome/Uni-degree caché. Parents send promising youth off to Rome/Unis.
They are indoctrinated with values hostile to the communities that
raised them.* In the Roman case, the now-mature youth were then returned
back to the tribes to sow discord, which they did in spades due to the
contempt they’d been trained to feel for the communities that raised
them and the values those communities held dear.

In the present case, when the economy is good, they just stay in the
big cities and live the life of Roissy. Bad economy -> the Roman case
becomes a more real possibility. I’ve seen some teachers like this,
although to be fair, also some teachers pushing back. We’ll see if the
result is just impotent discord. The alternatives range from Alaric to
Washington.

The irony is that the values of the tribes more closely approximated
the republican values that allowed Rome to rise in the first place than
the decadent ones that precipitated it’s fall. Likewise today. It is the
liberal values that have been corrupted.

* I’d argue in both cases violently less egalitarian, but I’m a little
original that way – suffice it to say in the present case that Yale Sex
Week wasn’t what the parents signed up for, or if that feels too
judgie/SoCon for you, one can peruse the syllabi for rampant
illiberalism, anti-semitism, radfem, anti-western, you name it. It’s
bad. I call it anti-humanism.

This is a cogent summary of one of the various downsides of the so-called meritocracy.  Another one is the way in which the destruction of the old WASP network on Wall Street and its strong sense of noblesse oblige led to the rapacious, mercenary culture that has devastated the American economy, created vast quantities of debt, and led to major malinvestment throughout the nation.

IQ and the Ivy League

One of the interesting things about the self-identified intelligent individuals of the cognitive elite is how they commonly demonstrate that the failure to think results in much the same consequences as the inability to think correctly.

Now, most graduates of Ivy League universities genuinely believe that most highly intelligent people attend Ivy League schools.  But in much the same way that atheists confuse a higher average intelligence with a larger quantity of intelligent individuals, they are confusing a concentration of intelligent individuals with the overall quantity.

Let’s assume that every single individual at an Ivy League school is
Mensa-qualified. That’s absurdly generous, of course, as anyone who has
ever been to an Ivy or conversed with more than a few Ivy League
graduates will know, but just to be conservative, we’ll assume that every single student enrolled at an Ivy posssses an IQ of 132+ and is therefore in the top 2 percent of intelligence. Now, note that the total Ivy
undergraduate enrollment is 59,561.

That is 0.32 percent of the 18,078,672
total U.S. undergraduate enrollment in 2010. That means, by even the most
generous and conservative estimate, (since not all Ivy undergrads are genuinely
Mensa-qualified and because the college-attending group has an average IQ a little above the 100 norm), there are at
least 5.25x MORE equally smart people, about 302,012, who are attending
state universities, community colleges, and other private colleges instead of Ivy League
universities.

I’d have to do a bit more research to come up with a more accurate number, but I would estimate that there are probably between 10x to 15x more smart people who did not attend an Ivy than did attend one.

Mailvox: homeschool or die!

A longtime reader writes:

That school in Victorville where they’re having the riots is where my kids would go if we didn’t homeschool.  So, thanks again.

Happy to help.  And what a succinct response to the inevitable raising of the “socialization” issue that family now possesses.  Although, I suppose it could reasonably be argued that given the current demographic trends, white American children should be educated to expect violent struggles, both political and literal, between the black and brown portions of the population.

Homeschool vaccine survey

If you live in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, or Oregon and homeschool your children, please consider taking part in this NHERI-sponsored pilot study:

A lot of people feel strongly about the
importance of all children being vaccinated for their own good and
society’s good. Others feel just as strongly that vaccines are dangerous
and do more harm than good.

Maybe you haven’t really thought about
it and are rather neutral about the issue. But wouldn’t it be
interesting to find out the facts about what might be going on with
vaccines and the health of our children and society?

This is a great opportunity for you to
participate in a study to help everyone understand this critical and
controversial subject. Homeschoolers, with either vaccinated or non-vaccinated children, are in a unique position to inform this area of research.

Study participants will remain anonymous. We fully understand the importance of confidentiality and anonymity.

This should be interesting, as there has been a great deal of theorizing about homeschoolers and vaccinations without anyone actually possessing much in the way of relevant evidence concerning it.

With a bang

The Baltimore public schools began classes today and lots of that all-important socialization is already underway:

Baltimore County Police are investigating a confirmed shooting at Perry Hall High School. Police say a 17-year-old student has been shot and one suspect, a student, is in custody…. The shooting reportedly happened in the school cafeteria and the victim was shot in the back.

Public school is child abuse.

Fascinating

The NYT appears to be feeling the need to turn against the teachers unions and the educational status quo:

“When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?” asks a union leader (Holly Hunter) in the movie. I don’t know, but that’s indeed the state of play when it comes to teachers’ unions, and it’s a dangerous one….

Better teachers, better teachers, better teachers. That’s the mantra of the moment, and implicit in it is the notion that the ones we’ve got aren’t nearly good enough. “It’s a historic high point for demoralization,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian at New York University.

We have to find a way out of this. Weingarten noted that most public school children are taught by teachers with a union affiliation, if not necessarily a union contract. That won’t change anytime soon. So a constructive dialogue with those unions is essential.

But so is real flexibility from unions, along with their genuine, full-throated awareness that parents are too frustrated, kids too important and public resources too finite for any reflexive, defensive attachments to the old ways of doing things.

Now, I happen to believe that the combination of technology, propaganda, and politics has rendered the 19th century system of schooling obsolete, intellectually inimical, and societally devastating. So it is fascinating to see those who have been the system’s most staunch defenders moving from a stubborn defense of the status quo to what is clearly a fighting withdrawal.