Recently in Education Category

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.

It was just before lunch when I received a phone call from my wife, Deb. She was taking a lunch break from her microbiology class at the local college when she called.

You may ask "What was so important that she had to call DCE during lunch?"

I can tell you on three words: She. Was. Livid.

During the morning lecture her professor, in the midst of talking about microbiology, went off on a tangent. That in itself isn't all that remarkable. It happens from time to time. But this time was different.

The 'tangent' in this case was a political diatribe that lasted quite some time. All the professor did was spout vitriol and vile slanders on Republicans, praise the all-knowing and caring Democrats, demonized anybody who disagreed with Leftist ideology, and so on. Some of the other students were overtly agreeing with the professor, but others were uncomfortable as the diatribe continued. As the vitriol continued, Deb started getting mad.

I have to explain that while Deb is fiscally conservative, she has her liberal side (and by liberal I mean a classic liberal, not a "government-knows-best" liberal). I guess that makes her libertarian.

Did what the professor was saying piss her off? No, not really. As she told me the professor did have a few valid points (though very few). So what was it that was pissing her off? Simply this:

She had paid good money that we could not easily afford to take a microbiology class she needed in her quest to become an RN. She hadn't paid that money to be subjected to a leftist political diatribe that belonged in a Marxist Political Science 102 lecture.

She called me again a couple of hours later, telling me that she'd gone to her adviser to complain about what had happened in the class. At that point her adviser started spouting off as well. Needless to say, that pissed off my wife even more.

So what has she learned from this episode in her college career?

Institutions of higher learning are not about education, but political indoctrination.

So endith the lesson.

A number of bloggers have covered the controversy over the University of Wisconsin - Stout in regards to Professor James Miller and his First Amendment rights to free speech on campus. Apparently the campus police chief doesn't believe in them. Neither does the interim Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

The U of W has beclowned itself on this matter and I'm not going to belabor the asininity of the powers-that-be at that fine institution of..ahem...learning. Instead, I am going to address the continuing destruction of our colleges and universities and the concomitant higher education bubble that is about to burst. Or rather, I am going to let Penn and Teller do it for me. After all, I have work to do and money to make so that someday I too can retire a year or so before my employer involuntarily "retires" my ass me because they believe I'm too damn old to do the job anymore. So sit back, relax, and enjoy their expose (in three parts).

Part 1:



Part 2:



Part 3:


That basically covers it.

I particularly liked the part when they talk to the supposedly smartest man in academia, Noam Chomsky. All he did for me is prove that he's a clueless, out-of-touch putz. (Frankly, the smartest man in academia is probably Stephen Hawking, at least in my opinion.)

We've seen a few articles dealing with false accusation of sexual harassment or sexual misconduct on college campuses and the rather lax criteria for determining the 'guilt' of the accused by college administrations, in many cases ignoring the evidence presented and even the findings of police investigations that show the accused is innocent. It elicited a response from a Dartmouth alumnus who suffered under just such an accusation even though the accuser was found to have lied about the alleged assault.

That in and of itself is a miscarriage of justice. But it was his experiences and observations that were more telling, especially observations about those who chose to judge him guilty despite overwhelming evidence that no such assault ever took place.

Dartmouth is one of the Ivy League schools, institutions of higher learning that supposed to be a cut above the rest. However, as we have seen over the years, their reputations for churning out the "best and brightest" are showing themselves to be less deserved than in decades past.

One observation of Gonzalo Lira's that struck me as being dead on.

What I didn't realize at the time--because I was too young--and which I would slowly come to realize over the years, was what the episode taught me, about America's elite. About the cowardice of the American elite. A moral cowardice that, I understand now, is far more significant than practically anything else that I learned at Dartmouth College.

The members of the Committee On Standards who sat in judgment of me in the Fall of 1991 were not some lofty group of my "betters", draped in gowns and wearing the wigs of English jurists: They were my peers--run-of-the-mill students of a small liberal-arts college in New England.

But that particular group of run-of-the-mill students is exactly the sort of individual who winds up running the United States. The current Secretary of the Treasury is a Dartmouth alum--Geithner '83. So was the last Treasury Secretary--Paulson '68--as well as a whole boatload of his partners at Goldman Sachs. The current head of General Electric (Immelt '68), the most influential Surgeon General in American history (Koop '37), the current junior senator from New York (Gillibrand née Rutnik '88), the senior White House correspondent for one of the major networks (Tapper '91), the soldier/writer who's experiences in Iraq formed the basis for a major television series on HBO (Fick '99)--

--all Dartmouth alums.

The kind of men and women Dartmouth enrolls and graduates are the bright men and women who find places for themselves in the gears of America society. The men and women on the COS hearing in the fall of 1991 were no different.

And they showed me how fundamentally corrupt the American leadership class really is.

Moral cowardice. I think that sums up the problem we have with those in power. It's more about feelings that about what's right or wrong. They are not willing to take a stand against something that is wrong because of how someone else might feel about it. It seems feelings have replaced morals, have replaced critical thinking. But what do we expect when over the past few decades education has twisted the meaning of right and wrong and replaced it with how one feels about something. (And if you notice, it's never about what someone might think about some event or issue, it's how the feel about it.)

Millions of American young people have been raised by parents and schools with "How do you feel about it?" as the only guide to what they ought to do. The heart has replaced God and the Bible as a moral guide. And now, as Brooks points out, we see the results. A vast number of American young people do not even ask whether an action is right or wrong. The question would strike them as foreign. Why? Because the question suggests that there is a right and wrong outside of themselves. And just as there is no God higher than them, there is no morality higher than them, either.

Could this be why Gonzalo Lira was 'convicted' and suspended by the Dartmouth Committee On Standards for an offense he didn't commit? Was he being punished for the alleged misdeeds of Clarence Thomas against Anita Hill (the Thomas confirmation hearings were ongoing at the time). Did they see him as a proxy for all of those out there that had committed such offenses and gone unpunished because they felt it was right thing to do, regardless of the fact that an innocent man was going to pay the price for others' transgressions?

Along this line are the replacement of morals with feelings which is the reason behind such odious things as political correctness, college "speech codes" that violate the First Amendment in an effort to prevent anyone from being offended by anyone else (except of course those on the Left being allowed to offend those on the Right because they feel it's necessary to show them their place), and a whole host of other actions that cast aside traditional notions of right or wrong. By extension, this also means they have no way of recognizing evil because to them it's all relative. ("There is no right or wrong.") It appears they do not believe that some act or some one can be so totally effin' evil that they do not have a right to exist. They explain away the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, and a host of other outright evil persons by claiming others drove them to it (the blame usually laid upon Western Civilization). They truly have no inkling that evil does indeed exist, that it can exist in the form of a single person willing to kill as many people as necessary to get their way. It is that moral cowardice that allows many of the aforementioned genocidal despots to do what they do with nary a protest from the enlightened, "feeling" ruling elite.

And we somehow expect these very same people to have our best interests at heart?

And now for another exciting episode of Is This Stupid, Or What?

I'm sad to say that this episode takes place in my home state of New Hampshire.

= = = = = = = = = = =

Shawn Stevens, a seventh grade student at Dover Middle School, had received an American flag from the mother of a US Marine getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan.

Imagine his surprise when the moment he stepped of his school bus carrying that flag it was taken away by a school staff member because "because it can be considered a weapon."

Excuse me?

Co-Principal Kimberly Lyndes said the spear point of the flag's stick was the problem.

"A student came to school yesterday with a flag that was rather large and didn't fit inside the backpack," she said. "A staff member felt that it could potentially be dangerous because of the pointy end and took the item and let the student know and the parent know that they took the item and could pick it up.

"It had nothing to do with patriotism or it being a flag. It was about potential danger and school safety."

I saw video of the "weapon" and I have one question for Co-Principal Lyndes: Are you kidding me? That "pointy" end was as about as pointed as the eraser at the end of a pencil. As Shawn's mother said, there are plenty of everyday items at school that are far more dangerous than Shawn's flag.

This is what happens when school administrators stop being educators and instead become bureaucrats. They take something that no one else would think twice about and turn it into a situation that makes them look stupid. And we trust people like this with our kids?

No wonder more parents would rather send their kids to private school.

I had an enjoyable discussion with one of my fellow employees this afternoon. It dealt with working, the differences between small and large companies, the advantages and disadvantages of both, and the recent dearth of qualified candidates for a number open positions within our company.

Without going into a lot of detail to protect the identity of my co-worker (and my job), let's just say we've been running into a couple of problems in regards to some candidates, the two biggest being that too many of them are well credentialed but not necessarily well educated, and lack of experience in the areas we really need. Apparently this is not a problem unique to our company.

While there are plenty of jobs open begging for people to fill them, there aren't enough people applying for them because they feel the jobs are beneath them ("I didn't spend all that money for a degree in Transgendered Native American Studies just to take a job working in a factory!"), or those applying for them have neither the experience or the capability of doing the job.

I caught a piece on Fox News this evening covering this particular issue. (No, I'm not going to link to it because I don't feel the need to do so.) A number of the companies they talked to said pretty much the same thing my co-worker and I had during our discussion. One manufacturer said they'll hire someone qualified even if they don't need them at the time because someone like that has been hard to come by.

As the WP Dad said about that report, "Is this because our incompetent education system hasn't been teaching our children what they need to know to make it in the world? What good is all that self-esteem they've been ramming down their throats the past 20 years if they can't get a job because they have neither the knowledge or ability to do it?"

Indeed.

By way of Facebook comes this advice for potential college freshman from Cal Techgirl.

Dear Prospective Freshmen, You are trying to get into a major 4-year university. You do yourself no favors by 1) acting like you're my friend (e.g. "Hey" is not an appropriate subject line for a 1st email) or 2) using text speak. We use grammar and spacing here in the big kids' sandbox.

A number of comments from some of her friends expanded a bit on this, most of with which I agreed. Names have been modified to protect the innocent from egregious retaliation.

BJW- Good luck with that one. Having taught a few high schoolers in the finer arts of English Literature, Grammar and Composition, I can tell you I fought the tough fight, but I fear I lost most days.

I once tried to convince my students to not use any "be" verbs in a particular assignment. They ignored me. I rewrote each of their papers, and I used 2 "be" verbs in two of them, and none in the others. They could not believe that I did it. One student claimed that I changed the meaning of what she had written. I sat down with her and went line by line. Then, she said, "but it doesn't sound like me." (Imagine the whine in her voice.) She did not amuse me. (I now teach only my children - homeschool. They don't like my "no be verbs" rules, either.)

Cal Techgirl- That's hard. But important for what we teach in terms of professional scientific writing. Most of them just don't get it.

--snip--

I think the other problem is that these kids just don't read as much as we did. You learn language by seeing it and hearing it.

CS- We just hired a girl with a bachelor's degree. Every e-mail she writes starts with "Hey", even to the Assistant Vice President of our department. ACK!

BJW- Our society has devolved to such a casual state! Can we blame Mark Zuckerberg?

I have seen this problem at work, where the writing skills of the engineers, technicians, and software coders leave much to be desired, particularly among the younger employees. It's one reason why I spend an inordinate amount of time rewriting procedures, design specifications, and product proposals. It's also the main reason I read anything BeezleBub writes for school as he has a tendency to use texting shorthand - mostly leaving out "unnecessary" words - which makes reading his writing assignments painful at times. At least he hasn't been using texting abbreviations...or at least not yet.

My opinion of zero-tolerance policies has always been low, seeing them as the last refuge of the incompetent, lazy, or lawsuit-shy school administrators.

Now it appears that after over 10 years of increasingly draconian zero tolerance polices, the trend is reversing itself, with schools loosening their policies or abandoning them all together. Some of the reasons for this are easy to figure out, with the main one being the policies have hurt far more students than they have ever helped. It could also be the lawsuits, investigations, and ridicule being heaped upon those who created and enforced those policies over the years. But it can all be boiled down this: They. Don't. Work.

The American Psychological Association reported in a 2008 journal article that research has found no evidence that zero-tolerance policies have a deterrent effect or keep schools safer.

Over the years, "zero-tolerance" has described discipline policies that impose automatic consequences for offenses, regardless of context. The term also has come to refer to severe punishments for relatively minor infractions. Some schools boast of using zero-tolerance; others insist that they do nothing of the sort.

It would be great if all school systems were dialing back the use of zero tolerance policies, but that isn't the case. Instead, some are becoming even harsher, creating even more backlash and more discipline problems. It sounds almost like the old saw, "Beatings will continue until morale improves!"

Some school systems zero tolerance policies have devastating effects on students caught up in them, damaging or destroying otherwise good kids in the name of discipline. In some cases, those closed-minded policies have killed, with students taking their own lives after being run through the ringer for what would otherwise be a minor infraction.

Fairfax [Virginia] parents tell stories of going into the process without an attorney and finding their children under fire at adversarial hearings. These families contend there is no impartial judge but instead a presumption of guilt. They say there is little discussion of a student's well-being, psychological state or the cause of the misconduct.

"The parents feel very often that they are in the middle of criminal prosecution - that there is no balance or context and the facts are skewed to the negative," said Bill Reichhardt, a Fairfax lawyer whose firm has handled more than 100 school discipline hearings in Virginia.

It sounds more a like kangaroo court, where even if you should happen to be innocent, you are still guilty. Can there be any question whether these policies do far more harm that good? Who are these policies supposed to be helping - the administrators? Or the students? It certainly appears from here the answer is the former, with the latter relegated to scholastic (and social) purgatory.

Is it any wonder more parents might want to send their kids to private schools or home school them so they won't have to subject them to such a nightmarish code of discipline? (I guess I must also conclude they'll also do so to ensure their kids also get a decent education, something these zero tolerance policies do not guarantee, but you get my point...I hope.)

It's time to end the reign of zero tolerance policies for they serve no one well, claims to the contrary notwithstanding.

At least according to a recent study that Randall Parker links to, joking that he hopes the egalitarian PC won't drag him away in the middle of the night.

There's even a book written on the subject, peer-reviewed and all that, by Richard Lynn and a Finnish scholar, _IQ and the Wealth of Nations_.  Why is wasn't given a larger hearing among the chattering classes is solely because of a childish disregard for group differences.

James O'Keefe has done it again. The damage to NPR will be long lasting. Perhaps now federal funding--over $400 million this year--will be canceled in future.

It seems Mark Levin's ill-tempered sobriquet for the left-leaning news source is mot juste.

And to find out another corrupt entity--I'm talking about college and universities, mere leftist indoctrination centers except for the gaggle of nerds, Asians, and Beezelbubs studying the hard sciences--just take a look at what's happened to the nefarious Houston Baker. Fifth paragraph down from the link below. That punk.

Hey, dumbie, it's New Year's Eve. There are four other errors you made that KC Johnson shows. His book he co-authored with Stuart Taylor is the most essential public policy reading since Charles Murray's Losing Ground in 1984.

Is there any accountability to the Group of 88? The Duke Rape Hoax needs a Mark Twain.

Perhaps I need to take a two- or three-year hiatus to write something.