After the disastrous economic mismanagement of a succession of Labour governments, which managed to give away 60% of the nation’s gold reserves, double public debt, build a huge out-of-control budget deficit (despite constantly raising taxes), and shrink GDP by a whopping 5% during its last full year, the incoming coalition government was faced with difficult choices.  Amazingly, they made the right one, and set out to implement drastic cuts in public spending in order to reduce the deficit. Unfortunately, however, they were either unable, or unwilling, to eliminate the deficit with just cuts, and decided they also had to increase VAT and raise taxes. With citizens under ever increasing economic pressure, particularly during the past two years, during which they had to put up with bankster perfidy, government waste, fiscal rapacity, job losses, and inflation (the true extent of which remains hidden), the coalition’s decision to cut subsidies and allow universities to treble their fees was not going to be met with smiles—particularly after 13 years of a Labour government that fomented a culture of entitlement through their egalitarian efforts to extend university education to half the population.

Leftist agitators mobilised their pawns—the university students—who yesterday converged in London to protest the increase in university fees. The protest turned violent and 5,000 protesters mobbed the Conservative Party’s headquarters in Millibank, London, where property was smashed and angry graffiti sprayed on marble walls. The UCU and NUS (unions, for educators and students respectively) were there, demanding the cuts to be stopped. The Socialist Worker, a fringe Marxist organ, also made their presence felt; their placards read ‘F**K FEES FREE EDUCATION NOW’.

Stupidly, or disingenuously, the agitators blame the Conservatives, even though the Liberal Democrats, who are left of Labour, are also part of the two-party coalition government. Stupidly, or disingenuously too, they (conveniently) forget that it was Labour who created the conditions that forced the cuts in the first place: the United Kingdom is estimated to have become the most indebted country in the world during the Labour years.

Does this mean that the Conservatives are free from blame? By no means! Over successive governments they encouraged immigration, which increasingly put the education system and public services under pressure. They also engaged in deficit spending, so the public debt was bigger each time they were voted out than each time they were voted in. They aligned themselves with the United States government’s Zionist Middle East policy, which eventually led to a wave of terrorist plots and attacks. They supported the spurious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which cost many thousands of millions of pounds. They ring-fenced the ever-growing international aid and ‘development’ budget, which wastes thousands of millions more every year. And so on.

Another installment in our ongoing series “So This Is How It Ends” (STIHIE), which chronicles instances of decadence so advanced that one can only conclude and  hope that we are living in a terminal stage of Western civilization.

Item: Freshman Orientation at the Lutheran Gustavus Adolphus College (ELCA)

My guess is that the Midwestern parents who spent upwards of $35,000 per year to send their children to a Lutheran school thought that this kind of stuff only happened at Berkeley. 

Though perhaps I'm missing the "unintended consequences" of an orientation session like this... For in performing polymorphous perversity much like a high school production of Godspell, might this hapless acting troupe actually make homosexuality seem really, really uncool to newly arrived first years?  When the geeky guy started talking about the "beautiful, understanding" people who are atheists, I had the urge to join a monastery!  

Let me begin by registering my agreement with Professor Charlton. It does not surprise me to learn that this gentleman teaches medicine, not social work, English composition or “women’s studies.” I expect serious thinking from someone who trains physicians -- as opposed to embattled feminists or Black Power advocates. In my years in the academic wilderness, I have discovered in abundance those deficiencies Professor Charlton points out. Most of those students I encounter give no evidence of any aptitude for or interest in higher education.

In colleges across the U.S., instructors seem perfectly suited to teaching the intellectually incompetent. Their pedagogic skills consist of working overhead projectors, organizing “group discussion sessions,” and talking about the victims of Western civilization. Although these bogus professors are certainly not God’s gift to humanity, I couldn’t imagine what else they could do in their jobs, given the discrepancy between what students should be learning and what they are capable of mastering.

It might be objected that, contrary to those who stress the cognitive preconditions for education, dull students can achieve more. This is the widely distributed argument of Peter Wood and other representatives of the National Association of Scholars.

It's fairly evident even to mainstream publications that there are too many Americans with college degrees, and not enough with the ability to do useful work.  Sure, if you go to the right schools, there is still some benefit in meeting members of the oligarchy. It is unclear that attending any other kind of school is worth anything, excepting as an extremely drawn out IQ test. It is very clear that the countless state schools, universities, community colleges: most of these are excuses for "virtuous slacking," rather than actual educational experiences. What do I mean by an actual educational experience? Consider the high school curriculum of, just taking an example at random, my mom, who graduated in the mid 1960s.

My mom went to an all-girls Catholic high school, taught by fearsome old nuns. Among her academic achievements from her very working class high school education: she has read a good fraction of Shakespeare, she learned enough Latin and Anglo Saxon to read books written in these languages, and she knows a bit of French as well. Her math in high school was integral calculus. When I went to high school ... well, I got a bit of French and we read Macbeth.  This wasn't unique to my mom either; William Henry writes about the debasement of intellectual currency in his book.

I'm sure someone will assert that knowledge of Latin and Anglo Saxon are unnecessary in our modern society. I suppose so, if you don't mind raising a generation of “educated” cretins who don't understand Western Civilization: however, there was also the integral calculus. There is also the implication that people in modern High School and College are learning something else which has displaced knowledge of Shakespeare, Anglo Saxon and Latin. I have yet to find out what this thing is.  Diversity studies, perhaps? I've only recently been teaching myself some Anglo Saxon, mostly out of embarrassment. From what I have learned thus far: the removal of Anglo Saxon poetry from standard educational curricula is egregious cultural vandalism. What better way to destroy a culture than to take away its past and give the "educated" a bucket of vulgar slogans in return?

Alas, bright cup! Alas, burnished fighter!

Alas, proud prince! How that time has passed,

Dark under night's helm, as though it never had been!

I'm sure some wise-acre will pipe up and tell us about how kids are learning all about computers now instead of learning of the glories of the Exeter poems. The funny thing is, all the people I know who have founded computer companies are college and even high school drop outs; and I know quite a few of these guys by now. They learned their computer skills by hacking, not by taking a course taught by some mediocrity who couldn't get a job at Google. Sure, they're often limited in their understanding of things like machine learning and statistics, but … people who know about such things are plentiful and cheap, thanks in part to the academic bubble, and frankly, very few people have found ways to make money off of machine learning and statistics.  People who can create technology companies are comparatively rare, and college doesn't seem to do much to create them. People who work in technology companies, well, they do tend to have college diplomas and make a decent salary. Their salaries are comparable to that of a policeman. While the policeman will never be recognized as a learned magnifico (or a nerd), he also has a retirement plan, a gun, a union, reasonable working hours, and unlike the software engineer with his student loans, he can't be outsourced, and an illegal alien can't do his job.

What is an economic bubble, exactly? There is a working definition in econophysics. A normal market is a situation in which many people have different opinions, investment horizons and models of how the world works. In a bubble, everyone has the same opinion, not because they're all doing research and have converged on the right answer. In this case the price would be fixed to an exact value. In a bubble, everyone follows a trend because they see the other fellow doing the same thing. Bubbles are only possible in times of cheap money; you have to bid up the tulips with something. So, you can see the present situation where everybody graduates from high school and attempts to go to government funded college is technically a bubble.  It is a bubble financially in that tuitions are very high due to government subsidy and cheap loans.

Does that look like a bubble to you? It certainly does to me. College is outrageously expensive. It's insanely expensive when you consider what it actually confers: a fairly limited puddle of knowledge, even compared to what we used to get for free in high school. College is long on political correctness, and short on the achievements of Western Civilization.

What is to be done? Well, to first order, nothing will be done.  According to this chart, we spend about as much on education as we do on health care. That much concentrated economic power won't go quietly into the night any time soon. The puling sanctimony over the holiness of education also doesn't bode well for putting a torch to the university system. People really believe that they will be undistinguished proles unless they have a bachelors degree in ... whatever. Many people who would otherwise be directionless in life comfort themselves by acquiring masters degrees in subjects which didn't exist 50 years ago. Excessive university education is a status bauble, as certainly as a Prius, Third World vacation or a Whole Foods shopping expedition. It is a phenomenon of people grasping after social status, rather than economic status. Until the idea of someone having a masters degree in public policy or women's studies becomes ridiculous, this preposterous charade will continue. One thing which should be considered carefully: if you decide your house isn't worth anything, you can default and walk away from it. You have to pay off your college education, worthless or not; bankruptcy can't protect you from the collectors of that debt in the United States.

This is the first in a three-part symposium on The Higher Education Bubble -- why the West’s highly leveraged, heavily subsidized university system shall collapse and why that is a good thing.

Modern education is about selection more than enhancement, with educational qualifications mainly serving to “signal” or quantify a person’s hereditary psychological attributes. On average, a modern college or university education enhances neither skills nor behaviors, nor does it inculcate useful knowledge.

In practice, higher education mostly functions as an extremely slow, inefficient, and imprecise form of psychometric testing that measures intelligence and evaluates personality. It would therefore be easy to construct a modern educational system that was both more efficient and more effective than the current one.

Since the modern educational system in general, and higher education in particular, are vastly over-expanded, it is likely that sooner or later this situation will prove unsustainable. Not least because the education system has been, for about a century, based-on the expectation of continual expansion in personnel, resources, years of education, and inflation of qualifications.

Therefore, when the crash comes it will be catastrophic. I would guess the system will shrink to about a tenth of its present size -- back to what it was a century ago.

With regard to the following article:

Racial Disparity in School Suspensions

14 September 2010

New York Times

by Sam Dillon

In many of the nation’s middle schools, black boys were nearly three times as likely to be suspended as white boys, according to a new study, which also found that black girls were suspended at four times the rate of white girls.

School authorities also suspended Hispanic and American Indian middle school students at higher rates than white students, though not at such disproportionate rates as for black children, the study found. Asian students were less likely to be suspended than whites.

The study analyzed four decades of federal Department of Education data on suspensions, with a special focus on figures from 2002 and 2006, that were drawn from 9,220 of the nation’s 16,000 public middle schools.

The study, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights organization.

The co-authors, Daniel J. Losen, a senior associate at the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Russell Skiba, a professor at Indiana University, said they focused on suspensions from middle schools because recent research had shown that students’ middle school experience was crucial for determining future academic success.

One recent study of 400 incarcerated high school freshmen in Baltimore found that two-thirds had been suspended at least once in middle school.

I am pleased to see the Left providing data that argues for racial segregation in education. We know that, thanks to the valiant efforts of the Left, White educators are now among the most politically correct class there is and the most fearful of being accused of racism, and that, as per today's conventional assumption, colored educators cannot be racist by definition, since racism is a uniquely White pathology; therefore, if Black students are suspended more often, it is because they break the rules more frequently. The only other possible explanation is that the Left has been inept at eradicating racism among educators. It is interesting all the same that the article provides no data with regards to the race of those doing the suspending. Are we to assume they are all White? Or have the Black students been suspended by Black staff?

On September 5, CBS News's 60 Minutes reported on a unique educational institution that has been established for Black children: a “SEED School” in the District of Columbia, a school district that already has the highest per capita spending per student in the country. (For a generation, CBS News has been reporting that the most exciting educational news comes from the District, where there is always some new, fool-proof program that proves Blacks are as smart as Whites.) Typically, President Obama sees SEED as a model for the Black children of the entire country: Of educational opportunity for non-Black children, Obama says not a word.

The SEED School is a public, segregated boarding school where Black teenagers get 24-7 mentoring and enriched education. It is breathlessly noted that none of these Black children ever imagined an environment where they would be expected to do as many as two hours of homework a day (which is oddly below the national average of 3 hours a day.)

One intense Black teacher at SEED, justifying the 24-7 focus on the Black students, noted, "no one ever makes it on their own, ever." Spoken like a true lifetime recipient of Government largesse.

Steve Sailer has an important blog at VDARE.com quoting  from Russel K. Nieli’s essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. It’s no surprise that there is affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos: “To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”

Unfortunately, the authors lump Jews and non-Jews into the White category, but combining their results with what we know about Jewish admissions to elite universities yields some interesting results.

In a 1998 op-ed (”Some minorities are more minor than others”), Ron Unz pointed out “Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America” (See also Edmund Connelly’s take.)  A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. (Princeton had only 13% Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over 6 times the Jewish percentage in the population to around 10 times.)

The first part of this piece, here, discussed Hanna Rosin's recent piece for The Atlantic, titled "The End of Men."

Part II: Shop Class as Soulcraft, "Idiot Work" and Other Observations

We are pre-occupied with demographic variables, on the one hand, and sorting into cognitive classes, on the other. Both collapse the human qualities into a narrow set of categories, the better to be represented on a checklist or a set of test scores. This simplification serves various institutional purposes. Fitting ourselves to them, we come to understand ourselves in the light of the available metrics, and forget that institutional purposes are not our own.

-- Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft

As a young man, Matthew B. Crawford developed an interest in repairing automobiles and motorcycles. The son of a physicist, he found that there was a difference between his father’s abstract, theoretical understanding of things and the tacit, real-world knowledge of the experienced gearheads he bumped elbows with at the shop. He worked his way though parts of college as an electrician, and found the work to be both satisfying and mentally engaging.

After picking up a Master’s Degree in Philosophy, he took his place as a “knowledge worker,” writing abstracts-by-formula for a company that indexed scholarly articles. His more esteemed job paid less, and was somehow less mentally engaging. The work lacked integrity, because in his words, it “could not be animated by the goods that were intrinsic to it.” His company produced products (abstracts), but the company was owned by a media conglomerate, and those products were merely a set of numbers in that company’s portfolio of holdings. The quality of the abstract itself didn’t matter; it didn’t really even matter if he understood what he was writing about, and the quantity of abstracts demanded guaranteed that even a smart guy like Crawford could never really be invested in what he was doing. It was busy work, and it encouraged a kind of lackadaisical attitude among his co-workers. One fellow confessed to him that he was doing heroin on the job.

Crawford eventually went back to school and earned a Ph.D. in the history of political thought. He took a high paying job at a Washington, D.C. think tank, and was tasked with coming up with scholarly-sounding arguments that “put a scientific cover on positions arrived at otherwise.” Any honest person with a substantial vocabulary and an aptitude for fancy writing will tell you that it is easier to come up with dazzling bullshit than it is to actually think. (See also: “the art world”)

After five months at the think tank, Crawford quit and opened up his own motorcycle repair shop. An education in the “liberal” arts didn’t lead to anything as freeing as being a man who is directly accountable for the quality of his own work, solving the kinds of problems that can’t simply be talked away. A motorcycle either runs properly or it doesn’t. You end up with the satisfaction of actually having fixed something and the feeling that you earned your fee, or you to take responsibility for your inability to fix it and make it right with the customer.

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.

In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how work, beginning with manufacturing work but extending to today’s “knowledge work,” has been degraded by a separation between thinking and doing. He offers the example of a nineteenth century wheelwright, whose craft demanded that he know how to select trees and when to fell them, and whose skillfulness and ingenuity was tested by the unique characteristics of each piece of wood. The work was holistic; as he did the work, he had to think about the end product. There was a sense of individual agency in the work, and each wheel he completed was proof of the quality of his labor -- something he could be proud of. However, when the individual craftsman was replaced by factory assembly line, the work could no longer be holistic. The work of one man was separated into processes to be performed by many men, interchangeably. A series of steps that were once challenging and engaging became repetitive drudgery, the performance of a process. The expert, personal, tacit knowledge of the craftsman was replaced, often inadequately, by the documentation of his “process,” and the understanding of the whole was concentrated into the hands of a few who in most cases didn’t actually do the work and understood it only in the abstract. The systemizing of work into process has become the norm, and it applies to white collar work as well.

At first glance this article on achievement gaps in Germany seems like it’s going to be as clueless as anything published in an American paper.

Ninth-graders from 1,500 schools across the nation were tested for their English and German skills, and the clear leaders were the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. They were followed by Saxony and Rhineland-Palatinate, while the worst performer was the city-state of Bremen.

The tests taken by some 41,000 students were the first measure of new nationwide educational standards set in place after the country's embarrassing show in the European standardised PISA test performance in 2000.

And then there’s this.

The standardised tests mirrored PISA results that showed a strong connection between social background and educational success. An upper-class child with the same intelligence as a child born to skilled labourers has 4.5 times the likelihood of attending a college-preparatory high school, results showed.

Germans actually control for intelligence when trying to find if there’s some unfair discrepancy!  What a bunch of Nazis they must still be. Of course there's still a fallacy if we start jumping from such findings to conclusions about income and opportunity.  If two kids have equal intelligence we can assume that their parents have similar IQs and thus the family that ended up at a lower SES likely has more of some other traits that prevent one from succeeding in life.  Regardless, the acknowledgment that there is such a thing as intelligence and that it’s the most important determiner of academic success-that it must be controlled for before you attempt to prove anything-shows that Germans are way ahead of anything we have in mainstream educational thought here in America.

The IQB tests also measured what proportion of students are from an immigration background, registering a nationwide average of 18 percent. The highest concentration of these students were in the city-states of Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen. The tests showed an enormous difference in the academic capabilities between these students and native Germans, with Turks, the country’s largest immigrant population, performing the worst. Students from Poland and the former Soviet states showed far better results, signalling large differences among individual immigrant groups, the IQB found.

 How about that... 

According to Richard Lynn Turkey’s IQ is 90 but it’s completely possible that Muslim culture may depress scores a bit.  Other southeast Europeans are in the 93-95 range, so the Turks in Germany may eventually hit that level as they begin to become culturally more European.  

Germany’s “embarrassing” 2000 PISA score seems to apply most to reading comprehension, where they finished 21 out of 27.  This decade they did better in math (16 of 29) and science (8 of 30).

In Germany’s defense, one thing I have trouble understanding is how you can test reading comprehension cross-linguistically.  How well an Italian reads I would think depends on how well he understands what’s in front of him compared to the average person literate in the same language.  By what absolute standards can one say that the average Japanese student has good reading comprehension compared to the average American?  While I don’t doubt that a person with an IQ of 110 understands written material in his native tongue better than someone of a different country with an IQ of 85, I don’t see how one can test that.  To take one example, a Polish student has to worry about agreement among seven grammatical cases while an American doesn’t.  Do you somehow make the English test harder in order to handicap the country with the simpler grammatical system?  How does one compare vocabulary?  If there's say five words on an English test which appear at a rate of one-in-a-million in normal text are they certain that the Norwegian test has exactly five one-in-a-million words which appear in the text-placed where they'd be equally relevant to where they're located on the English exam?  I doubt international educrats are that thorough.

It's worth noting that of of the top seven countries in reading in the year 2000, five were English-speaking. The US was 15th, but it preformed better than it does in math or science.