Education Endtimes Errata

[RE]

Just a couple of days ago in response to K-Dog on why Americans know nothing about the ethnic composition  of Ukraine, I explained it's because they are as ignorant of history as math & science, but all they had to do was go to the library and read.  It's not a Secret.

The problem of course is that most Amerikans educated in the last 20-30 years CAN'T read, even the college educated ones.  This is not newz to long term Diners, since I have on many occasions written about the failure of Public Schools, going back to my own years teaching almost 30 years ago.  Bad as it was back then, based on this article it has clearly got even worse since.  I had to publish the link here since it reinforces what I just wrote.

The various reasons for this we have covered before as well, grade inflation, no child left behind, computers and screen time etc.  Like the reasons why people aren't having kids, it should be common sense but they are not meaningfully addressed.  It's a cultural problem teaching isn't valued, nor is education except for the elite.  They have their own private schools, so they really couldn't give a shit.  The only reason public education was ever funded at all was to serve as a warehouse for kids until they were old enough to work.

For a while in the post WWII period public schools worked OK, at leastt for smart kids and kids from white middle class neighborhoods where property values and taxes were high enough to pay the teachers a decent wage, though they still were better off going into corporate work.  IN the NYC schools where they tracked the smart kids and put them alll together for college prep into a couple of high schools, we got a 1st class education.  But that was 1% of all NYC HS students, and at Stuyvesant we were just about all white or chinese, there were only a handful of black kids or hispanics.  In fact I really can't remember ANY, I just say a handful because there must have been a couple.

There was the occasional inner city success story paraded out also.  Who didn't see "Stand & Deliver", the story of Jaime Escalante teaching Calculus to East LA chicanos?

Inspirational as this is, the number of times something like this was ever pulled off was vanishingly small in 1985, and I doubt you could pull it off today.  Hell, if you can teach algebra you're ahead of the curve, colleges now teach PRE-algebra in their math departments.

In NYC, the typical HS had a trade track, where you took shop classes in machine shop and carpentry, etc, and kids who were poor at math just had to learn something like "business math" and add up numbers on a balance sheet.  Calculators eliminated the need to know even that, and before long kids were graduating without even knowing elementary school math.

Today, Johnny can't read, can't write and can't add or subtract.  You think any of these folks understand how compound interest on a mortgage works?  How to balance their bank account and make a budget?  Gen Z is leaving HS now dumb as rocks.  So dn't count on them to be making very good choices about who their leaders are or fixing what is broken in our society.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html

The Loss of Things I Took for Granted

RE

[K-Dog]

I can't remember how long it was ago.  I was in Vancouver with Marla (Mrs. Dog) and we saw Edward James Olmos walk across the street.  He was alone.  I turned to Marla and said "Is that who I think it is".

She said yes it is.

We have discussed education before and I was lucky to get a public education of unusual quality.

But we have also, and this applies to all Diner members, improved ourselves online.  Through the years here and elsewhere we have written comments and read extensively.  I am under the delusion that I can write halfway decently, and I know I was not as good as I am the first time I sat in front of a keyboard.

Not everyone has had the same interaction we have had.  I'll guess most people don't read a damn thing anymore since the local newspaper which kept the mass of people somewhat literate is gone.  Video replaced the cognitive brain.  Everyone is bedazzled. 



We bifurcated.  Split off and went our own way.

But why are there not more of us?  There are millions of people in America.  How can so much ignorance persist for so long?  With the wisdom of the ages at our fingertips, why does ignorance persist?  Why do TikTok videos hijack billions of brains.  Why in a city of millions, with all the problems the world has, is there no protest.  Not a whimper that things might be amiss.

M. King Hubbert did not have trouble finding like minded people (the book arrived).  Technocracy was once a thing.  Imagine the Diner with a staff of 100 people doing research and writing articles.  We would be a thing too!

The technocrats made a believable case for a kind of technological utopia, but their asking price was too high. The idea of political democracy still represented a stronger ideal than technological elitism. In the end, critics believed that the socially desirable goals that technology made possible could be achieved without the sacrifice of existing institutions and values and without incurring the apocalypse that technocracy predicted.  (<-- incorrect assumptions of the new deal )

That was not from the book, I had to stop and google the technocracy movement.  The movement was M. Kings 'Diner'.  The FBI file on Hubbert must be as thick as a brick.  In wartime intellectuals are always a target.

On October 7, 1940, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested members of Technocracy Incorporated, charging them with belonging to an illegal organization. One of the arrested was Joshua Norman Haldeman, a Regina chiropractor, former director of Technocracy Incorporated, and the grandfather of * Elon Musk.

It was later determined that technocrats supported the war effort.

M. King and his fellow 'doomers' flew close to the sun.  Their wings melted.  Now their story is forgotten, but if he were alive M. King might be here with us in the Diner.  Perhaps asking why there are not more of us here.  Perhaps asking why has everything else gone hockey stick but smarts.  Could smarts not have at least grown proportional to population?  To the contrary, there is no increase, and smarts has declined in a mass homogenization.

As if the entire population is pasteurized.

It is disappointing the * old school of Peak Oilers which some of us have roots in, did not know more about M. King. Hubbert and his involvement with the Technocrats.  The new school (this is it) is aware of the technocrats and will be finding out more.



Will this be noticed.

I want my carbon dividends.

* Musk might know more about M. King than we do.

* Old school peak oil  was embarrassed by the deployment of tight oil technology.  Now with the Biden administration using the Hail Mary Pass of American Tight Oil to finance their personal war in Ukraine, that embarrassment may be reversed.  Time will tell.

[monsta666]

Not really convinced that better schools would have made that much difference to our collapse journey. From what I hear Denmark, Finland and Japan have the best schooling systems in the world. Do these countries have anyone talking about collapse and the insanity of growth-based economics? Not really. So, I see no reason why things would be all that different even if Americans could read and do math. What you really need is strong critical thinking and people not to adopt herd mentality.

That is the issue. Herd mentality. You can have the best minds in the world but if the prevailing thought says to believe in business as usual that is what people will do. People will only jump on collapse theories when the truth becomes undeniable and then they will lament that is so painfully obvious it was going to happen. However how many of these people are willing to stick their necks before the event and risk being labelled a moron? Not many I suspect.

[RE]

I took 8 of the NYS Regents exams required for the so-called "Advanced" HS Diploma.  There were 3 for Math, Algebra, Geometry & Trigonometry.  Science had 4, Earth Science, Biology, Chemistry & Physics.  I only took the last 3 of those because I didn't take Earth Science, better known as "Rocks for Jocks".     That was the science class dummies took to fulfill their requirement of having at least 1 science course during HS.  I took the Amerikan History and English exams also.  They also had Foreign language exams, but I didn't bother taking the Spanish one, though I took the required 2 years of a foreign language.  I hated that class, found it very boring.

The tests were good basic science, not college level like the AP tests but if you could pass them you had a decent foundation for going into a college class already knowing the terminology and basic concepts, making understanding college textbooks easier.  I didn't take the AP tests because I was a lazy HS student, I didn't want to work any harder than necessary. lol.

I also taught the science exams during my short tenure as a teacher in a LI Public Skule.  My students generally did not do too well. lol.  They were even less motivated than me during HS and weren't good test takers. 

Any pretense that there are any minimum standards of proficiency or that a HS Diploma means anything besides the fact you attended are history.  Rather than admit that the education system is a complete failure, they just declare knowing any of this stuff as unnecessary.  Which in fact it is for many of the students who will never need to know any of it for the jobs available that they take.  The few highly paid tech jobs in society are gobbled up mostly by the kids of professional level parents who send them to private schools.  The remaining are taken by the 1% of high IQ kids who are autodidacts and can learn in any school just by reading the textbook.  OK, maybe it's 10%, that's about what I found while teaching in a typical lower middle class HS.  Thee parents in that community either were in goobermint jobs like cops, firemen, bus drivers and garbagemen or in the trades in plumbing, electrical or auto mechanics.  Salesmen and Real Estate agents also.  They had no need to learn chemistry, or with the invention of the calculator even how to add and subtract.

If they had dreams of making big money, it was in music or acting or sports.  Or more realistically, as Drug Dealers, and occasionally in legitimate bizness like opening a restaurant.  Quite a few went into the military also with dreams of becoming a pilot or if they were the tough guy type who liked Rambo, Mercs or Bodyguards.  The academic subjects of HS simply weren't relevant what they figured to do with their lives after HS.

What also was lost though was the ability to think in abstract terms, which is why they are so easily manipulated by politicians espousing one ideology or the other.  This has already happened though, all that is going on dropping the exams is acknowledgement of reality.  There's no reason to keep the tests, not enough kids can actually pass them.

It's hard for me to imagine what life must be like today in the typical HS classroom, for the students or the teachers.  It has to be incredibly depressing.  So it goes.

https://nypost.com/2024/06/12/opinion/new-york-is-about-to-make-its-high-school-diplomas-worse-than-useless/

New York is about to make its high school diplomas worse than useless

RE

[RE]

NYS will put the final nail in the coffin on the Regents Exams in 2027, so now schools won't have to worry about their pass rates to push the kids out the door on their 18th birthday, whether they can read and do addition and subtraction or not.

Of course for most kids, Public Schools in NY have been dogshit for 30 years, but the kind of bullshit they peddle these days to disguise the fact they teach nothing makes me want to puke.  Read this "Portrait of a Graduate" nonsense as an example:

Transformation 1: Adopt the New York State Portrait of a Graduate

This is intended to create a shared understanding of the skills and knowledge that New York state public school graduates have mastered.

To earn a high school diploma, a student will have to demonstrate proficiency in each component of the portrait, meaning that they must be critical thinkers, innovative problem solvers, literate across all content areas, culturally competent, socially-emotionally competent, effective communicators and global citizens, according to the state.

What does it mean to be "culturally competent"?    HTF do you measure this?

What a load of crap.

https://www.silive.com/education/2024/11/ny-dropping-regents-exams-as-a-graduation-requirement-here-is-the-proposed-timeline.html

N.Y. dropping Regents exams as a graduation requirement: Here is the proposed timeline

RE

[RE]

And right after that, they should close all the Public Schools, fire all the Administrators and start over from scratch with each PTA running their own school independently.

https://nypost.com/2024/11/19/opinion/ny-state-ed-has-fallen-into-total-irrelevancy-and-should-be-abolished/

NY State Ed has fallen into total irrelevancy — and should be abolished

RE

[RE]

As regular readers of this thread know, NYS is at the forefront of the war to destroy the last vestige of any standards in education.  They recently abandoned the Regents Examinations which used to be required to receive an Academic HS Diploma and now hand out some kind of global multicultural lipstick on a pig that certifies you survived 12 years of public school and possibly can add 2+2 if you are given a calculator.

Until now however, the Special HS for Science & Math, Bronx HS of Science, Brooklyn Technical HS and my Alma Mater Stuyvesant stood as shining beacons demonstrating at least some public schools could deliver a first class education to 1% of the HS students in each year's graduating class.

The way this was accomplished as to sieve off the creme de la creme of students with an entrance exam given in 8th Grade and your score on that test got you in, nothing else matters.  Your grades in elementary school, your attendance records, how much time you spent in detention in JHS all are irrelevant, you start with a clean slate.

However, as is true with all standardized tests of this type, poor kids from the slums do poorly on them, particularly black and hispanic kids.  This because what the scores most closely correlate to is the socioeconomic status of the father, just like the SAT and IQ tests.

So, despite the fact more than 45% of the kids who take the test are black or hispanic, only around 12% of the kids who score high enough to get in have that racial/ethnic profile.  Thus this is seen by affirmative action types as discrimination, and so now they are likely to screw with this system also with racial quotas to balance out the distribution.

This probably won't change the quality of the education that much, anymore than Affirmative Action changed the quality of education at Harvard very much.  Putting a few minorities to the head of the line doesn't change things overall since there are always enough who can do well if they get in.  What it does though is screw some White and Chinese kids who got better test scores out of their spots.  Not the highest scoring ones, the very top scorers still get in.  The ones who lose their spots are in the lower half of the draw of who gets accepted.  That's where they will pluck out a white kid who scored 680 and replace with a black kid who scored 650.  All the kids who scored over 700 still get in.  All the kids who score 500 still get rejected.

I suspect though that the culture in the schools will change and there will be quite a bit of resentment from kids who don't get in, or more accurately from their parents.  Getting in to BHSoSc is the difference between the kid eventually getting into MIT or ending up at APEX Technical College with a 2 year certificate for HVAC maintenance.

That's actually the good result in this situation.  The bad result is the decide to get rid of the test completely and develop some politically correct multicultural evaluation in its place.  In that case, the lack of a standard will end with these schools becoming the same kind of mish mash as the regular schools, and the teachers will have to start dumbing down the curriculum.

Fortunately, I was born before collapse had really taken hold in the public education system.  It is beyond help now.

https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/12/11/nyc-parents-sound-off-on-entrance-exam-for-specialized-high-schools-ahead-of-high-profile-vote/

RE