Higher Education in America

The government has decided that classroom professors are not getting "the message" across to students and have unleashed the police with batons to club and spear peacefully protesting students. This is a very important lesson about "power" in America:



More details from Berkleyside.

The top 0.01% control the politicians, the courts, and the police. So when students don't respect the right of the rich to plunder the middle class and impoverish the poor, then a little "school lesson" is needed with billy clubs to "beat some sense" into students.

Sadly, that is America. Land of the "free to be beaten up". Gone are the days of free speech and the right to assemble. These are they days when you need to buy your political rights just like the billionaires have so successfully done.

Update 2011nov13: Here is a bit from the student newspaper The Daily Californian:

For UC Berkeley graduate student Alex Barnard, the most disempowering moment of Wednesday night was not when he was repeatedly hit with a police baton, cracking one of his ribs. Instead, the most disturbing moment of his experience came afterward, when he says an officer told him he had “no rights.”

According to Barnard, who was arrested along 31 others as part of Wednesday night’s Occupy Cal demonstration, after he was handcuffed with a zip tie and taken into Sproul Hall, a police officer asked him for identifying information. Rather than immediately answering, Barnard said he asked the officer about his rights and when he would be allowed to speak to a lawyer. It was then that the officer told him he had no rights and, after Barnard disputed the statement, said he would be recorded as “uncooperative” on his police forms, according to Barnard.

“You didn’t have a voice,” Barnard said.

The experience described by Barnard and his fellow protesters’ violent treatment at the hands of the police — supported by video footage taken at the demonstration — has led to wide-spread condemnation of the police response. Critics ranging from campus student groups to members of the UC Berkeley faculty and even the national media have spoken out against the police officers’ use of force.

According to a campus-wide email sent by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and other top campus administrators, the campus Police Review Board will investigate whether police used excessive force given the circumstances.

Go read the original news story to get all the details and the embedded links.

I love it when the official have "an official investigation". It is just a way to bury the item. These students were assaulted by the police. No policeman was arrested for assault. The "investigation" will find "extenuating circumstances" and the whole thing will be buried. That is how the elites make sure that nobody rocks the boat. You have no rights. Sure you have lots of "paper" rights, but money in America owns all the "rights". Until the people change that, the standard of living in the US will continue to decline and the government will continue on its path to banana republic.

Update2011nov14: Here is a bit from a well thought out analysis of the hypocrisy of the UC Berkeley authorities by Aaron Bady on his blog zunguzungu. It also has more video and some detailed comments and specifics. But the key point is this:

I feel a lot of déjà vu in reading about these events. According to the UC administration, who have offered a lot of empty words in support of Occupy Wall Street in past emails, it wasn’t the aims of the protesters they opposed but their tactics. As they go on to elaborate:

This decision is largely governed by practical, not philosophical, considerations. We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control. Our intention in sending out our message early was to alert everyone that these activities would not be permitted. We regret that, in spite of forewarnings, we encountered a situation where, to uphold our policy, we were required to forcibly remove tents and arrest people.

Allow me to retort: what they really mean is that the University of California is not, in fact, governed by “a philosophy,” but by the reverse: an active refusal to require a philosophy in justifying its choices. That way he can write that “UC Berkeley as an institution shares many of the highest principles associated with the OWS movement,” but also actively work in opposition to people’s attempts to put those principles into practice. This is an arbitrary line in the sand, drawn by an administration that is unflinchingly willing to use whatever means necessary to maintain their ability to draw arbitrary lines. Your philosophy is not wanted here, they are saying; in the name of practical considerations — which they define — you will be governed by government. And so the fact that students are trying to “democratize the regents,” as a popular chant puts it, is exactly the threat. A sentence like this one:

We are not equipped to manage the hygiene, safety, space, and conflict issues that emerge when an encampment takes hold and the more intransigent individuals gain control.

is just another way of saying that when “intransigent” individuals refuse to acknowledge the university’s authority, the administration won’t be able to exercise its authority, so it will therefore need to exercise its authority. This is exactly as tautological and contradictory a line of “reasoning” as it sounds, a rhetorical snake eating its own tail. To maintain hygiene, the students cannot use tents to keep themselves warm; to manage the space, students must be kept out; to address “conflict issues,” students had to be attacked; and to keep the students safe, they will be beaten.

The language falls apart at this point, because it’s not “philosophy” that’s driving any of this, but the question of who has the right to speak and be heard about what the university is for. Which is why the next paragraph truly descends into absurdity, the one where you realize you are not dealing with an educator, but with a university Ministry of Truth:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

What he describes — occupying space in a way that nonviolently prevents the police from doing what they want — is actually the very definition of “non-violent civil disobedience.” On the one hand, it is utterly non-violent: linking arms and holding on to each other as the police try to knock you apart is not “violent” but is precisely the opposite. It is the endurance of violence. And second, it is civil disobedience, again, precisely by definition. They were disobeying civil authorities, obeying the authority of their own consciences and solidarity instead

I want to skim past this sentence on to the next part, however which is in some ways the most remarkable part: he argues that the “tradition of peaceful civil disobedience,” which deserves honor, is a tradition of obedience to civil authorities. He says that “we honor” those who do not obstruct the administration’s decisions, and that those who are “acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience” are, it turns out, those who obey authority.

This is not even ideology. This is simply nonsense. UCI professor Rei Terada has a great piece on what the administrator’s language might mean, but for me the important point to make is a much simpler one: they aren’t defending what they did — which would require admitting what they did — but only obfuscating it in language so bad that I can’t decide whether to call it vapid or actively dishonest. “Civil Disobedience” has always been, manifestly and unmistakably, a tradition of disobeying the civil authorities. I feel silly even needing to spell that out. And I feel embarrassed to work as an educator in the employ of anyone who would stand behind such specious stupidity. Linking arms and occupying the space between the police and their objective is a tactic used by just about every example of civil disobedience I can think of. It is, quite frankly the single best and most iconic example of the thing he says it is not. He is chewing up these words until they have become meaningless. Calling this language “Orwellian” is not hyperbole or exaggeration.

If he wants, Chancellor Birgeneau can approve of what the police did on Wednesday. If he wants to believe and argue that it is justifiable to try to break the bodies of students in hope of breaking their spirits, then let him believe it and argue it and then try to justify it. Let him tell us that when students put up tents on Sproul Plaza, the police will beat them until they take those tents down. Let him declare forthrightly that when students stand on grass at the wrong time and place — a time that is subject to the capricious and arbitrary decrees of the police and those who call them in — the administration believes its authority and responsibility is to beat them until they comply.

They have not said this. Birgeneau and his executive administrators are hiding behind meaningless language rather than talk openly and honestly about what everyone who was there or has seen those videos knows to be true: the UC will hurt you if you obstruct them or challenge their authority, even nonviolently. Free speech is a function of free thinking, and on the campus of free speech, Birgeneau should be free to say and think what he pleases, even if what he says is that those who do not obey will be beaten into submission. But let us hear him say that, if that’s what he believes. Let him admit and stand behind the decision he has made.

Trouble Right Here in River City

The Music Man sang about trouble in middle America. But there is now big trouble all across America in its higher educational institutions. Here is a bit from a post by Frederick Sheehan in Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture blog:

The Atlantic magazine has illustrated the unsustainable growth of student debt in the chart below. In David Indiviglio’s August, 18, 2011, article, “Student Loans Have Grown 511% Since 1999,” the author notes: “Obviously the number of students didn’t grow by 511%. So why are education loans growing so rapidly? One reason could be availability. The government’s backing lets credit to students flow very freely…. [U]niversities are raising tuition aggressively since students are willing to pay more through those loans.”

Click to Enlarge
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The number of colleges will plummet. This is due to the loss of nerve, confidence, substance, direction, integrity – will that do? – of teaching in America. Just look at that chart: what a picture of insatiable greediness and self-indulgence among the colleges. No thought to the unbearable debt deposited on their students.

... In another Atlantic article, “The Debt Crisis at American Colleges,” authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus write: “[C]olleges have embraced a host of extraneous activities – from obscure sports to overseas centers – and tacked most or all of their tabs onto students’ bills. Unlike businesses, which cut losing operations, colleges simply hike their tuitions.” Will former Harvard Professor Elizabeth Warren’s ill-defined federal agency, watchdog over slatternly marketing hoaxes by financial institutions, apply the same standards to deceptive, college sales practices?

...

Gloom, Boom & Doom Report, Marc Faber quoted a study from the Goldwater Institute that found between “1993 and 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at America’s leading universities grew by 39 percent, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service only grew by 18 percent.”

With unemployment sky high entry into the job market for new graduates is especially hard. So the diploma that was bought with all those big bucks is actually worth less today than it was 5 years ago. Prices up, but value down. That is a recipe for a product that is going to implode.

Education in America

This story is the Springfield Missouri News-Leader takes the cake for benighted, misguided, and stupid school administration. It is so crazy it seems impossible to be true:

A female student raped in 7th grade, but the school officials don’t believe her and force her to “apologize” to her rapist, and then they go ahead an expel her from school as her punishment for "lying". Next year she is allowed to come back to school, and her rapist commits yet another rape on her!

A lawsuit filed against the Republic School District alleges school officials failed to protect a middle school girl from a male classmate who harassed her, sexually assaulted her, and raped her.

In its written response, the school district denies all allegations in the suit and calls the claims frivolous.

The suit, filed July 5, alleges when the girl — a special education student — told officials about the harassment, assault and rape that occurred during the 2008-09 school year, they told her they did not believe her. She recanted.

The suit also alleges that, without seeking her mother’s permission, school officials forced the girl to write a letter of apology to the boy and personally deliver it to him. She was then expelled for the rest of the 2008-2009 school year and referred to juvenile authorities for filing a false report.

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In 2009-10, the girl was allowed back in school, and the boy continued to harass and assault her, the suit says. She did not tell school officials because she was afraid she would be accused of lying and kicked out of school.

In February 2010, the boy allegedly forcibly raped the girl again, this time in the back of the school library. While school officials allegedly expressed skepticism of the girl, her mother took her to the Child Advocacy Center and an exam showed a sexual assault had occurred. DNA in semen found on the girl matched the DNA of the boy she accused, the suit says.

The boy was taken into custody in Juvenile Court and pleaded guilty to charges, the suit says.

In the days before DNA analysis and before female empowerment, this series of crimes would have been ignored and the victim would have been stigmatized for life. I personally think the old-fashioned punishment of tar-and-feathering should be revived and used on the school board, the principal of this school, and some of the senior staff. This story is simply incredible.

Not only is this girl working with a mental handicap, but she has to deal with a cruel and indifferent school board and school staff. I can only imagine that the school staff was absolutely ignorant and indifferent to the conditions of their school and the plight of kids being bullied and harrassed by the wild and cruel elements in the school population (and probably even in the school staff). It is a story of an incompetent and probably vicious school hierarchy that attracted depraved types to both run its schools and act as teachers in the sadistic enterprise that pretended to be a "school"). Incredible.

Robert Reich on Education

Sadly, here is Robert Reich arguing that education has needs up there in importance with financial capital...



Lots of luck on that. The Republicans would privatize all schools. Obama seems determined to ensure that big corporations and Wall Street get all the public funds.

Poor Robert Reich, he is fighting a losing battle. No politically important institution in the US wants an educated electorate. Walmart and McDonald's don't need more than a 6th grade education to employ its staff. I think the not-too-subtle message behind the hit TV show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? is that Americans are over-educated and government should stop "wasting" precious funds that could more wisely be spent by giving more tax cuts to the "job creators".

Everybody thought that the 20th century was America's century. I can see that the 21st century is truly going to be "America's Century". Finally all the manufacturing will be shut down and the rust belt pleasingly turned into weedy fields, the schools will have gone past being the horrors of neglected inner-city schools and will finally be closed down and boarded up, and the voters will be relieved of the tedious duty of deciding between Tweedledee and Tweedledum political parties. Instead, they will be handed ballots for elections with only a American Patriotic 'Super Committee' Party with conveniently "locked-in" agreement with "triggers" to ensure that voters have only the one choice in any and every election. That's true democracy in action just like the recent exercise in democracy that has so brilliantly resolved the debt ceiling "crisis".

R. P. Wolff Puzzles over a Liberal Education

I keep an eye on Robert Paul Wolff's blog The Philosopher's Stone and stumbled upon his meditation on "What Good is a Liberal Education?". He poses three transitional justifications for a liberal education:

as the stigmata of the upper classes, as the royal road to upward mobility, and as the entree into the Great Conversation

He rejects these, but I still have a very soft spot for the last of the three.

Here's the key bit that captures my foolish infatuation with higher education:

The ideal of the Great Conversation is merely an elaborate formalization of Wood's charming conceit. Western Civilization is conceived as a perpetual debate about a number of timeless questions, conducted by the great minds of the Judeo-Christian, Graeco-Roman tradition, with its medieval Arabic variants, through the medium of a small, but continuously growing, library of great works of philosophy, tragedy, poetry, fiction, history, political theory - and, more recently, sociology, anthropology, economics, and anthropology. Homer and the nameless authors of the Old Testament, Sophocles and Euripides, Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus, Thucydides, Cicero, Caesar, Paul and the Evangelists, Ovid, Sappho, Philo, Tertullian, Aquinas, Maimonides, Averroes, Avicenna, Erasmus, Luther, Chaucer, Calvin, John of Salisbury, Jean Bodin, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Bacon, Montaigne, Descartes, Spinoza, Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, Locke, Galileo, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Leibniz, Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Herder, Marx, Smith, Bentham, Mill - on and on they come, quibbling, quarreling, drawing distinctions, splitting hairs, proving the existence of God, refuting the proofs for the existence of God, reading one another, referring to one another - a grand faculty seminar, captured for all time in no more than several hundred immortal books.

A liberal education - so this story has it - is a ticket of admission to the Conversation. Most of us are mere auditors, much as I was when, as a boy of ten, I sat on the steps of the staircase leading from my parents' living room and listened to my parents, my uncles and aunts, and the neighbors debating politics, literature, and the bureaucratic insanities of the New York City School System in which they worked. An inspired few actually enter the Conversation, and make to it contributions that will be taken up into the immortal lists of Great Books. But for the rest of us, it is enough that we have been initiated into its rituals and shibboleths. Throughout our lives, that eternal debate will be the intellectual accompaniment of our quotidien lives.

I was lucky enough as a dewy-eyed youth to go to an "experimental" college of the 1960s that was ungraded and focused on a "liberal education" and not merely the churning out of technical experts for the factories and offices of the future. I was in nirvana. I blossomed.

But then I went to graduate school and discovered myself back in a "high school environment" of grades and classes and even roll call! I withered. My joy in learning disappeared along with the lack of access to excited and interesting scholars. I had been spoiled as a youth at a college where classes were seminars and not lectures, where professors enjoyed their topics and would linger after class to answer questions. In graduate school I was reintroduced to "education" as a factory for stamping out graded and standardized minds. Needless to say, I dropped out of grad school and went and got a job in "the real world". But my joy in learning continues, but not in an academic setting. I still hold my ideals, I just recognize that contemporary institutions mouth one set of values but lives by another.

It is interesting that R. P. Wolff rejects my rationale and joy.

Here is his view of the purpose of a liberal education:

The true rationale for liberal education, in my considered and passionate judgment, is our society's desperate need for a reservoir of negative thought -and for some protected place in which young men and women can explore what my sons, some years ago, would have called the dark side of the force.

Here is an example from baby training:

One day, something inexplicable, terrible, frustrating, painful happens. The baby makes its demanding noise, with the cookie in full view just outside its reach, and the parent, instead of immediately handing it over, as has happened every day for as long as the baby can remember, now picks up the cookie, holds it tantalizingly before the baby, and says in what can only be construed as a deliberately sadistic voice, "Can you say 'cookie'?" Well, all of us know the rest of this story, for all of us have lived through it. The acquisition of language, the mastery of one's bowels, the control of one's temper - all of the stages in development that make one an adult human being who is recognizably a member of a society - all have a negative side, a side associated with shame, rage, pain, frustration, resentment, a backside, as we learn to think of it, as well as a positive side associated with praise, self-esteem, public reward, power, satisfaction - a front, which, as our language very nicely suggests, is both an officially good side and also a pretense, a fake.

By and large, we do not forget the frustration, the pain, the rage. We repress it, drive it out of consciousness, deny it, put it behind us, as we like to say. But, like our own backsides, and the feces which issue from them, they remain, and exercise a secret, shameful attraction for us.

This brief reminder of our common heritage makes it clear that the repression of "unacceptable" wishes - as Freud so quaintly and aptly labeled them in his earlier writings - is an essential precondition for our development of the ability to interact effectively with the world, and with one another. Mastery of our own bodies, mastery of language, the psychic ability, and willingness, to defer gratification long enough to perform necessary work, the ability to control destructive, and self-destructive, rages or desires - civilization, society, culture, survival depend upon them. But necessary though they are, they are painful; throughout our lives, we carry, repressed, the delicious, illicit fantasies of total, immediate, uncompromised gratification, of instantaneous, magical fulfillment, of the permission to indulge the desires that have been stigmatized as negative.

Personally I think that is a perverse presentation of the facts. The negative (Freudian) aspects are overplayed. Freud wasn't a scientist. He was more a novelist telling "just so" stories that sound credible but really aren't.

My experience of higher education had nothing to do with repressing desires. If anything, it was a romp, a joy, a discovery of an arena of pleasure that was far away from the demands of the workaday world.

As for high culture, I totally disagree with Wolff.

In this project, the great works of art, literature, philosophy and music of our cultural tradition play an essential, and rather surprising, role. Regardless of their manifest content and apparent purpose, these works, which we customarily consider the appropriate content of a liberal education, play a continuingly subversive role. They keep alive, in powerful and covert ways, the fantasies of gratification, the promise of happiness, the anger at necessary repression, on which radical political action feeds.

They don't convey any sense of subversive enjoyment and prod me with an "anger at necessary repression". Nope. I enjoy some high art for the sheer aesthetics. Some I don't care for. Similarly, I enjoy some low art for the sheer joy it brings me while I don't care for other aspects of low art. I get my pleasure from my interaction. I'm not some cog in some grand mechanistic psycho-drama that Marcuse or Wolff want to squeeze me into.

Playing "by the rules" is not some psychological repression. It is simply the game (or work or social environment). If I want to play I am required to play by the rules. But I'm free to reject the game or create my own game. But most people realize that if they "don't play by the rules, they will play alone". That isn't repression. That is just a fact of life. It causes no more anguish than to realize that I can't kick a 500 pound rock and expect to send it over the goalpost. I'm not repressed or compelled by the rock. It is just a fact. If I accept the fact, my life goes more smoothly. If I reject the fact, I'm in for a world of pain. It is my choice.

I just don't buy his argument:

In all seriousness, I suggest to you that this is the real justification for keeping alive the great tradition of liberal arts and letters in our colleges and universities. Not as a patina for modern aristocrats, not as an instrument of upward mobility, not even as an introduction to the Great Conversation, but as a way of putting young men and women in touch with their repressed fantasies of gratification, in such a fashion as to awaken in them the hope, the dream, the unquenchable thirst for liberation from which social progress must come.

But I enjoyed reading it. I didn't feel the least repressed by the thoughts nor did they invoke an "unquenchable thirst for liberation". Nope. That is a fantasy. A fun thought. But it is much like thinking I can punt a 500 pound rock over a goal post. I can enjoy thinking it. But it doesn't make up the reality of the world in which I live.

I do agree with the closing story that Wolff provides, i.e. great art or ideas can reach across decades and centuries and seize a person by the scruff of the neck, and given him a shaking that can liberate him from a lifetime of unthinking subservience to received authority. But that is exactly the joy of ideas without all the fussy nonsense about Freud and Marcuse. It is a chance to knock up against a great mind and realize a new thought, a new perception, a new theory, or a new aesthetic.

Don't take my word for any of this. Go read Robert Paul Wolff for yourself!

A New Education Tool

This sounds great. I found this on Robert X. Cringely's I, Cringely blog:

Democrasoft’s Collaborize product began as a way for communities to discuss issues online with the idea that the core groups would be cities or local governments. But the Santa Rosa, CA-based company found some of its earliest adopters were teachers — a group the company had never even considered. More than 6600 teachers are presently using Collaborize, which is still a very small percentage of American classrooms. But the adoption growth rate is a very viral 30+ percent per month, according to Democrasoft CEO Richard Lang, so this application is going to be significant.

A lot has changed about Collaborize since I last wrote about it. The business model for education is now free, for example, and there is a custom version, Collaborize Classroom, just for schools — the company’s largest present market.

The idea behind Collaborize is simple. It is a structured conversation. Any participant can pose a question for discussion, eliciting responses from the group or taking a poll. You can look at it as a quiz or a test but grading doesn’t have to be a part of what’s essentially an online Socratic dialog.

Yes, you can do this with a wiki, Mr. Smartypants, but the significant point here is that people generally don’t do this with wikis. Collaborize is more structured than a wiki and requires little customization.

One of the most important aspects of this tool, according to the teachers who like it, is that it has a social leveling function that brings students into the online conversation who might say little or nothing in the classroom. This is good.

What’s changed most recently with the product, though, is the addition of some social networking functions and especially the development of a library of discussions available to anyone.

Here’s the deal with the library. Some teachers are better than others at designing discussions. These can include video and audio clips to spur discussion and each becomes a little lesson in its own right, providing information, eliciting responses, and even measuring comprehension all at the same time. That’s powerful. But if you are a teacher who is intimidated by the whole question design process, why not use some other teacher’s discussions, either in their entirety or as the basis for your own derivative work?

The library already contains thousands of discussions in nearly every subject area.

Social networking provides both the door to this library and something even more important — peer review. Maybe a discussion could be improved or maybe it is just plain misguided: responses from other teachers will provide that context. If a discussion from the library gets a lot of positive responses from teachers whose opinions you respect that makes the discussion more valuable.

I've worked with wikis on projects many years ago. On projects where we had multiple companies collaborating along with government labs and university research teams, the wiki was a successful way to collaborate. Of course we had our resident wiki expert on staff. My limited knowledge of setting up a wiki convinces me that only the most tech saavy teacher would successfully manage the equivalent of what this tool does using a wiki. And this tool is free. Sounds like a great deal for teachers.

I keep hoping we hear about new innovations in the classroom that help teachers and students take a big leap forward using technology to improve the learning environment. This may be one of those tools.

Teaching Math

For a few years I taught math in high school many, many years ago. I wish I had been half... no, even a smidgen as inventive as Vi Hart is in teaching math concepts.

Here's a wonderful video to show deep connections between various techniques to multiply:



Go spend some time wandering around the amazing and beautiful things she has on her web site.

How to Get a Really Good Education

Frameworks! In a marketing course, you get the best education through a "marketing framework"...

And here is the behavioural economist Dan Ariely explaining how his MIT MBA students pressured him for half a semester to force him to give up the secret of frameworks for their marketing course:



This insight that frameworks are the key to a really good education reminds me of the scene in the film The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman gets the inside scoop on post-graduation employment:



I find it funny that people want to reduce complexities down to a single word or a "framework". Sure, as an educational crutch it is OK to simplify, but at the same time you have to remember that you are using a simplification.

Dysfunctional Institutions, the Science Edition

I saw the corruption of the proposal process in the sciences when I was working in R&D. I found that you had to promise more than you knew you could deliver in order to "stick out from the crowd". Another problem that I encountered was that, as industry, you had to include university partners and offer them large sums to sign on. But there was simply no way to get the university researchers to live up to their contractual promises. The system was broken. It was a mess. And the fund administrators didn't know enough science to even understand this since they could be flim-flammed.

Here's an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education which exposes the problem:

Academic science is in a crisis. At a time when scientific innovation is desperately needed to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental, technological, and medical problems, how scientists get money for their research stifles, rather than spurs, creativity.

The structural defect causing this major problem can be stated simply: The failure rate for proposals submitted by academic scientists has reached such high levels that many professors must spend virtually all their time writing proposals, leaving the creative thinking to graduate students and postdoctoral associates. The result is science by proxy.

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Universities are partly to blame. Some institutions explicitly tell their faculty members that they are expected to bring in $300,000 or more in grants each year. Researchers sometimes receive awards for bringing in more funds than anyone else at their institutions. At one academic banquet, a dean requested that professors who brought in over a half-million dollars stand up and be applauded by the audience. Such displays of commercialism exemplify what has been called the "selling culture" and a "gold-digger" mentality among university administrators.

Two things need to be done. First, increase the respect for teaching and lower the career rewards for publishing and winning grants. Second, give professors a free hand to pursue their own research interests through some system that gives them a large but not unlimited timeframe in which to establish their careers, say 10 years, before the publish or perish and grant wars pressures are brought to bear.

Teaching Independence of Thought and Morality

This Catholic school in Thunder Bay, Ontario has a unique way to teach students to think for themselves and search their souls for their moral views. From the National Post newspaper:

Pro-choice stickerslead tostudent suspensions

A Catholic school in Thunder Bay has disciplined seven students who sported homemade pro-choice stickers during a school-sanctioned pro-life Day of Silence.

The St. Patrick's Catholic High School students were either sent home or suspended for refusing to remove green pieces of tape with the word "choice" during a pro-life event Thursday, organized by a school chaplain and a student group, in which students sported similar labels with the word "life."

Among the students sent home was Alexandria Szeglet, 15, who initated the protest after telling her mother that morning she disagreed with the event. Ann Szeglet responded, "Be peaceful about it. Don't make it a big deal."

"I was really respectful, but I just think the school goes a little further than a high school should [in] saying prolife," Alexandria said.

Alexandria shared the tape and markers with her peers, but says she didn't solicit their participation. In total, 24 students were asked to remove the "choice" labels, 17 of whom complied. Alexandria was sent home only for the day, but once she left, events escalated and several students became confrontational, which led to six two-day suspensions. Four were issued for refusing requests to remove the labels and breaking the school's code of conduct, and two for swearing at teachers.

It appears the "lesson" this school wants to teach these kids is "shut and do as you are told" and that "independent thought will get you thrown out of school" and "morals are what we tell you and not what you feel or know or discover". I would say there is not much difference in the educational techniques of this school and those of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (aka Nazi party). But I must admit, as a non-Catholic I don't understand the subtle difference between accepting uncritically the dictates of "der Führer" versus accepting "with blind faith" the decrees of the Pope.

Some would say "if you don't accept the dogmas of the Catholic church, you shouldn't go to a Catholic school". I can buy that. But since Catholic schools are subsidized by taxpayers in Canada, it seems to me that those who honestly feel themselves to be Catholics but who have qualms over some aspects of "the Faith" should be allowed to attend the taxpayer supported schools. If you are going to accept public money, you have to give the public access to your facilities.

What I find outrageous is that any institution today thinks it has the right to tell people how to think. With the long history of corrupted institutions, it is just plain silly to think that one institution has hold of "the Truth" and cannot possibly be wrong. That runs smack up against the facts of human nature and the long history of human follies.

The Truth about Education

Here are some bits from an excellent NY Times op-ed by Paul Krugman:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

...

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.

Some years ago, however, the economists David Autor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued that this was the wrong way to think about it. Computers, they pointed out, excel at routine tasks, “cognitive and manual tasks that can be accomplished by following explicit rules.” Therefore, any routine task — a category that includes many white-collar, nonmanual jobs — is in the firing line. Conversely, jobs that can’t be carried out by following explicit rules — a category that includes many kinds of manual labor, from truck drivers to janitors — will tend to grow even in the face of technological progress.

And here’s the thing: Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate. Notably, with production workers in manufacturing down to about 6 percent of U.S. employment, there aren’t many assembly-line jobs left to lose. Meanwhile, quite a lot of white-collar work currently carried out by well-educated, relatively well-paid workers may soon be computerized. Roombas are cute, but robot janitors are a long way off; computerized legal research and computer-aided medical diagnosis are already here.

Read the whole article.

The reality is that most jobs are subject to replacement by computer. In the short term it is the repetitive jobs, as Krugman points out, whether they be blue collar or white collar. There is no place for a diploma-wielding person to hide. The machines are coming to replace you.

Back in the 1960s this was a scary message, but a lot of the fear was couched in "what are people going to do with so much more free time?" The assumption was that the society as a whole would carry everybody and salaries would rise and we would all live happier more stuff-filled lives because the machines were going to take over and produce the goodies.

But since the "Reagan revolution" all those extra goodies being produced have been monopolized by the ultra-rich to help them to go from fabulously wealth to mind-blowingly, insanely wealthy. Instead of 100 foot yachts, they now have to make do with 500 foot yachts. Instead of a main home and one or two vacation homes, they own five, six, or a dozen. Meanwhile unemployment is at record highs, poverty at a record high, and the average was is stuck. This isn't caused by machines. This is caused by a social system where the ultra-rich have a strangle-hold on all increments to productivity. As machines make us more productivity, the ultra-rich skim off the benefits for themselves!

Here's Krugman's bottom line:

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

Amy Chua

I enjoyed the interview that Charlie Rose has with Amy Chua regarding her very misunderstood book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She was very clear that the book was not "how to do" but meant to be humourous and a memoir. Her opinions about child rearing struck me as rock solid, i.e. hold high expectations for your kids, but be willing to recognize that their personality may conflict with your wishes as a parent and the parent needs to adjust while still holding high expectations.

From a McLeans review of the book:

The book is peppered with funny, self- excoriating scenes of Chua’s extreme mothering. Chua acknowledges she has had doubts, but she never goes so far as to denounce Chinese parenting. “The results speak for themselves,” she says a few times. Her oldest daughter Sophia played piano at Carnegie Hall, while Lulu won a prodigy award for playing the violin. When Lulu finally breaks rank, the rebellion is a satisfying, American-style tantrum. Full sympathy goes to Jed, the Jewish husband, who tries to dial down his wife’s intensity.

By heaping scorn on Western parenting, Chua will raise ire and polarize readers. At her most pointed, Chua says, “Western parents . . . try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out” (page 50). In reaction, some readers will call her a heartless drill sergeant. Others will want her to raise their kids.

In the interview with Charlie Rose she makes clear she isn't really for the strict Chinese mothering. She wants "strict traditional" and kept pointing out that the "founding fathers of America" were raised in a strict traditional upbringing. The permissive style of raising kids is only roughly 30 years old. She makes clear she wants a blend of traditional with a tempered, caring style of upbringing. She even points out in the Charlie Rose interview that she rebelled from the "strict Chinese" style of upraising just as he daughter Lulu. So she gets it. The book is self-deprecating. Readers need to ease up and enjoy the irony and the self-mocking tone.

Alphabet & Elements

Here's a kid who knows her alphabet and her elements...



Here's the blurb that goes with the video:

26 month-old Rose from Seattle loves to play "elements cards". We shuffled up the cards of the 50+ she knows (sorry praseodymium fans) and let her show off. Special guest appearance(s) by the alphabet.

I'm not keen on parents trying to "hothouse" their kids. You can really distort a poor kid by giving and withholding approval to "shape" them to what you want. That is tragic. But if they have a natural interest and you aren't pushy, then it is fun to see what kind of crazy interests & abilities kids can develop.

You can tell that she is using the alphabet with the element's symbol written on the back to "guess" some elements before the picture is shown. You can also tell that she is using phonetics to figure out some element names. And I would be that she is using whole language with all its contextual clues to figure out other element names. The parents can be seen to be encouraging her and pushing a bit, but they don't go all ballistic when she has lapses of attention or gets the odd element wrong. That is good. This is encouragement without being "pushy" parents.

Here's the post about her. She's 26 months old which is pretty young to be reading, but obviously she has the basics of reading down, plus a fascination with the pretty pictures of all those elements!

Here's a place to get those nifty periodic element cards.

Logic

I spent a decade of my life pursing formal logic. The following graphic pretty well summarizes all that I now know about "logic"...

Click to Enlarge

After many years of hard study I've learned an important lesson: the more you learn, the faster you forget.

Academic Treadmill

This brings back bad memories of being a graduate student...



The above is the Hui Zheng lab at Baylor, with their Gaga-esque production of Bad Project.

I got a chuckle from the video. At least they seem to be gelled as a group and willing to have fun and even poke fun at their laboratory lives. I did my graduate work in philosophy and remember it as a wasteland of isolation and indifference. There is a real rift between the two cultures. In the Humanities it is a solo flight. But in the Sciences you realize you are truly building on the giants who went before and you tend to work in teams.

I See that Obama's Promise of Better Education in America is Already Happening

From Salon.com comes this story of "American justice" and the provision of education as a "level playing field" in which the disadvantaged get a chance to compete with the elite...

A poor black woman broke the law to send her children to a rich white school. Is her punishment really justice?


In case you have not yet heard about Kelley Willams-Bolar:

AKRON, Ohio – A Summit County woman will spend 10 days in jail after she was found guilty in a school residency case that could set a precedent for Ohio school districts.

Judge Patricia Cosgrove also placed 40-year-old Kelly Williams-Bolar on two years of probation and ordered her to complete 80 hours of community service.

On Saturday, a jury found Williams-Bolar guilty on two counts of tampering with records. She was also facing one count of grand theft, but the judge declared a mistrial on that charge after the jury couldn't reach a verdict.

"I felt that some punishment or deterrent was needed for other individuals who might think to defraud the various school systems," Cosgrove told NewsChannel5 after the sentencing.

Prosecutors said Williams-Bolar lived in Akron, but falsified enrollment papers in the Copley-Fairlawn School District so her two girls could attend schools for two years.

Prosecutors said the lies cost the district about $30,000. Copley-Fairlawn does not have open enrollment and out-of-district tuition is about $800 per month.

There are myriad responses to this case, ranging from the impassioned response of Boyce Watkins to the "fraud is fraud" response by Bob Dyer of the Beacon Journal. Titles all over the Internet have proclaimed "MOTHER IMPRISONED FOR SENDING KIDS TO WRONG SCHOOL!" implying that the only thing wrong was simply enrolling where she shouldn't have. Under the current laws of Ohio, Williams-Bolar committed a crime. This can't be argued. What can be argued is whether the actions by the court are right and appropriate for the defendant's situation.

You threaten somebody with 5 years in the slammer for trying to give her kids a fair shake at life? That reminds me of when I was an adolescent and heard about a guy in the early 1960s finally being freed from jail for having stolen an apple during the Great Depression. Yep... hunger was illegal in America in the 1930s. You were supposed to not complain and simply crawl into a corner and die and not bother the other citizens with your distress. It is up there with the Scott sisters who got life sentences for a minor robbery of less than $200 of which their share was $11. Nobody was shot or killed. It was a robbery. For this they got life sentences in prison.

So... Obama is promising to make America strong through "improving education". Meanwhile, down on the ground, at the local authority level, people are being jailed if they try to move their kids from a run down urban school which is a glorified baby sitting institution to a suburban school where teachers and kids actually focus on education (at least some of them). For this, you get a sentence of 5 years in the slammer in the US. Looks like Obama's rhetoric and the reality on the ground have a bit of a gap that needs to be closed before America is ready to compete for the 21st century!

The Rules Have Changed

That the message of Barack Obama. Yes... the average person in the US has taken in on the chin. Funny... the fancy bankers on Wall Street got taxpayer money to make the whole and allow them to give themselves outrageous bonuses. They aren't suffering. But here is what Obama in his State of the Union address tells ordinary Americans:

That world has changed. And for many, the change has been painful. I've seen it in the shuttered windows of once booming factories, and the vacant storefronts on once busy Main Streets. I've heard it in the frustrations of Americans who've seen their paychecks dwindle or their jobs disappear -– proud men and women who feel like the rules have been changed in the middle of the game. ...

So, yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn't discourage us. It should challenge us. ...

And now it's our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.

What is this? I say it is crumbs from the table. Trickle down "feel good" speech making. The only rules that have changed is that the scales of justice have the fat finger of the wealthy and powerful holding down the side that gives tax cuts to billionaires, that gives nearly a trillion dollars to make Wall Street "whole" while telling ordinary citizens that "the rules have changed" (with the implication that they will just have to "suck it up" and trudge on without any real legislative help from his administration).

Americans already work the most hours of any advanced country in the world, and when I hear Obama saying that they must "out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world", I'm hearing a call to replace an eight hour week with a ten or twelve hour day, to replace the five day workweek with a six or even seven day workweek. This is a call for a Stakhovite America.

I would really like to believe that Obama is the street organizer who wants to help the bottom 99% of the population. But I just can't. Not when he gives tax breaks to the rich, when he waters down regulations to keep the bankers happy, and when he talks about "fiscal austerity" in the face of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

When I hear Obama say:

Our schools share this responsibility. When a child walks into a classroom, it should be a place of high expectations and high performance. But too many schools don't meet this test. That's why instead of just pouring money into a system that's not working, we launched a competition called Race to the Top. To all 50 states, we said, "If you show us the most innovative plans to improve teacher quality and student achievement, we'll show you the money."

I hear Bush's "No Child Left Behind" idle promises. He's already had two years on the job and as far as I can tell the inner city school are just as decrepit today as they were two years ago. It is hard to learn with the ceiling leaks. It is especially hard to learn when your parents are unemployed and you are getting fed because there is no money. Promises "educational reform" when 10% are unemployed and 20% are either voluntarily withdrawn from the workforce or working short hours because that's all they can get is a farce.

When Obama says:

In fact, to every young person listening tonight who's contemplating their career choice: If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child -- become a teacher. Your country needs you.

His actions belie where his heart really lies. He happily lets Wall Street types make billion dollar incomes, a single person makes enough to employ 15,000 teachers. Why would a person in his right mind "aspire" to be a teacher when they can make a King's ransom on Wall Street? You would have to be a fool to "aspire" to teach when the real money is to be made chasing digits across a screen on Wall Street. The American economy has been gutted over the last 30 years by allowing jobs that built stuff to be shipped overseas while the big rewards go to guys who play the role of "Master of the Universe" chasing digits across a screen on Wall Street. People are not stupid. They will work where there is decent pay. Having the President make hortatory speeches about self sacrifice for "the good of others" might motivate the few saints among the populace, but real people will go where the money is. By regulating society to allow the big money to go to Wall Street means you get a Wall Street economy. Schools fall into disrepair and only those with no other job prospect will go into teaching. The people with talents and vision and inspiration will head for Wall Street.

This is pure blarney:

If we take these steps -– if we raise expectations for every child, and give them the best possible chance at an education, from the day they are born until the last job they take –- we will reach the goal that I set two years ago: By the end of the decade, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

When JFK wanted America to reach for the stars he put spelled it out as a tough struggle that would require perseverance and commitment (ask not what your country can do for you, but you can do for your country). Obama presents a glowing future as ripe fruit that will effortlessly fall into your hands because Americans a "good people" an just deserve this. The reality is that the US is falling in student competence in tests judging knowledge and the dropout rate in America is rising. Nothing said by Obama addresses these fundamental flaws in the social fabric. He has given pixie dust and "clap your hands" hopes to Americans, but no tough roadmap that will make them competitive.

Obama has called for a mini-1937 recession inside a depression with this bit of "belt tightening and austerity" to satisfy the right wing deficit hawks. This is the same mistake FDR did and it created a real setback in the recovery from the Great Depression. But Obama is ignorant of economics, so he is calling for the same mistake:

But now that the worst of the recession is over, we have to confront the fact that our government spends more than it takes in. That is not sustainable. Every day, families sacrifice to live within their means. They deserve a government that does the same.

So tonight, I am proposing that starting this year, we freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. (Applause.) Now, this would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.

This freeze will require painful cuts. Already, we've frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I've proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs. The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without.

The inability of this President to tell the American people the truth is disheartening:

Look to Iraq, where nearly 100,000 of our brave men and women have left with their heads held high. (Applause.) American combat patrols have ended, violence is down, and a new government has been formed. This year, our civilians will forge a lasting partnership with the Iraqi people, while we finish the job of bringing our troops out of Iraq. America's commitment has been kept. The Iraq war is coming to an end.

Iraq is a disaster. It was an unnecessary war. Americans hideously slaughtered hundreds of thousands in a useless war. Strategically it was a disaster because it has handed Iraq over to Iran, the great enemy of the US. Policies in Baghdad are now set at the behest of Ahmadinejad and the theocracy in Teheran. Calling that something you can "hold you head up" over is a joke. A cruel joke on those who sacrificed to bring it about. Especially when those who planned and executed the illegal war -- Bush and his admininstration -- still walk about a free men. They should be bundled off the the International Criminal Court to be adjudicated for the blood on their hands. For an illegal war and for a policy of torture (which Obama continues!).

I really wish Obama could bring better government and a better economy to the US. But until Obama faces facts, admits his mistakes and the mistakes of previous administrations, until Obama get serious about the flaws in America and honestly presents how hard it will be to turn the misguided ship of state around, nothing will change. Words won't change the future. Obama is good with words. But he needs to deliver deeds. I don't see the deeds.

The Decline of American Civilization

From a posting by logician Richard Zach at the University of Calgary on the state of education in the US:

Gregory A. Petsko is the Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry & Chemistry at Brandeis University. In his column in Genome Biology (also published at Inside Higher Ed), he wrote an open letter to George Philip, the President of SUNY Albany, who evicerated the language department at his university. Priceless:

It seems to me that the way you went about [announcing the closure of the departments in a Friday afternoon meeting] couldn't have been more likely to alienate just about everybody on campus. In your position, I would have done everything possible to avoid that. I wouldn't want to end up in the 9th Bolgia (ditch of stone) of the 8th Circle of the Inferno, where the great 14th century Italian poet Dante Alighieri put the sowers of discord. There, as they struggle in that pit for all eternity, a demon continually hacks their limbs apart, just as in life they divided others.

The Inferno is the first book of Dante's Divine Comedy, one of the great works of the human imagination. There's so much to learn from it about human weakness and folly. The faculty in your Italian department would be delighted to introduce you to its many wonders -- if only you had an Italian department, which now, of course, you don't.

As a holder of an arts degree who worked in the high tech industry where almost all of my co-workers held advanced science degrees. I can tell you that I held my own. I rose through the years and became a key member of the R&D group. I can assure people that an arts degree is a thing of value, even if the business-oriented institutional presidents of US universities do not believe it. Smarts is smarts. Sure it helps to have training in the field in which you work. But except for the very tiny, tiny number of jobs which are real specialist jobs, a generalist education is more than enough if you have the smarts to go with it. Why? Because so much of knowledge is changing, you need to do lifelong learning and that requires a love of learning.

The wonder of an arts degree is that it puts you in contact with thousands of years of the human mind and its wondrous creations. This a purely technical education cannot and will not do. I believe that a background in the humanities is an excellent general background from which you can pursue specialist training in areas relevant to the workplace. I've seen far too many holders of advanced technical education simply unable to adapt to the demands of changing skills in a fast-moving technical workplace.

Finally, a bit of relevant history... The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose in the crisis of education where large "multiversities" like the University of California Berkeley saw their mission as no longer one of broad education but as a factory to turn out technicians for the modern economy.

Here is a bit from the famous speech by Mario Savio on December 2, 1964:

Now, I ask you to consider: if this is a firm, and if the Board of Regents are the board of directors, and if President Kerr in fact is the manager, then I'll tell you something: the faculty are a bunch of employees, and we're the raw material! But we're a bunch of raw material[s] that don't mean to have any process upon us, don't mean to be made into any product, don't mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We're human beings!

And that -- that brings me to the second mode of civil disobedience. There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

Here's the video of that speech:



That was the battle for a human education 50 years ago. Sadly, that fight still goes one. And it appears that the forces of enlightenment are engaged in a fighting retreat, giving ground, but trying to retain their principles as much as possible. Sad.

An Insight into American Education

And what do we see? Anxiety!

Here's a bit from a post by Robert X. Cringley on his worries about his own child and the excessive homework the poor kid is sent home to do each night:

American education, perhaps because of the No Child Left Behind Act, has become a testing nightmare. Metrics are everything and much of the curriculum is now intended not to educate but rather to pass the damned tests. It is precisely analogous to what I discovered thirty years ago investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, where reactor operators were trained to pass the operator test, not to actually operate the reactor. When things went wrong — when they went beyond the scripted scenarios — the operators had no idea what was happening inside that containment. Channing’s curriculum, too, tends to be 100 miles wide and an inch deep.

We’re being told our kids lack critical thinking skills, yet this curriculum doesn’t seem to teach those skills, at least not that I have seen.

Worse still, most of the homework is busywork. It teaches nothing. Worst of all, our child-centric culture has parents digging-in with their kids to do that homework, wasting all of our time and ultimately pitting adult against adult as surrogates for their exhausted kids.

What’s wrong with this picture? Everything.

When I was Channing’s age, 50 years ago, my parents’ attitude was one of benign neglect. They were busy doing whatever parents did back then (drinking and smoking cigarettes, mainly), but it sure didn’t include helping me with my homework. Somehow my siblings and I survived just fine. Yet today we’re supposedly faced with plummeting test scores and surging dropout rates despite whole generations of parents slaving away every night on homework. What gives?

Well one thing that gives is something I learned during my many years experiencing droughts in California: public officials don’t like good news, seeing it as un-motivating. If we had a dry year it was bad, they’d explain, because there wouldn’t be enough snowmelt, the reservoirs would be down but, most importantly, the forests and grasslands would be tinder-dry, increasing the danger of forest and wild fires. But if we had the occasional rainy year their line changed. Now the reservoirs were full (though that could change in a moment so don’t take any extra showers) but the extra snowmelt meant extra forest and grassland growth creating more combustible material making forest and wild fires even more likely. No matter what happened it was bad according to these guys because they didn’t want to ever give up the chance to preach down to us. They were determined to remove whatever joy there was in life.

Same thing in education. We aren’t as good as we used to be and that’s going to have a major impact on, well, everything. So the answer is always more resources, more testing, more consultants. Oh but no more art or music — those are too expensive.

Frankly I’m not sure any longer exactly what is the truth. Things might be getting better or worse, I don’t know. But I know I don’t generally trust the idiots who are telling me what to worry about.

Here's what Cringley finds to be strange about the American obsession about "falling behind" in the homework gap (an homage to the late 1950s/early 1960s "missile gap"):

German students have plenty of homework, too, and they go to school an average of 220 days per year to our 183. German kids go to school on Saturday. That should prove the point, right? Because nobody is saying the Germans are falling behind. Heck, they are the economic powerhouse of Europe.

But wait a minute. School in Germany starts at 8AM and ends each day at noon. Even the high schools follow that schedule. German schools don’t serve lunch because the kids have all gone home, I suppose to do their homework. But if you get home at 12:30 there is plenty of time for homework, eh?

Channing will spend this year 1,372 hours in school not counting basketball practice or chess club while the average German third-grader will spend 880 hours in school.

Personally, I was happy to be raised in the 1950s/60s environment. I did very little homework. The only thing I can remember were those essays that were assigned that I would finally sit down to write at 9:00 PM and finish around 2:00 AM all bleary eyed and strung out. It was no fun! And I didn't learn anything except that procrastination was painful. Ah... but that like high school typing were the two greatest, most useful, things that I learned.

The UK: Eating Your Seed Corn

Right wing nuts are rampant everywhere. In the UK they have pushed to raise fees for higher education. Wow! That is a great way to cut yourself off at the knees. You can "save" money now by not educating the next generation.

I accuse the UK Conservatives of having "too limited" a vision. Why don't they simply abolish education from the public purse and tell people they have to figure out how to pay to educate themselves. Obviously education is not important in a modern economy. Who cares that only 20% of the population earn enough to pay their own way. Let the other 80% take out loans. Or if they don't have collateral sufficient for a loan, let them go back to the "good old days" of my ancestors to made it to the new world as "indentured servants" (that's a fancy name for a person who sells himself into slavery for a limited time, 7 years, or 14 years, or 21 years depending how much money needs to be raised).

I don't claim to understand this, but the trend of raising costs in the following bit from BBC News is pretty obvious:

The motion, which still has to be backed by the House of Lords, raises the ceiling on annual tuition fees for English students to £9,000 - although the government says that would only apply in "exceptional circumstances" where universities meet "much tougher conditions on widening participation and fair access".

Another motion, also backed by a 21 majority, says the "basic threshold" for fees should rise to up to £6,000 a year - up from £3,290 at the moment. This would be introduced for the 2012-13 academic year.

I'm sitting in Canada thinking that some kind of hallucinogen has been unleashed in the water. Ireland has taken the people's money and given it to the banks and their ultra-rich owners and told the rest of the population to "suck it up" and work harder, pay more taxes, because the rich want to feather their beds a bit more. Apparently the Brits got jealous, so they are now trying to outdo the Irish with their own schemes like pricing education out of reach of the bottom 80% of the population!

A second thought... It has been several hundred years since the commoners cut off the head of a royal. Maybe the time has come again...



I'm being extreme, but when a "government" so caves in to the rich that it destroys the future of the nation' youth, extreme words are forced upon you. To lie down and take something like this is to allow those with power to crush the life out of the future of a country.

I simply don't understand where the crazy right all around the world is on the march to put a boot in the face of working people and the middle class. All in the service of the ultra-rich, the top 1%, the top 0.1%, and more seriously in service to the top 0.01% who are calling the shots.

Yet another thought... The above attack on the British "royals" is seen as shocking. This is seen as hooligans and ruffians gone amok. But if you watch the video below, similar students are held up as heros...



Violence is very bad. But when you have a government that won't listen, you drive a portion of the population to acts of madness. In the case of Tianamen it is held up as "patriotism" and "heroic". But the riots in the UK are held up as "meaningless violence". Amazing how the same thing looks so different. As far as I can tell, in both cases it is the youth of the country trying to save their country from madness that they see in the governing class!