Recently in Education Category

Not really. He said something similarly preposterous, though: schools lack personnel and resources.

EveryDay Math, a stupid math program that has swept educational circles recently, is something I despise. My school district teaches it; the state of NH has foisted it upon us. And have I told you I hate it?

If IQ is as predictive as I've learned it is--the most studied concept in the social sciences, actually--then, yeah, there are some children who are too dumb, or "morons," to be technical, to be taught material in which average to above-average students need to be taught. But things have been dumbed down, such as textbooks, something Diane Ravitch analyzed a few years ago, to help out the mediocre and the -isms of liberalism: feminism, identity politics, multiculturalism, und so weiter.

It's the problem of the left-hand side of the bell curve, a topic few dare to address, unlike Steve Sailer.

But a liberal, bringing emotion into it and the common fallacy of post hoc, ergo propter hoc, ("after this, therefore because of this") disagrees. In this instance, Dave Murray, a columnist for M(ichigan)live.com, writes, "Are There Some Children Who Are 'Unteachable'?" He answers, No. I wish he'd spent some time in Detroit public schools, where the scores of a recent standardized test were so low, lowest on record, almost lower than if the students there had merely guessed and had never gone to school! I've written about it. In 2009 Detroit students scored the lowest on record for the NAEP, a national standardized test.

And try teaching some of these children, Dave.

The average graduate is in debt to the tune of $28,720. Wow! I think as they live in their old bedrooms working a couple of part-time jobs they could have done immediately after high school that they may be wondering, "Was it worth it?"

The Five-Year Party, a book by an insider at Keene State, has an unhappy ending.

Charles Murray calls the bachelor of arts degree a work of the devil. I learned from Ernest van den Haag that one is supposed to have an IQ of between 110 and 120 to benefit from a rigorous college program. That's a small slice of the population.

I've kept thinking about this John Derbyshire VDare piece, showing the winners of the premier math competition for high school students. The link to the photo shows how at variance the portrayal of such things is in Hollywood--no females, definitely no Hispanics or blacks, maybe just one white--from the truth, what we who have an affinity for socio-biology, first coined by E.O. Wilson in the 1970s and now rebranded fro reasons that escape me, evolutionary psychology.

There's even a shorthand moniker for it among blogs that deal with reality, not egalitarian nonsense: HBD.

Notice the four winners from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Is it four? I'm not so good at math.

An implosion, actually.

Only 56 percent of the students are graduating from high school.

Accompanied by Bill Ayers--Physician, heal thyself--and an Obamalette community organizer, the teachers' union president,  Karen Lewis, spouts utter nonsense, blaming the poor results on the students and a lack of teacher prestige, notwithstanding a recent 10 to 15 percent increase in wages. She says:

I have seen the profession of teaching go from one in which it was considered, um, very prestigious to one that is constantly ridiculed, and, um, basically, uh, discarded and we feel, by and large, it's due to the fact that we serve, um, a predominantly, uh, working, and uh, and quite frankly lower class students, uh, and students of color.

Hey, didn't the former Chicago community organizer, armed with tens of millions of Annenberg Challenge funds, revitalize the public schools in the 1990s? I guess since Obama never sent his daughters to the rat holes, the answer is probably, No.

Larry Arnn, Hillsdale College president, being interviewed. I was deeply moved by his words.

My father sent me this video showing President Obama is be asleep at the switch when it came to the Deep Horizon Gulf spill.

For over half of college graduates, they don't have a job in which they can support themselves on their own. So they move back home.

But Randall Parker has a great idea: publish by major the rates that recent graduates are able to live on their own. He asserts that this will make for many more computer programmers and engineers.

I came across this rather cool NASA publication dealing with aerospace accidents and incidents, a 244 page (in PDF format) report on all kinds of aerospace accidents and their causes, covering everything from crashes of X-planes, rough landings of the Space Shuttle, and problems with "almost" loss-of-consciousness incidents with F22 Raptor, amongst a number of aircraft/spacecraft covered in the report.

The report shows that quite often it is not a single factor that causes these incidents, but a chain of errors that leads up to problems encountered.

The free download from NASA can be found here with three different formats available, E-Pub, Mobi, or PDF.

It's quite fascinating reading for those of you out there who are aviation and spaceflight fans.

If you do nothing else today, read "Doomed by Diversity," about the wonderful promise of the Golden Girl at UNC-Chapel Hill and her tragic end by a pair of young career criminals--and the utterly dysfunctional criminal justice system in North Carolina. This piece by Nicholas Stix is one of the best things I've read, very much like Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities.

Chan should pay especial note how criminals are now targeting colleges and off-campus venues. There are easy pickings there, and the universities often fudge about the true state of affairs.

I read an op-ed about the dangers of climbing Mt. Everest in the New York Times. It turns out the author, Freddie Wilkinson, is from Madison, NH.

Bret Stephens addresses members of the graduating Class of 2012, exposing them to some hard truths they haven't had to face until now. One of most salient points is something that will stand them in good stead, assuming they're willing to listen: "But if you can just manage to tone down your egos, shape up your minds, and think unfashionable thoughts, you just might be able to do something worthy with your lives. And even get a job. Good luck!"

Bret brings up a number of problems with our existing college and university system today, that being they are less about preparing students to face the real world and more about students "getting inflated grades in useless subjects in order to obtain a debased degree." What's worse is that many of these students put them and/or their families deep into debt, yet they won't be able to find jobs that will pay them anywhere what it is they owe.

Some of those commenting to Bret's piece miss the point, trying to make it seem that he's saying the only worthwhile degrees are in STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine), but that's not what he's saying at all. Instead he's warning students who get degrees in Womyn's Studies, Urban Graffiti, or Transgendered Native American Studies shouldn't expect to be snapped up by corporate America when there are more than enough graduates with degrees in Business Administration, Statistics, Finance, Graphic Arts, Culinary Arts, and an almost endless list of other BA and BS degrees that are far more applicable to the real world.

What's even worse for many of these still unprepared grads is that is that a lot of their contemporaries who didn't go to college are doing far better than they can ever hope to do. This is particularly true of those who went into the trades. They don't have huge student loans to pay off. They started earning their way years earlier than their college-bound friends. And in many ways they've grown up while their friends lived an extended adolescence in college.

On a slightly different thread, one commenter fell into a semantic trap, claiming students are being taught how to think. He went on to claim that they're being brainwashed into being good little progressive puppets. But what he really meant was that they're being taught what to think, which is entirely different.

Being taught how to think, meaning being taught critical thinking skills, is something we need more of in our educational system. If one can think critically, then they can reason from available facts and their own experiences rather than being spoon fed radical and, in the end, socially destructive ideologies masquerading as knowledge and wisdom. Unfortunately we aren't seeing much in the way of critical thinking being taught in our schools any more, and it shows. (This is particularly true in many of our liberal arts colleges.)

Could it be that the lack of critical thinking skills and the abundance of money through loan programs has caused this rampant problem of students studying majors that don't prepare them for life in the real world? I don't know, but it's something worth pondering.

Back in the 1950s only one in 20 workers needed a license in order to do a job. Now it's one in three. Source.

I'm not sure we're better served by all that extra paperwork. I go to people who are good at what they do, not whether they have achieved bureaucratic success in getting pieces of generally meaningless paper.

This is most vivid with teaching. Getting a certification to teach almost guarantees mediocrity. Have you ever had to sit in for the "professors" of education courses? Guys like the lefty who writes for the Laconia Daily Sun?

Neither Albert Einstein nor David McColllugh could teach high school physics or history, respectively. They aren't certified!

I think the English language should have rights, too.

Feminists view our beloved tongue as something to use for their political ends.

I'm not interested. But when I come across a clunky sentence at the end of an editorial in the University of New Hampshire newspaper--on a frivolous topic that's being blown out of proportion because of militant secularism--I can only shake my head, saying, "O tempora! O mores!"

Here it is:

When a student leader gives the pretense of acting on behalf of his/her constituents, he/she needs to actually be doing so.

We just got back from Deb's induction into Phi Theta Kappa, an international honor society for two-year colleges. We headed out for a celebratory dinner at one of our favorite local eateries after the ceremony and reception.

I am rapidly descending into digestive torpor so the post I'd been working on for tonight will be postponed until tomorrow.

Probably one of the best proponents of the "skeptics" view on AGW, Lord Monckton, gave his "Climate of Freedom" lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Monckton, being no fool, was well prepared to parry the claims and fallacies put forth by the indoctrinated "watermelon" environmentalists (green on the outside, red on the inside) either attending the lecture or protesting outside the lecture hall.

One of his better encounters was with Erin Delman, president of the Environmental Club at the college and one of the unthinking indoctrinated.

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). "There's a CONSENSUS!" she shrieked.

"That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk," replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle's codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy?  From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Ah, yes. The ever popular appeal to authority, the usual device of those who know their argument is a losing one. It's certainly one of the more used tactics of the warmist camp - if the facts don't support your beliefs, then make the appeal to authority as if that's all one needs to do to prove the unsubstantiated claims.

But for the moment let us return to to Erin Delman's refrain - "There's a CONSENSUS!" Monckton blew the consensus argument out of the water with a few examples of consensus that were anything but proof.

[Monckton] said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.

And there is the crux of the argument. Consensus, particularly when the term is applied to science, means absolutely nothing. It is merely a tool used to push unsubstantiated and, in some cases, wholly unprovable "scientific" gobbledygook. Consensus means nothing in regards to the validity of a scientific hypothesis. All it takes is one person outside the consensus to prove it wrong.

What made Monckton's lecture even more eye opening was using the IPCC's own data and conclusions to prove them as nonsense. As Monckton stated, the IPCC's reports were not peer reviewed, something the warmists claim ad nauseum is the only thing that is the measure of whether something is true or not. (Never mind that the only peers the AGW folks want reviewing anything are those who are firmly in the warmist camp. The open-minded need not apply.)

In the comments to the post linked above, Lord Monckton replies personally to some of the warmist trolls who tried to discredit his claims by making strawman arguments, misrepresenting what he stated, or trying to attack his data. Ironically, much of the data he used came from the IPCC itself, which he goes to great lengths to explain in his reply. Using their data he shows a number of faulty or unsubstantiated assumptions made by the IPCC to make their grossly overestimated projections about AGW. He shreds every one of the trolls' accusations and shows them for the indoctrinated and unthinking drones they are.

As more than one commenter opined, they'd love to see Lord Monckton debate Al Gore about AGW. Too bad we'll never see that happen. Monckton would bury him.

I've covered the decline of Detroit more than once, covering the various reasons for its precipitous fall from grace.

It's decline continues as the Democrat policymakers continue their experiment to create a socialist utopia. Too bad it's been failing and in such a spectacular fashion that it's impossible to hide. No amount of dissembling and sleight-of-hand can point observers away from the obvious: Detroit is dying and it's the fault of the Progressives who have been running the city for decades.

They have implemented just about every socialist program, regressive 'redistributionist" tax, and punitive business regulation on their wish list upon the city and its residents and the results are clear to see: Detroit has gone from the richest city in the US (per capita) to the second poorest. (Only Cleveland beat them out for that honor.) Detroit can stand as an example of what the rest of the nation will look like if Obama and the rest of the Progressives get their way. The socialist experiment has failed and no amount of window dressing can change that, no matter how hard the MSM tries.

Deb told me about this this morning and then showed me this video of a dad showing his 15-year old daughter the consequences of her actions, in this case badmouthing her parents on Facebook.

Apparently Dad is an IT professional and after spending a few hours and a bunch of cash updating her laptop he found her Facebook post. To say he wasn't amused is an understatement. Apparently this video has gone viral and is making the rounds, both on Facebook and in the media.



I discussed this with one of my co-workers and he thought the guy went overboard. But then my co-worker doesn't have teenaged daughters...but he will in a little over 6 years. I think then he'll change his tune.

Do I think he went too far? I can't say. But if this wasn't the first time she pulled something like this, and according to what her dad said it wasn't, then maybe his course of action was the right one.

I was going to wow you with a punched up version of "Why all your wireless stuff doesn't always work" as well as a few other related tidbits. But then I stopped by Fred Lapides' site (NSFW) and realized I had to chuck that idea until tomorrow. Instead I will be regaling you with a video that explains The History Of English...In Ten Minutes.



I couldn't have done any better myself. But he did miss two very important variants of English: Spanglish and Japlish.

Is it possible the Occupy Wall Street protests might succeed where indoctrination has failed?

While the OWS protests are obstensively supposed to show "the people" the evils of capitalism, it is having an unexpected side effect. It's teaching the OWS protesters the evils of socialism up close and personal, by way of Ayn Rand.

Not surprisingly, Occupy Wall Street has become a magnet for thieves and con-men. As one organizer complains, "Stealing is our biggest problem at the moment."

Then there are the bums. Originally, from what I can tell, street people were actively recruited by the Occupiers as a way of adding to their somewhat anemic numbers. But the naïve young hippies who make up the bulk of the movement are quickly discovering what the rest of us, with the benefit of actual life experience, already know about "the homeless."

Over at Occupy Boston, a protester complains, "It's turning into us against them. They come in here and they're looking at it as a way of getting a free meal and a place to crash, which is totally fine, but they don't bring anything to the table at all." Another report concludes with a similar sentiment.

"We have compassion toward everyone. However, we have certain rules and guidelines," said Lauren Digioia, 26, a member of the sanitation committee. "If you're going to come here and get our food, bedding and clothing, have books and medical supplies for no charge, they need to give back," Digioia said. "There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled."

These kids had better watch out. If they start thinking that like this, pretty soon they might find themselves at a Tea Party rally.

"There's a lot of takers here and they feel entitled." Gee, that sounds familiar. Could it be because the very ones complaining about the takers are themselves takers of a higher order? What hypocrites. They're finding out that the socialist/marxist creed of "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need," does nothing but create a large amount of 'needy' while diminishing the number filling the needs. It's right out of Atlas Shrugged, where the takers (looters) take more and more while creating a huge disincentive for those producing what is taken to keep working. At some point the producers end up becoming nothing more than slaves to the takers, as Rand outlined in her novel.

It seems the OWS protesters are "dominated by 20-year-old white middle-class college boys ." What the hell do these college boys know of real life and how economies actually work? From what they're showing the world, not much. But they're sure as heck learning the hard way that nothing free is actually free. Someone else has to pay for it. This time around, it's them.

(H/T Maggie's Farm)

This theme - Higher Education Bubble - is appearing more often, maybe because it has a heavy dose of truth buried within it.

As so many of us have written again and again, we've all been sold the idea that in order to get a good job that we had to go to college to get a degree. It's almost become gospel. The only problem with that idea is that it is dead wrong.

While some kind of education after high school is a good idea, it needn't be in the form of college. It could be trade school, including apprenticeships (something that has fallen out of favor over the past century or so), or military service, or going out and doing.

We've seen the effects of this wrongheaded thinking, where students come out of college with their sheepskin, a large amount of student loan debt, and no prospects for a job. It's not that college in and off itself is a bad idea, it's what the courses of study the students pursue that are a bad idea. As I mentioned in a section of yesterday's post, one of the protesters at the Occupy Wall Street tantrum was concerned because she was going to be thousands of dollars in debt once she completed her Bachelor's of Fine Arts degree, but had few prospects in the way of finding a job. What kind of job did she think her degree would help her find? You don't need a BFA to work at McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts or any of the other 'menial' jobs she's likely to have. The same is true of those whose degrees end in the word "Studies", or degrees in Philosophy or Sanskrit or Medieval European Husbandry and so on. Unless all those students plan on careers in academia, most of those degrees are useless in the real world. (One of BeezleBub's friends from the farm had a degree in philosophy from Trinity in Dublin. The only problem was that none of the philosophy companies were hiring, so he ended up with a job as a farm hand.)

Now don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with studying those subjects. But they should be secondary majors or post-grad courses of study. After all, I am a firm believer that all science and technology without the humanities is a bad idea.

What America needs more than folks with college degrees is people who know how to do things with their hands, be it in the trades (construction workers, plumbers, electricians, masons, steelworkers, mechanics, HVAC technicians, etc.) or in factory work (machinists, assemblers, inspectors, etc.). How many times have we seen reports of companies wanting to hire workers, but too many of them are inexperienced, unqualified, or don't have the right training to do the job? Some have gone so far as to hire qualified workers they don't need at the moment because they know they'll need them soon and they want to make sure they'll have them when they need them.

We've got to stop buying into idea that the only way to get ahead is to have a college education. For some job openings, the need for a college degree is overblown, as illustrated by this example. Since when does a receptionist require a college degree?

Hey, maybe that woman with the BFA can apply for the job! I'm sure her expensive college education will qualify her to answer the phones.