Tag: education

All forms of centralization comes with inherent risks:

A man armed with a knife went on a slashing and stabbing rampage in a kindergarten in southern China this morning, injuring 28 children, two teachers and a caretaker. It was the second such attack in two days on a school in China, and the third in a month…. One expert attributed the string of attacks on schoolchildren to increasing social problems in recent years. He said the choice of schoolchildren as targets could be a form of copycat phenomenon.

Fortunately nothing like that would never happen in your child’s school. Because, after all, crazy people live only in China. And, of course, all those wonderful and caring teachers will surely keep them safe… or perhaps not:

Just yesterday, a teacher on sick leave due to mental illness broke into a primary school in Guangdong province’s Leizhou city in southern China and wounded 15 students and a teacher in a knife attack.

JB looks at Changing Your Mind from the reverse perspective:

I think “Changing Your Mind: The Steps” could suggest a model of persuasion. The lessons I draw from the list for the persuader are the following:

1. Expect to be initially regarded as crazy, and defend yourself against that accusation effectively but unemotionally.
2. Continue to make the case; time will cure the “he’s crazy” phase.
2. Make points that will be objectively verifiable as valid.
3. Expose the poor behavior of the other side.
4. Highlight division within the ranks of the other side.
5. Leave room for opponents to defend you.
6. After exposure, give a person time to begin to adopt your viewpoint.
7. Don’t be so needlessly offensive you prevent the person from doing so.
8. Don’t inhibit admissions of error with gloating or demands for further change.
9. Point out the inconsistencies in the positions of the partially persuaded.
10. More people agree with you, and to a greater extent, than will say so.
11. Keep pride in check, because for every proclaimed convert, there are still 10 in the previous phases.

This is why a blog is so much more effective than a book at changing minds. A book loses the time and interactivity components of the above steps. Also, a book is usually narrower in scope, while people’s opinions are tied into their entire worldviews.

I think JB’s steps 6 and 8 are particularly important. It is difficult enough for people to change their minds, so adding to their degree of difficulty by making it personally uncomfortable for them to do so is inherently counterproductive. Now, I could quite reasonably be accused of violating step 7 on a regular basis, but it should always be kept in mind that I do not expect the vast majority of people to change their minds even when they are presented with an open-and-shut, 100 percent conclusive case.

It’s true, I could theoretically be more persuasive if I refrained from needlessly upsetting so many people. But that’s only true in theory, because if I gave a damn about what people happen to emote and rationalize in lieu of actually thinking, I would never be able to ignore the mindless protestations and spurious condemnations in pursuit of the most accurate truth I am able to comprehend.

Jamsco admits to traveling at least part way down this process with regards to libertarianism:

Changing Your Mind: The Steps
(One route – in 16 parts)

1. Experience pride that you have your mind made up on the issue at hand

2. Hear the differing opinion of a person with whom you disagree (the ‘opponent’) and disregard it as crazy

3. Hear the differing opinion of the opponent – think ‘Okay, valid points, but still wrong’

I always find it interesting to watch as conservatives gradually move towards libertarianism. They say that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged; in like manner, a libertarian is a conservative who realizes that the government is the biggest mugger of all.

Richard Cohen nonsensically points a finger at parents:

You will notice that in all the finger-pointing — the students, the teachers, the administrators — not a digit is aimed at the parents. Their children are accused of hounding a classmate to death and the parents apparently knew nothing. Not only that, they are somehow not expected to know anything. The teachers are supposed to know what’s going on. The principal. Maybe even the school nurse. But the parents? No. They’re off the hook. Not as far as I’m concerned. This tendency to blame teachers or administrators for all that happens in the schools is both unfair and unrealistic.

This is the sort of pure and unadulterated illogic that is so reliably produced every time an American liberal expresses her opinion. After laboring without cease to remove American parents from the child-rearing equation for forty years, they then have the gall to complain that parents are not doing the very job that liberals have been attempting to prevent them from doing for literal decades. Parents aren’t expected to know anything about the school lives of their children for the very good reason that many teachers are not only encouraged, but trained, to actively prevent parents from knowing what their children are being taught at school, from having any influence upon what their children are taught at school, and from interfering in any way with how the school district elects to raise their children in loco parentis.

Cohen mentions the school nurse in what is apparently supposed to be a comedic ad absurdum. And yet, the school nurse is the very individual who will be prescribing medicines to school children without the consent or the knowledge of the parents. The devotees of the state cannot cheer on the state as it seizes the parental power, dictates mandatory schooling and medical interventions and bans corporal punishment and religious activity, then turn around and complain that parents no longer effectively perform the responsibilities that have been forcibly taken from them.

I find it all too predictable how the expansion of “computer science education” over the last two decades has created a whole class of “programmers” who can’t actually program anything:

I wrote that article in 2007, and I am stunned, but not entirely surprised, to hear that three years later “the vast majority” of so-called programmers who apply for a programming job interview are unable to write the smallest of programs. To be clear, hard is a relative term — we’re not talking about complicated, Google-style graduate computer science interview problems. This is extremely simple stuff we’re asking candidates to do. And they can’t. It’s the equivalent of attempting to hire a truck driver and finding out that 90 percent of the job applicants can’t find the gas pedal or the gear shift.

I agree, it’s insane. But it happens every day, and is (apparently) an epidemic hiring problem in our industry.

Some of the best and most successful programmers I know still don’t even have college degrees. They might not be able to get past the average corporation’s HR department, but then, they don’t need to. I don’t know how anyone can still argue that education is the answer to anything when, in its current form, it produces junior high school students who can’t read, high school graduates who can’t do math, and college graduates who can’t program.

I still remember playing Ultima I with a young friend. He was a few years younger than me but was an accomplished Apple II programmer at the age of 12.

JB sends an update:

Perhaps you can recall the previous email I sent you requesting advice about staying in college or leaving? Just a brief update; I left the PhD program and got a regular job…best choice I’ve made so far. Thank you for your advice (and that of the Ilk). Also, after reading the blog for a while now, I’ve finally started contesting the atheists I know when the usual arguments pop up, (using your new slide show has been a huge boost to the discussion), and I can now see why the ilk are so entertained by the trolls who drop by the blog.

Welcome to the workforce! That’s a very smart move in this economy. It’s always good to see when the ongoing discourse here inspires people to step back, look at their situation, and actively think about what they’re doing. So much of life happens to people because they never stop to consider if the assumptions that put them on their present course still apply. Pursuing higher education was an excellent occupational choice 40 years ago, rather less so 20 years ago, and is arguably a terrible choice today thanks to the inexorable logic of supply and demand. Speaking of atheism, one result of the recent flood of the education bubble and the degree-selling it involved is that the irreligious are no longer much more highly educated than the norm; 21 percent of atheists have post-graduate degrees, which is a lower percentage than that of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Unitarians. And, since atheists are such a tiny fraction of the population, there are 16 times more Protestant Christians with post-graduate degrees than atheists.

One thing you are quickly forced to recognize when maintaining a blog like this is how most people think in a completely unoriginal manner. They simply repeat arguments that they heard and half-understood at some point in the past. I don’t post even a tenth of the critical emails I receive; if I did most readers would quite reasonably assume I was constructing really retarded strawmen in order to make myself look better. What the slideshow does very well is to not only show the atheist that his arguments are incorrect, but that they are not even his arguments. It can’t prove the existence of God or the truth of the Christian faith, of course, but it completely undercuts the atheist’s claim to any rational or intellectual superiority. That’s why none of the atheists who have attempted to belittle the slideshow have dared to do more than nibble about the edges; they know they can’t successfully argue the substance. Of course, in the event that any of that nibbling should turn out to be correct, I’ll simply utilize their criticism to update and improve it.

A college president explains why the English Department and other liberal arts institutions are on the way out:

Here is how the numbers have changed from 1970/71 to 2003/04 (the last academic year with available figures):

English: from 7.6 percent of the majors to 3.9 percent
Foreign languages and literatures: from 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent
Philosophy and religious studies: from 0.9 percent to 0.7 percent
History: from 18.5 percent to 10.7 percent
Business: from 13.7 percent to 21.9 percent

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

His thesis makes sense: throw out the canon and what do you have except heavily biased opinion? I never recommend an English major for those interested in pursuing any form of literary career; English majors were already quite clearly useless when I was in college two decades ago. It is a pity to see fewer history majors, as knowing what has happened in the past is one of the best guides to recognizing what is happening in the present. As for the “business” majors, I’ve yet to meet one who knew the first thing about business after obtaining such a degree; you’d be much better off to spend four years actually working in a business, or better yet, starting one of your own.