They’re not liberals.
Category Archives: Education
The Cargo Cult
…of credentials.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from (uncredentialed) Mark Steyn:
The justification for this absurd prolongation of adolescence is that it opens up opportunities for the disadvantaged. But credential-fetishization has the opposite effect. Remember Ronald Reagan, alumnus of Eureka College, Illinois? Since then, for the first time in its history, America has lived under continuous rule by Ivy League – Yale (Bush I), Yale Law (Clinton), Harvard Business (Bush II), Harvard Law (Obama). In 2009, over a quarter of Obama’s political appointees had ties to Harvard; over 90 per cent had “advanced degrees”. How’s that working out for you? In my soon to be imminently forthcomingly imminent book, I point out that once upon a time America was the land where guys without degrees (Truman) or only 18 months of formal education (Lincoln) or no schooling at all (Zachary Taylor) could become president. Credentialization is shrinking what was America’s advantage – a far greater social mobility than Europe. We’re decaying into a society where 40 per cent of the population do minimal-skill service jobs and the rest run up a trillion dollars of debt in order to avoid that fate, and ne’er the twain shall meet, except for perfunctory social pleasantries in the drive-thru lane.
We’re looking at education upside down: We should be telescoping it, not extending it.
But think of all the academic bureaucrats! Won’t someone think of the academic bureaucrats?
What You Can Do For Liberty
Three things, from Instapundit.
In light of depressing things like this, I’d also suggest a reading of the Declaration at your gathering tomorrow. The leftists who have taken over the educational system seem to have won.
Of course, to be fair, like the “Jaywalking” segments, we don’t necessarily see all the ones who had the answer right. It’s still dismaying that he could find so many so clueless. I doubt if that would have been the case, say, a couple years after the Civil War.
[Update a while later]
Young people are failing civics, and it’s a crisis for the nation:
For the past ten years, our research team at Stanford has interviewed broad cross-sections of American youth about what U. S. citizenship means to them. Here is one high school student’s reply, not atypical: “We just had (American citizenship) the other day in history. I forget what it was.” Another student told us that “being American is not really special….I don’t find being an American citizen very important.” Another replied, “I don’t want to belong to any country. It just feels like you are obligated to this country. I don’t like the whole thing of citizen…I don’t like that whole thing. It’s like, citizen, no citizen; it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s like to be a good citizen—I don’t know, I don’t want to be a citizen…it’s stupid to me.”
This seems to be a theme this weekend.
As I noted, a success for the left.
The Higher-Education Bubble
More thoughts on the overvaluation of a college degree:
Wolf’s position is firm. An increase in the quantity of graduates will neither create a dynamic, wealth-producing economy nor will it create the conditions for the emergence of lots of dynamic, wealth-producing individuals. Universities are not what they are currently being cracked up to be. But that leads to another problem. So deeply entrenched is the belief that, to use the words of the 1998 Dearing report, ‘Higher education has become central to the economic wellbeing of nations and individuals’, that it is becoming increasingly difficult to recall what the purpose of institutions of higher education might be. Their autonomy as academic bodies, in which one ought to be free to pursue an interest in a subject area to a higher level, has been effaced by their thoroughgoing instrumentalisation as drivers of economic growth and social mobility.
One of the biggest myths is that the subject matter doesn’t matter — that a degree in medieval French literature is just as good, and worth just as much money as one in chemical engineering. It’s not.
Fish, Barrel
There’s been a lot of Internet commentary on Time magazine editor Richard Stengel’s profoundly ignorant essay on the Constitution.
Here’s one dissection of it, and here’s another at Patterico.
Given idiocy like this, it’s not surprising that Queen Nancy’s only response to the question about ObamaCare constitutionality was “Are you kidding?! Are you kidding?!” These totalitarians don’t give a damn about the Constitution.
“A Very Expensive Shortcut For Lazy Hiring”
More thoughts on the college education bubble.
Mexifornia
Observations from VDH:
That schizophrenia is what confuses so many about illegal immigration — the simultaneous furor over even the suggestion of compliance with federal immigration law and the occasional symbolic expressions of dislike for the United States in public fora, whether booing at the Rose Bowl at mention of America, or walking out of a California high school en masse at the sight of an American-flag T-shirt on Cinco de Mayo.
When a foreign nation is treated as the home team, and when the home team is booed in the Rose Bowl, I think we can see why the entire open-borders, non-enforcement, ‘La Raza’ paradigm of tribal chauvinism based on ethnic solidarity has been proven an abject failure — summed up by one word, “hypocrisy.”
And it’s just one factor in the continuing California decline and ascendancy of Texas and the Gulf Coast.
Well, at least they’re wising up in Holland.
The Disadvantages Of An Elite Education
A long but important essay, that explains much about the mess we’re in, when one considers that these people are running the country, and our lives, particularly the one currently in the White House. For what it’s worth, I’ve never had a problem talking to either plumbers or auto mechanics. Perhaps because I’ve spent a good part of my life doing both.
A Victory For Free Speech
In the Netherlands:
The presiding judge said Wilders’ remarks were sometimes “hurtful,” “shocking” or “offensive,” but that they were made in the context of a public debate about Muslim integration and multi-culturalism, and therefore not a criminal act.
“I am extremely pleased and happy,” Wilders told reporters after the ruling. “This is not so much a win for myself, but a victory for freedom of speech. Fortunately you can criticize Islam and not be gagged in public debate.”
Meanwhile, back in the supposed land of the free and home of the brave, Yale has decided that criticism of some anti-semitism is off limits:
An antisemitism program needs scholars who deal with Qassam rockets, Grad rockets, and other rocket systems, not snowballs. Scholars who deal with satellite systems, and firebombs targeting Israeli civilians and tanks. Who study soldiers of Hamas, Hezbollah, and other antisemitic terror groups. It needs scholars who deal with Islamist thinkers, from Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb to Mohammad Chatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s anti-Israel and pro-suicide-bombing fatwas.
It needs scholars who deal with the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamism — not only in Egypt, but in the entire Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It needs scholars on Iran and the analysis of incitement to genocide.
It needs scholars on Turkey, lawful Islamism, and its relationship to anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
It needs scholars on Islamic jihad, terror, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and homegrown terrorism in the West.
It needs scholars on left-wing, progressive, Muslim, and Neo-Nazi anti-Zionist antisemitism, and the ideologies and concepts of postorientalism, postcolonialism, and their possible relationship to antisemitism (e.g., in the work of Edward Said). And it needs scholars on antisemitism and anti-Israel propaganda in Western mass media in the 21st century.
There is nothing wrong with scholarship on France and Jewish history; it is important. But it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for serious scholarship on contemporary antisemitism. The study of dead antisemites and past campaigns of vilification is already part of every single Jewish Studies department in the world. And dealing with Jewish literature (the topic of Samuels’ new book in 2010) has nothing to do with research on (contemporary) antisemitism.
Unfortunately, any serious anti-Semitism program at Yale would probably end up indicting much of the faculty there, which is probably why it was shut down to be replaced with the more anodyne one.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Mark Steyn:
Nevertheless, as in all these cases, the process is the punishment. The intent is to make it more and more difficult for apostates of the multiculti state to broaden the terms of political discourse. Very few Europeans would have had the stomach to go through what Wilders did — and the British Government’s refusal to permit a Dutch Member of Parliament to land at Heathrow testifies to how easily the craven squishes of the broader political culture fall into line.
And at the end the awkward fact remains: Geert Wilders lives under 24-hour armed guard because of explicit death threats made against him by the killer of Theo van Gogh and by other Muslims. Yet he’s the one who gets puts on trial.
As he says, it’s shameful.
The Office Of Civil RightsWrongs
Apparently it doesn’t think that free speech is a civil right.
Lukianoff notes that campus definitions of sexual harassment include “humor and jokes about sex in general that make someone feel uncomfortable” (University of California at Berkeley), “unwelcome sexual flirtations and inappropriate put-downs of individual persons or classes of people” (Iowa State University) or “elevator eyes” (Murray State University in Kentucky).
All of which means that just about any student can be hauled before a disciplinary committee. Jokes about sex will almost always make someone uncomfortable, after all, and usually you can’t be sure if flirting will be welcome except after the fact. And how do you define “elevator eyes”?
Given the prevailing attitudes among faculty and university administrators, it’s not hard to guess who will be the target of most such proceedings. You only have to remember how rapidly and readily top administrators and dozens of faculty members were ready to castigate as guilty of rape the Duke lacrosse players who, as North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper concluded, were absolutely innocent.
What the seemingly misnamed Office of Civil Rights is doing here is demanding the setting up of kangaroo courts and the dispensing of what I would call marsupial justice against students who are disfavored by campus denizens because of their gender or race or political attitude. “Alice in Wonderland’s” Red Queen would approve.
I hope that FIRE (which is a great cause to which you should contribute) will take them to court, and demand that they obey the First Amendment.