Education Endtimes Errata

[RE]

I have written previously in some thread here about the Collapse of Public Education, ongoing since shortly after my graduation from Stuyvesant in 1974 and in an increasing downward spiral ever since.  It actually probably was already underway by then, just I wasn't aware of it due to having been tracked into a program run by NYC schools to identify the top 1% of students and provide them a college bound preparatory curriculum.  I recall that my sister's regular local NYC HS H.S. was already a worthless shithole when she graduated 6 years before me.

The decay inspired Ronald Rayguns to warn of the failure in Science & Math education way back in 1982.

https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/13/us/reagan-warns-schools-are-failing-to-meet-science-and-math-needs.html

According to Paul DeHart Hurd, emeritus professor at Stanford University, the typical grade-school pupil gets only one hour of science and four hours of arithmetic every week. Only a third of high school students are graduated with three years of mathematics, he said. Lack of Qualified Teachers

Citing a growing shortage of math and science teachers, he said that half the people teaching those subjects in high schools this year were unqualified and were teaching only with emergency certificates.

The reasons for this are tooo numerous to mention in detail, but one of the biggest was the massive difference in pay scales for teachers actually proficient enough in these subjects to be qualified to teach versus what the same people could earn in careers in Banking, Engineering, Medicine, Pharmaceutical manufacture etc.  Starting pay to begin with was better, but the difference after a 10 year career ran into the 6 figures.  Good teachers simply left after 5 years, realizing they woul be lower middle class the rest of their lives, whereas a move before it was too late meant a future in the upper class or at least upper middle class.  Combine this with the ever increasing number of working mothers and single parent households, the system was already well into collapse by this time.

In 2001, right before the WTC came collapsing down on 911, Curious George Bush announced the "No Child Left Behind" initiative, which in practice was the No Child Allowed to Flunk system which dropped the bar so low even a Monkey like Curious George could graduate.  During my stint teaching in the 1990s, things were already so bad that most of my 9th grade physical science students couldn't even grasp basic formulas like Density=Mass/Volume, and my class devolved into a show & tell  hour of some flashy demo of blowing up something then passing out a connect the dots and fill in the blanks organizer since they couldn't take notes off the blackboard (granted, my handwriting was illegible, lol) and a 10 question quiz at the end of the week where I gave them the questions the day before so they could look up the answers.

Fast forward to today, where the SATs are now being dropped as a requirement for college admissions already, the Oregon State Dept of Ed has now dropped even the lower than low bar of No Child Left Behind era tests designed to graduate you on time as long as you could sign your name to a car loan and use a calculator to add up your grocery bill:

In public education's latest blunder, the Oregon Department of Education has just decided that basic reading, writing and math skills are not required for students to graduate with a high school diploma.

https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4288044-oregon-just-dropped-all-graduation-standards-failing-all-of-its-students-in-the-name-of-equity/

Prior to the passage of Senate Bill 744 in the Oregon Legislative Assembly's 2021 session, the state's "Assessment of Essential Skills" requirement for high school graduation was sensible: "read and comprehend a variety of text, write clearly and accurately," and "apply mathematics in a variety of settings." Students were required to demonstrate these skills by "earning at or above a cut score on the Oregon Statewide Summative Assessment test."

HTF are any colleges going to discriminate between applicants without not only national SAT scores but even state proficiency tests of basic skills?  Basically, most of them won't discriminate, they'll sign up any warm blooded Homo Sap who can fog a mirror and will take out a loan to pay  tuition to remedial classes.  The only ones discriminating will be the Ivy League schools, who will base it on their grades from Andover, the recommendation from herdads Congressman and the amount of money he will donate to the endowment.

Forget college, and forget public schools.  Let your kid study online and take a GED test.  Public Education has Officially Collapsed.

RE

[moniker]

I have written previously in some thread here about the Collapse of Public Education, ongoing since shortly after my graduation from Stuyvesant in 1974 and in an increasing downward spiral ever since.  It actually probably was already underway by then, just I wasn't aware of it due to having been tracked into a program run by NYC schools to identify the top 1% of students and provide them a college bound preparatory curriculum.  I recall that my sister's regular local NYC HS H.S. was already a worthless shithole when she graduated 6 years before me.

...

Forget college, and forget public schools.  Let your kid study online and take a GED test.  Public Education has Officially Collapsed.

RE

A few comments,

1. Stuyvesant was an awesome place for a kid commuting from western Queens.
2. The only useful knowledge anyhow is metaphysical or spiritual knowledge. Like all this tower of Babel building will lead to nowhere.
3. Although it was somewhat cheesy, the zeitgeist of the 70's was stellar compared to today.
4. American don't need to learn as they have been earmarked for extinction.

[RE]

4. American don't need to learn as they have been earmarked for extinction.

So who is not so earmarked?  Can't be the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese, Italians Swedes, Germans, Turks, Greeks, Mexicans or Palestinians.  South Africans?  Maybe Elon Musk can single handedly save his homeland from depopulating.

RE

[moniker]

4. American don't need to learn as they have been earmarked for extinction.

So who is not so earmarked?  Can't be the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese, Italians Swedes, Germans, Turks, Greeks, Mexicans or Palestinians.  South Africans?  Maybe Elon Musk can single handedly save his homeland from depopulating.

RE

As George Carlin said, they want "obedient workers". But I would add they want some high IQ types to invent stuff for them.

[RE]

4. American don't need to learn as they have been earmarked for extinction.

So who is not so earmarked?  Can't be the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese, Italians Swedes, Germans, Turks, Greeks, Mexicans or Palestinians.  South Africans?  Maybe Elon Musk can single handedly save his homeland from depopulating.

RE

As George Carlin said, they want "obedient workers". But I would add they want some high IQ types to invent stuff for them.

That would be the thought process of a High IQ type, operating under the assumption stuff needs to be invented.  Except nothing does need to be invented.  Any device useful in a low available energy future has already been invented.  The 5 basic machines of wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, screw, wedge and lever and their combinations and applications are pretty much all you need on an engineering level.  Knowledge of materials like how to work ston, bone, sinew and wood.  Building materials like adobe and clay.  etc, etc, etc, all stuff that's already been figured out long ago.  Anybody with a decent IQ can learn this stuff, so I don't see any real need for High IQ types in the future, unless they are willing to do the grunt work everybody else has to do, and not get more fish or nicer teepees, and especially not conspicuous consumption of A-List Vaginas because they use their high IQs to manipulate the property owwnership system to become filthy rich scum sucking bottom feeders.

RE

[moniker]

4. American don't need to learn as they have been earmarked for extinction.

So who is not so earmarked?  Can't be the Chinese, Indians, Russians, Japanese, Italians Swedes, Germans, Turks, Greeks, Mexicans or Palestinians.  South Africans?  Maybe Elon Musk can single handedly save his homeland from depopulating.

That would be the thought process of a High IQ type, operating under the assumption stuff needs to be invented.  Except nothing does need to be invented.  Any device useful in a low available energy future has already been invented.  The 5 basic machines of wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, screw, wedge and lever and their combinations and applications are pretty much all you need on an engineering level.  Knowledge of materials like how to work ston, bone, sinew and wood.  Building materials like adobe and clay.  etc, etc, etc, all stuff that's already been figured out long ago.  Anybody with a decent IQ can learn this stuff, so I don't see any real need for High IQ types in the future, unless they are willing to do the grunt work everybody else has to do, and not get more fish or nicer teepees, and especially not conspicuous consumption of A-List Vaginas because they use their high IQs to manipulate the property owwnership system to become filthy rich scum sucking bottom feeders.

RE

That would be the thought process of a High IQ type, operating under the assumption stuff needs to be invented.  Except nothing does need to be invented.  Any device useful in a low available energy future has already been invented.  The 5 basic machines of wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, screw, wedge and lever and their combinations and applications are pretty much all you need on an engineering level.  Knowledge of materials like how to work ston, bone, sinew and wood.  Building materials like adobe and clay.  etc, etc, etc, all stuff that's already been figured out long ago.  Anybody with a decent IQ can learn this stuff, so I don't see any real need for High IQ types in the future, unless they are willing to do the grunt work everybody else has to do, and not get more fish or nicer teepees, and especially not conspicuous consumption of A-List Vaginas because they use their high IQs to manipulate the property owwnership system to become filthy rich scum sucking bottom feeders.

RE

Grunt work can be good for these folks if they get caught up in overthinking.

[RE]

Grunt work can be good for these folks if they get caught up in overthinking.

Yes.  And no more plowing A-list furrows or nailing A-list boards. Only Monks who take a vow of poverty can dip their pens into A-list ink wells and fill A-list post holes. 

RE

[K-Dog]

I think I got lucky.  My public education was great.  Nothing like what I found education to like be in the rest of the country.  I found this out as an adult.  At the time I did not know.

I'm of the opinion that a truly educated man educates himself.  And a truly educated man shares what he knows, if for no other reason than to make the knowledge aware to himself.

Given the wars and the determination of the fortunate to keep things in our current lunatic arrangements as long as possible, I came across this.

This Luhman character saw society as a multidimensional collection of interacting systems. 

Which means nothing if I don't explain it.  Consider scientists create an new invention which is described by its actual physical characteristics.  Among themselves they talk about its physical properties.  Length width and such.  Businessmen take the invention and transform it into something else.  They describe it in a language they understand.  In their 'system'  their 'code' is profit and loss and only monetary value is considered.  The invention is seen through this new profit/loss lens.  From their lens a 'commodity' is created and only the utility of the commodity to produce profit is seen.

Every system has a 'code' which defines how things are understood inside the system.  A basic fact needed for essential communication and system survival.  This video explains the code of mass media is 'information', and not truth (not so directly as here because the education system likes it that way).

We move between systems.  Between systems which each understands objective reality as suits the system.  Consequently we live in a tower of babble in a society at cross purposes with a collective autopoiesis.  Being the social creatures that we are, we are unaware of our shifts between system realities.   We shift realities all the time.  Like fish unaware of water, we are unaware of the contradictions we swim in.  Or too comfortable with them.

Mass media attempts to define 'what is known to be known'.  It is one of many operationally closed, autopoietically self-reproducing, evolving communication systems that construct reality in the mode of second-order observation.  Another such system is the academic system which distorts reality in it's own particular way to perpetuate itself.

Teaching people to self-educate, the only path to deep knowledge.  Is something not in the best interest of an education system.  Only particular educators with a twinkle in their eye ever want this.  The mission of education is transmuted into : 'make good members of society',  Well educated in: what is known to be known and not one fucking thing else.

Beware thy system memberships.

The autopoiesis of social subsystems destroys the autopoiesis of the whole.

[RE]

Teaching people to self-educate, the only path to deep knowledge.

At least for me, the whole Doomstead Diner project has been an exercise in self-education.  As good as my education was (and it was about the best available anywhere in the world from my elementary school years at the United Nations school in Rio for children of diplomats, bankers and  military officers through high school at Stuyvesant and the Ivy League at Columbia), until the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2007-8, I was 100% unaware of the connection between available energy and the monetary system, as well as the issues of resource depletion and climate change.  I was only dimly aware of the problems of population overshoot and waste and the dependence of food production on fossil fuels.

When I first started figuring it all out, my initial conclusion was "oh, we'll have to go back to living like Amish people on farms with horses".  Then I figured out why living like that would be impossible, and we would end up back at stone age level hunter-gatherers, because agriculture itself was unsustainable.  At first I subscribed to the Doomsteading idea (thus the name of  our blog), because I felt setting up an off grid living situation was a good solution.  Then I realized how come this doesn't work in the absence of a larger community of like minded and equally well prepped individuals, and how expensive and inequitable the solution is.  Relatively few people have the resources to set up a good Doomstead, particularly amongst the millenial and later generations.

Another aspect of my learning over the last 15 years has been my increasing disaffection for science, technology and modern medicine.  I used to be a big fan of all these things, and the perpetual progress of the human race.  I used to be a big believer in the ability of human ingenuity & technology to solve all problems.  Now I believe that for every problem we think we solve with technology, we create at least 2 new, more difficult and more dangerous problems, so the more "advanced" our civilization gets, the worse off we actually become.

As important as all this newfound knowledge is to the future of the human race, to this date AFAIK there is no university level Major labelled Collapse Studies as you have Women's Studies or Black Studies programs.  Anyone interested in this still has to pop around through a dozen different disciplines from History, Political Science, Anthropology and Archaeology to Economics, Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics, to Environmental Science, Meteorology, Geochemistry, Biochemistry and Medicine and more to begin to get a grasp of the scope of the issues involved in Collapse.

My own journey through these topics I feel is a good Roadmap for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of the Collapse of Industrial Civilization we are immersed in, and I hope at some point to retrieve all my writings from the original Doomstead Diner that traced my own journey to understanding what is happening to our species and why it is happening.  Perhaps if more people had this understanding, something might be done to make some positive difference in the outcome.  Continuing with the level of ignorance we currently have assures a REALLY BAD outcome.  When theoretically very smart people write about how optimistic they are for the future and how solvable our energy problems are if we just pay attention to the 3 E's, we are in real trouble.  It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be so collosolly and completely wrong it's like concluding that 1+1=Purple or that on a planet over stressed with 8B people we need to encourage more reproduction because our biggest worry is depopulation. 

It is time to stop listening to people who are really, Really, REALLY WRONG.

RE

[K-Dog]

It is time to stop listening to people who are really, Really, REALLY WRONG.

But we know that Musk is not capable of changing.  Musk will mend his ways when a leopard can change spots.



And after the leopards are all extinct, none of them will be changing spots.

...

My story is a bit different from most.  I sort of saw all this coming way back in 1972 when the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth.

At the time, I was young and dumb.  The difference now is I am not so young.  I spent the first half of my life up to about September 11th (When America changed, so maybe there is hope for Musk after all?) thinking the smart brains in the room were working the problem.

Then I learned I was wrong.  Dead wrong, as we all will be.  I learned, contrary to toxic parental lessons that were pretty much beat into me, that I am one of the smart people in the room, and nobody is working the fucking problem.

Through the years I have met a few dozen people who have claimed a 160 I.Q.  Maybe not so many as that, but more than I can remember.  How rare is a 160 I.Q. ?  Only one person in 11,308 has one higher, and claiming that arrogance is beyond me.

So how much would a person need to be a contender on Jeopardy?  Give me a few weeks to review lists of English Kings and such, and I could have been.  Perhaps one person in 162?  That would equate to a 140 IQ.

You don't meet many people claiming an IQ of 140, people insecure enough to need to deceive themselves go for the gusto, the big gulp, at least 160.

But some talents are worthless.  Like the talent of apprehending collapse.  Nobody cares.  The human race has not been out of the trees long enough to become smart enough to change the outcome or to care.  The human race became smart, but not smart enough.  But too smart for our own good, we are.  Then Sigmund Freud and his asshole and much praised nephew Eddie ushered in ' The Century of The Self '.  Baking doom into the cake.

Pleasure became the highest good.  The highest good to a brain-dead populace with more free time and pleasure than any generation born before them.  Temperance did not benefit the elite, the ones who control.  A self-obsessed population of consumers benefits the rich.  To that end the human race was corrupted.

He became a caricature .

Free time, pleasure, and Summer Music Festivals.  Where mega consumers go.

Hamas attacked the SuperNova Music festival. 

A celebration of peace and love attacked, three miles from where the former inhabitants of the land are imprisoned for life .

We live in a nation that has lost all sense of irony.  But the irony of the SuperNova attack is not lost on me.  Omelas again, but now something is not right with the magic.  Almost two and a half million souls do not wish to suffer any longer.  Not locked in their Omelas rooms by choice, they fight the magic.

* (that is the best beer belly I ever saw)

[RE]

A few things to remember about IQ testing and scores.

1-  By definition, the Median score of a population is always 100.  So if the population as a whole is getting smarter over time,  people tested later are smarter than people tested earlier.  The opposite also is true, if a population is getting stupider over time, people tested earlier on the time line are smarter than those tested later, at the same score.

Now ask yourself, is the population of Amerikans getting smarter or stupider?

2-  The SAT test given to millions of Amerikan college bound students each year is a thinly disguised IQ test.  It scores from 800 to 1600.  Knock off the last digit to get the IQ.  If you scored 1250 on the SAT, that's a 125 IQ.  The reason it stops at 160 is because it's not normalized past that, and no common IQ test is.  Claims of IQs like 180 or 200 are pretty much ridiculous and are specialized tests that require you have quite a bit of learned knowledge to even try taking them.

3-  Every year since the 1960s the SAT has gone through revisions, 3 major ones I am aware of.  Why?  Because the raw scores were decreasing for the population, so in order to normalize the curve for a 100 median derived score, the test had to be simplified.  AKA, the population of college bound seniors has been getting stupider.  A major reason for that is over the same time period the population of college bound students vastly increased as more colleges popped up and needed students.  A huge class of people never tested before were being tested.

3- Thee SAT score you get is most closely correlated to the income level of the father.  AKA, rich people get higher IQ scores on average than poor people.  Does this mean (as Elon Musk would have you believe) that rich people are smarter than poor people?  Of course not.  IQ tests have a huge cultural bias, and what they test is what a rich person is exposed to and expected to learn as they grow up, both in school and in their other experiences.  So as more people from lower middle and poor classes took the test, down went the median score.

Fast forward to today, they are dropping the SAT completely from college admissions requirements, with my best guess being that the median raw score is so horrifically low from nearly every kid educated in the public schools it's close to useless anyhow.  Although the National Average IQ of 100 must still be true of the millenials and later, I guarantee this is a stupider 100 than that of 30 or 50 years ago.

4-  Typical, traditonal IQ tests developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are tightly bound to western european, christian, white post enlightenment scientific type of thinking that serves you well if you go to an institution like Cambridge or Harvard.  If you grew up in a household like that, you probably did well.  Traditional Jewish households also do well, and so do Chinese and Indians.  Aboriginal and Native people, Blacks and Hispanics do not score well as groups.  There are of course individuals who do well.

5-  Despite the limitations of IQ testing, I personally cannot fathom exactly how colleges are going to be able to discriminate at all between students based only on grades from schools with wide disparities in what they teach and how well they teach it.  Is it going to come down to your essay?  AI will probably write most of them.  Interviewes?  They can't possibly innterview everyone, even with Zoom meetings.

Not that this is that important.  College has become a fabulous waste of time and money for everyone, even the elite.  What you learn there now has nothing to do with what you need to know.

RE

[moniker]

Anybody with a decent IQ can learn this stuff, so I don't see any real need for High IQ types in the future, unless they are willing to do the grunt work everybody else has to do, and not get more fish or nicer teepees, and especially not conspicuous consumption of A-List Vaginas because they use their high IQs to manipulate the property owwnership system to become filthy rich scum sucking bottom feeders.

I used to share your apparent anger at the "property ownership system", but now I believe that it's not the system but that I am overly concerned about it. Of course, having no property at all is a serious problem, and I am not trying to minimize that.

[RE]

I used to share your apparent anger at the "property ownership system", but now I believe that it's not the system but that I am overly concerned about it.

No, it's really OK to be paranoid when they really are out to get you.  Trust me, you CAN'T be too concerned about it.  Property ownership is the legal underpinning of the monetary system, and MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL.

EAT THE RICH!      



RE 

[RE]

Two collapse education articles today, one from the Ed PoV, the other from the Job PoV.

1st, from Ed

https://www.newyorker.com/news/us-journal/an-academic-transformation-takes-on-the-math-department

This one is about cuts to the only Ph.D. level Math program in WV, which granted is a poor and backward state, but still I think this is representative of a nationwide trend.  The great expansion of higher education which began with the baby boomers graduating many Ph.D.s who needed jobs teaching math had to go do it our at satellite university far from the core of the main schoolss like MIT they learned at.  MIT has only so many tenure track math professors of course, and they're the creme de la creme.  So your more average Ph.D got his tenure at Podunk University.

Problem is, out in Podunk there weren't many students to teach high level math to, so they did research, published some papers and farmed out teaching the beginner classes to adjuncts.  In this WV school, in 35 years the dept head has had 3 Ph.D. students.

So, all the teachers who really know math are either leaving of their own volition or their jobs are being cut.  Leaving a Land of One Eyed Kings, teaching the Blind.

Historically, tenured professors didn't need to worry too much about student evaluations, because their jobs were secure. Teaching faculty don't have this luxury. "Now we have math courses that are basically sixth-grade math," Pantea said. "Pre-algebra."

This was the situation I was in when teaching High School.  I was remediating what I had learned in elementary school.  It was impossible to actually teach Algebra, much less trigonometry or calculus.  Now college teachers are teaching elementary school math.  Nobody this ill prepared in math can possibly take a job in banking or insurance or medical billing.

Which leads us to the Jobs article:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/nov/24/reports-find-colleges-no-longer-produce-ideal-job-/?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAQu4i5mYXI3v_NARi0rbXN4cy1yJcBKioIACIQXBEbMEZz5y5Gid_4CzfDmioUCAoiEFwRGzBGc-cuRonf-As3w5o&utm_content=rundown

Of course they don't, because for the types of jobs they are talking about, you need to do better than 6th grade math.  But that is all most colleges teach now, because they don't have enough students coming in who already know 6th grade math.  They have been socially promoted and graduated HS without knowing HS level math.  Happens all the time.

So now, college has become basically obsolete, not enough teaching jobs of real college level material; not enough students capable of learning it.  What these companies want now is some kind of Online Certificate which says you know how to use an Excel Spreadsheet.  That's what they are hiring you to do, they don't need anything else.

It will not be long before the only places to get a Ph.D in Math will be at the Elite Universities.  The only people getting such a degree will be coming from the Elite class, nobody else will bother with a full 4 year degree.  Hell, even Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard.  He didn't need a Harvard degree, just the computer science he learned in the first couple of years he was there to get Microsoft going.

I shudder to think what it must be like trying to teach math at the average Community College today.  What a fucking nightmare.  In the  words of the Chairman of the WV University Math dept:

Goldwasser won't be here: he's one of the senior faculty who volunteered to go...
 "My decision was selfish," he said, finally. "I wouldn't want to work in the kind of department that's going to be left."

This also brings us back around to our Depopulation discussion and why it is happening.  You could look at it as occuring because there aren't enough smart people being born for the smart teachers from prior generations to teach.  Only after the current population of smart people dies off will we start to come into balance with the number of stupid people we have left to teach.  Right now the ratio of smart people to stupid people is too high.  The current surplus of math Ph.D.s will need to forget about doing research and teaching and go work on Wall St instead.

RE

[monsta666]

Education and intelligence are often touted as solutions to various problems but I don't think it has done much to raise awareness on collapse or how unsustainable our economic system is. Maybe it is my imagination as I was not alive in the 70s and was much too young to remember anything from the 80s but it would seem people today are much less aware of how unsustainable our lifestyles are.

I mean, back in the 70s people openly thought our society is run on fossil fuels but now this isn't the case. Heck just the other day I hear some guy on QUORA (which is supposed to house intelligent people) saying the "peak oil myth" has been debunked and business as usual will prevail and we need not worry about those worrywarts. Not his words exactly but the thrust of his argument. The guy speaking was a lawyer and has practised law in multiple countries so you can't use the "uneducated/lack of intelligence" as an excuse.

To me I see intelligence as something like this; an intelligent person can offer you a good answer but a wise person can ask the right questions. People aren't asking enough of the right questions and collectively we are lacking in wisdom and humility to see the true picture.

Without wisdom, naked intelligence is as dangerous as giving a baby a gun. The baby will not fully understand the weapon they are wielding and over time will unleash untold damage and carnage. All this intelligence and education is just sending us into a rabbit hole into oblivion. You also got to remember intelligent people are more adept at rationalising any lack of logic or inconsistencies in their world view.

In the end, I don't really subscribe to the notion that if we were more intelligent or more educated the situation would be appreciably different. We are social animals at heart and even the most intelligent amongst us will just follow the herd so to speak. People with contrarian opinions will become outcasts or social misfits and won't fit in enough to make a difference.