Public Education Must Die! #2

Reason Online once had an intriguing article by John Stossel on American education. He discusses an ABC Special Report that he did entitled “Stupid in America”.

As I’m sure that I’ve mentioned at some point, I’m a recovering public school teacher myself. A career that I committed myself to in a moment of altruistic weakness. I know, it’s a horrible thing for a individualistic, scientific, capitalistic, Objectivist, Age of Reason-loving man to do to himself. But after years of meeting and dealing with working teachers I began to feel a calling.

I realized that many of those kids probably went days at a time without hearing a rational voice, or without having their spirits and rational yearnings crushed, either by the teachers themselves of the pack animal-like mentality of their fellow students. I decided that I could make my contribution in that way.

Unfortunately, this was not to be so. When I started out I figured the easiest way to be a good teacher would be not to do all the stupid things my teachers did while I was growing up. All this accomplished was a greater appreciation of what my favorite teachers went through. It seems that half the stupid stuff my teachers said or did was district policy, the other half was state law. Maybe this is why administrators view innovation as equaling insurrection.

So we Americans pay more for education than any other nation on Earth and then get the following from Stossel’s article:

…we gave identical tests to high school students in New Jersey and in Belgium. The Belgian kids cleaned the American kids’ clocks. The Belgian kids called the American students “stupid.”

We didn’t pick smart kids to test in Europe and dumb kids in the United States. The American students attend an above-average school in New Jersey, and New Jersey’s kids have test scores that are above average for America.

The American boy who got the highest score told me: “I’m shocked, ’cause it just shows how advanced they are compared to us.”

We start off with a reminder of a peculiarly American phenomenon. The more time American kids spend in school the less they seem to know.

At age ten, American students take an international test and score well above the international average. But by age fifteen, when students from forty countries are tested, the Americans place twenty-fifth. The longer kids stay in American schools, the worse they do in international competition. They do worse than kids from countries that spend much less money on education.

This is a similar phenomenon to the one that Michael Barone wrote about in “Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future“. It famously asked how a nation that produces so many spectacularly incompetent 18 year-olds can simultaneously produce so many extraordinarily competent 30 year-olds. In a nutshell, Soft American coddles them until they are 18 or so, then dumps them unprepared into the clutches of Hard America which rapidly separates the wheat from the chaff. A civilian baptism of fire if you will.

I find it interesting that Barone chose those two ages to compare. They are 12 years apart; the same amount of time it takes to earn a high school diploma. One might say that students spend 12 years getting their diploma and 12 years getting over getting it.

I have personal experience with this. I was fortunate (unfortunate?) to be smart enough to skate through public school. I could learn by “osmosis” as some people say, or as I liked to call it, the sit and “soak method”. Except for math, I could passively absorb enough information to pass my tests. I was the kind of student who got an A on almost every test, but a zero on almost every homework assignment because I rarely turn any in. It usually averaged out to a C and I could keep concentrating on “important” things, usually the bosom on the girl sitting next to me.

Going to college was almost as easy–at first. My coursework as an underclassman was pretty breezy too. Then I hit my upper division classes and found myself losing the battle against organic chemistry. I completely lacked the self-discipline necessary to tackle that course. Up until that time I had considered having to study 2 or 3 hours a week to be an outrageous burden. Nowadays, when I’m taking classes, I feel guilty if I don’t study 2 or 3 hours a day

Stossel’s article puts the blame on a cause familiar to card-carrying capitalists the world over:

This should come as no surprise once you remember that public education in the USA is a government monopoly. Don’t like your public school? Tough. The school is terrible? Tough. Your taxes fund that school regardless of whether it’s good or bad. That’s why government monopolies routinely fail their customers. Union-dominated monopolies are even worse.

And I would suspect that union-dominated government monopolies, like public schools, are the worst of all.

Tell Einstein to Sit Down and Shut Up

We’ve all seen it. That bumper sticker with the Albert Einstein quote: “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.”  Usually it is seen on the back of a poorly-maintained 20-year-old vehicle that belches smoke like a 19th Century smokestack. Liberals love it. One of the most brilliant physicists who has ever lived agrees with their position on war and the military. But that’s the problem now isn’t it? He was a brilliant at physics and not much else. Albert would have made a good poster child for the concept of multiple intelligences if it had been circulating back then. Few things he believed, and said, are more absurd that the quote above. It shows a profound lack of understanding of basic human nature. In fact, there is a quote from another person that says exactly the opposite: “If you would live in peace, prepare for war.”

My point? Precisely this: The world is filled with people that are bright, or at least cunning, in some area and they mistakenly believe that intelligence or cunning in one area necessarily translates into intelligence in all other areas. For instance, I have an ex that was good at math, but if you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers she couldn’t add, subtract, multiply, or divide to save her life, and her check book proved it.

My advice? Generally, don’t base your assessment of other people’s intelligence on their own assessment of it. Bear in mind that it’s quite common for someone to be a genius in one area and a blithering idiot in another. Make them prove themselves in areas outside of their expertise before you rely on them.

Specifically, my advice is to bear this all in mind until the November elections. Now that His Royal Smugness is the presumptive nominee we can expect to be treated to a display of just that sort of behavior. He is obviously bright in some ways, but the few positions he has dared to take openly show him to be incapable of learning from history, even recent history. Be vigilant, and keep an eye on the gullible around you.

The Memo Writers’s Observations on Life #2

Students at the Michael Moore Elementary School proudly display their winning entry in the Independence Day banner contest. By the way, God created dirty words so liberals wouldn’t be mute.

1. People shouldn’t drink and vote.
2. Voting for Democrats is nothing to be ashamed of, as long as you do it in the dark and wash your hands afterwards. (Apologies to Robert A. Heinlein.)
3. To liberals it will always be 1969.
4. Fifty-year-old men shouldn’t wear pony-tails.
5. Public schools have turned into giant under-staffed day care centers.
6. Left-wingers keep shrieking the same old tired talking points for the same reason that skydivers keep yanking on the ripcord of a parachute that has failed to open.
7. Why aren’t more open-border proponents studying Spanish and Arabic? They’re going to need it.
8. Liberals deeply resent the religionization of Christmas.
9. Feminists hate women.
10. Children don’t want freedom as much as they want parents.
11. Liberals think failure is a virtue.
12. Real life lesbians don’t look like the ones in the movies.
13. Most university professors have lost their key to the clue locker.
14. The concept of an objective reality makes liberals wake up screaming at night.
15. The French still think they’re significant.