Education

Sucking the Blood of a Declining Civilization

~ admin ~ Leave a comment
civilization
The 7 Maoi facing the equinox sunset at Ahu Akivi on Easter Island (photo copyright Ian Sewell)

Paul Rosenberg – Civilization has to be transmitted from one generation to another. If it isn’t, processes break down and life becomes difficult. Soon there must be a painful reform, or else the civilization will be lost.

This is fundamentally the job of families (especially parents), but at the moment that’s not really possible: How many families can survive on one income? And if one of the parents can’t stay home and teach the fundamental lessons of civilization, who will pass them to the next generation?

Certainly the better daycare facilities try, but to think that someone watching a couple dozen kids is going to transmit civilization to them as effectively as a parent who’s with the child day and night is simply ridiculous. The blame for this rests almost solely at the feet of the state of course, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

I’ll begin by quoting the redoubtable Fred Reed on the current situation:

We live in a dying culture and, soon, a diminished country. It cannot be saved.

Not true? Add up the bits and pieces. We laugh in horror, some of us, primarily the older, at the decline of schooling, the courses like Batman and the Struggle for Gender Equity. Comic, yes. Yet in aggregate, these constitute an academic and civilizational collapse both profound and irreversible. Enstupidation does not happen in a healthy country. Who even wants to reverse this onrushing night? Not the universities, nor the teacher’s unions, nor a professoriat gone as daft as the “students,” nor the banks battening on student loans [sic].

Continue reading →

Gates Foundation: We Made Mistakes, But We Still Support Rotten To The …

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

educationJoseph P. Farrell – It has been a long time since I ranted about Amairikun egdykayshun and the nitwit busybody billionaires that, since progressive education was a gleam in John D. Rockefailure’s and Andrew Smarmygie’s eyes, have made such a hash of it. Well, I have to rant again after reading this article shared by Mr. V.T.:

Gates Foundation chief admits Common Core mistakes

Yes, it’s confession time for Bill and Melinda Gates, and for that matter, even the Los Angeles Pravda-Times:

Sue Desmond-Hellmann, foundation chief executive officer, wrote this in a newly released annual letter:

We are firm believers that education is a bridge to opportunity in America. My colleague, Allan Golston, spoke passionately about this at a gathering of education experts last year. However, we’re facing the fact that it is a real struggle to make system-wide change.

And she wrote this about the foundation’s investment in creating, implementing and promoting the Common Core State Standards:

Unfortunately, our foundation underestimated the level of resources and support required for our public education systems to be well-equipped to implement the standards. We missed an early opportunity to sufficiently engage educators – particularly teachers – but also parents and communities so that the benefits of the standards could take flight from the beginning.

This has been a challenging lesson for us to absorb, but we take it to heart. The mission of improving education in America is both vast and complicated, and the Gates Foundation doesn’t have all the answers.

Continue reading →

What Genius Thinks Of Education

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

educationPaul Rosenberg – As I compiled the thoughts from geniuses last week, one group of thoughts that I left out – simply because there were so many of them – were the thoughts of geniuses on the subject of regimented education. Thus, today’s list.

Again in this area, the brightest men and women reach a surprisingly consistent set of conclusions. And again, we’ll begin with Einstein:

Albert Einstein

  • It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
  • School failed me, and I failed the school. It bored me. The teachers behaved like sergeants. I wanted to learn what I wanted to know, but they wanted me to learn for the exam… I felt that my thirst for knowledge was being strangled by my teachers; grades were their only measurement.
  • I learned mostly at home, first from my uncle and then from a student who came to eat with us once a week. He would give me books on physics and astronomy.
  • Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.

Baruch Spinoza

  • Academies that are founded at public expense are instituted not so much to cultivate men’s natural abilities as to restrain them.

Marshall McLuhan

  • Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.

Continue reading →

Poverty, Overpopulation and Eugenics

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

educationKatherine Frisk – The solution to poverty, overpopulation and the obvious threat this poses to the dwindling availability of resources that cannot sustain large populations is obvious. But the solution requires investment, time, patience and hard work. It requires money.

In the 20th century all of this was available to us, but many instead chose more profitable options such as armed conflict and genocide which is the aftermath of war; or poisonous genetically modified maize which increases infertility and cancer rates; vaccines disguised as anti-malaria in order to make women infertile; or viruses like HIV, Bird Flu, Mad Cow disease or Ebola. Cull ém and make a profit.

The real solution is the education of women. All women. This requires money and investment. Singapore took this option and in a short span of time, reduced poverty levels and created a stable population growth rate that would not threaten this islands limited resources. Birth control and family planning was part of the program. They did not resort to dictatorship coups and the culling that invariably ensues justifying these actions with excuses that range from “political dissidents,” “liberals,””communists,” “terrorists” or “engineered civil war.”

A country like India which has a disastrous over population problem and poverty levels so horrific that are not seen in many other parts of the world, is exacerbated by little to no education for the majority of women coupled with a medieval caste system. The cause is a social and economic system where women are third class citizens, forced into arranged marriages, the purpose of which is the transference of wealth from the bride’s family to the bridegroom with expensive dowries attached. In other words, parents pay a heavy price to marry off their daughters. The resulting poverty and overpopulation is dealt with by abducting women and forcing them to have their tubes tied rather than educate them. Bride killings are also common.

In South Africa poverty levels even after 20 years of ANC rule is still blamed on “the whites.” A convenient whipping boy for all current social, economic and political problems. But the root cause for high poverty levels and unemployment is the low standard of education for the vast majority of black women, coupled with a disastrous social scourge where almost 50% of women are single parents, some supporting up to six children with little to no financial and emotional support from the fathers of those children. The situation has been exacerbated by a decline in family values and responsible parenting; high divorce rates; the institution of marriage denigrated; and the proliferation of hard-core and often violent pornography that has as its spawn, rape, sexual child abuse, teenage prostitution and unwanted babies. Continue reading →

The Changing World of Work 5: “Human Robots” and High-Level Skills

~ admin ~ Leave a comment

Charles Hugh Smith – While it is impossible to summarize the job market in a vast, dynamic economy, we can say that the key to any job is creating value. That can be anything from serving valuesomeone a plate of mac-and-cheese to fixing a decaying fence to feeding chickens to securing web servers to managing a complex project–the list is essentially endless.

The question is: how much value does the labor create? The value created, and the number of people who are able to do the same work, establishes the rate employers can afford to pay for that particular task/service.

As noted elsewhere in this series, work that can be commoditized has low value because it can be outsourced or replaced by software and machines. In cases where it is not tradable, i.e. it cannot be performed overseas, the value is limited by the profit margins of the service being provided and the number of people who can perform the work.

In many cases, for example, the fast food industry, workers are trained to become human robots, highly efficient at repeating the same tasks dozens of times per shift.

The severe limitation of human robot jobs is that they rarely offer much opportunity to learn a wide variety of skills–precisely what enables us to create more value with our labor.

Longtime correspondent Kevin K. describes how this lack of opportunity is a function of Corporate America, which demands every employee follow set procedures to homogenize the customer experience throughout the company and insure the product is the same everywhere in the market sector. Continue reading →