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Monday,
May 5, 2008
Cinco de Mayo
1330: When I got my blood drawn last Thursday I discovered that there was
a warrant out for more of my blood, and since I have an upcoming appointment
with Dr. Rodriquez, the oncologist, and he'll want to see that as well as
the internist who ordered it, I went out this morning at 0800 to get my
blood drawn.
Choosing a Monday wasn't smart. It took a long time. Also they wanted a
urine sample, and I had already done that task before driving out there, so
while waiting between registration when I found out and getting to the
technicians -- about 20 minutes, which was about how long I stood in the
registration line -- I told you choosing a Monday wasn't smart -- I kept
drinking water, and then after that I went to the cafeteria for coffee,
breakfast, and a pint of tea. So about 10 AM I was able to give the urine
sample and come home. By then I was nearly exhausted, but I sat down at the
breakfast table and read the papers. There was a lot to read, much of it
relevant to the day's work, which is the column including the International
Edition.
Debt and Education
There were also two articles relevant to education that need comments,
both in the Wall Street Journal although there was no indication that the
WSJ editors recognized that they had much to do with each other.
The first was an editorial on student loans.
http://www.nasfaa.org/publications/
2008/aweditorial050508.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB120994278813866099.html
You and I now own a lot of them.
Recently we told you about
Congress's feverish effort to clean up the mess it made in the
student loan market. Convinced that private lenders were making too much
profit on federally insured loans, Democrats enacted changes last fall
that rendered most new student loans unprofitable. As numerous firms
abandoned the market amid the credit crunch and just before the peak of
college financing season, the anxious pols realized their blunder and
are now seeking a bailout of the same lenders they had just finished
punishing.
This follows the disastrous experiment of having the
government be the direct lender back in Clinton's time as President. The
problem then was that the bureaucracy wasn't able to process the loans in
time for the students taking out the loans to pay their tuition and
expenses.
You will note that whoever owns the loans, they are loans,
and those who graduate having taken out those loans enter life under a
burden of debt that many will never escape.
I also note that while I went through undergraduate
education by way of the GI Bill (3 years benefits for each 2 years in the
Korean War army) and Board Jobs (1 hour waiting on tables for 1 meal off the
menu at Reich's Cafe in Iowa City; no longer possible under the minimum wage
act), and my wife worked her way through college as an office worker with
New York Life in Seattle, nowadays it is pretty difficult to work your way
through college -- big lifetime devouring loans are often required, even if
you manage to go to a state university under resident tuition. (The reason I
went from Iowa to the University of Washington was that my parents were
legal residents of Alaska when I got out of the Army, and in those days
residents of Alaska were legal residents of the State of Washington for
tuition purposes; and resident tuition was important to me given that the GI
Bill didn't pay a lot and my work hours were limited by my class and work
schedules. Fortunately I managed to get assistantships at both Iowa and UW,
and those helped a lot.)
I also lived a rather Spartan life. In Iowa I had a single
room in a private home; it had a gas ring but no refrigerator, so the only
way to preserve food other than in deep winter when a window box was good
enough was to keep a pot of soup simmering at all times. That soup became
legendary among my friends: what went into it was anything including stuff I
could collect at supermarkets when they were cleaning out the produce at
closing time, stale (officially day old) bread, and any meat or protein I
could collect. It all went into the pot, and my main meal at night was a big
bowl of that soup/stew and a chunk of "day old" rye bread so hard that it
had to be dipped in soup to be edible; and of course my daily meal at
Reich's Cafe.
Spartan the life was, but it worked until I impressed my
professors enough to get an undergraduate assistantship doing lab technical
work at Iowa. At UW I was "animal room manager" which consisted largely of
conveying huge garbage cans full of rat dung and dead rats down three
flights of marble stairs (in Smith Hall; the lab was in the attic) a couple
of times a week, and generally cleaning up the animal cages. It wasn't fun,
but it paid me; I didn't have to go into debt.
Nowadays the notion of working your way through college
seems bizarre.
Now even resident tuition in a state university plus the
cost of living near campus comes to more than most undergraduates can make.
It's true that bright students who can prove they're high up on the right
side of the Bell Curve can manage "scholarships" and "grants" that serve to
cut the costs, and some do escape huge debt loads on graduation: but then
those well out to the right side of the Bell Curve usually manage one way or
another.
It's the IQ 80 - 120 who end up debtors for the rest of
their lives.
Of course many of them ought not be in college to begin
with. If our high schools and junior (community) colleges were anything like
what they ought to be, anyone to the left of IQ 115 wouldn't bother with
college. What they learn in a 4 year college isn't going to be all that much
help; what they need to learn can be taught for a lot less money than our
Universities charge. And those out to the right of the Bell Curve find
themselves in classes taught by immigrant grad students who speak
incomprehensible dialects said to be English; the Universities have to have
jobs for these people (whose governments often pay full tuition) and the
size of classes leaves the university little choice.
That brings us to the second article in today's WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB120995103004666569.html?
mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Often it seems as though
American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the
outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor
threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their
"anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught
English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students
were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a
hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her
superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a
confessional exposé, which she promises will "name names."
The trauma was so intense
that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for
Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead
to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Two things worth noting here: she left Dartmouth for
Northwestern; one expensive university for another; and secondly, she taught
Freshman Comp, otherwise known as Bonehead English. One wonders why
Dartmouth or Northwestern accept students who need Bonehead English. The
existence of Freshman Comp classes is an indictment of the whole college
prep education system.
Note that Bill Gates and many experts claim that the goal of
our high schools should be to guarantee every child in the nation a "world
class university prep education". Note that if that were accomplished the
demand for university education, already far too high (and the major factor
in the spiraling costs that end up with half the middle class saddled with
lifetime debts), would grow by more leaps and bounds, forcing the costs
still higher.
Note also that the higher incomes the universities get let
them afford Priya Venkatesan who teaches "French Narrative Theory" and
Deconstruction in Bonehead English class.
Now I have to confess: When I went to the University of
Iowa, they had tests for incoming freshmen, and my results got me relieved
from both Freshman Comp and Freshman Speech; I was able to start the "core
courses" Iowa was famous for in those days, and took Greeks and the Bible (a
literature course involving a couple of dozen Greek plays by Aeschylus,
Euripides, Sophocles, and that gang; the Laurence of Arabia translation of
the Odyssey; and a very literary translation of the Bible; as well as
Plato's Republic). I found that a lot more useful than Bonehead English
would have been, but I suppose it disqualifies me for much commentary on the
value of Freshman Comp and Freshman Speech. Still, from what I observed,
those who did take Freshman Comp did not usually shine in the more advanced
seminars in upper division work. Note that "did not usually" does not mean
never and no one. I am sure that some -- perhaps many -- got bad
secondary training and Freshman Comp helped them get where they ought to be.
But one thing I am certain of, "French Narrative Theory" in
Freshman Comp doesn't accomplish that result. No one ever had problems in
advanced courses because of a lack of French Narrative Theory or
Deconstruction in high school -- and Bonehead English is supposed to remedy
high school education defects, not teach college level Deconstruction
theory. Note also that my Southern Catholic high school was able to teach me
enough that I had no trouble getting exempt from Bonehead English.
The points here are two: first, pretending that everyone is
competent to go to university drives the cost of university education up to
the point that many will have to go heavily into debt in order to afford a
university education; and secondly, the major universities are so awash in
money now that they can afford -- and WANT to afford -- Priya Venkatesan to
teach French Narrative Theory in Freshman Composition.
Many go to University who ought to have learned their career
skills in high school -- or at least in junior college. It is not necessary
for all the citizens of a republic to have gone to university and learned
French Narrative Theory. One need not know know anything at all about
Foucault or Deconstruction to be a good citizen, vote in elections, pay
taxes; and indeed I put it to you that being without debt is probably
preferable to knowing French Narrative Theory.
I think you will have no trouble drawing more inferences
from the above pair of articles. And in case you were wondering, this is not
my long delayed essay on education, although it has been inspired by that
essay's conclusions. I'll do that essay when I get caught up on computer
related stuff. This diatribe just flowed out; it's first draft, surely full
of flaws, but I hope worth your time.
==============
14:30 It is now time to get started on this week's column
which must also include the International Edition for Japan, Istanbul, Sao
Paulo, and points east and west...
Is there any program other than rar itself that will open .rar
files?
Hi Jerry,
The free windows program "universal extractor" will
open rar and a lot of others.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_universal_extractor/.
Cheers,
Peter Cupit
Thanks!!
==========
On requiring every child to be above average.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/
The-age-of-educational-romanticism-3835
==================
May 1, 2008
You'd think James Watson would be pretty
good at apologizing by now. Last October, the then 79-year-old Nobel
Prize winner was quoted in the Sunday Times of London Magazine
as saying that he was "inherently
gloomy about the prospect of Africa" given that "all our social
policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same
as ours—whereas all the testing says not really."
http://science-community.sciam.com/
blog-entry/Sciam-Observations/James-Watson
-Six-Months-Later/570001601
Of course Watson is a well known idiot of no intellectual
capability or value. It wasn't always that way, but last October it became
obvious. And science doesn't permit certain subjects to be discussed as if
they were amenable to scientific method.
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