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.
(Years ago) Tucker outlined to Hillary the transformation of the entire American system into "a seamless web that extends from cradle to grave" and is the "same system for everyone," coordinated by a "system of labor market boards at the local, state and federal levels" where curriculum and job matching will be handled by counselors "accessing the integrated computer-based program." The mission of schools would change from "teaching children academic basics and knowledge to training them to serve the global economy in jobs selected by workforce boards" in an outcome-based system "guided by clear national standards of performance," set to "international benchmarks" that "define the stages of the system for the people who progress through it." In this "new system of linked standards, curriculum and pedagogy will abandon the American tracking system." Best of all, college loans debt will be forgiven for "public service." Sound familiar?
I was pretty good college material because I have always been curious about everything, have always read up on anything I did not know about, and have always had adequate verbal and mathematical abilities.
Feeling ignorant was a blessing for me because I always wanted to fight it, and learning new things has always been one of my joys.
Readers know that I believe that being unproductive in the world is a terrible, worthless, pointless, goal, especially for people with the American spirit. Unfortunately, some people are forced into it by bad luck, illness, and age limits. Also, some people aspire to it because the advertising tells them to.
Ask any guy, and he'll tell you that a man without a job or a full-time mission feels half-emasculated. That is a least one part of why most guys who retire seek to return to work after two or three years. I see people in their 90s still working. In addition, few wives want their husbands around all the time.
What people aspire to, I believe, is a degree of financial security so they can worry about other things in life besides survival. That is a worthy goal, and makes any sort of work more enjoyable.
Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains, scientists believe. Much like a computer struggles as the hard drive gets full up, so to do humans take longer to access information, it has been suggested. Sarah Knapton at telegraph.co.uk
"What I like to do is to start businesses. It can be any kind of business, I've done everything from restaurants to specialty wire manufacturers. Most fail, some struggle along, some do OK, and occasionally there is a home run. It's great fun, all of it."
Why does it matter? It's a business, and makes money for the school. This is not news. Universities have become businesses, and, often, big ones. They serve their consumers.
When sitting in a duck blind or deer stand, standing on a ski slope watching your grandkids, and winter hiking, it's much more pleasant to have warm toes and fingers. I have had times in duck blinds when my fingers were too cold and numb to pull a trigger, but I have a touch of Raynaud's Syndrome.
Assuming that you wear things to keep toes and hands dry, hand and foot warmers can add plenty of comfort.
This site has aluminum-coated insoles and insoles ("footbeds") with inserts for 6-hour warmers.
In his December ruling against the Wunderlich family, (German) judge Marcus Malkmus called homeschooling a “concrete endangerment to the well-being of the child,” comparing it to a “straitjacket” that he said binds children to “years of isolation.”
“The request of the parents to reinstate their right to determine the location of the children, the right to make educational decisions for the children, as well as the right to file legal applications for their children is being refused,” the judge stated.
The "right" to make educational decisions for your children?
It's basically government day care, isn't it? Progressives relentlessly pursue their cradle-to-grave programs to turn all Americans into wards of the State (or serfs - we're already serfs, given the % of our labor we have generously voted to offer to our morally- and intellectually-superior Lords).
We wonder why we serfs do this. Perhaps we have so many immigrants with serf and slave heritages that they are comfortable with it or comforted by it, but not even Marx would have imagined Democratic Feudalism.
Obama
Administration Demands Racial Quotas in School Discipline - See more
at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/forum/2014/01/obama_administration_demands_r.html#sthash.v5gvo85V.dpuf
A colleague who teaches in the humanities at the state college where I work also teaches at a nearby private college. In the colleague’s description, the private college is perpetually in the grip of a panic over the prospect of a drop in enrollment. The college’s administration has therefore instituted an unwritten but implacable policy the upshot of which is that the student is always right, no matter how absurd his complaint, and the consequence of which is that instructors must never tax students beyond an infantile minimum of scholarly exertion. Among the consequences of the consequence are that students refuse to undertake out-of-class reading assignments, fail quizzes related to those assignments, and then lodge complaints with chairs and deans against the instructor.
As Cardinal Newman warned, knowledge really is an end in itself. I fill no gap in the department, because there is no shimmering and comprehensive surface of knowledge in which any gaps might appear. Like everyone else in English, I am an extra, and the offloading of an extra is never reported or experienced as a loss.
I feel the loss, keenly, of my self-image. For 24 years I have been an English professor. Come the spring, what will I be?
My colleagues will barely notice that I am gone, but what they have yet to grasp is that the rest of the university will barely notice when they too are gone, or at least severely reduced in numbers — within the decade, I’d say.
Homeschooling terrifies the Left because the Left is at its core totalitarian, seeking to bring political discipline to every aspect of life — and control of education is essential to that project. The public school is in miniature what the Left believes the world should look like: Everybody arranged in orderly rows and moving about on an orderly schedule punctuated by bells, being taught about diversity and climate change by nice union ladies who also lead them to their federally subsidized lunches. If you can say “no” to that, you can say no to any part of the Left’s vision. Homeschooling is an existential threat to the privileged position of the institutional Left. The schools are the factory in which it manufactures its future clients. [See also Kyle Smith in Saturday's New York Post: "US education model creates assembly-line workers" -- Ed]
If you go back more than 40 years, you find that few occupations were closed to people who did not have college degrees to their names. What changed? In short, I think it was a combination of these factors: the erosion of high-school standards (which used to bring about at least respectable basic competence in young people but began to slide in the ’70s), the subsidization of college, which led to more and more people earning degrees and thus casting doubt on the capabilities of those who did not, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), which turned testing of job applicants into a legal hazard for employers and thus encouraging them to look at a safe alternative means of identifying individuals who might have the right characteristics.
As an employer, I have to agree with all of the above.
The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.
Unfortunately, I’m essentially arguing that professors ought to, out of the goodness of their heart, get rid of their graduate programs and go back to teaching introductory classes to distracted freshman. Maybe they should do this. But they’re not going to.
I was pretty good college material because I have always been curious about everything, have always read up on anything I did not know about, and have always had adequate verbal and mathematical abilities.
When sitting in a duck blind or deer stand, standing on a ski slope watching your grandkids, and winter hiking, it's much more pleasant to have warm toes and fingers. I have had times in duck blinds when my fingers were too cold and numb to pull a trigger, but I have a touch of