The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
From his (almost) Commencement Speech to the 2014 Rutgers graduating class:
What intrigues me is that there are 31.1 million Americans between 18 and 24, and 21.8 million of you—70 percent—are going to college. It is not possible that 70 percent of you are among the 50 percent of you who are above-average in intelligence.
Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs fame) has an organization he runs, MikeRoweWorks.com, that gives scholarships to students studying the trades. He posts on Facebook today:
Question: If I were to form “The American Idol Scholarship Fund” and announce $15,000 of professional training for anyone who wished to become a pop star, how long do you think it would take to give away a million dollars?
A day? An hour? A minute?
What if I offered the same money to anyone who wanted to learn how to maintain and repair diesel engines? How fast would the million dollars go then?
Currently, this question has no official answer. But I can tell you this – for the last month, mikeroweWORKS has been offering FULL-RIDE scholarships to one of the best trade schools in the country. And as of now – a big chunk of that million dollars is still up for grabs. Why? Because mikeroweWORKS scholarships do not reward fame or celebrity. They reward work ethic, and the willingness to learn a necessary skill. In other words, they are designed to train people for jobs that actually exist.
Last month, I shot a few commercials to announce my latest partnership with Universal Technical Institute https://www.uti.edu/mrw As you may know, UTI trains the technicians that keep America’s trucks on the road. Not as sexy perhaps as the next American Idol, but a great place to find a few American Icons. Truth is, our Trade Schools play an important role in maintaining this thing we call “civilization,” and given the preponderance of Help Wanted signs currently papering our transportation industry, I wanted to help draw some attention to another specific career that too many people simply overlook.
Anyway, this particular commercial didn’t make it past Standards and Practices, for obvious reasons. But since I’m the only censor in these parts, I’ve made it available here, for the refined taste and sophisticated worldview of my 835,000 closest friends. http://profoundlydisconnected.com/naked-mike-unauthorized-video/ (Warning – Partial Nudity and Poor Judgment abound.)
Mike
Here’s the video:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ja327jUMg?rel=0]
PS. As long as you’re loafing around on the interweb, do me a favor. If you or someone you know are willing to explore a career in the transportation industry, I’d seriously like to help. The opportunities are real, and the details about this particular program – along with a more tasteful version of the above message – can be found here. https://www.facebook.com/UTI
PPS. By traditional standards, this scholarship program is working just fine. I’m just personally appalled that the money didn’t vanish in the first twenty minutes. (I’ll work on my expectations.)
PPPS I know. The diet starts tomorrow.
Pass this around, would you?
No, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” but I had an interesting occurrence this evening. I’m out of town on a job, and had dinner at a little restaurant. Standing at the register to pay, the waitress rang up my total as $15.54. I handed her a $20. She punched $20 on the register, and the display showed “PPPPPPP.”
“Well, that’s different,” I said, as she stared at the display. But when she reached for a calculator, I said “$4.46.”
She looked at me like I’d just pulled a rabbit from a hat. “I can’t do math in my head like that.” She appeared to be about 19 years old.
I weep for our future….
Fran Porretto has more on Robert and Adlynn Harte, whom I mentioned in the überpost below. Fran also links to Nice Deb‘s piece, The Horrendous Criminal Enterprise Known as the Democrat Party which is absolutely worth your time.
Having said that, however:
Fran also links to another piece you should read concerning Common Core and the teaching of American History. A long time ago, Steven Den Beste wrote an essay on the four most important inventions in history, upon which I based my überpost Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them. Den Beste stated in his peice:
In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.
In the intervening years, I’ve written a lot of posts on education (236 tagged that, according to Blogger). My point in focusing on education has been that the Left has used the last two of those inventions infiltrating and controlling what each new generation is taught, laying the foundation for our future.
Fran’s post Sometimes One Weapon is Enough expands on that. Chillingly. He links to this piece, which explains:
We have a new set of AP American history standards and it’s only the first out of 33 AP course standards to be written. We can give thanks to the Architect of Common Core and College Board president, David Coleman. He has taken the five page outline currently given to teachers and has turned it into a 98 page Framework.
The new standards interpret American History for us.
Jane Robbins describes a few problems:
The new Framework inculcates a consistently negative view of American culture. For example, the units on colonial America stress the development of a “rigid racial hierarchy” and a “strong belief in British racial and cultural superiority.” The Framework ignores the United States’ founding principles and their influence in inspiring the spread of democracy and galvanizing the movement to abolish slavery. The Framework continues this theme by reinterpreting Manifest Destiny—rather than a belief that America has a mission to spread democracy and new technologies across the continent, the Framework teaches that it “was built on a belief in white racial superiority and a sense of American cultural superiority.”
She goes on to note:
A particularly troubling failure of the Framework is its dismissal of the Declaration of Independence and the principles so eloquently expressed there. The Framework’s entire discussion of this seminal document consists of just one phrase in one sentence: “The colonists’ belief in the superiority of republican self-government based on the natural rights of the people found its clearest American expression in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and in the Declaration of Independence.” The Framework thus ignores the philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration and the willingness of the signers to pledge “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor” to the cause of freedom.
The weaponization of public education kicks into high gear.
At this point, however, it seems redundant.
“Cookie Cutter Curriculum”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx5qSJ37lk0?rel=0]
Quote of the Day:
And like Obamacare, with Common Core all of the faults get incorporated into a single point of failure. And then that point fails. But you can always call the toll-free number: 1-800-IMSHOKD, which will play you a recording directing you back to the Common Core Website, which will direct you to call 1-800-IMSHOKD.
Please hold for the next available bureaucrat.
Dr. Furr is a professor of medieval English literature, yet he writes books on Russian history, specializing in the period where Stalin was in power. Mass murder under Stalin? Never happened, he says:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRPTZF5zSLQ?rel=0]
So all those Kulaks that starved to death? Not Stalin’s fault or did they just not happen at all?
This guy teaches college students. And, I imagine, he has tenure, so he’ll never have to worry about working another day in his life.
Other people have fisked this Salon.com Slate.com op-ed, If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person, I just want to pull a QotD from the comments:
i am a teacher. the line ” But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good. ” took me aback. generations? we should not send kids to private schools so the children of this nation get mediocre education until public schools improve? are you nuts? are you a drug addict? mediocre education? hundreds of years of MEDIOCRE education would be the death of america. you think government is bad now? wait for the students with mediocre educations to be government leaders. — “yiersan”
It would appear that “yiersan” has a problem manipulating the Shift key (or thinks he/she/it is the second coming of e.e. cummings), but aside from that, “hundreds of years of MEDIOCRE education would be the death of america. you think government is bad now? wait for the students with mediocre educations to be government leaders.”? Not been paying attention, have we? We’ve had eleven decades of “mediocre” (I would say pathological) education, and the product of that education is running the nation NOW. How the FUCK do you think we GOT HERE?!?
A three-fer. First, from Sippican Cottage:
You see, there are no public schools in America that I know of. They’re reeducation camps for people that weren’t educated in the first place, maybe, or little prisons, or pleasure domes for creepy teachers, or places where tubby women work out their neuroses about eating on helpless children at lunchtime — but there’s not much schooling going on in school. A public school is a really expensive, but shabby and ineffectual, private school that collects their tuition with the threat of eviction from your house.
I grew up in the same town as Horace Mann. I know all about public schools. The concept is as dead as a Pharaoh. The idea that universal literacy and a coherent public attitude toward citizenship would result in a better life for the country as a whole was a sweet one, and it worked for a while, until they “fixed” it. They’ve been fixing the hell out of it for over half a century now. They fixed it the way a veterinarian fixes dogs, to my eye.
Second, from Salon.com:
This amazing drive and capacity to learn does not turn itself off when children turn 5 or 6. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of our system of schooling is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.
And third, from John Taylor Gatto, a repeat:
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School is the first impression children get of organized society; like most first impressions, it is the lasting one. Life according to school is dull and stupid, only consumption promises relief: Coke, Big Macs, fashion jeans, that’s where real meaning is found, that is the classroom’s lesson, however indirectly delivered.
The decisive dynamics which make forced schooling poisonous to healthy human development aren’t hard to spot. Work in classrooms isn’t significant work; it fails to satisfy real needs pressing on the individual; it doesn’t answer real questions experience raises in the young mind; it doesn’t contribute to solving any problem encountered in actual life. The net effect of making all schoolwork external to individual longings, experiences, questions, and problems is to render the victim listless. This phenomenon has been well-understood at least since the time of the British enclosure movement which forced small farmers off their land into factory work. Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating, creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy—these are precisely what the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another.
As I watched it happen, it took about three years to break most kids, three years confined to environments of emotional neediness with nothing real to do.
Mike Rowe, star of Dirty Jobs, narrator of Deadliest Catch and other TV shows, spokesman for Ford and supporter and promoter of the skilled trades, does a Pulitzer-prize quality fisking of a piece by one Steve Kloosterman on MLive.com, Question of the Day: Are bad jobs good for the economy and people who work them?
It’s all good, but I loved his opening:
Steve Kloosterman, MUSKEGON, MI – Most of us can tell a story about a job from hell somewhere in our past. There’s the first job, the one we took because our parents said, “You can’t hang around the house all summer long.” Maybe it was at a fast food place or in a retail outlet.
Mike Rowe – First of all, Steve, the Dirty Jobs Code of Conduct contains a Damnation Clause that clearly and unequivocally states that my photo “can not be used in conjunction with any satanic reference, including but not limited to Lucifer, Hades, Old Scratch, Hell, Perdition, Beelzebub or Honey Boo Boo.”Secondly, jobs don’t come from hell. They come from people with money who are willing to pay other people to work for them.
Thirdly, I have worked in both fast food and retail and neither one reminded me of the Netherworld. (Although the Taco Bell drive-through at 2 a.m. does smell vaguely of brimstone and sulphur.)
And it just gets better from there.
Saw this and had to share it:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Irl_6h_55eo?rel=0]
Good speech! Looks like a new cast of The Big Bang Theory will be graduating in a few years!