Quotulatiousness

December 21, 2009

Persuasion having failed, they now turn to emotional blackmail

Filed under: Education, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:10

Frank Furedi looks at how modern educators have adopted the methods of Soviet-era authorities to try to turn children into a home-based fifth column:

There is a long and sordid tradition of trying to socialise children by scaring them. The aim of such socialisation-through-fear is twofold: firstly, to get children to conform to the scaremongers’ values; secondly, to use children to influence, or at least to contain, their parents’ behaviour.

When I was a schoolchild in Stalinist Hungary, we were frequently warned about the numerous threats facing our glorious regime. I also recall that we were encouraged to lecture our errant parents about the new wonderful values being promoted by our brave, wise leaders. The Big Brothers of the 1940s saw children as tools of moral blackmail and social control. Today, in the twenty-first century, scaremongers see children in much the same way, exploiting their natural concern with the wonders of life to promote a message of shrill climate alarmism.

If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

November 13, 2009

British emigration woes

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:02

Jeremy Clarkson enumerates all the places would-be Ex-pats can’t go:

There’s talk of emigration in the air. It’s everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can’t see the point because she won’t be going to university, because she doesn’t have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don’t live in America.

[. . .]

It’s a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can’t go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can’t go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don’t sweep your lawn properly, and you can’t go to Italy because you’ll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse’s head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for “organising” a plumber.

You can’t go to Australia because it’s full of things that will eat you, you can’t go to New Zealand because they don’t accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can’t go to Monte Carlo because they don’t accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can’t go to Spain because you’re not called Del and you weren’t involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can’t go to Germany . . . because you just can’t.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you’ll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it’s okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can’t go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

November 3, 2009

Biggest stimulus success – more government jobs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:49

Veronique de Rugy looks at the most recent claims of the number of jobs created or saved by Obama’s stimulus, and finds that most of the new jobs are in the public sector. The cost to “create” these jobs is eye-watering, too:

The White House claims that 640,329 were created or saved. That, by the way, is way less than what Christina Romer claimed would be created. Last week, she mentioned 1.4 million during a Joint Committee hearing. Remember.

First, $159 billion has been spent so far. That’s $248,273 per job.

However, when you look at some specific contracts that were awarded you find that some jobs were created or saved at an insane cost to taxpayers. For instance, $1,359,633,501 were awarded to CH2M WG IDAHO LLC, in WA to create 2,183 jobs. That’s $622,827 per job. That’s not as bad though as the $258,646,800 awarded to the Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC in NY, to create 25 jobs. That’s over $10.3 million per job.

I would be happy with one of these jobs.

Second, while the administration is promising good and in time reporting, we can see that it’s far from being the case. Agencies report having spent $207.3 Billion and yet only $36,688,660,161 were reported by states. That’s a big gap, isn’t it?

Third, some 85 percent of the money went to 4 agencies: HHS, Labor, Education and Social Security. That money wasn’t spent on shovel ready projects. For instance, some of the HHS funds went to some rural high school and college students from Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee to conduct medical research this summer with a team of leading scientists at Vanderbilt University. The Department of Labor spent $11,058,877 in unemployment insurance (UI) modernization incentive funds to the state of West Virginia. And the Department of Education is mainly spending its money to keep union protected school teachers in their jobs. Not really shovel ready projects, are they?

October 16, 2009

QotD: Maturity, fading

Filed under: Education, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:11

Maturity as a general virtue, however, declined in the Sixties when indiscriminate sexual liberty, detached from responsibility and emotional engagement, became a human right from puberty forward. With no need to defer the gratification of appetite, there was no further need for patience, maturity’s hallmark.

And yet what stage of life could be worse for indefinite prolongation? Adolescence is a period marked by extreme intellectual callowness, thrall to raging hormones, obsession with appearance and social caste, contempt for authority, fascination with the transgression of rules, immoderate self-righteousness and intense sensitivity to perceived offence.

For the negative physical consequences of adolescence as a cultural norm, consider the body-sculpting, porn and plastic surgery industries. Our culture’s obsession with youthful appearance and limitless, Dionysiac sexuality is pandemic.

For the more pernicious negative intellectual and political consequences, consider the universities. In academia one finds a ruling cadre of grey-haired, jeans-clad university teachers pickled in Woodstock-nostalgic revolutionary amber, still rebelling against their parents’ conformity and hypocrisy, still contemptuous of their parents’ institutions and values, even those that stabilized family life and nourished communitarianism.

The political correctness these ideologues embody, Epstein shrewdly notes, is a peculiarly adolescent phenomenon: “Political correctness . . — from academic feminism to cultural studies to queer theory — could only be perpetrated on adolescent minds: . . . Only an adolescent would find it worthwhile to devote his or her attention chiefly to the hunting of offenses [and] the possibility of slights, real and imagined.”

Barbara Kay, “The decline of maturity”, National Post, 2009-10-16

September 30, 2009

Testing whether incentive pay for teachers improves student outcomes

Filed under: Economics, Education, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:13

A post up at Marginal Revolution summarizes a new paper by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman, examining whether incentive pay for teachers (PDF) improves student performance:

1) Evidence comes from a very large sample, 500 schools covering approximately 55,000 students, and treatment regimes and controls are randomly assigned to schools in a careful, stratified design.

2) An individual-incentive plan and a group-incentive plan are compared to a control group and to two types of unconditional extra-spending treatments (a block grant and hiring an extra teacher). Thus the authors can test not only whether an incentive plan works relative to no plan but also whether an incentive plan works relative to spending a similar amount of money on “improving schools.”

3) The authors understand incentive design and they test for whether their incentive plan reduces learning on non-performance pay margins.

In the west, with most students being taught in publicly funded schools with strong teaching unions, these results will not be welcomed by the majority of school systems or unions. From the abstract:

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students’ test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on “conceptual” as well as “mechanical” components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.

I’m surprised that the results were so positive for relatively minor incentive bonus amounts.

September 8, 2009

What’s in a name?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education — Nicholas @ 09:17

For most people, certain names pick up associations that have to do with the first person you encountered who bore that name. You may view all “Garys” with mild apprehension, while you’re automatically well-disposed to “Michaels”. “Kathy” or “Chelsea” may remind you of an unpleasant classmate from grade school, while “Tina” or “Pauline” may be viewed in advance as good people, all based on your early experiences.

Teachers in Britain have their little list of names, too:

As teachers eye the register on the first day back at school this September, they’ll be nervously keeping a sharp look-out for certain names which “strike fear into the nation’s tutors”.

The list of those likely to make mischief includes young ‘uns dubbed Aliesha, Brooke, Brooklyn, Casey, Chelsea, Connor, Crystal, Demi, Jack, Jake, Jessica, Kyle, and (pay attention at the back there El Reg’s Executive Vice President, Global Sales), Liam.

This roster of foreboding comes courtesy of Bounty.com, which polled 3,000 blackboard botherers to determine just which names spell trouble. Doubtless there are those among you who have a lad called Jake who’s an absolute angel, but that makes no difference to tremulous teachers, because they’ve already got him marked down as a wrong ‘un as soon as they clock his ID.

September 4, 2009

The show must go on!

Filed under: Education, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:45

David Harsanyi looks at all the reasons it would be a good thing to support President Obama’s schools webcast next week:

Why would anyone want to deprive impressionable school-age children of hearing the inspiring wisdom of the president? Barack Obama is determined to impart his knowledge upon our pliable offspring via webcast across the country next week, and we should not stand in his way.

This is, as they say, a teachable moment. There is nothing to fear. Naturally, teachers and parents, incapable of handling the sheer concentrated intellectual force of such a historic event, have been forwarded a detailed lesson plan by the Department of Education (sic) so that no child will be blinded inadvertently by the dazzling light of hope.

[. . .]

Moreover, if your child is incapable of handling a 20-minute haranguing from a self-important public servant, he will be tragically unprepared for the new world. (Whom do you think he will be dealing with when he needs that hip replacement in 60 years?)

Even if you oppose the president on a political level, it is empirically evident that the more one hears his homilies the less inclined one is to trust him. And Obama’s penchants to lecture us endlessly, to be the center of attention endlessly and to saturate the airwaves and national conversation are clear indications that he believes government is the answer to every societal, religious, economic, and cultural question we face. Why should your kids be immune?

Well, I’m convinced. Just as long as there’s no singing (Monty Python reference, in case it’s too obscure.).

August 31, 2009

Frederick Pohl graduates from high school

Filed under: Books, Education, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:42

Fred Pohl, the long-time science fiction author (his first published piece was a poem in the October, 1937 issue of Amazing Stories, according to Wikipedia) has finally received his high school diploma:

Happens that I never graduated from high school, the reason being that I quit school as soon as I was old enough, which was 17. I had several reasons for doing that, but the one I prefer to give when asked that question is the one given by my friend John Brunner when he quit in England, at about the same age. That was, “I had to leave school, because it was interfering with my education.” (In case you wonder, I didn’t go to college, either. I did teach at several and lectured at scores if not hundreds of them, all the way from local community two-year schools to the Ivy League, in maybe a dozen different countries as well as our own, but I never attended one.)

[. . .]

I do have one problem, though. I remember matchbook ads for a correspondence school, back in the days when people still carried matchbooks, which promised that people who got a high-school diploma would get $25 more a week. The problem is I don’t know whom to bill.

August 26, 2009

Print media’s problems

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:04

Colby Cosh has concerns about the direction in which the newspapers have been moving:

Some days I think print media should die even if I would too

Our business would have a lot more credibility if we spent less time giving each other awards and concentrated on handing out boobie prizes for uncritical, gormless stuff like the St. Albert Gazette‘s breathlessly excited coverage of a new local math curriculum for primary schools that “covers far fewer concepts.” As I get older I grow more cowardly about making enemies in a rapidly contracting business, plus I’m taking the piss from a somewhat higher summit than I used to; but seriously, how do some people sleep at night?

August 19, 2009

QotD: The annual Beloit College Mindset List

Filed under: Education, History, Humour, Quotations — Nicholas @ 12:12

If the entering college class of 2013 had been more alert back in 1991 when most of them were born, they would now be experiencing a severe case of déjà vu. The headlines that year railed about government interventions, bailouts, bad loans, unemployment and greater regulation of the finance industry. The Tonight Show changed hosts for the first time in decades, and the nation asked “was Iraq worth a war?”

Beloit College, 2009-08-18

July 20, 2009

Decoded: the secret of modern education

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education — Nicholas @ 17:06

Tyler Cowen provides the skeleton key to understand the modern education system:

Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated?

[Ben Casnochna writes:] He reluctantly provides the terrifying conclusion: Maybe that’s what current methods of education already consist of.

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