Let’s end homework forever — just end it now — and open up more daylight hours for life’s inexhaustible succession of microlessons. Knowing how to paddle a canoe, or fix a faucet, or work a cash register, or bake a coffeecake, or comfort someone who is unhappy, is much more important than knowing the names of the six kingdoms of living organisms, or the layers of the atmosphere, even if you’re going to become a naturalist or an atmospheric physicist — and paddling and faucet-fixing and cash-registering and cake-baking and the offering of sympathy, like most memorable proficiencies, happen best when they’re voluntary, after school is out.
Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.
July 1, 2018
QotD: Homework
June 26, 2018
QotD: Writing essays in school
To find their way in American life, high-schoolers need to be able to speak English, to read, to listen to and respect other people’s opinions, to have a command of the basic elements of courtesy and, to a lesser extent, to write. (They do not need to know how to write a thesis sentence. More injury is done to high-school essays by the imposition of the thesis-sentence requirement than by any other means. The trick, kids are sometimes told, is to begin with a word like “although.” No.)
Nicholson Baker, “Fortress of Tedium: What I Learned as a Substitute Teacher”, New York Times Magazine, 2016-09-07.
June 12, 2018
Conformity
An eminent professor signed an open letter he didn't believe: @WSJopinion pic.twitter.com/maP3cGs5z1
— W Bradford Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) June 8, 2018
May 30, 2018
QotD: Microeconomics
… I sincerely believe – believe to the point that I can say that I know – that principles of microeconomics is the most important economics course any student can ever take. Ever. By far. If taught properly, and learned with an open and critical and attentive mind, a principles of microeconomics course will impart to the student more understanding of the operation of economies than will all other economics courses combined – and I include here even well-taught PhD econ courses.
Too many academic economists, in my experience, are bored with microeconomic principles. Such principles are so basic. No genius is required to understand them or to teach them well. Teaching microeconomic principles provides no opportunity to showcase great cleverness or to push out the frontiers of understanding. It is, instead, to repeat timeless verities – and verities the majority of which have been known and understood by wise economists for nearly 250 years, and nearly all of which have been known and understood by wise economists for the past 50 years.
[…]
My goal in teaching Principles of Microeconomics is not to launch my students on a path to earn a doctorate in the subject, or even for them to become econ majors. While I’m always pleased when a student, after taking my class, switches his or her major to economics, I teach the course as if it is the only economics course these students will ever take. (Empirically, this assumption of mine is true.) So unlike many other intro-econ courses, I do absolutely no mathematics; I even draw no cost curves. I define a handful of esoteric terms (such as the “law of diminishing marginal utility”) but never mention many others (such as “perfect competition” or “marginal rates of substitution”) that are typical fare in many other principles-of-microecon courses. I wouldn’t even dream of doing indifference-curve analysis in such a course.
I open the course with some economic history. (“Have you any idea how materially prosperous you are compared to the vast majority of your ancestors?!”) I spend a lot of time on supply and demand. I devote two whole sections to international trade, another to public choice, and one to public goods and taxation. (Each section is two-and-a-half-hours long. And I cover some other topics in addition; I mention these only to give a flavor of my course.)
My goal – by teaching basic, foundational, principles of microeconomics – is to inoculate students against the bulk of the common economic myths that they’ll encounter throughout their lives – myths such as that the great abundance of goods and services available to us denizens of modernity is the result of a process that can be easily mimicked or understood in detail by smart people or planners – that the market value of goods or services can be raised by price floors (such as a legislated minimum wage) or lowered by price ceilings (such as rent control) – that benefits can be created without costs – that government is an institution capable of rising above the realities that ensure that private institutions never perform ‘perfectly’ – that intentions are results – that destruction of property is a source of prosperity – that exchange across political boundaries differs in economically meaningful ways from exchange that takes place within political boundaries – that the only consequences that occur or that matter are those that are easily anticipated and seen.
Don Boudreaux, “Teach the Timeless Verities”, Café Hayek, 2014-08-26.
May 13, 2018
Title IX complaints as a form of Prisoner’s Dilemma
The more I read about Title IX, the more I wonder why university students dare risk mingling with the opposite sex under any circumstances outside class:
The University of Cincinnati suspended a female student for allegedly engaging in nonconsensual sex with a male student who claimed he was too drunk at the time to approve the encounter.
The fact that this case involves a male accuser (“John Doe”) and a female aggressor (“Jane Roe”) makes it unusual among Title IX complaints. (Title IX is the federal statute that forbids sex discrimination in schools.) But the female student’s lawsuit against Cincinnati — which accuses the university of violating her due process rights — reveals something even odder: Roe had previously filed a sexual misconduct complaint against one of Doe’s friends.
Roe’s lawsuit, then, suggests that Doe filed the complaint against Roe as a kind of revenge for getting his friend in trouble. (I have an alternative theory, but I’ll save that for the end.)
“On information and belief, John Doe was motivated to file a Title IX Complaint in retaliation for a prior Title X Complaint Jane Roe had filed against his friend,” according to the suit.
Roe also contends that it was ridiculous to find her guilty of nonconsensual sex because of Doe’s drunkenness, but not find Doe guilty too: Roe was also drunk at the time, so under the rules she was just as unable to consent to sex as he was. While this might seem like a paradox — how can two young people rape each other? — it would actually be a straightforward application of affirmative consent, which requires all participants in a sexual encounter to proactively obtain freely given and unambiguous consent before proceeding.
[…]
According to The Cincinnati Enquirer, Roe said that she was being punished for “engaging in the same sexual freedoms that men on the campus enjoy.” It might be more accurate to say she is being held to the same standard — a standard that is, for many reasons, horrible.
Roe’s theory that Doe’s complaint was a form of revenge is interesting, and it could be true. Perhaps the whole thing was a setup — he lured her to his bedroom, feigned drunkenness, and initiated sexual contact, fully intending to race to the Title IX office the next day, no-one-wounds-me-with-impunity style.
Here’s an alternative theory: Doe woke up, realized they had engaged in sexual activity while they were both drunk, and feared that she would file a complaint against him, as she had done to his friend. Panic-stricken, he felt he had no choice but to beat her to the punch.
Indeed, if you suspect you are going to become the subject of a Title IX investigation, the optimal strategy may very well be to file the first complaint. For reasons not completely clear to me, Title IX administrators often appear biased in favor of the initial complainant, and presume the other party is the wrongdoer.
May 11, 2018
May 8, 2018
Author dubious about students “analyzing” his novels
This is a most amusing little anecdote:
Ian McEwan, the award-winning author, has admitted feeling “a little dubious” about people being compelled to study his books, after helping his son with an essay about his own novel and receiving a C.
McEwan, author of works including Atonement, Amsterdam, and On Chesil Beach, said he remained unconvinced about the purpose of asking students to analyse his work.
“I always feel a little dubious about people being made to read my books,’ he told Event magazine, saying his son Greg was required to write an A-Level essay on Enduring Love several years ago.
“Compelled to read his dad’s book – imagine. Poor guy,” McEwan added.
“I confess I did give him a tutorial and told him what he should consider. I didn’t read his essay but it turned out his teacher disagreed fundamentally with what he said.
“I think he ended up with a C+.”
Asked for his thoughts on the literary landscape of 2018, McEwan suggested he was sceptical.
“Literary fiction is in a curious nosedive saleswise, down about 35 per cent over the past five years,” he said.
“Everyone’s got a theory: TV box sets, some sort of fatigue, who knows. Maybe it’s not just good enough.
“When people ask me who are the amazing writers under 30, I’m not in a position to judge. I start a lot of modern novels and don’t find myself compelled to continue.”
May 4, 2018
Jordan Peterson – Winston Churchill predicted the Death of our Civilization
Dose of Truth
Published on 9 Apr 2018Without tradition or culture and the diligence to keep it alive our value systems and lessons learned by our ancestors will be soon forgotten and Western civilization will descend in to chaos as a result of the forgotten history and disregard for its tradition and value structure. Jordan Peterson sits down with former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson and they discuss this topic and Jordan Peterson provides us with an education on concepts in psychology like memory and its function. John Anderson starts off with words of Churchill, as Jordan Peterson unpacks the statement made.
April 13, 2018
The free speech views of “Gen Z”
Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt argue that despite many nay-sayers, there really is a freedom of speech crisis on university campuses:
In our first post responding to the skeptics, we showed that the skeptics support their skepticism primarily by relying on data about the Millennial generation (those born 1982-1994). The skeptics are correct that Millennials are not much different than previous generations when asked about free speech issues. We also argued that this debate has nothing to do with Millennials; it is about CURRENT college students, who are not Millennials. By the fall of 2015, most college students (especially at elite four year schools) were members of iGen, the “Internet generation” (sometimes called “Gen Z”), which begins around birth year 1995, and which first arrived at college around 2013.
We noted that the new attitudes about speech — including the idea that speech can be violence (even when it includes no threat), and corresponding requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings — only began to appear on select campuses around 2013 or 2014, and we noted that these ideas only became widely known after the wave of student protests that began at the tail end of 2015. Therefore, we pointed out, it is unlikely that nationally representative samples, drawing on students in America’s 4,700 institutions of higher education, could have picked up any changes before 2015, when colleges were still full of Millennials who had never heard of trigger warnings and microaggressions. We proposed that the best way to evaluate whether or not things have changed on campus is to examine data collected on current college students in 2016 or later, and compare it to data on current college students from 2014 and before.
When we performed such comparisons, we found some evidence that in fact things are changing. There is not yet much data available to make direct comparisons, but the GSS does show a change for the little bit of iGen data that it has (see figure 1 in post 1), and the larger Knight study showed a change just from 2016 to 2017. In this post we do a much deeper dive. We present far more data on current college students and we assess whether the campus climate has changed in the last few years with regard to speaking up and sharing one’s views.
The key question is this: are students and professors today more reluctant than they were a few years ago to share their views or to question dominant views? If so, then there is a climate or culture problem on campuses where that change has occurred. We note that the overall climate can change rapidly even if there has been no change in average attitudes about speech. All that needs to happen is that a small group of students begins imposing social costs on those who say things they don’t like, while at the same time college administrators do nothing to stop them. (For a fuller explanation, see this essay by Lee Jussim, or this one by Nassim Taleb, whose title explains the key point: The most intolerant wins: The dictatorship of the small minority.) If college students are more likely to report the feeling of “walking on eggshells” in the years after 2015 than they did in the years before 2015, then there has been a change in the campus culture, even if the average student’s support for free speech has not changed.
“…it is possible to complete an entire degree in anthropology without hearing any criticism of Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa“
Margaret Mead’s reputation has run the gamut over the last nearly 100 years after her career-making visit to Samoa in the mid-1920s:
… my journey did leave me with a newfound and abiding respect for the anthropologist Margaret Mead. At the same young age of 23, Mead travelled to the Samoan Islands to the east of the Vanuatu in the South Pacific Ocean to study the islands’ Polynesian people. On a cloudy Samoan day in August of 1925, she stepped off the S.S. Sonoma in Pago Pago Bay, Tuttuila, and began her research. By the end of her career, she was celebrated as the mother of anthropology, both revered and despised for the image of humanity she presented to the world, and for her conclusions about the Samoan people, in particular.
At first, her conversations with the Samoans did not go especially well:
Mead: When a chief’s son is tattooed they build a special house, don’t they?
Asuegi: No, no special house.
Mead: Are you sure they never build a house?
Asuegi: Yes. Well, sometimes they build a small house of sticks and leaves.
Mead: Was that house sacred?
Asuegi: No, not sacred.
Mead: Could you take food into it?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.
Mead: Smoke in there?
Asuegi: Oh no, very sacred.
Mead: Could anybody go into the house who wished?
Asuegi: Yes, anybody.
Mead: No one was forbidden to go in?
Asuegi: No.
Mead: Could the boy’s sister go in?
Asuegi: Oh no. That was forbidden.Mead later recalled that she could have “screamed with impatience.” To make matters worse, the native Samoans would often take her belongings and redistribute them according to ceremonial obligations. But, eventually, she began to make progress. Mead developed close friendships with a small and dedicated group of young girls who became her chief informants. She was made a taupou, a ceremonial virgin, despite having a husband back in the United States. Before long, Mead was considered a respected honorary member of the society, and her research project blossomed. A few months and a tropical hurricane later, Mead returned to the United States, and in 1928, she published the results of her research, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization.
Her work was widely accepted and praised but by the 1960s, there were some signs challenging her research and conclusions, especially the research of New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman. Although he held back the publication of his work until after her death, she was aware of his criticisms and received one of the chapters of his book in advance:
Countless readers had formed a romantic image of the Samoan people from Coming Of Age in Samoa, but now Freeman had broken the spell. The people most blindsided by Freeman’s book were those anthropologists who had stood in front of lecture audiences and fed students Mead’s image of Samoa. Some of them immediately attacked the book. Anthropologist Laura Nader, sister of independent US politician Ralph Nader, called Freeman’s book a “Right-wing political backlash” for questioning the influence of culture on human behavior, and a vote by American Anthropological Association condemned the book as unscientific.
Over the next few decades, Mead’s reputation hung precariously in the balance as anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists battled it out in the nature-nurture controversy. However, the cruelest blow to Mead would come from anthropologists themselves.
It turned out that the young girls Mead apparently depended upon for many of her concepts about Samoan life were far from truthful about their lives:
Unlike the American anthropologists who preached Mead’s findings, Samoans themselves tended to look upon Mead’s work negatively. Some of the Samoan elders burned copies of Coming of Age in Samoa when they realized what Mead had written, and for some time libraries in Samoa didn’t stock the book. Samoan anthropologist Unasa L. F. Va’a called it “one of the worst books of the twentieth century.”3 One of the questions that preoccupied Freeman was how Mead arrived at the erroneous conclusions she drew in her book. He decided that Mead’s own research came mostly from interviews with women, particularly young women, who are hardly the best informants when it comes to matters of historical warfare and violence. On the subject of promiscuity, Freeman conjectured that Mead was the victim of a hoax by her young female informants: “All the indications are that the young Margaret Mead was, as a kind of joke, deliberately misled by her adolescent informants.” In 1987, a few years after Margaret Mead and Samoa was published, it was discovered that one of Mead’s close informers in 1926, Fa’apua’a Fa’amu, was still alive, and wished to swear on the Bible to clear the record on what she had told Mead all those years ago about sexual relations among the Samoans:
We said that we were out all night with the boys; she failed to realize that we were just joking and must have been taken in by our pretenses… She must have taken it seriously but I was only joking. As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking. But Margaret accepted our trumped up stories as though they were true.…Yes, we just lied and lied to her.
But was she totally wrong? Doubts exist here, too:
Although Mead’s analysis is obviously highly questionable, the degree to which her work misrepresented Samoan society remains an open question. In 2009, the anthropologist Paul Shankman published his book The Trashing of Margaret Mead in which he reconsiders the evidence. Shankman describes Freeman as an unruly character marked by mental instability, a vindictive desire to ruin the careers of other anthropologists, and plain rudeness (Shankman recalled a nightmare experience when he gave a lecture at ANU and Freeman sat behind him opening and reading his mail so loudly that Shankman had to ask him to stop). This ad hominem attack on Freeman might seem like a desperate effort to evade his refutation of Mead, or to seek revenge on Freeman, but Shankman does succeed in raising some important questions. For example, although virginity is prized in Samoa, it is much more prized among the taupou, the ceremonial virgins of higher status who go on to marry the chiefs. Among the lower status girls, sexual mores were more relaxed and some of these girls did sleep with men before marriage as even Freeman’s data found. Other aspects of Shankman’s belated defense of Mead are more contentious. For example he dismisses Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony about lying to Mead as irrelevant due to her advanced age and sometimes contradictory statements. He also speculates that Fa’apua’a Fa’amu’s testimony was probably not influential on Mead’s wider conclusions because she was only one of 25 informants. These are important qualifications to what is often presented as Freeman’s decisive refutation of Mead’s work.
April 1, 2018
Boarding Schools – what are they like?
Lindybeige
Published on 15 Oct 2016For two years, I went to a British public boarding school, and recently, I attended a reunion. I talk about them.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeIt was difficult in the edit to achieve the balance I wanted, but this can be redressed in later videos. I recorded a few more pieces to camera and took more shots of the school. I don’t feature the people there because this was a personal project, and it would be unfair to involve them in something they may find expresses opinions and ideas with which they disagree. Besides, I wanted to talk to old friends, not poke a camera in their faces.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
March 31, 2018
QotD: Workshops and how to avoid them
Kingsley Amis, a man whom, for reasons neither interesting nor publishable, I did not much admire, once said that the word “workshop” summed up all that was wrong with the modern world. He was right, and his comment was both shrewd and prescient. Courses, conferences, away-days, workshops, team-building weekends – they’re all part of the same pathology, and they’ve spread like bacteria on agar gel.
With a regularity bordering on the boring, from many sources, I receive flyers offering me courses to improve myself. I am far from supposing that I cannot improve or be improved, but most of these courses seem more designed to relieve me of money than anything else. They come with pictures of the course leaders (or trainers), happy and smiling and, to my eyes at least, deeply crooked.
A learned journal to which I subscribe always arrives with invitations to courses and conferences. Some, naturally, are of interest: those given by people who are acknowledged experts in their field, and who will provide a convenient digest of the latest research in it. But a high proportion of them are about what one might call para-work: activity that has nothing, or something only very tangential, to do with the ostensible aims of one’s profession.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.
March 29, 2018
British Schools Explained – Anglophenia Ep 25
Anglophenia
Published on 5 Mar 2015How much do you know about the U.K.’s education system? Siobhan Thompson teaches you the basics. Study up!
March 27, 2018
Stereotype duel – Boomers versus Millennials
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt discusses the long-term damage the Boomers have done to the Millennials:
I’m highly amused that the boomers, possibly the most media-stereotyped generation in history, where the decent members keep telling us they’re not like the lunatics who protested, shut down universities and joined sex communes to share medieval-like diseases from never bathing, are the ones most stereotyping the millennials, according to how the media portrays the millennials.
As some millennial readers here have said, and as I know from my circle, most millennials aren’t like the lazy, game addicted creatures who preach socialism at everyone that the media shows you. Most millennials I know were raised under the spur of boomer teachers who — sorry guys — really are stereotypical in “challenge all authority except mine!
Yes a lot of millennials got lost along the way, and yes, I know my share of millennials drifting through life with no aim, no job, no training, nothing.
But do consider these kids were assured from their youngest age that they were surplus (there are too many humans. I mean they tried to force both of my kids to sign a no-reproduction agreement); that there is nothing they can do (capitalism is inherently unjust, and we’re all ruled by corporations and big, shadowy forces); that no one cares about them (blood for oil; the only reason guns aren’t banned is because people want you to get shot); that their future is poorer and any children they have will be condemned to hell on Earth (we’re running out of oil, water (according to my kids’ teachers), glass (also according to my kids’ teachers) and anything else you can think of (including some things you can’t), there is no future for humanity (global warming is going to kill us all.)
The amazing thing is not that some millennials drift through life with no aim and no plan. Who cares, if it’s all going to end, anyway.
I’m fairly sure they resemble nothing so much as the generation that grew up in the shadow of the year 1000, except without the religious portion, since the prophecies that depress them pretend not to be religious. And yet, anyone who has seen a millennial white male talk about how he’s guilty of all the evils in the world and how he will never be clean of white privilege knows EXACTLY what the flagellants looked like.
Put yourself in their place. The kids who swallowed the gospel of human guilt for everything and in particular the gospel that the West is particularly evil and that the end is nigh and inevitable aren’t getting up and building. I’m shocked, aren’t you shocked?
The brighter they are, too, the easier it is for them to swallow that gospel, because it’s easier for smart people to become attracted by internally consistent systems even if (particularly if) they have no contact with the outside world.
Again, these aren’t all the millennials, just like the toking, commune dwelling lot weren’t all of the boomers.
But they are a significant portion, and in some way they might be the portion that would have been most dedicated/creative.
So, what can be done?
March 26, 2018
Rick McGinnis on Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Peterson’s book and lecture series has been much in the news lately, so Rick McGinnis shares his thoughts, particularly about the message and intended audience for 12 Rules for Life:
It was probably inevitable that this sudden notoriety would create a demand for a book-length statement of principles from Peterson, and he obliged earlier this year with 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Deceptively packaged as a self-help tome, the book expands on a series of postings Peterson made on Quora, a crowdsourcing website that, instead of asking for money, invites its readers to contribute answers to questions posed by other readers.
The book’s structure is straightforward; after sketching in the origin of the dozen precepts, he states them at the outset of each chapter, explains them in varying degrees of complexity with examples from his practice as a clinical psychologist, anecdotes from his own life or – and this is proving to be most tantalizing – ruminations on quotes from history, philosophy, mythology or (most often of all) the Bible.
On the surface, Peterson’s edicts for a good life are self-evident: Stand straight; Obey the Golden Rule; Choose your friends wisely; Set yourself reasonable expectations; Raise your children well; Don’t be a hypocrite; Cherish meaning; Don’t lie; Listen before you speak; Choose your words carefully; Let children fail so they learn to succeed; Be kind to animals.
But lest you think that short paragraph should save anyone the price of the book, it has to be understood that we are at least a generation, perhaps several, from the point where these commonsensical statements were known, understood or accepted by any sane adult. We are, at the end of a century of phenomenal technological advances and cataclysmic history, sorely in need of a book-length exposition on phrases that you’d once expect to find on needlework samplers.
Early on and quite often, Peterson comes across with butt-clenching dread as the smartest-man-in-the-room, laying out the stories behind the facts, culled from his years of reading and research, with the force and volume of a firehose. He relies heavily on evolutionary biology to explain our hardwired need to create and find our place in hierarchies, with examples that distill our endlessly troubling social responses to bluff, authority, and even violence down to chemical and neurological mechanisms set in place way back in time with far less complex creatures (a scenario that’s easily satirized as “we are all lobsters”).
It’s been observed – and confirmed by Peterson – that the ideal audience for his book is young people in general and young men in particular. As a former young man, I can attest that being told by a wise older man, clearly on your side but unwilling to sugar coat the facts, that the bully and the big-man-on-campus are better armed than you are to jockey for status and fulfillment – the alpha lobsters, waving their claws around to appreciable effect – is very much less than comforting. Peterson’s ideal audience will have to endure the climb up a very steep hill of biological determinism to reach the far more hospitable plateau beyond.
I’m not saying Peterson is wrong. From the perspective of an older man, I’ve seen this lobster battle played out too many times to deny its plausibility. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t suggest that the ideologies that he decries, imagining that there is no biological determinism – not even the binary division of gender – or even a landscape governed by measurable standards or objective truth, is far more appealing to young people raised to believe in an ever-expanding entitlement of “rights” and a pursuit of “justice” that needs to triumph above history or biology.
It’s when Peterson tries to explain the philosophical and even theological roots of our cultural systems that things might be rewarding, for both young and older readers. He has a core group of texts that he relies upon, with particular emphasis on Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn on the modern side, and while he will evoke ancient mythology – the gods of Egypt make several appearances, though even he can’t overcome the essential strangeness of their myths – he reaps more rewardingly from the Bible, especially in one passage where he analyzes the difference between the Old and New Testament God.
