#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Okay, so it appears I may have overestimated the average intelligence of teachers when I calculated it at around 90 IQ. Mea culpa. Now, here’s the damning quote: “Every other student in class accepted my lesson without argument….” Keep in mind that’s almost surely true of your public-schooled children too, even when they are being taught that black is white and kilometers are longer than miles.
I know, I know, this NRO reader’s supposedly good suburban school is nothing like the good suburban school that your kids attend. Because your kid’s school is, like, really good. All the teachers who work there tell you so.
So, we are in a reasonably affluent suburban school district with a good reputation. This year, the elementary school has decided that it is going to provide breakfasts for the students every day. In the classroom, before they start actually doing anything else. When questioned about this, the school principal regurgitated statistics explaining how kids who eat breakfast do better in schools. I have no doubt this is true, but let’s face it, the kids who don’t eat breakfast are almost certainly the same ones whose parents don’t try to read with or to them every day, don’t make sure they are doing their homework etc etc etc . I also really doubt whether many kids in our elementary school miss breakfast in the morning.
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but the teacher also tells us he won’t have time to make his third graders do multiplication tables this year.
And, this is in a “good” school district. I don’t want to imagine what they are doing in DC and similar places.
In fairness, one can’t seriously expect an education major to distinguish between correlation and causation. If anyone bothers to do a study demonstrating that there is a strong correlation between children eating a healthy dinner and doing better in school too, there will probably be a Department of Education-funded program extending the afterschool programs until 8 PM and supplying steak dinners in the classrooms within five years.
And here’s an interesting fact. Every single person I have ever met whose children attends a public school happens to live in a district where the schools are “really good” and the teachers are uniformly “excellent”. What are the odds? It is always very, very hard for me to resist the urge to ask these fortunate parents what particular metric they are using to make these determinations.
That’s all the time it took to allow a supposedly dyslexic girl to not only keep pace with her public-schooled peers, but make up all the ground she’d lost while in school.
I was assessed by my local home education division within the council and was surprised to discover I had to spend only 45 minutes a day teaching Georgia to give her the same level of attention as a full day in a class of 35 pupils.
Of course, the irony is that after having homeschooled her daughter long enough to make sure she had caught up, the mother promptly stuck her back in school again. I don’t recommend limiting homeschool to only 45 minutes a day, but given that pace, consider how fast even children of average intelligence can advance simply by spending three hours a day on their academic education.
Why do parents insist on doing this to their children? Why do they sentence those they supposedly love beyond everything else to thousands of hours of mindless indoctrination just because everyone else does?
We’re at his classroom. We’re supposed to leave right away. They told us that in Parents’ Orientation. They said hanging around only makes it worse. It couldn’t be any worse. Robby is fighting panic, asking questions, stalling to keep us there, tears running quietly down his cheeks.
“How many hours will it be?” he asks.
Thousands, I think. Thousands and thousands, in classrooms, away from us, until you’ve learned to accept it, and you don’t cry when we leave you, and your dolphin never talks any more.
To me, the saddest thing about sentencing little children to school is the speedy and unnecessary loss of their childhood joy and innocence. I spoke with one pediatrician who told me he can tell which children are homeschooled and which are not from nothing more than their demeanor when they get their medical checkups. And the sacrifice is made in the name of receiving an inferior education combined with learning social graces more appropriate to The Lord of the Flies.
In fairness, her experience was worse than most. You know going in that you’re not going to get a real job with a degree in Women’s Studies or Sociology. But this woman was sold a totally worthless piece of paper for $70,000.
Carrianne Howard wanted to design video games. But her $12 an hour gig as an industry recruiter didn’t work out, so now she is stripping at a topless club in Cocoa Beach, Florida.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Howard told Bloomberg. “I’ve got a worthless degree. It’s like I didn’t attend school at all.”
I happen to know a reasonably significant percentage of the game designers in the industry. For example, yesterday I got a call from a very successful old school game designer in Australia about an idea we’ve been kicking around for about a year, and in the course of the conversation we discovered that he had signed a game to the same guy in England who had offered me a job around that time. In other words, we had nearly found ourselves working on the same project. It’s a fairly small world. And I have never met anyone who has a degree in game design. It’s one of the more shameless educational scams out there. If you want to get into game design, study programming, play a lot of games, and pursue an internship as a tester.
Still, most people never learn. The punchline is that she’s saving her money… for a business degree.
What a surprise. A man who is dependent upon government “education” handouts is a proponent of totalitarian school law:
I am not a fan of homeschooling; in fact, if I had my way, I’d make it illegal. Too often it’s an excuse to isolate kids and hammer them full of ideological nonsense, and in a troubled public school system, it doesn’t help to strip students and money from a struggling district — it should be part of the social contract that we ought to provide a good education to everyone.
Of course he would. PZ is a conventional godless fascist of the early 20th century variety. Totalitarians always oppose everything that strengthens individual freedom and poses a potential rival to the secular religion of the state. There is a very good reason why the Nazis banned homeschooling in 1938 and “Free education for all children in public schools” is the tenth pillar of the Communist Manifesto, while it is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution or the English Common Law.
UPDATE – I realize some of my critics, especially those partial to Pharyngula, find it difficult to believe that PZ is really as stupid as I consider him to be. Perhaps this quote will help them understand that I am not exaggerating in the slightest. And try to remember, PZ isn’t a scientist or a professor at an elite university, he’s an ex-scientist who hasn’t published in years and now teaches at a former community college. “When I told PZ Myers that in order for everyone to be equal we would have to make the smart people stupid. His response was to tell me that instead everyone should be educated. In order for everyone to be equal through education, we would have to force everyone to understand university level biology. Not only that, but everyone would have to understand university level mathematics, university level physics, university level English, and so forth.”
Equality through education. The amusing thing is that PZ’s idea of a solution is one of the concepts used to bring about the dumbing-down of American education in the first place. The clueless professor doesn’t even grasp the basic concept of the lowest common denominator, probably because he is too close to it. Nor does he understand that educators cannot educate intelligence any more than basketball coaches can coach height.
Academic tenure is one of the many factors that increasingly make American academia an intellectual joke and reduces the value of academic credentials. Fortunately, it is one of the more easily fixed ones. Just do the obvious and financially responsible thing and get rid of it.
If you were the C.E.O. of a company and the board of directors said: “We want this to be the best company of its kind in the world. Hire the best people you can find and pay them whatever is required.” Would you offer anybody a contract with these terms: lifetime employment, no possibility of dismissal, regardless of performance? If you did, your company would fail and you would be looking for a new job. Why should academia be any different from every other profession?
To those who say that the abolition of tenure will make faculty reluctant to be demanding with students or express controversial views, I respond that in almost 40 years of teaching, I have not known a single person who has been more willing to speak out after tenure than before. In fact, nothing represses the free expression of ideas more than the long and usually fruitless quest for tenure.
One of the main reasons that academics are so hopelessly dull these days is that they are heavily incentivized to pay homage to the present orthodoxy and risk joblessness and career-ending ostracism if they do not kowtow to the status quo. For example, it is utterly absurd that economics professors remain stubbornly and willfully ignorant of Austrian economic theory in favor of their outdated and inaccurate monetarist and Neo-Keynesian models that have left four generations of economics students bewildered at the way in which real world economic events refuse to conform to their educations.
It’s not exactly a secret that tenure does exactly the opposite of what it is supposed to do with regards to academic freedom. While it does protect the professoriat from interference on the part of those who pay their salaries, it actually subjects the individual academic to greater pressure from the academics who control the golden tenure grants.
There are two reasonable arguments for tenure. First is that it protects academic freedom, shielding professors with unpopular views from retribution. Supposedly, this increases intellectual diversity, promoting universities as a marketplace of ideas. Secondly, tenure is a fringe benefit that makes academia more attractive to the best scholars, in so doing reducing the salaries needed to lure them.
While tenure has undoubtedly protected some good people from losing their jobs, it actually may on balance reduce intellectual diversity. Many ideologically driven tenured professors use their job security to aggressively thwart efforts to increase alternative viewpoints being taught. Hence conservatives often feel that they are frozen out of good academic jobs simply because the tenured faculty dominating departments simply do not want alternative perspectives given academic prominence…. The fact is that tenured faculty members often use their power to stifle innovation and change.
It would appear that the value of a college degree is actually about one-third of its previously estimated value. And that’s without factoring either opportunity cost or 4.5 years of lost wages into the value equation.
If there’s one truism that goes virtually unchallenged these days, it’s that a college degree has great value. Beyond the great books, beyond the critical reasoning skills, and beyond the experience itself, there’s another way that a college degree has value: Over the course of a working life, college graduates earn more than high school graduates. Over the past decade, research estimates have pegged that figure at $900,00, $1.2 million, and $1.6 million.
But new research suggests that the monetary value of a college degree may be vastly overblown. According to a study conducted by PayScale for Bloomberg Businessweek, the value of a college degree may be a lot closer to $400,000 over 30 years and varies wildly from school to school. According to the PayScale study, the number of schools that actually make good on the estimates of the earlier research is vanishingly small. There are only 17 schools in the study whose graduates can expect to recoup the cost of their education and out-earn a high school graduate by $1.2 million….
One-third of what was previously estimated… that sounds familiar somehow… ah, perhaps this is why.
Like most things, it comes down to supply and demand. Full-time college enrollment has increased 44 percent since I graduated in 1990. The US population has increased 20 percent, thus rendering a generic college degree approximately 24 percent less valuable while the cost has risen 63 percent in constant dollars. Even if you assume that you graduate successfully, your education dollar is worth about 28 percent of one spent in 1990.
Let’s face it. Scientific studies are largely superflous when you’ve got a superintelligence handy.
As I have repeatedly pointed out, none of the various problems facing science have anything to do with religion, the baseless assertions of the New Atheists notwithstanding:
America’s schools, it turns out, consistently produce large numbers of world-class science and math students, according to studies by Harold Salzman of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University and his co-author, B. Lindsay Lowell, director of policy studies for the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. But the incentives that once reliably delivered many of those high scorers into scientific and technical careers have gone seriously awry.
If the nation truly wants its ablest students to become scientists, Salzman says, it must undertake reforms — but not of the schools. Instead, it must reconstruct a career structure that will once again provide young Americans the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career. “It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” Salzman says….
Today, only a handful of young scientists — the few lucky or gifted enough to win famous fellowships or score outstanding publications that identify them early on as “stars” — can look forward to such a future. For the great majority, becoming a scientist now entails a penurious decade or more of graduate school and postdoc positions before joining the multitude vainly vying for the few available faculty-level openings. Earning a doctorate now consumes an average of about seven years. In many fields, up to five more years as a postdoc now constitute, in the words of Trevor Penning, who formerly headed postdoctoral programs at the University of Pennsylvania, the “terminal de facto credential” required for faculty-level posts.
One of the interesting things about the problem with American science is that those reviewing the situation are entirely forthright about the way the best and brightest have avoided pursuing scientific careers for decades now. To put it simply, the smartest students are not dumb enough to fail to notice the way in which the supply of science degrees considerably outstrips the number of jobs available in the various scientific fields or that there are far more remunerative and intellectually satisfying fields in which to pursue employment.
And yet, those who weren’t smart enough or aware enough to consider their future employment possibilities are the very individuals who tend to claim that those who were are less intelligent and their opinions about scientific and non-scientific matters alike are less valid because they do not have science degrees. (Never mind that I do, in fact, have a Bachelor of Science, that’s beside the point.)
So, this tends to suggest that in addition to whatever structural changes are being proposed by the various parties that are interested in solving the problem, a course or two in logic would not be amiss. And for a group of people who claim to be better educated and more highly intelligent than the norm, they do tend to expose a shocking ignorance of some very basic economic concepts that were solidly established more than 200 years ago. The reality is that the problem is simply a variant of the conventional one of malinvestment caused by credit expansion; the huge and unsustainable government allocation of financial resources to the scientific sector in the thirty years from 1940 to 1970 clearly sent a false signal about the market’s demand for scientists to students pursuing science degrees over the subsequent three decades.
It’s hard to summon up any sympathy for unemployed and underemployed lawyers given that it was obvious that there were far too many of the worse-than-useless, anti-productive bastards back when I graduated from college:
Look past the occasional vulgarity and disgusting pictures. Don’t dismiss the posters as whiners. To a person they accept responsibility for their poor decisions. But they make a strong case that something is deeply wrong with law schools.
Their complaint is that non-elite law schools are selling a fraudulent bill of goods. Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.
And for the opportunity to enter a saturated legal market with long odds against them, the tens of thousands newly minted lawyers who graduate each year from non-elite schools will have paid around $150,000 in tuition and living expenses, and given up three years of income.
How smart can these overeducated and unemployable people be anyhow if they weren’t capable of taking simple supply and demand into account AFTER four years of college? And if those who insist that education creates societal wealth are correct, then there can’t possibly be a problem here anyhow.
Never forget that law schools, like every other form of school, exist in order to make money for someone. The education and degree are merely the means to an end. Therefore, caveat emptor applies.
I almost started to feel sorry for this guy, until I remembered that his intention was to work as a lawyer and enjoy a well-compensated career by diverting money away from the productive classes of the country. And the most amusing thing in all of this is the failed larval lawyers who fail to see the irony when they hypothesize about those who hold lawyers in contempt will desperately need a lawyer should they find themselves facing an unjust lawsuit….
So in an effort to show you what happens after a law school has robbed a student of $120,000 + and their dream of becoming a practicing attorney, let me show you a day in the life of a Jobless JD. This is what happens after the scam money has been collected and the student leaves without a job in hand:
It starts about 2 AM for me, when I wake up with my heart pounding, wondering what I am going to do. What bill should I pay this month? Electric, gas, rent, all past due. I decide I will pay for gas and electric, go without food, because I still want to lose a few pounds and I have some rice and yogurt left that I can eat this week.
I get up and stare out the window and wonder for the ten millionth time what the hell I was thinking when I decided to go to law school. I play the would have / could have / should have game (If only I wouldn’t have gone to law school, I could have worked and I wouldn’t have debt, I should have thought this out) That usually gets me to 6 AM.
I shower and walk (subway is expensive) to a public library that has computers so I can blog. Mine blew up last year and I can’t afford a new one. Next I go to my $10 an hour part time job (all I’ve been able to get a year out of law school) and I try to be sunny and cheerful and pretend that I’m happy to be there so that I can hold on to it.
That being said, the authors of the Scamblogs are doing noble work indeed by exposing the monstrous scam that is law school. And since they couldn’t figure out the scam ahead of time, it seems unlikely that they ever thought through the way in which law firms make their money. So, in the end, we shouldn’t hold their innocent infatuation with legal extortion against them.