| Friday, August
24, 2007 .I spent yesterday evening at the Writers
of the Future dinner, where I got to meet and pontificate to a bunch of new
writers, some of them darned good. Tonight is the awards dinner and
presentation at the Athenaeum at Cal Tech. I go over there in an hour or so
to put on my tuxedo.
I have to say this is not the optimum time for this, since
I am slowly making progress on finishing INFERNO II. Niven is off to Japan
next Tuesday, and it will be up to me to finish things and send it off to
our agent and our editor. I still have two critical scenes to write,
and I suspect Niven will improve them when he gets back from Japan. I'd like
to have them done before he goes, but every time I sneak up on those scenes
I find new places for other new scenes... It's worth all this effort,
but this stage of a book is sheer Hell (pun intended).
I'll get the mailbag done for the weekend, but the column
may be delayed a couple of days. The book reviews are done, but I may
add a couple of them.
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Mail
today includes a discussion of science and rationality. Science is best
of playing by its own rules.
The issue of the day is the terrible things we are doing
to our bright children, particularly those who aren't born to rich families.
Rich families can send their kids to good schools. That
means that even bright normal kids from wealthy families have a chance to
learn more than the basic minimums.
Really bright kids from less wealthy families have to go
to public schools so they get to pay a horrible tax: they are put into
classrooms where the teacher is far more concerned with getting the very
dull, dull, and dull normal kids to pass a test than in teaching bright kids
anything at all. The bright ones won't be left behind.
So the bright kids put up with discipline problems,
disruptions, special ed kids who have been mainstreamed, and a general lack
of teacher time; in exchange they get all the benefits of diversity. Odd,
but most of those who can escape diversity choose to do so.
But I am sure that this is a dangerous way to talk. It
will not be all that long before there is a movement to jail Diversity
Deniers.
In 1983 Glenn T. Seaborg as Chair of the National
Commission on Education concluded that if a foreign government had imposed
our system of public education on the United States we would rightly
consider it an act of war.
It has not become better since then; and No Child Left
Behind has made it even worse. Diversity and Mainstreaming are disastrous.
Yes, yes: it's probably better for at least some of the very dull, dull, and
handicapped kids to be mainstreamed. But the cost of that is to neglect the
bright ones.
Wealth and private schools have given us some reprieves
here. Teachers understand the situation and send their kids to private
schools when possible. But any bright normal kid born to a poor family is
pretty well doomed to learn diversity without learning a lot more.
Whether we can sustain a First World economy with an
education system indistinguishable from an act of war against the people of
the United States is a very interesting experiment; but haven't we run it
long enough?
Jerry,
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,294145,00.html
Even education officials should be smarter than this!
And we pay property taxes for this nonsense. And it is in Arizona. Must be
the extreme heat.
Phil
===========
Joys of diversity:
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/
ap/2007/08/23/ap4050372.html
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