Tag: education

Zero Hedge underlines one of my personal maxims:

Confirming, yet again, that MIT Ph.D.’s (such as the FRBNY’s Brian Sack) are among the most dangerous around, a paper made the rounds yesterday by one Josef Oehmen titled: “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors.” In the ensuing 48 hours, anyone who listened to Josef’s advice (who incidentally is not a scientist) and was also “not worried about the reactors” has paid an exorbitant price, possibly up to and including their lives. We demand that MIT School of Nuclear Science and Engineering clarify their position on the matter, and make sure that incidents such as this, where Oehmen’s paper received top billing due to its perceived “endorsement” by MIT and has since been completely discredited, never recur.

Full paper as was originally posted:

I repeat, there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.

An expert is someone who is always correct when it doesn’t matter and usually wrong when it counts. This is one of the reasons why I never, ever, put any faith in credentials. Credentials are completely worthless, they’re not worth the paper on which they are printed. Experience is somewhat more useful, but when the experienced individual cannot provide clear and sensible answers to straightforward and logically sound questions, your BS radar should be sounding like a radiation alarm at a Fukushima nuclear plant.

How did that M.I.T. PhD-backed prediction hold up? “Dangerous levels of radiation leaking from a crippled nuclear plant forced Japan to order 140,000 people to seal themselves indoors Tuesday after an explosion and a fire dramatically escalated the crisis spawned by a deadly tsunami. In a nationally televised statement, Prime Minister Naoto Kan said radiation had spread from the four stricken reactors of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant along Japan’s northeastern coast.”

And now we know what an assurance from an M.I.T. PhD is worth. How much less, then, is a PhD from a lesser school or in a less rigorous discipline to be trusted? What must always be kept in mind is that the expert’s primary motivation is not what most people assume it to be. Their main motivation is to sound credible rather than make an accurate judgment so they will always play the probabilities and state the obvious because this a) allows them to be correct most of the time, and b) only be wrong when everyone else is wrong.

Will wonders never cease! Of course, I note that what he gets right is an observation on education and technology that has absolutely nothing to do with economics. It would appear his track record of uniform failure on that subject remains spotless:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

The day after the Obama-Bush event, The Times published an article about the growing use of software to perform legal research. Computers, it turns out, can quickly analyze millions of documents, cheaply performing a task that used to require armies of lawyers and paralegals. In this case, then, technological progress is actually reducing the demand for highly educated workers. And legal research isn’t an isolated example. As the article points out, software has also been replacing engineers in such tasks as chip design. More broadly, the idea that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

It is actually not a question. Everyone is wrong to the extent that they believe education has anything to do with macroeconomic success, and this is easily observable even if one omits the technology factor. In Tunisia, for example, 57 percent of those entering the labor market have college degrees. The comparable figure in the United States is 30 percent. But the Tunisian unemployment rate among those college graduates is 45 percent, three times higher than the national rate. That’s why so many of them who participated in the recent revolt a) spoke English, and b) had the time to participate.

What those who make a fetish of education simply fail to understand is that knowledge – particularly knowledge of the sort that is sufficiently codified to be included in a college textbook – is not intrinsically valuable to anyone. It makes no difference to me if you happen to know the date of Agincourt, the periodic table of the elements, or the correct way to utilize Pascal parameters. Your knowledge of those things isn’t going to produce any value to me, since profit is only created through human action.

The fallacious idea underlying the link between education and economic growth is that expanding an individual’s knowledge base will enable him to engage in more economically productive action. But this completely depends upon a) what that knowledge is, b) the ability and willingness of workers to translate knowledge into action, and c) the utility of those actions in producing goods and services that customers want or need. In most cases, the education that is being provided fails on all three points.

Producing more lawyers, social workers, and Womyn’s Studies majors is not going to generate any productive economic activity, indeed, it is guaranteed to generate activity that will increase economic contraction by inhibiting the free flow of goods and services. Combine that with the development of technologies that will significantly reduce the need for human service providers such as lawyers, paralegals, engineers, and teachers, and there is a perfect storm of mass white-collar unemployment on the horizon, not only in the United States, but all around the world.

Teachers are in shock at the contempt in which they are held:

The jabs Erin Parker has heard about her job have stunned her. Oh you pathetic teachers, read the online comments and placards of counterdemonstrators. You are glorified baby sitters who leave work at 3 p.m. You deserve minimum wage.

“You feel punched in the stomach,” said Ms. Parker, a high school science teacher in Madison, Wis., where public employees’ two-week occupation of the State Capitol has stalled but not deterred the governor’s plan to try to strip them of bargaining rights…. Around the country, many teachers see demands to cut their income, benefits and say in how schools are run through collective bargaining as attacks not just on their livelihoods, but on their value to society.

Even in a country that is of two minds about teachers — Americans glowingly recall the ones who changed their lives, but think the job with its summers off is cushy — education experts say teachers have rarely been the targets of such scorn from politicians and voters.

Perhaps the reason for this scorn might have something to do with little facts such as these:

About three-quarters of the 17,500 freshmen at the community colleges this year have needed remedial instruction in reading, writing or math, and nearly a quarter of the freshmen have required such instruction in all three subjects. In the past five years, a subset of students deemed “triple low remedial” — with the most severe deficits in all three subjects — has doubled, to 1,000. The reasons are familiar but were reinforced last month by startling statistics from state education officials: fewer than half of all New York State students who graduated from high school in 2009 were prepared for college or careers, as measured by state Regents tests in English and math. In New York City, the proportion was 23 percent.

I would argue that most public school teachers don’t even deserve minimum wage, for the obvious reason that they can’t do their jobs. Fire them all, tear down the system, and replace it with a technological spin on homeschooling for those parents who can’t homeschool. I guarantee the results would not merely be superior, but vastly superior.

Whatever would we do without those dedicated, unionized Wisconsin school teachers?

Two-thirds of the eighth graders in Wisconsin public schools cannot read proficiently according to the U.S. Department of Education, despite the fact that Wisconsin spends more per pupil in its public schools than any other state in the Midwest.

There are two ways of looking at this. One is that without the Wisconsin public school teachers, 80 percent of Wisconsin’s eighth graders wouldn’t be able to read. More likely, though, is that the idiot teachers are getting in the way with their counterproductive methods such as “whole language instruction”, and that getting rid of all the teachers would actually improve the literacy rate.

There are good teachers out there. I very much respect them, considering all that they are up against. But they are very few and far between. Fortunately, the coming education technology will make them more and more valuable, while eliminating the need for 95 percent of their less useful colleagues.

The Wisconsin governor is doing a staunch job of standing firm, but it’s time to go on the offensive and fire every teacher who called in sick on Thursday and Friday:

State and Madison teachers union leaders are urging their members to report to the Capitol Friday and Saturday for continued protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining proposal. “We need you to come again (today). We need to hear you on Saturday,” Mary Bell, Wisconsin Education Association Council president, said at a rally Thursday, when teachers from around the state joined Madison teachers whose absences closed schools for a second day.

I’d actually like to see Walker go one step further, decertify the teachers union and fire every public school teacher who belongs to it. That would border on epic and would instantly make him a national hero in the image of Reagan. One of the defining lessons of the Thatcher and Reagan eras is that the people love a politician who crushes unions. Pawlenty should be hoping for the spread of the teacher sickouts to Minnesota thus giving him the chance to improve his national profile by breaking the public employee union there… although this would presumably be difficult as I am reliably informed that he is no longer governor there.

Unions are the evil, stupid, parasitic cousin of government. They possess most of the negative attributes with none of the positive ones.

As I am working on what is now the third revision of the monetarist inflation video – I never should have started reading Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought before finishing it – it occurs to me that I am hardly the only individual in possession of esoteric information here. And it’s quite obvious that my video production skills are towards the low end of the spectrum.

What I’m interested in doing is making more Voxiversity-style videos available on a variety of subjects. So, if you have an idea for a series on anything from basic evolutionary biology to Calvinism or the impossibility of a Japanese naval invasion in 1941, let me know and we can discuss it via email. I’ll review each completed video before it will be added to the YouTube channel; there has to be some amount of quality control and you should probably plan for at least two rounds of criticism and refinement until you’ve got a good handle on what’s expected.

I don’t know if anyone will be interested or not. I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing regardless, but if anyone has anything worthwhile to add, it would be welcome.

I find it interesting that no one ever seems to address the main reason that so many students feel no shame about cheating, cyber or otherwise, is that they know that a college education isn’t about education, it’s merely purchasing an employment ticket:

In a study of 1222 undergraduates, Selwyn[1] examined differences in cybercheating levels between a variety of majors and student types. Overall results? 61.9% of students cybercheat.

And why shouldn’t they? If you’re not attending college to learn anything and if your professors are more interested in indoctrinating you than educating you, it stands to reason that you should act to ensure that you graduate with the best grades and the least amount of effort.

If anyone is going to be held accountable for cheating, it should be the university administrators and professoriats. They are the ones who are fraudulently selling promises of employability, after all. My only regret about college, besides a) not dropping out after my sophmore year to sell sound boards, and b)not playing soccer instead of concentrating on track, is that I didn’t cheat at all. I managed a decent GPA while combining an absolute minimum of effort – by which I mean not even showing up to campus until the third week in the semester – with never cheating on anything. But with a little selective cheating, I could have easily nailed down a 4.0 and graduated with honors. C’est la vie.

It is clear that science teachers are completely missing the point of testing standards. They don’t appear to understand that it isn’t what they find valuable that actually matters:

The Obama administration has urged broadening the subjects tested under the law — possibly including science. But some teachers say they are already burdened by state requirements to teach a wide range of facts — say, the parts of a cell — which prevents them from devoting class time to research projects.

“I have so many state standards I have to teach concept-wise, it takes time away from what I find most valuable, which is to have them inquire about the world,” said Amanda Alonzo, a science teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif.

Alonzo has it all wrong. It is absolutely worthless to anyone but the teacher for high school students to “inquire about the world” at school. Intelligent inquiry requires information and teenagers simply don’t possess enough of it for them to ask anything but stupid and ignorant questions. Although it is to the detriment of the student’s education both students and teachers prefer self-centered “inquiry” to objective standards because the former is subjective and avoids the accountability of the latter. This does not mean that all standards are intrinsically desirable, only that some form of standards testing is the most reliable means that parents have of determining if their children have actually learned anything or not.

The uncomfortable truth that so many teachers are desperate to avoid is this: a properly instructed student should be able to pass the basic standards tests with ease regardless of the particular form his instruction took. If the standards are too difficult, then obviously they should be adjusted. But it makes absolutely no sense to assert that students will learn better if they are a) educated according to the individual whims of their teacher, and b) never tested by an unbiased third party on their knowledge at all.

SarahsDaughter writes of giving public school a fair shake:

We just returned to homeschooling after a 2 1/2 yr trial with public school. There are several incidences to site for our decision, here are a few:

-7th grade, my son was playing Halo online and was friend requested by one of his male teachers and was chatting live with him for a couple of minutes before we were made aware of it. We met said teacher in the principal’s office. He was confused why it was a concern and, his words: “it’s the same as if I’d met up with him at the bowling alley,” my husband almost physically beat that wheelchair bound man. The teacher went away for three days and my son was moved to a different class.

-7th grade Geography teacher’s lesson for the day, “The Space Shuttle is blasting holes in our ozone layer,” and “the world will end in 2012” (great thing to have pubescent teens be made aware of.) We met her in the principal’s office and requested that she stick to the book.

-8th grade Pre-Algebra progress report reflects a “D” for my otherwise straight “A” son. Turns out the lazy teacher failed to enter in the remaining 2 of 6 graded assignments into the computer. His actual grade was a 100% “A”. One would think math of all subjects should have more than 6 assignments in 4 weeks.

-8th grade Reading, our son has a solid “A” leading up to the final assignment that is worth 1/3 of the grade. After 2 weeks of knowing about it he spends 10 minutes working on it the night before it was due. He received a well deserved 41%. The next day he brought in 3 canned food items for their food drive and was awarded 5 points per can toward his grade. Then he gave the teacher $10 for an extra 20 points. Received an “A” for the final grade.

-Last straw, I wrote the following on a piece of paper and asked him to read it: .62, he replied “point six two,” I asked how it is actually “read” and he couldn’t answer sixty-two one hundredths. Then I asked him to convert it to a simplified fraction. I was apparently speaking a different language. Back to homeschooling we went.

I don’t have an intrinsic problem with a teacher playing online games with his students; I’ve probably played with thousands of kids online although I have no way of knowing how young or old my various opponents and teammates happen to be beyond simply observing their reflexes and speech patterns. The initiation of the friend request by the teacher, on the other hand, is a little creepy. If the kid knows Mr. X is a hardcore gamer, he very well might want to play with him, but in that case, the request has to come from the kid, not the teacher.

Of course, one could argue that the Reading teacher has taught her son a valuable life lesson. Probably not as important as being able to read, but certainly not without value. Everybody’s got their price.