Tag: Education

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Issues and Answers 2.3: The Enstupiation of America

This issue is far, far too big to do more in a blog post than simply point in a couple of directions for answers. But one thing is absolutely rock solid certain: Americans are becoming stupider by the minute.

(Doubt the “absolutely rock solid certain” nature of increasing estupiation? I’ve blogged before on genuine illiteracy, innumeracy and other aspects of increasing enstupiation of the American populace before. Search my site (or just google around for yourself) for previous posts linking such things before arguing with me about enstupiated Americans. Heck, in all the posts I’ve done in the past on the topic, I’ve no more than scratched the surface.)

“If a foreign nation had imposed this system of education on the United States we would rightly consider it an act of war.”–the 1983 National Commission on Education, Glenn T. Seaborg, Chairman

Hmmm, not much has changed for mthe better in the last 25 years…

Let’s first simply take as demonstrable fact that “public education” (more properly called “prisons for kids” nowadays) in America is broken beyond repair and ought to be scrapped and rebuilt from the bottom up. Sure, there are a few sterling examples of public education working well, but

a. the instances are too few and far between to offer any redemption of public education in general and

b. the methods of successful schools–schools that have as their product productive citizens from ALL educable or trainable portions of the bell curve –WILL NOT BE ALLOWED in schools controlled by remote educrats/politicians.

So, to turn the tide of enstupiation, we must first radically change public education. The first step? Take a page from those who mis-quote Falstaff and “kill all the pubschool administrators.” OK, not actually, but at least metaphorically. Remove those who are arguably the stupidest class of people in public education from any position of inluence (administrators” and give them something useful to do in stead, say, making little rocks out of big ones.

(Yes, here are those rare pubschool administrators who are both competent and focused on truly serving as an aid to the teaching/learning process. But they are so few as to be dismissed as nonexistant for the purposes of cleaning houses. *heh*)

Then do the same thing for professors of education–you know, the wackos who come up with another theory to use in experimenting on your kids every year, theories that always seem to make kids dumber, not smarter. Heck, from the consistency of educational theories coming out of schools of edcucation over the past 40-50 years, one might almost think that there were a vast conspiracy aimed at making the American citizen into Amercan sheeple. But, as has been attributed to Napoleon, “Never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity”–and the twc corrollary: “Never underestimate the stupidity quotient of really smart people.”

(But then, schools of education aren’t even populated by very bright people to begin with. Heck, most of the social “sciences” are populated by people too dumb or too lazy to do anything creative. Double that for English and graphic arts departments on most college and university campuses, which goes a long way toward explaining the works considered “great art” in the 20th Century… )

Next: get the feds OUT of education. Period. Check your copy of the Constitution. There is NO (zip, zero, zilch) Constitutional justification whatsoever for a federal Department of Education. If you find one, go tar and feather the person(s) who “taught” you to “read” and misunderstand the English language.

And then slap yourself upside the head for being so stupid as to not learn on your own.

Then: place the responsibility for children’s education firmly where it belongs. If Johnnie or Janie can’t read, write and do arithmetic, then blame the parents. Oh, you think we ought to blame the teachers? Sure, go ahead. Who ought to make sure the teachers are teaching their children properly? The question answers itself. And if Johnnie and Janie can’t read, write and do arithmetic and end up being unenployable, then let their parents be responsible for their support. Why should you and I have to take up the slack because lazy, stupid parents refused top BE parents and make sure their children learn what they need to learn to be productive citizens?

But parents’ respnsibilities do not begin and end with formal schooling. Actually, the most destructive lessons are taught by the time kids enter kindergarten (an horrific intellectual/social charnal house I and most of my generation was spared). While there are many destructive lessons “GRUP” parents* are teaching their children nowadays, the most destructive is the idolization of the child.

Parents who are their children’s buddies or servants or “facilitators” (*yech!*) are NOT offering their children the single most valuable lesson of all: a model of adulthood that celebrates maturity. In fact, it’s difficult to think of any place most children might look to find a real adult to model themselves after.

Thus we have “parents” who go ballistic (complete with explosions, firey immolations and childish temper tantrums) if funding for school sports is reduced in favor of *shudder* academics; “parents” who would rather see an academically demanding teacher fired than have little Johnnir or Janie actually, well, learn anything. (Yes, you do too know such parents.); “parents” who will excuse any of their own child’s misbehavior and fight tooth and nail to avert any actual consequences coming to bear on the child.

“Parents” who refuse their own responsibility for raising their children and shelter their children from the consequences of the chldren’s behavior: growing stupid, irresponsible citizens who will stupidly and irresponsibly

spend themselves into debt slavery for things they’ll just throw out tomorrow

elect politicians who will contin ue to sell our progeny down the river for a few more votes from enstupiated, greedy sheeple today

never see the hammer fall when it all comes to its inevitable end

Oh, gee. And I haven’t even touched on that other Great Enstupiator: The Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind…

*GRUPs are childish people who are chronologically adult but emotionally immature, clinging to youth, worshipping, adoring, seeking to emulate the immature behaviors of young people. The antithesis of maturity and wisdom, they seek to deny their advancing years. Dumbasses, one and all.

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Prescription for What Ails US: Hope and Change

Yes, both “us” and “US”. This will be short (relatively), and I will provide zero supporting elements. Any comments resulting from readers doing their own homework on the elements below are welcome. Comments that demonstrate absolutely no knowledge of the elements below will be mocked. Do your own homework. I will NOT provide links here. You can type “google.com” as easily as I can.

Barry Hussein Obama-Winfrey floats a lot of hot air about “hope” and “change” (yeh, he hopes to change the US into a completely socialist society filled with grievance groups of “victims” leeching off producers–and he has a good chance of success). Well, unless we, as an electorate, take steps to knock a few politicians *spit*, bureaucraps and assorted other leeches on the head (metaphorically, you understand) in order to change the direction our coutry is headed, I hold out little hope for a future U.S. with any resemblance to the City Set on a Hill envisioned by the Founders.

What must be done (apart from throwing the bums out of office–darned near every elected official we can find)? Several things would stem the tide–perhaps even roll it back.

1. Don’t take this lightly. Every person I’ve presented this to so far (and I’ve been talking this up in the RW for years *sigh* so far w/o much movement) has expressed a positive response–even those who view themselves as “lefties”:

Each State of the Union needs an amendment to its State constitution providing that
a. every elective position on each ballot include “none of the
above” as a choice on the ballot
b. if “none of the above” recieves a plurality of votes, then ALL
candidates listed for that ballot position are disqualified from
seeking that office in the future and
c. a new election must be held for that position with new
candidates.

Frankly, I could see “none of the above” winning in a landslide in the upcoming presidential election…

2. Get the feds OUT of public education, at ALL levels. Out. No influence, no monies, no diktats. Nada, zilch, a big zero with the rim kicked off. Then work on reducing State influence on local schools. Make local school boards and parents completely responsible for their children’s education. With around 2/3 of recent college graduates functional illiterates, largely as a result of early intervention by “feddle gummint” busybodies’ stupid policies, we need to get the fedgov out of education.

It’d be a start.

3. Do some commonsense things to get our economy back on track. No, I’m not talking here about the recent Chicken Little wails about recession. I’m talking here about the fact that we’ve been strongly encouraged (in large part by stupid fedgov meddling) to become a nation of consumers surrendering more and more of our nation’s producing capabilities. “Line jobs”–factory work, even low-to-medium skill work–is dropping off, and this suits socialists just fine (more dependents for government handouts) but does nothing for a republic of free folk. Look, by definition, half our population is “below average” in intellectual potential. What are you going to do for productive, meaningful work for thse folks as more and more real goods manufacturing is moved offshore? Put ’em all in call centers making telemarketing annoyances of themselves?

Or maybe they can all go to work for McDonalds. Ya want fries with that?

To stem the tide of manufacturing jobs bleeding from our society (mixing metaphors is what metas are for, IMO :-)), two simple things would make a huge difference. (Do remember Clausewitz’s admonition that “everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult” and remember that we The People must recognize that we are in a sort of war with our political buffoons *cough* leaders.)

a. despite the opposition of politicians who do NOT want to
reliquish the power over your life that the IRS and the income
tax gives them, we must press for The Fair Tax.

Do your own homework. I’ve posted enough FACTS here at twc in the past to demolish most of the disingenuous arguments against the plan, so any comments demonstrating you have not done your homewoprk will be roundly raspberried. Rational argument demonstrating you’ve done your homework will be welcome, though. (*crickets chirping*)

b. a 10% accross-the-board tarrif on ALL imports from
EVERYWHERE, no exceptions whatsoever. Period.

These two things alone would do much to restore America’s competitiveness in manufacturing, create more jobs for the average joe (and josephine :-)), strengthen the dollar and encourage thrift (more investment capital–of the right kind).

4. Get a handle on illegal immigrants who are stealing American jobs, stressing American health and social services, Close our borders. Period. Make sure we facilitate LEGAL immigration, but close our borders, seriously police them–like Mexico does its Southern border (complete with shoot to kill orders, exactly as Mexico does). And aggressively go after ALL employers of illegal aliens (are you listening, Tyson?). Shut down the jobs and social services (all social services except for legitimate health emergencies–provide emergency health care and then a free ride to the border) and watch the flood of illegals make their way to the borders. And make no mistake, of the 20,000,000 or more ilegals in this country, much more than 75% of them will head south… Eisenhower accomplished similar results in the 1950s, and what man has done, man can aspire to do… It ain’t rocket science.

Reminder: any arguments with assertions made above should show you’ve done your homework.

5. Make some commonsense decisions about energy policy. Right now, energy policy is being made by stupid, short-sighted politicians who’re either afraid of their shadows (eco-whackos) or bought and paid for lackeys of oil companies, OR by greedy, short-sighted energy company execs who just want to cash in now without serious thought for the future.

a. eliminate our need for fossil fuels for electricity production.
E-lim-in-ate.

MIT has put plans for a modular pebble bed reactor in the public domain. China likes it. Although China is now leading the world in oil imports (actually, energy imports of all kinds), it plans on being a net exporter of energy within the next decade, relying largely on pebble bed reactors. Now, admittedly, PBRs are not the most technically advanced possibilities for nuclear energy production, but the technology is here, now, and is safer than any other energy production method, save possibly hydro-generation, that can approach its ability to provide large-scale electricity production. Safe. (Do your homework. Oh, and include readings on radioactivity, hormesis and what actually happens when Cobalt60 is accidentally introduced into the building materials for a large apartment complex… yeh, you get one link from me to start you off. It’s a PDF file. :-).) And please, no cries of “What to do with nuclear waste?” That problem’s been solved, solved and solved again. Take your pick of safe, eficient and easy methods. It’s 19th Century engineering.

But oil for other uses? Why the heck is the U.S. importing oil at all? We already have enough reserves for short-to-medium term oil production. If the fedgov would get out of the way, that is. And technologies like thermal depolymnerization manufacturing of oil are proven technologies. Heck, if every lil burg simply contracted with a TDP company to process its raw sewage, the lil burgs would have their clean water as a “by-product” and the contracting company could sell the oil. Everybody wins. And the odor some folks complain about from TDP plants? Not any worse than raw sewage, my friends, and the odor from TDP plants has this advantage: it smells like money. Talk about win-win-win-win: lower costs could be assessed on citizens for water treatment, city has a new business to tax (*feh*), the Saudis and Hugo Chavez take it on the chin, and the TDP business makes money.

And nuclear energy, available proven reserves and TDP plants are just three of many things we could be doing right now to wean ourselves of foreign oil. No pie in the sky technology leaps necessary, just political will.

There you have it: the twc five-point plan. It’s not exhaustive (I’ve not mentioned, for example, annual meetings of Mass Media Podpeople with Dr. Tarr and Mr. Fether or many of the other things that would benefit our society), but you get the picture.

Argument welcome, but remember the warning above: comments that demonstrate the commenter hasn’t bothered to do his/her homework will be mocked.

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“…ready to dump our schools…”

From Robert Cringely:

…we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.

And about time! Cringely’s of my generation (well a little younger) and makes his point well about the chasm between technology use by different generations. While I may sometimes chuckle and wrying shake my head when my octogenarian father describes his (do note: successful) struggles to master his computer and make it a useful part of his lifestyle, my children, I’m sure, chuckle to themselves and wryly shake their heads at my abandonment of my cell phone and lack of any desire whatsoever to “text”.

But Cringely goes beyond the obvious divide in different generations’ integration of new technologies as genuinely useful parts of their lives and notes a specific impact of the effect on education.

These are kids who have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. But far more important, there is emerging a class of students whose PARENTS have never known life without personal computers and cell phones. The Big Kahuna in educational discipline isn’t the school, it is the parent. Ward Cleaver rules. But what if Ward puts down his pipe and starts texting? Well he has.

Speaking about the shift from knowing stuff to Googling stuff–yeh, who hasn’t “put down” that eBook to do a quick search on “Albegensian” or whatever? *heh* I picked that because I already knew a bunch about that word’s historical implications from “old guy” stuff rattling around in my head… and still did a search on the term some months ago. Google is sometimes better than memory, you know–Cringely notes:

This is, of course, a huge threat to the education establishment, which tends to have a very deterministic view of how knowledge and accomplishment are obtained – a view that doesn’t work well in the search economy. At the same time K-12 educators are being pulled back by No Child Left Behind, they are being pulled forward (they probably see it as pulled askew) by kids abetted by their high-tech Generation Y (yes, we’re getting well into Y) parents who are using their Ward Cleaver power not to maintain the status quo but to challenge it.

Read the whole thing for a twist you might not see coming… 😉

h.t. Jerry Pournelle’s Mail. Drop by. Read. And wish Dr. Pournelle well.

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Who Needs School?

I’ve mentioned MITs OpenCourseware before (somewhere–I’m not looking for it right now). Such things are widely available all over the web. For example, THE work on systems analysis, Herman Kahn’s Techniques of Systems Analysis, is available as a free download from the Rand Corporation.

With such sites as Project Gutenberg and many other organizations and universities making literature and courses available for free, anyone with the mental horsepower, the desire and access to a computer or a public library (most have computers available now) can have not only the usual library resources available but a world of educational enrichment at their fingertips.

I used to haunt the public libraries where we lived when I was a kid. School libraries all the way through grad school , most definitely ALL the school libraries I could reach–collections varied. *heh* I needed “The Second Sex” for a research paper once and the ONLY copy available in five college libraries (and two public) consulted was Le Deuxieme Sexe. Right. In French. Thanks to a good French prof, that was OK. (Of course, it was also fun when the prof asked me to translate material I cited. *heh* What? Didn’t think I’d actually read the horrible book? Simone de Beauvoir was one kinky, twisted woman. Still, I’d probably have been less critical of the book had I not known her history.)

Anywho… off the rabbit trail, now and back on track. If you’ve not learned anything new today, you’ve wasted your time so far. Go. Learn. Grow.

(OK, I’ll admit that formal schooling has its uses, but the way public schools (AKA, “prisons for kids”) are going and the manner in which colleges and universities have become low-class diploma mills for sub- and illiterates, the value of such things is rapidly approaching large negative numbers. Trade schools and such like: great for training, not so much for education–and yes, the two are very different things.)

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More from “The Underground History of American Education”

Reading the book yet? Here’s another teaser:

Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary.1

Think about it. “Reading specialists” throughout our nation’s prisons for kids have a vested interest in making the art of teaching reading as arcane and difficult as possible. There are those, however, who have had universal success with a program that essentially lets kids teach themselves.

Storm the “bastilles’ of public education! Rescue the children! Save our future as a nation!

Those are not too strong. If anything, all those exclamation points are too few, too weak.

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Thought for Today

From John Taylor Gatto’s, The Underground History of American Education,

I’ve yet to meet a parent in public school who ever stopped to calculate the heavy, sometimes lifelong price their children pay for the privilege of being rude and ill-mannered at school. I haven’t met a public school parent yet who was properly suspicious of the state’s endless forgiveness of bad behavior for which the future will be merciless.

I’ll just keep on posting these teasers every now and then until y’all start reading the book. *heh*

Hmmm, maybe I should do the same with this book…

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What’s the matter with kids today?

From a wide array of socially destructive interests affecting youth today, one stands out as the 500-pound gorilla: prisons for kids, AKA public schools. While I have some arguments with some of his sub-points, John Taylor Gatto’s The Underground History of American Education is a book every American should read… those that are able to, that is. *sigh*

Why, in the face of readily, easily, available source information, free courseware (here and elsewhere, as well), tutorials, literature and direct interaction with Wise Men is the electorate of our democratic republic ever more stupidly uninformed (as can be inferred from the candidates it votes for)?

I think I can assuredly assert that at least a major part of the reason is our nation’s prisons for kids, AKA public schools.

As Gatto asserts,

Exactly what John Dewey heralded at the onset of the twentieth century has indeed happened. Our once highly individualized nation has evolved into a centrally managed village, an agora made up of huge special interests which regard individual voices as irrelevant. The masquerade is managed by having collective agencies speak through particular human beings. Dewey said this would mark a great advance in human affairs, but the net effect is to reduce men and women to the status of functions in whatever subsystem they are placed. Public opinion is turned on and off in laboratory fashion. All this in the name of social efficiency, one of the two main goals of forced schooling.

Gatto’s book, linked above, is available in full on the web. I’d like to reorganize his website to make it easier to read, but if you stick with it (and do open links on the TOC page in new tabs–that’ll help) and read the whole thing, you’ll soon be foirwarding the link to everyone you know… especially those in your addressbook who are teachers.

Don’t expect politicians to read the thing. They don’t have the time or inclination to read things that would tell ’em how to actually fix what they’ve broken (and the record shows they do not have to fear an electorate holding them accountable for the child abuse they encourage–and in cases outright dictate–in the classrooms across our country). You’ll have to read it, spread the word and build a grassroots groundswell of “take your damned hands off my kids!”

*heh*

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