Notes for a video on education. I invite your comments.

20221005

Introduction to this blog

I have put together notes for a movie I plan to make on changes we can expect to education and research by the time my children grow up.

I have not stuck with the original plan for a series of three videos on the new normal:

1.     The new normal in the meaning of life
2.     Changes that will be brought by the new normal
3.     Coping with the new normal

Working on number 2, I found enough to say on depopulation that I gave it its own video. That seems to be pretty true for education and research as well.

In preparation for the video I wrote my thoughts on these topics in essay form. I might as well post them on this blog before I make the movie. Education and research are separate, though related, subjects.  I am more sanguine about the future of research than that of the educational systems in modern America – another reason to make two separate blogs and two separate videos.

My hope as always to spark a discussion, get some comments. Lately this blog has been receiving somewhat more comments. I certainly invite your feedback on these themes.

With that introduction, here are my thoughts on education.

Education

Public School

History

When I was a child in the 1940s and 50s, teaching was a profession. Most teachers at the elementary level, were women. They were single, hoping to marry, or old maids who had not.  Teaching was one of the relatively few professions that was wide open to them. Women have a natural affection for children and they seem to enjoy being in the classroom.

This was the time that teachers' unions were just getting started. There was a heated discussion to the effect that when teachers were unionized they would become like union labor in other industries. That is to say, difficult to fire and inclined to work to the rules. The fears appears to have been well grounded. That is exactly what one sees in classrooms everywhere in America today.

Teacher productivity is hard to measure. It requires judgment on the part of the principal to choose an effective team. Once the unions became involved, administrators were no longer free to apply their own judgment. Mediocrity became the standard.

Public school teachers come by their liberal persuasions via a number of avenues. The union movement in America as always been liberal. Academia has been taken over by cultural Marxists starting with the Frankfurt school of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse in the 1930s, and the schools of education are situated within academia. As noted above, teachers are predominantly women. Women are on average more liberal than men, led by their hearts rather than their heads.

Status today

However it came to be, public school education no longer stresses the skills that are most important to learn: reading, writing and arithmetic. Many teachers do not speak or write good English. Neither do parents and students. Predictably, there is less emphasis on teaching these skills. Many math teachers are mathematically illiterate.  Instead they put stress on social justice. Little girls quickly observe and often learn to share their teachers’ built-in bias against boys. The endless prating about the evils of whiteness convince all but the strongest children that they are somehow defective.

Trends that will continue

Funding

Public school education has been declining in quality for a long time. It is a few decades since Diane Ravitch wrote the classic “Left Back –A Century of Failed School Reform” and John Gatto “An Underground History of American Education.” Nothing since has even slowed the rate of decay.

The teachers’ unions have become so strong that they are bankrupting cities. They have been so effective at dumbing down the curriculum and destroying discipline that decreasing attendance is costing them their jobs. They don’t care! They don’t mind becoming redundant as long as the pensions remain.

That is the rub. Many of the teachers’ pension plans are going broke. Up until this point there has always been another element of government (viz, for Chicago, Cook County and the State of Illinois) ready to backstop the pension funds when government stupidity made them insolvent. Given that every tier of government is severely underwater and out of balance, something has to give.

Home Schooling

The better performing student groups, Jews, Northeast Asians and whites are increasingly underrepresented in public school. All three demographics have children at far below replacement rate. Homeschooling is an attractive alternative for those whom they do have. We can expect homeschooling to grow.

Diverse student body

With the decrease of the more talented pools of students, above, the student population is becoming more diverse. Even the best of teachers have to accept the limitations of the students they get. Some pupils are simply not that capable. Many come from families that do not value education and get little support at home. There is an increasing divide between capable students from supportive families and the rest. There is and will be a widening divide based on means and social class.

Despite massive interventions such as school busing, there is geographic isolation is well. Some of it comes as families continue to leave jurisdictions such as Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Baltimore. Those who are left behind are increasingly incapable of and/or unwilling to absorb education.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in Europe. Public education is worsening in Sweden, France, Germany and others.  Immigrant children do not have the same desire or the ability to learn as the indigenes. The native Europeans and more capable Asians such as the Indians in England use money to isolate themselves or find alternatives to public education.

Distance learning

Covid demonstrated the pluses and minuses of remote learning for elementary students. Education can be delivered over a distance. The effectiveness of online education depends a great deal on the parents. Motivated parents were able to teach about as effectively as schools. The majority were not motivated.  Their children fell far behind during Covid.

There are many good curricula available online, such as the Khan Academy, the Ron Paul curriculum and so on. I teach my son using the Ukrainian public school textbooks. They are free online, thorough, and without conspicuous bias. My challenge is the same as any teacher – getting my son to read and absorb the material.

Curriculum and textbooks are mostly under state control

In most countries printing textbooks is under federal control. The United States is an exception.  There it is handled by state education associations and at times by school districts.

As a practical matter, however, the buying preferences of the state education associations of the biggest states dictate what goes into the textbooks. If California has a taste for textbooks that emphasize global warming and diversity, global warming and diversity it will be. Textbook printing is a business and the customer is always right.

The public school curriculum will continue to shrink. As teaching the basics becomes more and more difficult, and parents have less interest in curriculum including art, music, foreign language, advanced science and other enrichment.

Student Health

The overall health of students has been declining for years. Among the factors are diet and obesity, autism and ADHD.  The Covid vaccinations are another impact. The percent of children dying is rising significantly. It is, however, from such a small base that it has escaped widespread notice. 

The major causes of deaths shortly after injection are heart diseases myocarditis and perecarditis. There is evidence of many more ailments such as autoimmune and prion diseases that take longer to manifest themselves. Babies of vaccinated mothers are dying at an unexpected rate.  It may be connected to the fact that elements of the vaccines are being passed to them in their mother’s milk.

The vaccines have been shown to reduce fertility.  Live births are down as much as 20% in some jurisdictions.

The cause and extent of these phenomena are still under investigation.  If they are substantial, they could further reduce school attendance and elevate the number of special needs students over the coming years.

Tertiary Education

Bricks and mortar institutions

Campus-based Universities are dinosaurs, the walking dead, for many reasons.

1)    The process by which they provide their service, a putative education, is vastly too resource intensive.  It involves legions of people who don’t teach, instructors whose time is not efficiently used providing education, and physical facilities that were built for an archaic style of delivering education.

2)    With a shrinking base of middle class high school graduates, the customer is now king.  Since with loans they can afford it, today’s customer wants a maximum of comfort and a minimum of demands.  The credential of a college degree costs more and provides less education.

3)    The mantra that every child must go to university dictates that universities perforce cater to average students. That’s the definition of mediocre. Even selective schools, such as Reed College, which I attended sixty years ago, have gutted their most demanding courses.  Their stated reason is to serve diversity.  Practically speaking, courses are dumbed down to the level of the diverse students they compete to enroll.

4)    Student loans support the delusion that all will benefit from a college education.  It makes money for financial institutions making the loans and addicts students to a lifetime of debt.

5)    The institutions that employ liberal arts graduates are themselves largely obsolete. Government employment is a sinecure. A government worker succeeds by going along and getting along, not through any display of competence. In fact, the government workplace is usually hostile to honest and productive employees. Large industries, and certainly academia have been thoroughly co-opted by the government. To receive government contracts they have to mimic the government, including the nonproductive, rent seeking activities that characterize government employees.

Overseas universities

Though academic institutions throughout the world are afflicted by the same problems to one degree or another, the situation is worst where the rot set in earliest, the United States and Western Europe. Economies in Eastern Europe and other less-developed countries tend to require, and the universities to teach, more down to earth skills, such as engineering, agronomy and the like.

Overseas universities are generally government-funded and fairly cheap. Fewer loans are available. Students are able to graduate without excessive debt. The tendency to go away to college is not as great. The dormitories are not as sumptuous as on American campuses, and a higher percentage of students live at home.

Countries that remain fairly homogeneous have not had to accommodate the clamorous demands of minority students to modify (i.e., dumb down) the curriculum. Eastern European students studying world history will still learn about the Greeks and the Romans and not be inundated with wondrous facts about the past glory of Wakanda.

Statistics students in China will learn that human intelligence is distributed according to the Gaussian bell curve, how that formula is derived and implemented in software, and (smugly) that Chinese find themselves fairly well to the right along that bell curve.

Online education

The concept of massive online open education has been around for about a decade. Though delivering education via the Internet presents a number of logistical problems, the economics are so overwhelmingly favorable that it is bound to come.

Caltech, MIT and many other universities are making a lot of their course materials available without charge, or are allowing students to enroll and attend courses remotely.

The absence of in-class learning poses several shortcomings:

·       It is harder for students to ask questions and get support
·       The students do not as easily socialize and learn from one another
·       The credentialing process is uncertain. It is almost impossible to proctor examinations given over the Internet.
·       Laboratory work cannot so easily be done remotely.

On the other hand, there are advantages

·       Students can stop a video to take notes.
·       Students can replay the video in order to understand difficult concepts.
·       Students can interrupt the lesson to research word meanings and related topics on the Internet.
·       Students can use their computers to try out mathematics, statistics and other topics being discussed

Many of today’s most productive academics work remotely. They interact with their peers via the Internet, Skype, Viber, Zoom, Telegram and other such media. Freed of the obligation to commute to a campus, they are able to get more done.

As Karen Head, the author of “Disrupt This!,” cited above, says the promise of MOOC it is difficult to realize within the constraints of a campus-based University. There are too many people involved, and too many conflicting interests to serve.

My own proposal would be to gather English language course material from universities in the United States and deliver education abroad.

Textbooks are a large expense for campus-based students. However, it is almost always possible to assemble suitable course materials from out of copyright or moderately priced online resources. For instruction delivered overseas, it would probably be beneficial to have it translated in any case. Just as an example, here are two pages from my son’s Ukrainian language sixth grade geography book, side-by-side with the English machine translation.

Translating the whole 260 page book took about half an hour. This demonstrates two things: 

(1)  Language is not a major issue and

(2)  Copyrights are only an issue for the fastidious. It should be possible at a reasonable cost to locate textbooks to be made available online.

To satisfy the remote part of the education, one could have the students access English language lecture materials online. For the requirements that are best handled by personal interaction, one could have the students meet with modestly paid teaching assistants in classrooms in a foreign country. The teaching assistants, meeting with students in person, could ask questions to determine whether or not the students understand the lesson, present blackboard talks to explain the difficult parts, lead discussions about the material, and deliver and proctor examinations to satisfy the credentialing requirements.

Having students live in Latin America or Eastern Europe would dramatically cut the cost of housing as well as teaching assistants and other staff. It would automatically give them exposure to a foreign language. Moreover, it would situate white and male students in an environment in which whiteness and masculinity are not mortal sins.

There are already a significant number of students from Western Europe in Poland, Hungary and other central and eastern European countries.  I expect this trend to accelerate as western institutions collapse of their own woke and budgetary excesses.  There will be hell to pay when government guaranteed student loans dry up.

Indoctrination

Indoctrination has been an element of the process since public education began in the 19th century. The objective has been to form good workers, soldiers and citizens. My elementary school began every day with a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. We sang patriotic songs such as America the Beautiful and the Star-Spangled Banner. We learned the stories of American patriots such as Davy Crockett.

This kind of nationalistic indoctrination is part of the educational process everywhere. It is counterproductive when it goes against science and common sense. The Soviet embrace of Lysenko and his belief in the heritability of acquired traits is a textbook example.

The educational systems of the United States and Western Europe are shot through with politically correct but scientifically untenable dogmas. Teachers and professors who deny the proposition that all people and peoples are equal in ability, or question the efficacy of mandatory public health measures, the reality of climate change or the advisability of wars can be fired.

The nature of indoctrination changes with each generation. A decade ago transsexuality was not on the agenda at all. We can reasonably expect that education will include some forms of indoctrination in times to come. The best we can hope for is freedom of speech, through which we can question dogmas that stand in the way of truth and progress.

Credentialing

A university diploma is an essential credential to enter today’s American workplace. The irony is that foreign-born workers with unrecognized diplomas from India, China and Eastern Europe are hired on the strength of what they can do. This is true as well in medicine. Britain’s National Health Service is loaded with Indians and Pakistanis.  St. George’s School of Medicine in Grenada placed more graduates into first-year residency in America than any other university in the world.

Reliability of credentials

Even American credentials are not impossible to fake. Every year or two one reads about somebody in a prominent position claiming to have graduated from an institution that never heard of him. More frequently, people are able to acquire credentials fraudulently. They have other people sit in for them, taking standardized tests for admission or final exams for completion.

Companies such as Microsoft and Oracle have attempted to impose credentialing schemes on people who work with their software. It is only somewhat successful. The real measure is whether or not a person can get the job done. Since the credentialing process has been so skewed by affirmative-action, diversity concerns and so on, employers know to give increasingly less credence to credentials. I expect their importance to further wane over the course of time. As this reality emerges, the overpriced, over-woke universities’ position athwart the path to success will be weakened.

This is already evident in the erosion of the stranglehold of the Ivy League on American education. Many of today’s most prominent academics avoid the straitjacket of political correctness by teaching at second tier institutions. Just to name a few off the top of my head:

·       Victor Davis Hanson – Fresno State College
·       Philippe Rushton – University of Western Ontario
·       Gregory Cochran – University of California at Davis
·       Kevin MacDonald – Long Beach State College
·       Edward Dutton – University of Oulu, Finland
·       Michael Woodley of Menie – Technical University of Chemnitz
·       Richard Lynn – Ulster University
·       Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying – Evergreen State

Conclusion

Both public school and tertiary education are so completely shot through with the woke agenda, and so overladen with unnecessary expenses, that they will fall of their own weight.  There will not be enough students in the rising generations to support them, and they are not positioned to prepare those young people for the workplace.

Foreign universities will gain stature at the expense of the fading western institutions. They will benefit from lower cost structures and less political correctness. They may also benefit from contributions made by a source of many of the world’s previous great discoveries - white men.

The artificial credentialing system now in place will collapse along with the institutions of education.  The world will find other means of determining who can accomplish what needs to be done.  A young person today should concentrate on mastering the basics: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.  And the most essential fourth R, reasoning.

That’s the output from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man is taking advantage of the fact that Grandpa is back from the hospital, as a result of which Grandma can spend some time with Marianna, and the other kids are occupied with kindergarten and studying. Thoughts on research tomorrow. Please use comments to offer your own insights.