H/T to Chris Myrick for the link.
September 2, 2011
September 1, 2011
August 27, 2011
The value of education may actually just be a signalling mechanism
Bryan Caplan looks briefly at the micro (to the person) and macro (to the society) benefits of higher education, but comes up with a more interesting view of the real value of education:
All this is well and good. But there’s an even deeper level of education to examine: What students actually study, learn and retain. I think of this as the “picoeconomic approach”* because it focuses on details too small for the “microeconomic approach” to see. The microeconomic approach tells us how much the market rewards education. But in the end, it doesn’t tell us why. To discover why education matters, we must descend to the picoeconomic level.
Key example: the main reason I’m think signaling is big deal has nothing to do with either Micro-Mincerian or Macro-Mincerian estimates of the return to education. The main reason I think signaling is a big deal is that (a) students study a ton of material that almost no job uses; (b) the Transfer of Learning literature shows that learning is highly specific — you don’t build general purpose mental muscles by learning Latin; (c) students quickly — and happily — forget most of what they learn, anyway. And yet employers amply reward education! The signaling model instantly looks like the best way to explain all the key facts.
[. . .]
* I know that the term “picoeconomics” is already used to describe the study of self-control problems, motivation, and so on. But why not think of self-control problems as one picoeconomic topic, and mine as another? We can treat picoeconomics as a blanket term that covers everything too small for microeconomists to notice.
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August 16, 2011
Influence of the education system on the London riots
Neil Davenport wonders how changes to the English education system may have influenced the rioters’ attitudes:
Some young people, asked by journalists why they rioted, blamed their violence on the scrapping of the educational maintenance allowance (EMA), the hike in university tuition fees or rising youth unemployment. These apparently radical platitudes sound obviously rehearsed, designed to please liberal journalists. [. . .]
No doubt there was a hardcore of repeat delinquents smashing in windows. But many more of the rioters seemed like the normal, and likeable, teenagers that I have taught in schools in London over the past decade. In the capital, some 91 per cent of the riotous offenders were under 25, many of them aged between 16 and 18. As one commentator quickly observed, this means they were all educated under the New Labour government (1997 to 2010). It makes you wonder what they learnt at their New Labour-era hi-tech schools. Perhaps the real lesson they learnt is that nothing should be allowed to dent their self-esteem, and nobody should ever be allowed to ‘victimise’ or ‘bully’ them or prevent them from doing what they like.
In recent years, young people have internalised a corrosive sense of entitlement, where they really do believe that the world owes me, me, me a living. Since this retrograde outlook is far more institutionalised in London’s education system than elsewhere in Britain, it is not that surprising that a hardcore of rioting took place in the capital rather than in, say, Scottish cities. Their education system is largely separate from England’s.
‘New Labour kids’ have been more flattered, mollycoddled and freed of responsibilities than any generation before them. These days, as young people progress through the education system, they learn that there is a whole raft of medical reasons why they can’t write neatly or behave properly in class. They also know that if their exam grades are slightly disappointing, they can always blame the teachers. And New Labour’s social-inclusion charter also means that schools cannot automatically throw kids out, even in the sixth form, for not working hard enough or for their poor behaviour. Local education authorities can fight to ensure that a suspended child is reinstated and then attack the school for failing to provide ‘adequate support’ to address the pupil’s ‘psychological issues’.
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July 24, 2011
QotD: School isn’t for everyone
If the communists hadn’t nationalized the old Lutheran Gymnasium of Budapest, my father might have put his foot down. As it was, he resigned himself to my not going back to school in the fall of 1952. “Can’t say that I blame you,” he said. “The comrades are crashing bores. I doubt if you’d learn anything from them, but why take a chance. You’d just have to spend years unlearning it, especially if it started with an ‘e’ like economics or ethics.”
[. . .]
I’m not sure if anybody was. In those days, there was no such illness as Attention Deficit Disorder, and in any event I didn’t suffer from it. I could be tirelessly attentive, even obsessive, about things I liked. I could, and did, read voraciously. Futzing with details was a delight; I just needed to explore things that interested me in settings that didn’t rub me the wrong way.
School did. The sound of chalk on blackboards did. What I suffered from wasn’t ADD but SADD: School Attention Deficit Disorder. The sight of a classroom made me sleepy and hyperactive at the same time. Years after I dropped out, I had one recurring nightmare: I dreamt I was sitting in my bench in class, trying to explain to everyone it was a mistake because I had no business being there.
Some soar in a school setting; I could barely drift. I loved books, but hated the way teachers expected me to deal with what I’ve read. I wanted to think, absorb, fantasize and dream about characters and stories; they wanted me to parse and précis. I was puzzled and frustrated by their fussy, fusty, pedantic, and pedestrian ways. They’d show me Mona Lisa’s smile, and ask me to count her teeth.
George Jonas, “Everything I know, I learned from not going to school”, National Post, 2011-07-24
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July 12, 2011
Dealing with irritations: two varieties
First up, Charles Stross is questioned about his “credentials” by a budding scholar:
From: numpty#@gmail.comHello, I’m citing your work for a debate article I’m using about space colonization and how it is improbable. I do need credentials however, and I’ve yet to find them online. If you could reply with your credentials that’d be great.
(I assume he’s talking about this; it’s all over the internet, triggered a firestorm, and I keep getting gimme emails from content farms asking to reprint it.)
From: meI’m a novelist, not an academic. If you want credentials, go look me up in wikipedia.
From: numpty#@gmail.comYour time is clearly very valuable, as you would rather argue with me over this than simply take a minute or two to state your credentials. Furthermore, I have no need to know the extent of your writings, I simply need to know if you are indeed certified to be considered a credible source on the topic. For instance, if your credible knowledge is on the topic of slaads and borrowing from George R. R. Martin, you are not considered a credible source on space colonization. So let me just ask you this, why should I believe your article has any rational basis, when for all I know now is your true expertise lies in the githyanki.
And in another instance, Dark Water Muse has to deal with a clueless telephone solicitation:
I had the privilege today of being phoned by fraudsters phishing for access to my computer. This is the second time I’ve received this type of call and I’ve used the same response in both cases. Try it, it’s fun.
[The phone rings. callee answers the phone.]
Callee: Hello?
[several seconds pass before the background noises of a busy call centre can be heard]
Caller [affected by a thick South Asian accent]: Hello?
Callee: Hello??
Caller: can I speak to Mr…uhhh…Goon…please?
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July 7, 2011
“Bodice-rippers” guilty of perverting women’s lives
Apparently, The Guardian thinks that women are weak-willed and easily (mis-)lead, especially when it comes to their sex lives:
Mills & Boon’s romance novels should come with a health warning, according to a report published in an academic journal.
Blaming romance novels for unprotected sex, unwanted pregnancies, unrealistic sexual expectations and relationship breakdowns, author and psychologist Susan Quilliam says that “what we see in our consulting rooms is more likely to be informed by Mills & Boon than by the Family Planning Association”, advising readers of the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care that “sometimes the kindest and wisest thing we can do for our clients is to encourage them to put down the books — and pick up reality”.
Her comments follow a recent claim that romance novels can “dangerously unbalance” their readers, with Christian psychologist Dr Juli Slattery saying she was seeing “more and more women who are clinically addicted to romantic books”, and that “for many women, these novels really do promote dissatisfaction with their real relationships”.
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July 1, 2011
Why Canadian students learn so little history
An article in the newly launched Dorchester Review discusses the teaching of history:
Here in Canada the preoccupation with victimhood has mostly centred on Japanese Canadians and residential school “survivors.” Peter Seixas in Teaching Canada’s History (pp. 18-21) thinks children should be encouraged to condemn Caucasian writers who used terms like “Eskimo,” “primitive,” and “pagan.” What Seixas, a professor of education, seems not to appreciate is that schoolchildren are too young for this kind of academic pseudo-complexity and that their worldview is warped by pretentious classroom efforts to “heal the wounds.” Indeed what he advocates is what we have already had in many locales for a generation and counting.
[. . .]
In its more recent form, the classical model proposes that various integrated fields from science and math to English and second or classical languages should be covered at three stages (hence “trivium”), each time to a deeper, more systematic and engaging degree. For example, one approach for history could look like this, in four fields: (1) classical antiquity, (2) medieval-renaissance, (3) modern history, and (4) national, regional, and local history. Taught as a trivium, each of these four fields would be covered three times between grades one and twelve. Students today complain about repetition, but that is because they are tortured repetitively with the same introductory material by different uncoordinated teachers — rather than going into the subject more deeply and systematically as they grow older and more capable. As Anna Clark wrote in her 2008 paper on history teaching in Australia and Canada, “There is little point mandating the subject if it does not engage students and teachers.” Textbooks should be used as a guide not a crutch, as classical educators have long maintained.
[. . .]
We all have far to go. First, the evidence suggests that effective historical memory work is haphazard and unsystematic in public and many private schools. Students arrive at senior grades fundamentally culturally deprived and ignorant of facts. Even if narrative history is “compulsory” in Britain to age 14, in practice pupils lack “chronological understanding,” according to Ofsted, the agency that inspects school standards. Teachers have failed “to establish a clear mental map of the past.” Students “knew about particular events, characters and periods but did not have an overview.” In Canada, social studies curricula in the English-speaking provinces reveal a similar prevalence of disconnected, episodic case studies. In England (and presumably elsewhere), as Michael Gove’s critics admit, “The real problem is not with the curriculum, but with the schools’ failure to deliver it.”
Secondly, “critical skills” are introduced too early. “Where ignorance and scepticism meet, a course on British history becomes a course on running Britain down,” remarks one Financial Times writer: “By age 16, students will have as much cynicism and ‘distance’ as any educator could wish.” In Canada, a typical curriculum (Alberta’s) prescribes “historical thinking” in grade nine, “a process whereby students are challenged to rethink assumptions about the past.” But how can students “rethink” something they haven’t learned in the first place?
Regrettably, the British curriculum downgrades history to an elective after age 14, a premature cut-off that sabotages the three-stage process that classical educators promote. It reduces history to an elementary subject. It’s similar in Canada: after children are immersed in relativist “traditions and celebrations” (grade two in Ontario), they jump around in grades three to seven social studies from settlement in Upper Canada backwards to the middle ages; backwards again to antiquity, followed illogically by first nations and explorers and a survey of Canada. After grade seven, as in Britain, history becomes an elective. We have all seen the schoolbus with some banal motto painted on the side such as “On the Journey of Learning.” Most parents may never realize what this really means: “On a Journey to Nowhere in Particular.”
I went to school in the 60s and 70s and I loved history . . . just not the crap that was taught in history classes. It seemed to me that they deliberately tried to make Canadian history as boring as humanly possible. I had a few teachers who really seemed to enjoy teaching the subject, but for most of them it did appear to be just a tedious exercise they had to go through.
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June 28, 2011
Happy Tau Day
Just when you think it’s safe to go back to mathematics, you discover a holy war against pi:
Tau Day revellers suggest a constant called tau should take its place: twice as large as pi, or about 6.28 — hence the 28 June celebration.
Tau proponents say that for many problems in maths, tau makes more sense and makes calculations easier.
Not all fans of maths agree, however, and pi’s rich history means it will be a difficult number to unseat.
“I like to describe myself as the world’s leading anti-pi propagandist,” said Michael Hartl, an educator and former theoretical physicist.
“When I say pi is wrong, it doesn’t have any flaws in its definition — it is what you think it is, a ratio of circumference to diameter. But circles are not about diameters, they’re about radii; circles are the set of all the points a given distance — a radius — from the centre,” Dr Hartl explained to BBC News.
[. . .]
Dr Hartl is passionate about the effort, but even he is surprised by the fervent nature of some tau adherents.
“What’s amazing is the ‘conversion experience’: people find themselves almost violently angry at pi. They feel like they’ve been lied to their whole lives, so it’s amazing how many people express their displeasure with pi in the strongest possible terms — often involving profanity.
“I don’t condone any actual violence — that would be really bizarre, wouldn’t it?”
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June 26, 2011
Anti-semitism at the University of Toronto
Post-graduate students at the U of T may have gotten a bit too honest and outspoken in class:
Picture the following: A discussion in a post-graduate university class on the topic of Jews turns ugly. The professor is uncritical when one student says he doesn’t want to be around Jews. Another student complains about “rich Jews,” implying their excessive power. In a subsequent class, the same professor, as if to validate those points, says half her department faculty are Jews and with her approbation, students conduct a ‘Jew count’.
While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work. Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.
The controversy began when some visible minority students in a Social Work Master’s program at the University of Toronto expressed discomfort about being around “rich Jews,” in Professor Rupaleem Bhuyan’s class, regarding a proposed outing in 2009 to the Baycrest Centre, an internationally renowned Jewish geriatric and research facility. They were undoubtedly confident of a sympathetic ear from her. The previous year, Bhuyan denounced Israel as a satellite of the United States, unworthy of distinction as a separate country.
The few Jewish students in Bhuyan’s Master’s Program class were intimidated into silence for much of the discussion by a classroom culture slanted against them. Finally, one young woman spoke up, protesting her grandparents had come to Canada with virtually nothing and she was proud her family could now afford the fees for them to reside at Baycrest.
That must have rung an alarm bell for Professor Bhuyan, because startlingly, she then admonished her students not to divulge what transpired in class to outsiders.
H/T to Ilkka for the link.
June 13, 2011
AC Grayling’s “embryo London humanities university … has induced apoplexy in the old left”
Simon Jenkins marvels at the over-the-top response to the announcement of a new private university in London:
This has been a purple week for red rage. The hirsute philosopher, AC Grayling, may call himself a “pinko” but his embryo London humanities university in Bedford Square has induced apoplexy in the old left. He and 13 high-octane scholars are having their lectures “targeted”. The Guardian is in ideological meltdown. Foyles has been hit by a smoke bomb. The Kropotkin of our age, Terry Eagleton, claims to be fit to vomit. Bloomsbury has not been so excited since semen was spotted on Vanessa Bell’s dress.
Britain’s professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists’ lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.
What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.
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June 10, 2011
Update on the “educational” SWAT team raid
There’s been a bit of clarification from the authorities, although what they reveal isn’t pretty:
The Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General served a warrant on Stockton, California resident Kenneth Wright at six in the morning on Tuesday. Though the initial story gave the impression that the raid was focused on unpaid student loans, the department’s press secretary helpfully informed us this was not the case, and that the office conducts investigations of bribery, fraud, and embezzlement.
That’s little comfort. A review of the warrant reveals that the investigators were searching for financial records connected with suspected financial aid fraud, conspiracy, theft of government funds, false statements to the government, and wire fraud. Wright wasn’t the suspect — his estranged wife was and she wasn’t present for the raid — but for this list of white collar crimes the agents breached the front door, dragged Wright and his three children from the home, and kept them in a police cruiser for hours (the children for two, Wright for over six).
Kenneth Wright’s gut reaction, captured on video, largely mirrors mine. Ridiculous. Someone may have lied on student loan paperwork, so federal investigators converged to kick in a door and keep a family in the back of a cruiser for hours when they could have simply knocked and served the warrant.
Of course, the stated reason for the raid isn’t likely the real one:
This raid was a tactical dog and pony show to justify the existence of the OIG’s office, timely executed as Republicans are sharpening their fiscal knives. The same bureaucratic survival instinct motivated the ATF’s raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The ATF needed a high-profile bust to justify its existence in the face of perennial budgetary scrutiny, scrutiny that is deserved now more than ever as ATF officials knowingly let guns get shipped across the Mexican border to support the cartels. Two turned up at the scene of the shooting death of a Border Patrol agent and others shot a Mexican military helicopter and forced it to land.
Update: Some useful commentary at Popehat:
Anton Chekov (no, not the Star Trek guy) said of writing drama, “one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
Law enforcement training and procurement follows a similar ethos: supply creates its own demand. If you buy fancy toys for cops of any stripe, and train them to use them, then they’re going to use them. Once law enforcement is equipped and trained to wield the hammer of paramilitary raids, then every search looks like a nail. [. . .] (I suspect there’s a Napoleonic phenomenon going on as well: in my experience as a former fed and current defense lawyer, the more petty an officer’s power, and the narrower his patch, the more he itches to exercise force and authority.) That’s how they get to the place where they think it’s appropriate to use this much force against an innocent citizen with no criminal record, and his family, because his ex was committing fraud
[. . .]
Searches can be unreasonable not just in their purpose or in their supporting probable cause, but in their execution. A paramilitary raid is a grotesquely disproportionate approach to the investigation of a non-violent crime. It poses a grave risk of accidental death. It terrorizes innocents. And it conditions both police and citizens to view any law enforcement inquiry as justifying overwhelming force. Things like loan fraud and illegal milk sales should not require shock and awe.
The bottom line: we need to be vigilant for government abuse of the application for and execution of search warrants as well as erosion of the use of search warrants.
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June 8, 2011
New tactic on delinquent student loans: SWAT teams
Thinking about getting behind on paying back your student loan? Think again:
Kenneth Wright does not have a criminal record and he had no reason to believe a S.W.A.T team would be breaking down his door at 6 a.m. on Tuesday.
“I look out of my window and I see 15 police officers,” Wright said.
Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as a S.W.A.T team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn.
After the public humiliation, he was then handcuffed and chucked into the back of a police car for 6 hours, along with his three young children. He’ll think twice before getting behind on his student loans, right?
Perhaps not: they weren’t even his loans: the SWAT team was looking for his estranged wife.
June 7, 2011
Intolerance of educational experimentation
Brendan O’Neill surveys the range of responses to the proposed establishment of a new private for-profit university in London:
It is ‘odious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘parasitic’, ‘hypocritical’, a ‘travesty’, a ‘money-grubbing’ scheme, and ‘it would be better all-round if its doors never opened’. Wow. What is it? A whorehouse? A Satanic church? A junk-food chain that specialises in feeding fat straight into children’s veins via a drip? In fact it’s a proposed new London-based university, called the New College of the Humanities, which says it will teach students the best of literature, culture and history for a fee of £18,000 a year. And yet judging from the unhinged coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had proposed opening a Ratko Mladic fanclub in Islington.
The response to Professor AC Grayling’s educational experiment, for which he has recruited other ‘star’ professors such as Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson, has been extraordinarily intolerant. No sooner had the press release about the new university been emailed than Grayling and Co. were being accused of selling out working-class students and the ideal of ‘education for all’ by opening an institution that only the wealthy (and those lucky enough to secure a scholarship) will be able to afford. As one journalist summarised, the initiative has met with ‘universal scorn from commentators in the national press’. Journalists have described the university as a ‘disgrace’, ‘nauseous’ and ‘disgustingly elitist’. The Twittersphere, always keen to ape the pronouncements of its heroes on the op-ed pages, heaped 140-character fury upon Grayling’s vain/pathetic/evil/doomed initiative.
Not to be outdone, members of the University of London Union and other radical student groups called an ‘emergency meeting’ last night. Not an emergency meeting to discuss the corrosion of liberty and free speech in the West or the future of the Arab uprisings — as radical students might have done in the past — but an emergency meeting to discuss how to crush this new uni. ULU’s vice president called for it to be blacklisted, insisting that the University of London refuse to recognise or work with this ‘repugnant’ institution. There was a serious debate about how to shut it down before it had even opened. One left-wing group said we must ‘stop Grayling’s sham university’ because it’s the ‘thin end of the wedge [of privatisation]’. Without so much as a whiff of self-awareness or irony, it went on to describe New College as ‘an attack on free education’. Yes, that’s right — this educational institution must be smashed in order to defend ‘free education’. Perhaps we should also burn its books in the name of defending book-reading.
Of course, if the quality of teaching at the New College of the Humanities is not up to an acceptable standard, it will fail and the university will close. That does not appear to be any part of the motivation for all the screaming and wailing. It rather implies that they’re actually afraid it will succeed, which might start raising questions about the existing university system.
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June 1, 2011
Similarities between US public schools and prisons
As kids, we always used to grumble about school and it being “like a prison”. Kids today probably say the same thing, but with rather more reason:
In the United States today, our public schools are not very good at educating our students, but they sure are great training grounds for learning how to live in a Big Brother police state control grid. Sadly, life in many U.S. public schools is now essentially equivalent to life in U.S. prisons. Most parents don’t realize this, but our students have very few rights when they are in school. Our public school students are being watched, tracked, recorded, searched and controlled like never before. Back when I was in high school, it was unheard of for a police officer to come to school, but today our public school students are being handcuffed and arrested in staggering numbers. When I was young we would joke that going to school was like going to prison, but today that is actually true.
The following are 18 signs that life in our public schools is now very similar to life in our prisons….
#1 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has announced that school officials can search the cell phones and laptops of public school students if there are “reasonable grounds for suspecting that the search will turn up evidence that the student has violated or is violating either the law or the rules of the school.”
#2 It came out in court that one school district in Pennsylvania secretly recorded more than 66,000 images of students using webcams that were embedded in school-issued laptops that the students were using at home.
#3 If you can believe it, a “certified TSA official” was recently brought in to oversee student searches at the Santa Fe High School prom.
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