Category Archives: Education

Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

Che Guevara

February 10, 2014 Rand Simberg 10 Comments

…and the American (and other) idiots who admire him:

Che’s comrades and associates were equally ruthless. Venezuelan-born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal, was trained in one of Che’s guerrilla camps outside Havana. He emerged from his studies a monster and became the most wanted terrorist on earth. “Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed,” he said following Al Qaeda’s assault on New York and Washington. “I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States nonstop from the beginning. I can’t describe that wonderful feeling of relief.”

He is serving a life sentence in the French penal system for murder.

And yet anti-establishment young people all over the world have Che’s face on their walls and their T-shirts. Most of them don’t know anything real about the man they admire. They have no idea he was one of the most violently illiberal establishment figures in the Western Hemisphere’s history. They admire the image, which is and always has been a fraud.

Fontova quotes a Cuban exile who goes by the moniker Charlie Bravo who says Che’s fans in the West need a kick in the ass by reality. “I’d loved to have seen those Sorbonne and Berkeley and Berlin student protesters with their ‘groovy’ Che posters try their ‘anti-authority’ grandstanding in Cuba at the time. I’d love to have seen Che and his goons get their hands on them. They’d have gotten a quick lesson about the ‘fascism’ they were constantly complaining about—and firsthand. They would have quickly found themselves sweating and gasping from forced labor in Castros and Che’s concentration camps, or jabbed in the butt by ‘groovy’ bayonets when they dared slow down and perhaps getting their teeth shattered by a ‘groovy’ machine-gun butt if they adopted the same attitude in front of Che’s militia as they adopted in front of those campus cops.”

Of course, that’s not the only subject on which they need a kick in the ass by reality.

Read the whole thing, and be sure to hit Michael’s tip jar.

Business, Education, Political Commentary

Obama Has A Point

February 3, 2014 Rand Simberg 7 Comments

Mark the day that Glenn Reynolds agrees with the president. I don’t think he goes far enough here, though:

Right now, too many people go to college by default, even if they don’t usually major in art history. College is a status symbol that many regard as essential to membership in the middle class, but now it’s a status symbol that requires a six-figure investment, often supported by student loans.

There’s nothing wrong with going to college, and there’s nothing wrong with liberal-arts majors, so long as they’re rigorous: The world does not enjoy a surplus of people who can think critically and write clearly, and America is certainly not overloaded with experts in foreign languages. The real problem is with non-rigorous majors, which are common. Those cost just as much, but leave their graduates no better off than when they entered, and often in debt to boot.

If they were only no better off, it wouldn’t be as bad, but many of them come out of the experience notably less educated and malinformed, in the sense that they have been indoctrinated into the nonsense that the faculty provides.

Business, Education, History, Media Criticism, Philosophy, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

The Death Of The Humanities

January 29, 2014 Rand Simberg 14 Comments

Thoughts on the depths to which they’ve plunged, by classics professor Victor Davis Hanson:

…classical liberal education—despite the fashionable critique that it had never been disinterested—for a century was largely apolitical. Odysseus was critiqued as everyman, not an American CEO, a proto-Christian saint, or the caricature of white patriarchal privilege. Instead Homer made students of all races and classes and both genders think twice about the contradictions of the human experience: which is the greatest danger to civilization, the Lala land of the comfortable Lotus Eaters, or the brutal pre-polis savagery of the tribal Cyclopes? Telemachus was incidentally white, rich, and male, but essentially a youthful everyman coming of age, with all the angst and insecurities that will either overwhelm the inexperienced and lead to perpetual adolescence, or must be conquered on the path to adulthood. Odysseus towers among his lesser conniving and squabbling crewmen—but why then does his curiosity and audacity ensure that all his crewmen who hitch their star to the great man end up dead?

In the zero-sum game of the college curricula, what was crowded out over the last half-century was often the very sort of instruction that had once made employers take a risk in hiring a liberal arts major. Humanities students were more likely to craft good prose. They were trained to be inductive rather than deductive in their reasoning, possessed an appreciation of language and art, and knew the referents of the past well enough to put contemporary events into some sort of larger abstract context. In short, they were often considered ideal prospects as future captains of business, law, medicine, or engineering.

Not now. The world beyond the campus has learned that college students know how and why to take a political position but not how to defend it through logic and example. If employers are turned off by a lack of real knowledge, they are even more so when it is accompanied by zealousness. Ignorance and arrogance are a fatal combination.

Ignorance and arrogance is a deadly combo, as demonstrated by the current occupant of the Oval Office.

Business, Economics, Education, Health, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Democrats’ War On The Young

January 20, 2014 Rand Simberg 1 Comment

The young are finally starting to get unhappy about it.

The Republicans should hammer on this the same way the Dems lied about the fake “war on women.”

Business, Economics, Education, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society, Social Commentary, Space, Technology and Society

Jobs And Technology

January 19, 2014 Rand Simberg 18 Comments

A good survey at The Economist on the coming tsunami on unskilled labor, for which no government is prepared. They’re right that the most important thing is to reform K through post-grad education, root and branch, but there are a lot of entrenched interests that will continue to fight that.