Tag: education

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.

Why would the police need to investigate students simply attempting to finish their homework at school instead of taking it home?

A second-grade teacher in Northern California was placed on leave while a school and police investigate accounts by students that classmates engaged in oral sex and stripped off some of their clothes during class, officials said Friday.

As Spacebunny wryly noted, clearly homeschooling parents are going to have to significantly broaden their curriculums if they are going to keep up with the public school standard. And the amazing thing is that now it’s become common knowledge that homeschoolers are scholastically ahead of their group-schooled peers, critics of homeschooling actually attempt to use the “socialization” argument.

If the critics simply applied the same standards to public schools that they would like to apply to homeschoolers, the public schools would have been banned already.

Wine, women, and song would arguably make for a better and more educational investment:

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning … not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The ironic thing is that this near-complete lack of learning doesn’t stop the average college student from believing that he’s somehow learning something by osmosis. The most cocksure and clueless critics are almost invariably college students, who aren’t learning anything substantive at their universities but haven’t been smacked in the back of the head by reality yet either.

The crazy thing is that even the Voxiversity quizzes, which cost you nothing at all and take me about 30 minutes to write, are more challenging than anything you’re likely to encounter in a history or literature class at an Ivy League university.

Even very good grades to go with the requisite university degree don’t indicate anything more than the possession of a pulse and a large student loan. And the problem isn’t limited to the United States:

The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland’s oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970. Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

I’m not saying that credentials aren’t important in practice if you’re concerned with getting past the HR gatekeepers. But the important thing is to understand that you’re not purchasing an education any longer, you’re just buying an employment ticket. So, your object should be to figure out the fastest, least expensive way to buy the ticket that will get you where you want to go. That may mean a conventional 4-year degree at a private university, but it may not now that more and more quality schools are offering degrees online. The important thing is to approach the process with open eyes and an open mind.

And, of course, to pursue an actual education on your own because you’re certainly not going to get it at a university. Given what we’ve learned in looking at the undergraduate and graduate science curriculums, even those with the sort of hard science educations that require university schooling have to admit that pretty much everything they’ve learned outside their core scientific discipline has been learned outside the academic system.