While back in La-La Land…

Chickens coming home to roost?

…or as someone much wiser has said, you reap what you sow.

A Concise Summary of the Situation

 

Obsolete?

In an age when scientists are creating artificial intelligence, too many of our educational institutions seem to be creating artificial stupidity.

So observes, quite rightly so, Dr. Sowell in his most recent essay entitled, “Is Thinking Obsolete?”  As usual, his logic is spot on, and the deductions from it are distressing at best, at least for those of us who do think.  Liberal strategy calls to for the induction of ignorance, of not thinking but only feeling.  Dr. Sowell serves up another example of the disastrous consequences of such a strategy.

Case in point (emphasis added):

Geraldo Rivera has denounced the Drudge Report for carrying news stories that show some of the negative consequences and dangers from allowing vast numbers of youngsters to enter the country illegally and be spread across the country by the Obama administration.

Some of these youngsters are already known to be carrying lice and suffering from disease. Since there have been no thorough medical examinations of most of them, we have no way of knowing whether, or how many, are carrying deadly diseases that will spread to American children when these unexamined young immigrants enter schools across the country.

The attack against Matt Drudge has been in the classic tradition of demagogues. It turns questions of fact into questions of motive. Geraldo accuses Drudge of trying to start a "civil war."

Note how the strategy can be implemented.  Note it and be aware of it, and ready to denounce it as stupidity on display.

Another Fine Theory Mugged by Facts

Thomas Sowell’s most recent exercise in throwing reality into the face of liberals relates to the frequently espoused dogma of the Left that race plays an important role in the quality of education as measured by the resultant outcomes of that education…regardless of any other factors.

The issue at hand:  blacks in America score lower on test scores than do whites, and obviously it’s because their race faces such extreme discrimination in their educational opportunities that it must be due to racist whites in control of that education, etc., etc.

Then comes reality from Britain (emphases added):

The November 9th-15th issue of the distinguished British magazine "The Economist" reports that, among children who are eligible for free meals in England’s schools, black children of immigrants from Africa meet the standards of school tests nearly 60 percent of the time — as do immigrant children from Bangladesh and Pakistan. Black children of immigrants from the Caribbean meet the standards less than 50 percent of the time.

At the bottom, among those children who are all from families with low enough incomes to receive free meals at school, are white English children, who meet the standards 30 percent of the time.

"The Economist" points out that, in one borough of London, white students scored lower than black students in any London borough.

White students are consistently doing worse than blacks children?  As Dr. Sowell notes:

These white students in England come from the same race that produced Shakespeare and the great scientist Sir Isaac Newton, among other world class intellects over the centuries. But today many young whites in England are barely literate, and have trouble with simple arithmetic. Nor are these white students the victims of racial discrimination, much less the descendants of slaves.

So what is going on?  Might the Left be incorrect in their conclusions regarding the causes of the grade disparity?  Again, Dr. Sowell makes an observation from the facts at hand:

What do low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common? It cannot be simply low incomes, because children from other groups in the same low-income brackets outperform whites in England and outperform blacks in America.

What low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States have in common is a generations-long indoctrination in victimhood. The political left in both countries has, for more than half a century, maintained a steady and loud drumbeat of claims that the deck is stacked against those at the bottom.

The American left uses race and the British left uses class, but the British left has been at it longer. In both countries, immigrants who have not been in the country as long have not been so distracted by such ideology into a blind resentment and lashing out at other people.

And this little tidbit:

We in America have gotten used to vast gaps between blacks and whites on test scores. But this was not always the case, in places where there was anything like comparable education.

Back in the 1940s, before the vast expansion of the welfare state and the ideology of victimhood used to justify it, there was no such gap on test scores between black schools in Harlem and white, working class schools on New York’s lower east side.

Dr. Sowell’s closing statement is really quite poignant; when you sow ideological falsehoods, you do not reap reality:

You can find the data on pages 40-41 of an article of mine in the Fall 1981 issue of "Teachers College Record," a journal published by Columbia University — that is, if you think facts matter more than rhetoric or social visions.

On atrophied neurons

Eminent anti-idiotarian Thomas Sowell hits another one out of the ballpark with his essay “Is Thinking Obsolete?”  Some key excerpts to induce a complete reading:

There is a remarkable range of ways of seeming to argue without actually producing any coherent argument.

Decades of dumbed-down education no doubt have something to do with this, but there is more to it than that. Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination. Moreover, it is largely indoctrination based on the same set of underlying and unexamined assumptions among teachers and institutions.

and

A moral monopoly is the antithesis of a marketplace of ideas. One sign of this sense of moral monopoly among the left intelligentsia is that the institutions most under their control — the schools, colleges and universities — have far less freedom of speech than the rest of American society.

While advocacy of homosexuality, for example, is common on college campuses, and listening to this advocacy is often obligatory during freshman orientation, criticism of homosexuality is called "hate speech" that is subject to punishment.

His conclusion is one that incapacitates our country presently and will doom it to disaster in the long run.  But then, maybe that’s the goal of those responsible?  (Emphasis added)

The failure of our educational system goes beyond what they fail to teach. It includes what they do teach, or rather indoctrinate, and the graduates they send out into the world, incapable of seriously weighing alternatives for themselves or for American society.

How to answer a liberal…

From Mark Steyn’s mailbox, an excellent example of a liberal trying to muddle the issue and missing the primary criticism, and Mr. Steyn’s politically incorrect response:

Mark…

Read your recent "Jo Biden Teachable Moment" essay. True, Vice Presidents and their selected quotes are often even easier targets than Presidents. Ask Dan Quayle. The task of taking Biden’s words to a group of school children trying to explain his point of view… and then using that somewhat simplistic narrative as "policy gospel" was easy pickings. Just not necessarily accurate gospel.

What has been happening (sometimes, more accurately, what’s not happening) with funding for public education locally, as well as at the state national levels over the years, is pathetic.

No Child Left Behind, which was formulated based upon a series of exaggerations and lies (Sound familiar? Think WMDs. Same "brain trust.") regarding public education in Texas (The widely debunked "Houston Miracle") has gone a long way towards wasting precious resources in both money and educator talent. More like Plenty of Children Left Behind… married to No Tax Dollars Left Behind.

Here in Pennsylvania, former Republican Governor Ridge (before Rendell), wasted enormous resources chasing very unpopular voucher programs which were constantly rejected by a vast majority of state voters. New Republican Governor, Corbett, has again picked up this dubious, mostly for-profit voucher legislation, and is pushing it mightily despite the fact that poll after poll, study after study, across all of PA and the country, shows no real educational benefits of vouchers.

Moreover, virtually 2/3s of Pennsylvania’s population is opposed using public tax dollars for sending kids to private and/or parochial schools.

Not to mention the unconstitutionality issue of using public tax dollars in an often thinnly-veiled attempt to prop up struggling religious schools.

State and federal net funding for public schools has dramatically shrunk over the years… not just during these tough economic times… and that support is still shrinking…. exacerbated by increasing and costly state and federal unfunded mandates. And, at least in PA, the state actually has a budget surplus.

So, we can take pot shots at a Vice President’s speech to some school children, or we can get serious… and take more meaningful shots at politicians in State Capitols and in Washington who seem far more invested in smearing and stonewalling their opposition than they are in supporting adequate financial support for our public schools.

There are many successful, high-functioning schools and school districts in our country. I happen to live in one. But there are also many struggling schools and school districts. I happen to live "across the street" from one. It’s not the kids faults. It is, to a great extent, the fault of those adults who would rather play politics with the future of our children than to responsibly address their needs. Like smoking political crack, partisan rhetoric may feel good for a moment, but does not replace the hard, day-to-day work of tackling the education of all our children with all their needs. In fact, such partisan rhetoric, when it continuously stalemates unselfish, real educational solutions, is as destructive to generations of students as is poverty… or drugs.

In the end, the real decision people will have to make is, do we want to again start committing adequate resources to our public schools? Or do we want to build more and bigger prisons.

Our adults should know better. Our kids deserve better.

Sincerely,

David Rackow, Board of School Directors, School District of Cheltenham Township
Cheltenham, Pennsylvania

Mark Says:

C’mon, man, you’re a big-time educrat on a "Board of School Directors" and the best you can do is a Dan Quayle dig? With the benefit of your fine education, you’re not even up to a Charles Gates Dawes crack? Oh, and by the way, for future reference, the "Jo" of "Jo Biden" takes an "e" at the end – like "potatoe".

Hey, you know what’s even funnier about that Dan Quayle guy? He’s so dumb he couldn’t even come up with his own misspelling! When he corrected the kid’s answer to "potatoe", he was going from the flash card written out by the teacher. You have to wonder what was going through Quayle’s head: Gee, that doesn’t look correct, but she’s a teacher and she must know the answers, right? Like far too many politicians, he deferred to the wisdom of the professional educators – and it destroyed him. That’s the real lesson of that incident – not that Dan Quayle can’t spell "potato" but that an American schoolteacher teaching spelling can’t.

Be that as it may, obviously "No Child Left Behind" is a racket, as some of us said years ago. But that wasn’t what my column was about. You say America won’t "commit adequate resources". I pointed out that America as a whole spends more per pupil on education than any developed nation except Switzerland – and York City spends a third above that. And you have nothing to show for it. Why can’t you address that fact? Bush is gone, get over it. But the Finns and the Koreans and the Chinese and the Swiss and the Japanese and Canadians and Dutch and New Zealanders, Singaporeans, Brits, Australians, Austrians, Germans, Belgians, French, Icelanders, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Estonians, Slovenes, Luxembourgers and Liechtensteiners are all still out there, and they’re cleaning your clock. As I pointed out, the York City budget deficit is higher than what the Slovaks spend per student in total – and yet amazingly they get better math results than you do. That’s the question for you "educators": why are you both so expensive and so utterly crap?

If per capita spending is a third above the per capita spending in the highest spending nation in the OECD and it’s still not "adequate", what would be "adequate"? Fifteen grand per pupil? Twenty-five? Forty-three? Or, in your more honest moments in the deepest darkest recesses of your soul, do you have a vague suspicion that, even if you "committed adequate resources" of a million dollars per student, they’d still be mediocre and unable to compete with Finland or Slovakia or anywhere else because the system you represent is mediocre and unable to compete. Instead of answering that, you start pansying around with Bush WMD cracks. That may still wow ’em on Open Mike Night at the NEA cocktail lounge, but do you realize what a parochial dweeb you sound to the rest of us? To repeat: The problem in Pennsylvania is not the lack of money, but that so much of the money is entirely wasted. On the evidence of your letter, I would include whatever remuneration you receive from the School District of Cheltenham Township.

~~~

I think that left a mark!

Why Johnny Can’t Figure Out Which End of the Hammer to Hold

From the inimitable Mark Steyn over at NRO:

I see that the president, in a spirit of bipartisan compromise, is proposing this time round to toss a mere third of a trillion dollars into the Potomac and watch it float out to sea, all in the interests of what the Associated Press calls “jump-starting” jobs.

David Espo and Jim Kuhnhenn are using “jump-start” metaphorically. In fact, I would be interested to know whether Barack Obama has ever in his life jump-started anything in a non-metaphorical sense. Or whether Messrs Espo and Kuhnhenn have. In my (ahem) new book, I have a little section on how so much of our language has decayed from the practical to the metaphorical — a somewhat predictable by-product of an age which values six-and-a-half years of a leisurely Bachelor’s in Whatever Studies over the ability actually to do anything. So I was interested to see this piece from my pals at Maclean’s up in Canada on how our present generation is “mechanically challenged“:

Shop classes are all but a memory in most schools—a result of liability fears, budget cuts and an obsession with academics. Still, even in vocational high schools where shop classes endure, a skills decline is evident. One auto shop teacher says he’s teaching his Grade 12 students what, 10 years ago, he taught Grade Nines. “We would take apart a transmission, now I teach what it is.” Remarkably, most of his Grade 11 students arrive not knowing which way to turn a screwdriver to tighten a screw. If he introduces a nut threaded counterclockwise, they have trouble conceptualizing the need to turn the screwdriver the opposite way. That’s because, he says, “They are texting non-stop; they don’t care about anything else. It’s like they’re possessed.”

At home, spare time is no longer spent doing things like dismantling gadgets, building model airplanes or taking apart old appliances with dad; there’s no tinkering with cars, which are so computerized now you couldn’t tinker if you wanted to. A 2009 poll showed one-third of teens spend zero time per week doing anything hands-on at all.

Even if we avoid total societal collapse and/or an Iranian nuclear strike and so will not be required to build a rude dwelling in the wilds, in a post-prosperity America a lot of us will have to figure out how to make stuff last longer. Doesn’t sound like we’re up to it.

Beyond that, almost all the great transformative breakthroughs of the last half-millennium were made not by eminent scientists but by tinkerers. (Derb is very good on this stuff, so I hope he’ll take it from here.) But nobody tinkers any more, and we are ruled by thinkers. Who think the answer is to dump another third of a trillion bucks into trying to jump-start seized-up metaphors.

Planned Obsolescence of the Mind

Read the following recent observations carefully:

The ignorance about our country is staggering. According to one survey, only 28% of students could identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. Only 26% of students knew that the first 10 amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights. Fewer than one-quarter of students knew that George Washington was the first president of the United States. … Ignorance and possibly contempt for American values, civics and history might help explain how someone like Barack Obama could become president of the United States. At no other time in our history could a person with longtime associations with people who hate our country become president. … The fact that Obama became president and brought openly Marxist people into his administration doesn’t say so much about him as it says about the effects of decades of brainwashing of the American people by the education establishment, media and the intellectual elite.

–economist Walter E. Williams

The above situation is not by chance.  It has come about through careful planning and skillful and persistent execution on the part of the Left.  It is well documented in their goals going back into the 1950’s, which I documented here back in 2006 on my first blogsite.  Note goals 17-19.  Many of their other goals are being achieved through our public education system.  This is one of the reasons it will take years to correct our course, if, indeed, it is not too late.  We can only pray like it all depends on God, and work like it all depends on us.

Forging ever onward!

Yes, it’s that bad…

A category of issues we generally follow here is the dismal state of public edjamacation.  I recently found a comically sad example of some of the problem on a site I sometimes visit at the end of the day, www.JumboJoke.com.  (One caveat:  the site’s author frequently posts jokes that could be considered offensive by some, including yours truly.  In most cases he tags them as such so the reader is forewarned and may choose to skip said page.  Thus, I do not endorse all the examples of humor found there.)  Below are portions of a recent post, the title of which tells it all.  Read it and weep for the state of our young!  (Frighteningly, these are future voters!)

The Problem With Social Networks

"Social Networks" like Facebook are booming — especially Facebook. There’s only one problem with them: to communicate there, members pretty much have to write. How can that be a problem? After all, all of us learned to write in school, right? Well, no! And here are some real life examples.

 

Rachel: "I’m board."
Jeff: "I’m chalk, we should get together."
Rachel: "BOARD! Like I don’t have anything to do, not BORD, like a chalkbord. Learn to spellcheck."
Jeff: "Oh god I hope you don’t breed."

 

Abigale to Darcy: "You shouldn’t be aloud to talk."
Darcy: "You shouldn’t be allowed to spell."

 

Post: "Never leave facebook open. Sueing _______ for defaming my character."
Reply: "You did not spell ‘suing’ correctly and you’re in law school so I think you just defamed your own character."

 

Cory: "DONT LET YOUR EMOTIONS OVER POWER YOUR INTELIGENCE’S"
Alexa: "seriously?"
Cory: "ya why ?"
Alexa: "overpower* intelligence*"
Cory: "WUT? CUZ I DIDNT PUT SPACES . are u stupid"

 

Poster: "when is the point when you no that you cant fail worse?"
Reply: "When you realize you spelled ‘know’ incorrectly."

And here’s why this happens:

Alyssa: "honer roll now with mostly a’s and 1 b hopping for princapals honer roll next time :-)" Lee: "Just curious, does your school give spelling tests?"
Alyssa: "nope y?"

That, and:

Post: "….thank you Massachusetts for making it impossible for me becoming a teacher. Stupid a** MTELs"
Reply: "’For me becoming a teacher.’ I suspect Massachusetts has its reasons."
Poster: "for anyone to become a teacher. the tests are rediculous."
Reply: "Rediculous? You sure they are not greeniculous?"
Poster: "ha. =) its just a test that is suppose to test you on your reading and writing….but its over stupid topics like chocolate and mexican landmarks."

Yeah. That.