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Rep. Elise Stefanik recently issued a fairly typical conservative criticism of the university, telling Fox News that “We need to focus on engineering, math, science, the classics. And instead they are training not the next generation of leaders, but the next generation of Marxists.” This kind of rhetoric is common on the right. “Many professors are Marxists or other varieties of radicals who hate America,” warned Phyllis Schlafly in 2005. “We have ceded education to the radical Left,” laments Sebastian Gorka. JD Vance, of course, tells us that “the professors are the enemy,” quoting an older statement by Richard Nixon. The pro-Palestine protests today, writes Craig DeLuz in the Sacramento Observer, are part of “a long-standing trend towards Marxist indoctrination within our universities.”
An objectively correct ranking of Sour Patch Kids and various Sour Patch Kids-flavored things
The post Sour Patch Kids, Ranked appeared first on Aftermath.
For decades, train hoppers have maintained—and guarded access to—the Crew Change Guide, a handbook for riding freight throughout the US and Canada. “You can’t buy such a book, can’t download it, can’t trace its often multiple authors,” Jeremiah David writes. “But if you run in the right circles, all you have to do is ask.” For The Paris Review, David, who never properly asked for his own copy, tells the story of how he came to possess one anyway. His essay is a fascinating literary history of an underground text, a lyrical appraisal of its contents, and a sparkling study of yearning. Take the ride.
I took to walking the train tracks at night, learning the routes and schedules and watching the gutter punks scurry out noiselessly from under a bridge near the rail yard. I even packed a sleeping bag once and spread it out on the bucket of a parked grainer—a train car with a small covered porch. I lay there in the dark for hours before stumbling home at first light. The train hissed and sputtered but never moved an inch.
When I relayed this latest disappointment to a friend, he finally pitied me enough to give me his copy of the Guide. He was a mid-thirties seasonal firefighter with a long blond mullet and a black canvas jacket he rubbed with beeswax to waterproof it. He handed me a bundle of unbound pages. No raising my right hand, no oath, no witnesses. “I think you need it more,” he said, tossing the bundle in my lap.
For Bob Cox It has to start somewhere, this business of being an intellectual. Chances are, it doesn’t start well. Your early efforts are bound […]
The post Gateway Books appeared first on The Point Magazine.
Back during the pandemic two things happened with students. Overall they committed more suicides, BUT when schools were closed, suicide rates went down. (I predicted the latter at the time.)
Then there’s this lovely chart:
Well, well, well. Seems forcing people to do what they don’t want to do, in what is usually a socially oppressive environment, is bad for them.
There are, of course, those who thrive in school, and love it, usually the socially dominant kids. But for a lot of kids, school is Hell.
This has a lot to do with alignment of goals, I think. I wrote recently about the epidemic of AI cheating and how to avoid it, but I think the smartest commentary I’ve seen on AI cheating, and cheating in general is this one:
Has anyone stopped to ask WHY students cheat? Would a buddhist monk “cheat” at meditation? would an artist “cheat” at painting? No. when process and outcomes are aligned, there’s no incentive to cheat. so what’s happening differently at colleges?
Back in the stone age, I took an introductory sociology class. The professor asked those who were intending to be teachers to put up their hands. A forest. She told them to keep their hands up, and asked everyone who was planning on social work to put up their hands.
Out of a class of about a hundred and fifty, only three people’s hands weren’t up.
One hundred and fourty-seven students weren’t taking sociology because they were interested in it, but because it was a waystation on the way to a goal.
The problem with “higher” education is that good jobs are locked by the requirement for degrees. The vast majority of students aren’t in university because they want to learn, they’re there because they need the credential. They don’t see the applicability of what they’re learning to their future jobs, in most cases correctly, so they just want to get thru the courses with the least effort possible while getting the necessary grades.
Of course they cheat. They’re being forced to waste three or four years and huge amounts of money on a chance of getting past the gatekeepers.
I used to amuse myself by talking to graduates. I’d ask them what their major was, then discuss it with them. Nine times out of ten, I knew more about the subject than they did, even though I’d never taken a single course in the topics at hand. They memorized enough to pass the tests, then immediately forgot it, because it had no relevance to their goals or their life.
The only case for requiring a bachelors degree in a job that doesn’t use the knowledge taught by that course is that it screens out people who won’t put up with bullshit and who won’t do what their told when it doesn’t align with their goals. A B.A. certifies to potential employers “this person will do what their told and put up with your bullshit. They barely need to be coerced, they do what is expected of them.”
Problems is, it also certifies “they will put in as little effort in the job as they can, unless it serves them to do otherwise.”
If it were up to me, I’d make it illegal to require unrelated educational credentials. Want to hire an engineer (an actual engineer, not a programmer)? Fine, ask for a degree. But if it’s just some unrelated job, no.
But I’d go even further, I’d mandate exams to test for job knowledge. (In person, supervised) similar to how a lot of companies test programmers. “Can you actually make a small program?”
Testing for jobs used to be pretty standard. Almost all civil service jobs were gated behind exams and so were a lot of private sector ones.
Then see how they perform for a few months.
Forcing people to do what they don’t want to do is sometimes necessary, to be sure. But it has to make sense. There’s plenty of evidence that good home-schooling teaches students skills faster than classroom teaching (and no, not all home schooling is right wing nutjobs, where I grew up it was hippies.) As for socialization, there are other ways to socialize children, most of which are probably more pleasant and less harmful than the often hellish social circumstances in schools, especially high schools.
As for spending time with adults, well, that’s what children did for most of history. They weren’t stuck just with kids for most of the day, then just their parents. After all, you’re a kid for a lot less longer than you’re an adult, and it’s the adult world you need to know how to navigate.
I’m not saying mass schooling has or had no benefits. It obviously does and did. But can we find a better way to teach children?