The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Via Dr. Pournell:
I teach at a community college, now. Kids tell me they have been taught how to think; they are no longer taught a lot of facts because they can just look stuff up. As a result, they don’t know anything. Some do, but some had more old-fashioned teachers. Most don’t and it is such a pity. All their days spent working on good classroom behavior and learning so little. What a waste.
Kate Pitrone
My emphasis.
“I was never taught that knowledge.” No shit.
Via Jaded Haven:
Daphne opines, “We’re Doomed”.
Nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
For years, cellphone makers had avoided using glass because it required precision in cutting and grinding that was extremely difficult to achieve. Apple had already selected an American company, Corning Inc., to manufacture large panes of strengthened glass. But figuring out how to cut those panes into millions of iPhone screens required finding an empty cutting plant, hundreds of pieces of glass to use in experiments and an army of midlevel engineers. It would cost a fortune simply to prepare.
Then a bid for the work arrived from a Chinese factory.When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.The Chinese plant got the job.“The entire supply chain is in China now,” said another former high-ranking Apple executive.“You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away. You need that screw made a little bit different? It will take three hours.”An eight-hour drive from that glass factory is a complex, known informally as Foxconn City, where the iPhone is assembled. To Apple executives, Foxconn City was further evidence that China could deliver workers — and diligence — that outpaced their American counterparts.That’s because nothing like Foxconn City exists in the United States.The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said.
That’s not QotD, though I strongly recommend you RTWT. I quoted that so I could quote you this, from an AR15.com thread, “What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard a professor say?”:
Yesterday, I had a professor who was born and raised in China try to give a lecture about how offshoring hurts China. Yeah, you read that right, American offshoring hurts China.
He went through a power point presentation showing environmental problems (dead fish in streams, sand storms, etc.), and I just sat there. He held up a dry-erasable marker and said “Chinese workers only make 100-200 dollars per month making things like these.” He kept emphasizing how little they made and how hard they worked.
I couldn’t take it any longer. I respectfully raised my hand and asked “how much were these workers making before offshoring was prominent?”
You want your iPhone, iPad, Macbook AirJordans and $7 quilted winter coats? Offshoring is the cost.
Discuss.
Seen at Curmudgeonly & Skeptical, the Independence Day Quiz, a test of knowledge about American history and government. Rodger’s site says:
Supposedly 96% of all High School Seniors FAILED this test … AND if that’s not bad enough, 50+% of all individuals over 50 did too!!
I missed one.
I’ve covered the Tucson Unified School District’s “Ethnic Studies” program here before, in Balkanization, from May of 2008, Balkanization Pushback the following June, Why I Keep Marxadelphia Around in February of 2010, THAT’S RACIST in May of that year, More Balkanization in January of last year, A Failure of Critical Pedagogy in May, and An Example of Critical Pedagogy just a couple of days later.
Well, now the excrement has well and truly hit the rotating air-movement device:
TUSD board shuts down Mex. American Studies
The TUSD Governing Board voted to dismantle the contentious Mexican American Studies program in an effort to avoid losing millions in state funding.Tuesday’s 4-1 vote came amid name calling in the boardroom and an angry overflow crowd chanting outside TUSD headquarters, “We will not comply!”Board President Mark Stegeman, board Clerk Michael Hicks and members Alexandre Sugiyama and Miguel Cuevas voted to drop the program.All supported revamping either the program or some classes so they are more comprehensive and include the contributions of all ethnicities.Member Adelita Grijalva voted against the decision, calling instead for the district to continue to defend the program through a court appeal and to challenge the constitutionality of the law, which she called racist.“I feel like this community has faced such a battle over the last year and a half, it’s almost exhausting,” Grijalva said. “You see it in the tears and pleas from the students. … I feel that this board doesn’t understand the impact beyond our TUSD community.“This is an issue that is not going to go away by this vote. When bad laws are written, they are usually picked up by other states. This is an opportunity to fight a bad law,” she said.
The comments, 284 at the time of this posting, are running overwhelmingly in favor of the vote.
Adelita Grijalva is the daughter of Rep. Raul Grijalva, co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
I’ve just begun reading Paul Kengor’s Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. In the preface, he hammers the point that Marx and Lenin both understood and stated repeatedly that Communism and Capitalism could not co-exist, that one must inevitably defeat the other, and for Communism to win it would be necessary to actively pursue the destruction of Capitalist governments by any means possible. The preferred method was destruction from the inside by infiltration and subversion. His book is a detailed examination of that subversion.
The battle isn’t over just because the Soviet Union fell. The True Believers and their dupes are still out there working away. They fooled the American public into electing Obama, after all…
More disturbing, I think, is the extent to which America has suffered not a failure of the elites, but a failure of the people. Do we measure up to the founders of this country? The fact that Americans fought a revolution against Britain in the first place continues to astonish me. When in all of history have prosperous men with property — farms and businesses — risked their lives and fortunes to establish a better political order? Only a spiritual grandeur of a depth we barely can imagine today can explain it. When in all of history has a country gone to war and sacrificed a 5% of its total population to suppress slavery? The evangelical zeal that sent the North to war, singing of the grapes of wrath in the apocalyptic vision of Isaiah 63, surpasses our understanding today. — David P. Goldman, Has the Conservative Elite Really Failed?
A failure I blame on public education.
I stumbled across this post at Pithy Title Goes Here, and had to explore further. It seems that an adult took a standardized test for 10th graders, and failed miserably. What was at fault? Why, the test, of course!
“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.
He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.
“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.
“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.
“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”
Wow, a multi-degreed professional couldn’t do 10th grade math!
I guess I shouldn’t snark so much about “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader.”
Who was this highly credentialed person?
The man in question is Rick Roach, who is in his fourth four-year term representing District 3 on the Board of Education in Orange County, Fl., a public school system with 180,000 students. Roach took a version of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, commonly known as the FCAT, earlier this year.
—
Roach, the father of five children and grandfather of two, was a teacher, counselor and coach in Orange County for 14 years. He was first elected to the board in 1998 and has been reelected three times. A resident of Orange County for three decades, he has a bachelor of science degree in education and two masters degrees: in education and educational psychology. He has trained over 18,000 educators in classroom management and course delivery skills in six eastern states over the last 25 years.
(My emphasis.) Surely it must be the test!
I’d certainly like to see the questions. Let me quote once again from The George Orwell Daycare Center:
“There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.
“In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” – Thomas Sowell
—
“It is only from a special point of view that ‘education’ is a failure. As to its own purposes, it is an unqualified success. One of its purposes is to serve as a massive tax-supported jobs program for legions of not especially able or talented people. As social programs go, it’s a good one. The pay isn’t high, but the risk is low, the standards are lenient, entry is easy, and job security is pretty good…in fact, the system is perfect, except for one little detail. We must find a way to get the children out of it.”—Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian.
As Glenn Reynolds puts it, “Credentialed, not educated.”
I’m not discounting the possibility that the questions themselves are ridiculous, after all, I’ve had some experience with “new math” myself. Again from George Owell Daycare Center:
In 1960: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four fifths the price. What is his profit?
In 1970: (traditional math): A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 80% of the price. What is his profit in dollars?
In 1970: (new math): A logger exchanges set L of lumber for set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100 and each element is worth $1. Make 100 dots representing the elements of set M. The set C of costs contains 20 fewer points than set M. Represent set C as a subset of set M, and answer the following question: What is the cardinality of the set P of profits?
In 1980: A logger sells a truckload of wood for $100. His cost of production is $80 and his profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
In 1990: (Outcome-Based Education): By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a logger makes $20. What do you think of this way of making a living? Topic for class discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?
In 2000: A logger sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is $120. How does Arthur Andersen determine that his profit margin is $60?
In 2010: El hachero vende un camion carga por $100. La cuesta de productiones…
So I want to see the questions. But somehow I don’t think that would explain the whole problem.
And I really wonder how Mr. Roach would do on the American Civics Literacy Quiz.
First Mike Rowe, then John Ratzenberger, then Jay Leno, now City Journal has an in-depth look at the lack of skilled workers in industry. Pullquote:
“The ability to make things in America is at risk,” says Jeannine Kunz, director of professional development for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers in Dearborn, Michigan. If the skilled-labor shortage persists, she fears, “hundreds of thousands of jobs will go unfilled by 2021.”
The shortage of industrial skills points to a wide gap between the American education system and the demands of the world economy. For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and “creative” professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.
That attitude is a relic of the post–World War II era, a time when a college education almost guaranteed you a good job. These days, the returns on higher education, particularly on higher education gained outside the elite schools, are declining, as they have been for about a decade.
I ran across something in the archives a couple of days ago that I want to repeat here. It was an excerpt from a 1974 interview by Eric Sevareid of Leo Rosten on the topic of “higher education.” Remember, this was 1974, considerably longer than a mere decade ago:
We’re practically using the colleges as a dump into which to put youngsters we do not know what to do with. There are today 45 million people between the age of roughly 7 and 24. Their parents don’t know what to do with them. They want them to go to college and they often think that they’re being trained for jobs. But they’re not getting training for useful employment.
Someone has said that education is what remains after everything you’ve learned is forgotten. The purpose of educating young people is not only to illuminate their spirit and enrich their memory bank but to teach them the pleasures of thinking and reading. How do you use the mind? As a teacher, I always was astonished by the number of people in the classroom who wanted to learn as against those who just wanted to pass. I took pride in my ability to communicate. Generally “communicate” meant one thing. Now the young think “communicate” means “Agree with me!”
The student rebellions of the 1960’s exposed the fact that our entire educational system has forgotten the most important thing it can do prior to college: indoctrinate. I believe in the indoctrination of moral values. There’s a lot to be said for being good and kind and decent. You owe a duty to those who have taken care of you. You owe a duty to whatever it is that God or fate gave you – to use your brain or your heart. It’s senseless to whine, to blame society for every grievance, or to assume that the presence of a hammer means you have to go out to smash things.
The young want everything. They think they an get everything swiftly and painlessly. They are far too confident. They don’t know what their problems are, not really. They talk too much. They demand too much. Their ideas have not been tempered by the hard facts of reality. They’re idealists, but they don’t sense that it’s the easiest thing in the world to be an idealist. It doesn’t take any brains. This was said by Aristotle 2,300 years ago. Mencken once said that an idealist is someone who, upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, assumes that it will also make better soup.
Hell, most of ’em can’t make soup if it doesn’t come out of a can. But they can make drum circles in public parks!
Another one from Tam:
Look, without getting into my usual rants about public education (in which I point out that the adjective “public” modifies the noun “school” the same way it does “transportation” or “restroom”: serving as a warning that it is filthy and full of junkies and criminals,) can we agree that the school board has larger fish to fry than this minnow? After all, what good does it do to be able to laboriously copy out “See Spot run” in the most elegant of scripts if you haven’t successfully been taught to read it in the first place?
UPDATE: This one from Tam is better, and would have won had I seen it first:
Central governments have managed to turn murder from a hobby pursued at home by individual craftsmen into a wholesale industry churning out slipshod and substandard corpses in numbers that can’t be read without sounding like Carl Sagan.
It’s connection to education? We should learn from our past.
Several years ago Peggy penned a piece about “tough history coming.” Saturday, her Wall St. Journal column echoes that earlier piece a bit:
People are increasingly fearing the divisions within, even the potential coming apart of, our country. Rich/poor, black/white, young/old, red/blue: The things that divide us are not new, yet there’s a sense now that the glue that held us together for more than two centuries has thinned and cracked with age. That it was allowed to thin and crack, that the modern era wore it out.
What was the glue? A love of country based on a shared knowledge of how and why it began; a broad feeling among our citizens that there was something providential in our beginnings; a gratitude that left us with a sense that we should comport ourselves in a way unlike the other nations of the world, that more was expected of us, and not unjustly — “To whom much is given much is expected”; a general understanding that we were something new in history, a nation founded on ideals and aspirations —— liberty, equality —— and not mere grunting tribal wants. We were from Europe but would not be European: No formal class structure here, no limits, from the time you touched ground all roads would lead forward. You would be treated not as your father was but as you deserved.
“Shared knowledge.” Education. That had to go first.
RTWT.