We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
The train wreck in Connecticut brings to mind the classic 1999 book, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. This book spurred the development of the field of accident research, but it is somewhat dated now. Accidents are inevitable, and at some point efforts to prevent dangers creates new forms of danger.
Several aspects of modern life seem to have been very accurately predicted by both Orwell and Huxley. Orwell’s idea of “New Speak,” for example, the deliberate remoulding and distortion of the English language by Big Brother, has been rightly compared to the politically correct manipulation of language that has become all too familiar in western societies over the past twenty to thirty years. The political purpose of “New Speak” is to control the thinking of the populace – not too different in aim from the new terms and words coined by political correctness. Huxley does not go into the language issue in the same way as Orwell, though we note too that in the Brave New World certain “offensive” words – such as “cross” – have been eliminated from public use. Thus for example Charing Cross Station in London has been renamed “Charing T Station” – after Henry Ford’s Model T automobile.
I spoke with a Mom yesterday. She mentioned that her daughter was a high school junior, intending to apply to college. I asked what the kid was interested in. She said "Well, she likes to watch movies. Not much else. She hates school and is not a very good student. She doesn't really study." I replied, "So, why college?" She told me that the kid likes her social life and "wants the college experience. She also wants a diploma."
If they hate fossil fuel, they should first set an example by giving up their cars, computers, cell phones, heat, and air conditioning. Nobody is stopping them from wearing pinwheels on their heads for wind power.
The Feds are always eager to stick their hands into places where they do not belong. I disagree with Mead that the intentions are good, but I agree that it's a nutty idea. For one thing, college is not job training. For another, the data would be meaningless.
By the way, what is Rubio's name doing on this idea?
We see in higher education something like what we saw in housing. Government programs aimed at increasing college education and homeownership, particularly among minorities, turn out to hurt many of the intended beneficiaries.
The intentions of the people who created these programs were good. The results -- well, not so much.
On reading the article, one might be left with the impression that California higher ed is afflicted with a crisis-sized epidemic of destructive racism and sexism. I would doubt that. From what I have seen and read, the U of C is mainly afflicted with a crisis of poorly-educated and ignorant kids whose four years of Fun 'n Indoctrination is largely thanks to the abused California taxpayer.
Already signs of big changes are appearing. Overall college enrollments fell last fall for the first time in years. Even law schools are struggling for students -the ABA is openly discussing possibly going to two-year training. Bond rating agencies are showing growing concern about indebtedness of colleges, and student-loan default rates are very high. Big changes are coming to American higher education.
"I had been brought up to believe the Left stood for altruism rather than selfishness, community rather than individualism, self- discipline rather than the law of the jungle and the survival of the fittest.
Instead, society was worshipping at the shrine of the self, and this was causing a rising tide of juvenile distress, crime, emotional disturbance, educational and relationship failure.
The fact that I continued to write along these lines regardless of all the abuse hurled to shut me up seemed to drive the Left nuts.
Yes, they espoused a doctrine of being tolerant and non-judgmental, but not when it came to me. I was branded a ‘moraliser’, which appeared to be a term of abuse.
Most of the time, those hurling insults provided no contrary evidence or even arguments, just blanket denials and gratuitous abuse..."
She imagined she was on the side of the angels until she began thinking for herself. It's a good story, along the lines of David Horowitz' excellent Radical Son and David Gelernter's Drawing Life.If a person's view of the world does not change between age 20 and age 50, they haven't been thinking or challenging their assumptions very much.
Most of us here have changed our views on things many times. It's called growth, accumulation of information, experience, and, one hopes, wisdom.
... college grads should forget the dream of stable, long-term jobs in the education, health care, or public sector (what he refers to as the “rentier cartel-state economy”), and instead adapt themselves to the realities of the freelance economy.
Good advice. The rentier economy is going nowhere but downwards.
If you have been raped, you dial 911. If in danger of being raped, you try to use 911 or else pull out your Derringer or your Glock if you have one. Rape and assault are felonies. Why one would phone a campus administrator is beyond me because law enforcement is not their job. They do not live in reality.
Last year Target, a marketing company, yet again proved the power of algorithms, in a startling way. Its software tracks purchases to predict habits. Using this, it chooses which coupons to send customers. It seemed to have gone wrong when it began sending a teenage girl coupons for nappies, much to the anger of her father, who made an official complaint. A little later, the New York Times reported that the father had phoned the company to apologise. "It turns out," he said, "there have been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of." He was going to be a grandfather—and an algorithm knew before he did.
It would take me all day to solve simple problems with algos. My brain thinks by jumps. Computers need them though.
The growth of school administrators, from public primary schools to private colleges, has been much commented on. I have no idea why it has been such a strong trend.
...dangerously, schools of education impose “political litmus tests” on those who want to become public teachers. They vet students’ “dispositions,” especially their commitment to the left-wing notion of “social justice.” One of the most prestigious education schools in the country, Columbia University’s Teachers College, tells its students that teaching is a “political act.” Aspiring teachers are expected to be “participants in a larger struggle for social justice” and “to change the system and make schools and societies more equitable.”
Lukianoff points out the problem with such politicized pedagogy: “Vague, subjective, and politicized evaluation standards are dangerous. They invite administrators and faculty members to substitute their own opinions and political beliefs for fair, professional criteria to evaluate students’ demonstrated skills as members of a profession.” Competence, then, takes a backseat to political correctness, a problem rife in K-12 teaching credential programs, where knowledge of subject matter is less important than political ideology.
Germany, historically the model for the American educational system, has a far more practical system than America does today. We often forget that the traditional model for higher ed was designed for scholars, and teachers, some wealthy elites, and Protestant ministers.
We know that a minority, probably a small minority, of American college students are natural scholars or passionately curious. More want, or need, the credential.
It seems to me that much of the discussion of "mission" has to do with confusing "higher ed" with Liberal Arts education. I do not know how much of Higher Ed today is Liberal Arts and how much is vocationally-oriented (eg Nursing, Agricultural, Hospitality, Education, Law Enforcement, Business, Engineering, Communications, Performance Arts, etc etc, but I know that a lot of it is.)
Cornell for example, a strange hybrid of state university and private university, has 7 undergrad colleges. Only one of their undergrad schools is Liberal Arts, and many large universities are similar. It's been many years since "college" has meant Liberal Arts.
I think most of the angst is only about the "mission" and "purpose" of Liberal Arts higher ed. Nobody is confused about the "mission" or "purpose" of degrees in Nursing or Civil Engineering.
If any reader can find those Higher Ed stats, I'm sure we'd all be interested. Specifically, I'm interested in what % of US undergrads are attending vocationally-oriented colleges and programs compared to those doing Liberal Arts programs.
In 2009-2010, "college" in the US yielded 800,000 Associate degrees and 1.7 million Bachelors degrees.
Of the 1.7 million bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10, over half were concentrated in five fields: business, management, marketing, and personal and culinary services (22 percent); social sciences and history (10 percent); health professions and related programs (8 percent); education (6 percent); and psychology (6 percent) (see table A-38-1). The fields of visual and performing arts (6 percent), engineering and engineering technologies (5 percent), biological and biomedical sciences (5 percent), and communication and communications technologies (5 percent) represented an additional 21 percent of all bachelor's degrees awarded in 2009–10.
"College" doesn't mean what it used to mean. It used to mean Liberal Arts but now it can mean Hotel Management. The change has already happened.
Mayor Mike, the Nanny of all Nannies, is a control freak. He could have been the inspiration for the quip "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?"
Students learn the new orthodoxy quickly. Fearing classroom humiliation, they keep any reservations to themselves, instead regurgitating on their exams their force-fed lessons. As a result, they learn little. The landmark national study, Academically Adrift, finds 36 percent of students show little to no increase in fundamental academic skills—critical thinking, complex reasoning, and clear writing—after four years in college. Their natural desire to know gives way to repeating whatever is required for a good grade.
And what good grades they get! Under the new student-teacher compact, professors award more A’s than ever in exchange for students’ acquiescence in the transformation of classrooms into ideological training camps. Fifty years ago, 15 percent of all college grades given were A’s. Today, an A is the most common grade (43 percent), despite the fact that, during the same period, average student study-time has fallen from 24 to 14 hours a week.
Come on, we all know that nowadays it's just a credential for most college attendees except for the special ones for whom it is a wonderful opportunity for intellectual adventures. The business needs to please the consumers. "The customer is always right."
Sad to say, an Ivy "A" means nothing today and everybody knows it.That's why so many firms these days avoid hiring Ivy grads. Too arrogant and entitled for today's world, often. I am happy to report that they still like Dartmouth kids, though.
Every four years I let my Dermatologist buddy scope out my skin with his special lights and magic glasses. He doesn't miss a single square centimeter of it, scalp to anus to the bottoms of my graceful feet. I'd like to avoid death by melanoma, if possible. Not sure what I want to die from, but I just want it to not be right now.
$175, cash for 1/2 hr. consult (he won't do insurance), including the good conversation and comraderie, plus a pile of samples for my spot of eczema and a little nitrogen zapping of some ancient sun damage to my face.
He knows that I have spent all of the time I could in my life outdoors, usually without hat and never with disgusting sunblock (except maybe on the nose when the Mrs. makes me). When I was at prep school, we termed sunshine "catching bennies," ie the beneficial rays of the sun. Studying Latin or dozing on the lawns.
I have happily spent all the time I can on boats, soccer fields, lacrosse fields, golf courses, tennis courts, tractors, trout streams, skiing, beaches, gardens, and hunting fields since I was a kid.
As he scrutinized my beautiful, well-fed, pasty-white-skinned body, he told me that one problem he has is people with sun phobia. He said people require an hour or two daily of exposure to unblocked sunshine (not sunburn), and that sun phobia (especially with kids covered with hats and sunblock) is a more important health hazard than benign sun-related skin cancers (which are pretty much all easily-curable when found in a timely way).
Our skin produces instantly-bioavailable and natural Vit D, necessary for normal bone growth, vitality, and disease-avoidance (cancer, heart disease, depression, osteoporosis, etc.). In the US, they add Vit D to milk (but only enough to prevent rickets in little kids) and it's far from enough to substitute for wholesome playing in the sunshine.
Sunburn bad (possibly but not definitely associated with melanoma, but definitely associated with wrinkles), but wholesome sunshine (even through clouds) is good for us. Not to mention the reality that a little tan makes us crackers look more attractive.
My dermatologist claims that we evolved to live in the nude, outdoors. Sheesh. I'd try it, but I would get arrested because I do not live in San Francisco - and I would have to fight off the women.
...what about those future financial crises and terrorist attacks? For that matter, what about the risk of deepwater oil wells’ rupturing or of tsunamis’ hitting nuclear facilities? And those are just the “known unknowns.” What about the truly unknown unknowns? If we are to draw a useful lesson from Silver’s and Taleb’s excellent books, it is that we need both of them. As Silver contends, we should improve our forecasts whenever possible. But as Taleb cautions, we must have the modesty to admit that some matters do not lend themselves to sound forecasts—and plan accordingly.
The Luddite in me is inclined to think that the techno-dreamers are headed for another disappointment. But this time around, something does seem different—and it’s not just that the MOOCpioneers have an infectious excitement rarely found in a typical faculty meeting. They also have a striking public-spiritedness. Koller sees a future in which a math prodigy in a developing country might nurture his or her gifts online and then, having been identified by a leading university, enroll in person—on a scholarship, one might imagine, funded by income derived from Coursera. This idea of using online courses as a detection tool is a reprise (on a much larger scale) of the one that spurred the development of standardized tests in the mid-twentieth century, such as the SAT, which was originally envisioned as a means for finding gifted students outside the usual Ivy League “feeder” schools.
I think a more interesting question is why so many of the successful people in business are Obama people. Over half of the very wealthy people I know are ardent Democrats, and are people who understand how the real world works. Of course, I do inhabit New England where blue is the cultural color of choice.
If you can’t handle the reality that academia is rife with politics, back-stabbing, and an operational Social Darwinism due to finite funds, then obviously it isn’t for you. Real jobs in the real world have many of the same issues, but are not burdened with the same idealistic presumptions. The academic pipeline is a difficult and brutal sieve.
Our friend AVI put up a comment here yesterday to the effect that Leftist forces are far more interested in undermining Western culture than they give a damn about the pawns they use.
What goes on these days at an elite, expensive, private liberal arts college? It's been studied, and parents might not be too pleased by the looniness there.
Students are encouraged to "think critically" about anything that threatens the college's dogmas on diversity, multiculturalism, gender, and sustainability, etc., but, for the most part, not to think critically about those dogmas themselves. That is the problem: such contradictions go unnoticed. And they go unnoticed because at Bowdoin, and places like it, there are precious few people who can point them out.
It all reminds me of a conversation I had with a nice lady last weekend. She was talking about the oppression of Muslim women. I offered the notion that she was not being very multiculturally-tolerant in wanting to impose her Western views on Muslim culture. I asked her whether we should not respect cultural differences.
Somewhat apropos: Islam’s Latest Fatwa Permitting Rape of Non-Muslim Women. Why does Islam seem so preoccupied with the interests in rape, pedophilia, homosexuality, bestiality, religious imperialism, and killing Jews? Surely there must be other, more productive and positive things in life to focus on.
Perhaps the Bowdoin faculty could enlighten me on these points because the only aspects of it which seem to be approved on college campi are the homosexuality and the killing of Israelis.
I like the 
After all, Spring is here and it's been a long cold winter in New Hampshire. Here 'tis:
Every four years I let my Dermatologist buddy scope out my skin with his special lights and magic glasses. He doesn't miss a single square centimeter of it, scalp to anus to the bottoms of my graceful feet. I'd like to avoid death by melanoma, if possible. Not sure what I want to die from, but I just want it to not be right now.