Maggie's Farm

That tropical storm up here dumped the river into my pool, filled it with mud, plants, and frogs, and knocked down a fence. I think VT got the worst of it all.

What books are you reading right now?

No cheating. Don't tell us that you are reading Kant.

I am reading the new Mark Twain autobiography, but you cannot really read it. You just dip into it. He was a charming fellow.

I hope I am not boring my readers with all of my posts about the college bubble and the meaninglessness of the current American college degree. From The Case Against the College Degree:

College degrees are poor proof of learning, and perhaps a barrier to it

Students want jobs and respect. Degrees bring both. Employers, meanwhile, want smart, capable workers. A degree is a decent enough proxy for intelligence, but we want it to be more than that. We want degrees to mean that students have learned the foundations of human knowledge literature, chemistry, physics, composition, metaphysics, psychology, economics and so on. If we didn t, we d replace degrees with inexpensive vocational exams.

Charles Murray, a fellow at American Enterprise Institute, calls for just that in a recent book, Real Education. He argues that too many kids who lack the ability to complete a liberal arts education are being pushed into four-year liberal arts schools, because there s a steep societal penalty for not getting a degree. Schools, in turn, have made their degree programs easier. Murray provides a sample of courses that students used to fulfill core degree requirements at major universities in 2004, including History of Comic Book Art (Indiana University), History and Philosophy of Dress (Texas Tech University) and Campus Culture and Drinking (Duke). He documents not only falling standards but rampant grade inflation.

Read the whole thing. He has an interesting suggestion too, but colleges won't go for it. For their own survival, they are committed to their marketing of their expensive credential, whether it means anything or not. In my experience over recent years, it means little-to-nothing.

You used to know what assumptions you could make about somebody with a BA. Not any more. Now, they don't even need to know basic calculus. That's crazy.

Why is a college degree diminishing in its economic and social value?

Because so many people are going, nowadays. It's not special anymore, and unselected people are getting degrees today who could not have gotten near higher ed one generation ago. It's a consumer-oriented biz now, desperate for gullible consumers. From our IBD link this morning:

A recent example of this exaggerated view of the value of higher education is "The Undereducated American," a paper by Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose of the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce.

The authors argue that the United States needs to produce far more college graduates than it currently does.

Their evidence is that there is a significant wage "premium" for those who graduate from college — across all fields of work. They argue, in effect, that the high return on investment applies regardless of whether the graduate becomes a financier or a dishwasher.

But they fail to look at generational differences.

Recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal that gains for recent college graduates have been declining for more than 10 years.

Do personality flaws and weakness result in poverty, or does poverty "cause" personality flaws?

David French discusses.

I say that it can be either, both, or neither. If one grows up in a drug- and crime-tolerant environment, it's more likely that the wicked side of one's nature will be given free rein and things won't work out well, just as it's easier to live like a Boy Scout when all around you are doing the same.

My problem with addressing the subject this way, however, is that it ignores the large numbers of voluntarily poor, unluckily poor, and temporarily poor. Poverty is not a unitary phenomenon. Is a struggling artist or actor "poor"? And what is poverty in America anyway?

I think that French may be speaking more about "the poor in spirit" than the materially-deprived.

Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers - When Everyone Makes the Grade (h/t reader via Insty via Inside Higher Ed).

One quote from the conclusion:

Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K-12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers' perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.

It's difficult for me to form a strong opinion on the grading topic because I have no idea what Education Majors learn or study. Maybe it's so easy and simple that anybody can master it readily, and all deserve As. Maybe they have full-semester courses in making Lesson Plans, and full-semester courses in Social Justice. Beats me.

However, it does not escape me that no profs in higher ed have ever taken a teaching course (outside of those profs in the Education Dept.). Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, not one of my kids was ever taught by anybody with an education degree.

(A reader asked the question. Yes, very expensive private schools. Private education is the only way to not be taught by people with ed degrees, if such things matter to you. Most of my kids' teachers had done a lot in life before they decided to follow their hearts and teach. Their Latin teacher was a professional actor on the side, their math teacher a retired Wall Streeter, their English teacher a retired Sports Illustrated writer, etc.)

I think it would be constructive to abolish the entire notion of the Education Major. Let people who feel called to K-12 teaching study something like everybody else does and, if they want to take some courses on the side on primary school education or Special Ed or whatever, OK. It seems to me that most teachers ultimately learn their trade by being assistant teachers - by apprenticeship and supervision, not in education departments.

Teaching is not hard work, if you know your topic. I've done it. It's fun (but some kids can't learn and some don't want to. Many are not interested in anything academic.). In fact, every parent becomes an amateur teacher. Much more primary education is ultimately home schooling than schools might want to admit. (In my state of CT, the "quality" of the schools across towns correlates exactly with the levels of average education and income of the adults in the town - regardless of teacher pay etc - suggesting to me that it is, in part, education-minded parents who make their schools look good.)

I think one of the things that defines our website, Maggie's Farm, is curiosity. Curiosity about almost everything. We are only adequate writers; we lack creative flair and a zippy way with language; we rarely present entirely new ideas about things (but sometimes we do); we are dilettantes in most areas we discuss.

Curiosity is us. We like to wonder what is inside things.

As I sit by the pool this lovely Connecticut afternoon sipping a Scotch and enjoying a decent ceegar after having done a mile in the pool nude nekked with only God and the wife's horses watching me, I have been reading this in American Scientist: That’s Interesting - Curiosity drives discovery. But what, exactly, makes us curious? One quote:

Faced with a puzzle, and excited by it, I do try to understand the anomaly before me. My failure to find a ready explanation, and my feeling that the phenomenon is nonetheless understandable—these are both motivating psychological actions. In time, if I am fortunate, my thinking brings me to an explanation that makes sense not only to me, but to the community of chemists. I wouldn’t have gotten there without thinking, “That molecule is really interesting.”

Three things drive learning: curiosity, ambition for mastery, and necessity. Curiosity is an underrated and relatively rare gift. We try to nurture it in ourselves.

Maybe most of the world is on vacation now, or taking breaks from their information-gathering and opinion-surfing. Still, I expected more interest in my racism post yesterday. Perhaps it is all old hat to our readers. I thought I did an OK job of pointing out that multiculturalism, when extended to acceptance and "tolerance" of self-destructive cultures or subcultures, is not a particularly noble or constructive mission (despite its obvious political motives).

Star Parker has a piece on the topic today:

 ...for the highly politicized parts of black America, the point has always been to keep race in American politics.

For black political culture that dominated after the Civil Rights Movement, the point was not just equal treatment under the law, but special treatment under the law.

Plus the assumption that more black political power -- defined by more blacks holding office -- would mean that blacks would be better off.

In other words, post-Civil Rights Movement black political culture embraced an agenda exactly the opposite of what the civil rights movement was about.

Its agenda was to get laws and policies that were not neutral but racially slanted and to put individuals in power based on their race and not on their character and capability.

So, according to the script of this political culture, election of a black man as president meant more than an end to racism. The conclusion had to be that if the man holding the highest political office in the nation was black, it must follow that blacks would be better off.

Anyway, I am back to my education beat today.

One of my repeated claims here has been that those who deserve advanced education are those who pursue it on their own. After high school, nobody should want or need to be force-fed most (I'll make an exception for Physical Chemistry and Calculus) of what they need or desire to know, so the only test of their desire is whether they pursue it on their own (rather than the simple credential-buying).

All learning is self-education, and "going to college" does not make anybody "educated." Furthermore, true students study throughout their entire lives. There is no finish line, and you do not have to be in academia to do that.

Dinocrat reminded me of iTunes U.

Of course, at Maggie's we are Teaching Company addicts. What's on TV? Joy of Mathematics

At Q&O re Herman Cain as Uncle Tom, Who is the “racist” here?:

The absurdity of Garofalo’s theory is evident to anyone who knows even a little bit about Herman Cain. He’s no one’s dupe. But to the racist left he’s the Clarence Thomas of the political world. “How dare he wander off the plantation. We want our escaped slave back!”

I have always contended that Repubs (and their allied Conservatives and Libertarians) are the non-racist party. It's the party of Lincoln, the part of Ike who desegrated the army, and the party whose support was essential in passing the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s against a large segment of Dems.

I have always contended that the Left is the racist party in viewing American blacks as a helpless, feckless, childish category of people, a permanent victim underclass destined to eternal dependence on government actions and benefits and the beneficence of white Libs who want to take care of them, like pets. That's the "plantation" people talk about. In my view, this is a deeply condescending and insulting way of viewing any group of people.

People like Tom Sowell, Herman Cain, Mayor Nutter, Bill Cosby, Juan Williams, Shelby Steele, and many others agree with this.

Fact is, before WW2 there was a vast (although often segregated) black middle class in America, church-going, hard-working, self-respecting, etc. The disruption of the black family during the war (large numbers of black men moving north for high-paying industrial jobs), combined with the Great Society's enabling and supporting of family dissolution, have been the real problems. Young single motherhood under unstable and poor (due to the singleness) conditions are the obvious problem, and everybody knows it. No amount of money can fix a subculture like that.

Of course, there are still large numbers of middle-class blacks in America. However white Liberals, in their hypersensitive yet condescending way, are phobic about speaking about the self-destructive black subculture (even though there are poor white subcultures which are no different, and can be found anywhere), in the US as in the UK (vid h/t SDA):

(This woman has chosen government as her husband. She does not seem too bright, but is clearly gaming the system. What that piece ignores is how many entry-level jobs in the UK are eagerly taken by ambitious and entrepreneurial immigrants. "There are no jobs" because somebody else got to them first, or convinced somebody to create them. Same thing in the US: the Hispanic immigrants around here work their butts off, and are not too proud to get their hands dirty. Nobody has a job handed to them on a silver platter.)

So even though the US is probably the least racist nation on earth, it seems necessary to the Left to keep the racism meme alive - even with a black president. Otherwise, they'd have to talk about the truth of the (possibly insoluble) problem of underclass dysfunction and exploitation of assistance - regardless of skin tone. Free money.

To keep the meme alive, sometimes people have to look pretty hard to identify a sort of victimhood which requires or justifies government dependency and unequal treatment. Here's a beaut: Secret Racism Running Wild in Our Government.

As a "person of color" Michele Malkin says:

I’ve heard more than 20 years of this oppressive windbaggery from do-gooder liberals who treat my unhyphenated American brothers and sisters and me as treacherous puppets for The Man. Their smug refusal to acknowledge free will, individual choice and true diversity of thought confirms that race-obsessed liberals remain the most unrepentant and odious racists of all.

More at Legal Insurrection:

They have become their own self-parody, but they are dangerous because the constant repetition works in creating a public imagination that Republican candidates are racist.

So if you think it cannot get any worse, trust me, it will.

And back to England again, a Brit condemning gangsta culture denounced as racist: UK riots: It’s not about criminality and cuts, it’s about culture... and this is only the beginning. In other words, gangsta culture, criminality, drugs, and rampant materialism is just natural for blacks, right? He is being condemned because he doesn't buy that narrative?

The "racist" thing is insane. Neo-McCarthyism.

From our archives -

To create blissful Socialist utopias, we need smart, strong, deeply caring men in charge. Lefty men, like Robespierre, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, etc. Geniuses to rescue us from our pitiful fates as little people.

A quote from Fred Siegel's review of Flynn's A Conservative History of the American Left in City Journal, re 1820s socialist Robert Owen:

Owen anticipated both Marx's concept of false consciousness and Herbert Marcuse's of repressive tolerance. He insisted that men, because of the way they have been hitherto educated . . . are incompetent to form a correct or sound judgment. Creatures of their environment, they have been rendered irrational by the absurd doctrine of free will and responsibility. All could be put right if such subjects. . . . be instructed in better habits, and made rationally intelligent. But until then, Owen didn't want the opinions of the ill-trained and uninformed on measures intended for their relief and amelioration. No! . . . their advice can be of no value.

Owen's sentiments were exemplified by the most famous of the utopian communes, Brook Farm in Massachusetts. Influenced by the ideas of French social reformer Charles Fourier, Flynn writes, Brook Farm was stocked with Boston Brahmins, Harvard graduates, [and] descendants of the Pilgrims who retained the Puritan conviction that they were the elect but had little common sense. Failures at subsistence farming, dependent on charity for their Thanksgiving dinner, they needed to hire unskilled laborers in order to feed themselves. Writing about the plebes, one of Brook Farm's members, Charles Dana, insisted: 'We are in fact the only men who can really point out their course for them and they can hardly help looking to us for their advisors." But the laborers chafed under their supervisors feckless paternalism, openly mocking Dana and his fellows as "aristocrats."

My, my. How little has changed in the Left in 200 years. Utopians always condescend to us ignorant, feckless, unwashed, irrational "masses," don't they?

My personal utopia is all about freedom from utopians and power-seekers. I wish to control no-one - unless they are trying to harm me.

On MSNBC's Morning Joe today, economist Jeffrey Sachs, a self-professed supporter of Barack Obama in 2008, said the president has no plan to save the economy and that "there's never been a plan."

That's a big "Duh" from me, because, in cloud-cuckoo land, money just grows on trees and all you have to do is to harvest the excess from the undeserving lucky. This only goes to confirm the shrewd post from Powerline the other day.

Problem is, the numbers of those undeserving lucky are shrinking rapidly in this Obama economy. So who pays? And who hires?

Honey, while you're up, get me a Laphroaig please, while I contemplate the Dems' plans to go after assets - before death - instead of only income.