Posted by
rycK on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 11:42:11 AM
The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles about Education.
As we read the NYT—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1]-- we look for new and progressive ideas from various leftist perches. Problems must only be solved by government as we know. The liberals have no history unless they tailor certain strains and provide some necessary redaction to the facts. Today we are treated to a reinvention [Al Gore syncretism] of the history of education, work and American success. As always, we will be on high alert for new taxes, a general condemnation of capitalism and constant reminders of imperialism. In the proper propagandistic manner, we begin with a rhetorical question that is promptly answered using the appropriate tenets of liberalism and what they frantically barrowed from Karl Marx and J. J. Rousseau. Once the stage is set, the feathers, kazoos and drums assist the intermezzo. The conclusion will always end with a clarion call for new taxes.
The Babbling Brooks begins with a history lesson on education:
“Why did the United States become the leading economic power of the 20th century? The best short answer is that a ferocious belief that people have the power to transform their own lives gave Americans an unparalleled commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom.”[2]-- The Biggest Issue by David Brooks [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]This link references all quotes in this essay unless otherwise stated.
Missing here is the salient information that we fought disgusting savages, the weather, bugs, the British and had a juicy war with the Indians, then the French and Indian alliance, then British and Indians, the British with help from the French and more. The notion that Americans were originally or singularly gifted with these anti-socialist attributes [commitment to education, hard work and economic freedom] is false. They had to shoot a whole bunch of savages and British in bright red uniforms and then hang a few Tories to get some relief from the feudal system. Our ethics and success was derived spontaneously by casting off the shackles of Europe. The Europeans are now even stupider than before and waxing dumber all the time.[3] The facts are that given the freedom to make individual choices, capitalism will always be reinvented in new settings in a creative and positive way. The past leads to sloth, disease and mediocrity. The leftist know that and wail and moan and offer reasons why they should be able to squelch enterprise.
The History Lesson:
“Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade”
“As Claudia Goldin[4] and Lawrence Katz describe in their book, “The Race Between Education and Technology,” America’s educational progress was amazingly steady over those decades, and the U.S. opened up a gigantic global lead. Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.”
This is irrelevant. This correlates with nothing. What does correlate is the destruction of society by Marxism. Nobody surpassed the propaganda training of the USSR for 74 years before it collapsed.
I suppose we can trust the minutiae here as they only set the stage for some far left and probably Feminazi-inspired [spelled FemiNazifor emphasis and not to be confused with the EcoNazis[5]a similar form of mental illness, churlish behavior and envy] screed from Claudia, her forte at Harvard where all new ideas flow like honey from the tall trees. We should now look for the new and progressive explanation of how our taxes must be hiked and government should more closely control education. It follows.
“But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments stagnated completely….”
It was not unhappy for the industrious and entrepreneurial. It is unproblematic to thrash the sorry leftists in the social arena, college, work, investments, business and most societal attributes. They are losers and demand that others lose with them to attain ‘equality.’ This bold analysis cited above omits a wide-ranging analysis of SAT scores, affirmative action blunders and tokenism, idiotic admissions policies at former educational places like Cornell who had their academic credentials stuffed in the latrines in the 80s and other major problems. The difficulty occurs when you try to educate people in a university setting when they lack the cognitive skills to understand or compete. Here basket weaving, rock and roll, gay rights, group sex, black studies and other cookie courses are needed to boost the GPAs of the mentally disnimble. Grades of “A” are rubber-stamp guarantees for just signing up for such courses. That keeps the mentally disnimble from flunking out, although it didn’t save Al Gore from failing seminary. [6]The liberals are skilled at crafting such follies and ‘proving’ that everybody must be ‘equal’ when they are not.[7] The liberals proved convincingly that you really could make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.
Here is the long-awaited punch line and intellectual ‘discovery’ by the far left:
“Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.”
This gonjo-inspired nostrum is so hopeless that it is difficult to find a place to begin the deconstruction of this leftist fluff. I could, seriously, scrape a superior economic analysis off my shoes.
[1] These are no correlation between the technology and mass education. If that had been a requirement then, by definition, we could never have progressed from the hunter-gatherer state that many far leftist society embrace, such as Cambodia and North Korea.
[2] The industrial leaders paid for the discovery of new technologies such as smokeless powder, the steam engine, air flight, plastics, transistors, computers and electronic gadgets.
Now, another Expert is piled upon the stage:
“The meticulous research of Goldin and Katz is complemented by a report from James Heckman of the University of Chicago.”
In “Schools, Skills and Synapses,” Heckman probes the sources of that decline. It’s not falling school quality, he argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.”
Here a social ‘scientist’ gropes for an excuse.
“Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.”
“I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability.”
Bong!! The essay against IQ begins. Of course it is possible to predict who will be successful in education, life, marriage, wealth and more from simple IQ tests. This screed is just anther attempt to scrounge around for an excuse to promote the non-existent ‘equality’ that liberalism is grounded upon. There is no equality given the facts given in the Bell Curve[8]. People are not equal, but this fact undermines the leftist attempts to homogenize society. They would rather have brain surgeons and nuclear physics chosen by their socials skills or politics than by cognitive skills. Ignored are the leftist objections against the ‘nuclear family.’ Where is the abortion effect here?
This clumsy piece of propaganda is a hopeless attempt to rectify the notion that “…relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.” This is so unfair, thus it becomes the cause celebreof the left. Why not lay around the student union lounge, smoke dope and then be prepared for a top-level salary on Wall Street.
There is no solution to the problem of incongruent mental skills among people so the disparity among people becomes the fulcrum of political action. There is no solution so there is no end to the whining and attempts of create ‘equality’ by political means. That is leftist mentality. This is an unassailable circular essay.
So, we must look for the conclusion:
From the ‘research’ activities above The Babbler comes up with three salient points, as simple as a, b, c:
[a] “ [The] … skills slowdown is the biggest issue facing the country.
[b] “Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.”
[c] If you look at Barack Obama’s education proposals [“The G.O.P. is largely irrelevant.” Ed] — especially his emphasis on early childhood — you see that they flow naturally and persuasively from this research”
Political stoogery in print. We need more education!! What else?? Let us rely on the teacher’s unions to guild us back to prosperity by ignoring innate intelligence while supporting social skills and political appeasements.
Obama also wants to see fewer tests. [9] I wonder why? Do SAT tests sort out the students by IQ??
This mindless fluff whereby the intrinsic inequalities of society are somehow swept under the stoop by ‘progressive’ thinking is so naive and hackneyed that it is astonishing that Brooks would rescrub this latrine. This brings new meaning to the word tautological.
This set of sorry nostrums is the reason that socialist societies are in the economic doldrums. They cannot become efficient because they select the most awful possible drooling idiots to make the laws, provide governance and populate their universities. The most effective form of ‘education’ for the left is exemplified by the Madrasses[10] of the radical Islamic-Fascisti. Harvard gets a C- compared to those schools, which are very effective.
This current NYT article a highly sophomoric screed that attempts to open the back door to Communism again. All that is missing is “…each according to his needs” or some comical notion of shedding chains. It attempts to revive the glory of the Khmer Rouge as they did manage to attain some form of ‘equality’ as we must assume from the eternal praise of these monsters from the left. We must recall that Mao appointed some intellectual discard lacking a college education to be in charge of PekingUniversity. This is called education. Somebody got a dog passed through Harvard. Many wonder if a dog might be the HarvardUniversity president and improve education there.
IQ tests clearly show us who should be [and who should not be] making decisions in government and industry. We need menial tasks and menial pay for those who slog the ruts of intellectual mediocrity. Those are customarily liberals and their victims.
As a retired Senior Scientist with 6 patents, $50 million in product sales, 25 research papers [5 from YaleMedSchool] and a d0zen developed commercial chemical products, I find this very amusing.[11] I wonder how some person with an IQ of 85-110 could have attained what I have in my life. I actually turned down proffered Ph. D studies at Yale, SUNY and U Delaware. Any of those would have mandated a 5-year long waste of my talents and the burden of producing slave labor for some professor who successfully whored money from the government for his ‘research.’ I rejected these find ‘opportunities’ mostly because of my disgust and lack of respect for many of the drooling leftist stooges that I had to associate with at UCLA, SUNY, Yale, University of Delaware and other places from the early 60s to the present. All you had to do to be a success at the average university was to take drugs, bawl about the war in Viet Nam and celebrate sodomy to be hired and praised. William Ayers is an example of that. So is Angela Davis. Murderers and racists[12] are welcome in leftist institutions. Anybody can get a PhD in anything at Harvard now, particularly if you are a minority, a drug addict, a pervert or, best, an anti-capitalist. Those who met these sordid requisites now sit at Harvard and attempt to redact history while rejecting the natural and obvious cognitive skill distributions. Let us celebrate stupidity and put the stupid in charge.
There is an eternal exploration for new ways to repackage communism (or worse) by the left and inequality is their essential precept. They do not strive for equality because they actually teach the opposite. They teach and insist on underperformance from the masses to preserve their fragile perch in education. They are failures and private schooling and such can easily beat the left and t heir phony educational theories.
So, Hike Taxes and Educate! Sure.
This is one of the sorriest pieces of propaganda and leftist sloganeering that I have read in the Times in a long time.
Defund Harvard—it is a zoo. Put a dog in charge.
rycK
Comments: ryckki@gmail.com
[1] In honor of that celebrated Communist stooge and liar and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for the NYT. The color RED is used in my essays in honor of Walter Duranty, a saint, if there could be one, in the Marxist Archives of Honor.
[7] Every citizen has certain strengths and weaknesses as defined by accepted norms of conduct, inherited skills, home training and are analyzed in detail by well-defined by standardized test scores patterned from the scientifically verified Bell Curve. This process has been verified and has been used with success since 1906. There is an obvious distribution of cognitive skills among all individuals in all societies that serves to convincingly refute the notion of ‘equality’ as the leftists define the term. It turns out that certain leftist views of social conduct, particularly the choices to appease the Marxists and socialists and cause the labors of citizens to be misdirected, are socially and intellectually bankrupt and this fact need to be emphasized in government and education. The political term ‘equality’ is used to enlist the votes and support of the lower classes and criminal elements thus confounding the simple notion that we are all equal. We are not equal. The tautological and perpetual quest for ‘equality’ actually generates and validates the gross equalities they hypocritically harp about. These inequalities produce self-designed opportunistic cracks in the social fabric and thus create false strata in our society that are conveniently utilized by the overt racists and far leftist radicals who desire power.
The Road to Social Success, Peace and Justice: California has NO Vision!
http://rycksrationalizations.blogtownhall.com/2008/06/26/the_road_to_social_success,_peace_and_justice_california_has_no_vision!.thtml
[8] The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (ISBN: 0029146739)
by Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles Free Press of Glencoe , Inc, Old Tappan, New Jersey, U.S.A., 1994.
[9] Obama's Education Plan to Reform Schools & Reward Teachers. “Tests should not be designed as punishment for teachers and students, they should be used as tools to help our children grow and compete.
Tests should support learning, not just accounting. Because if we really want our children to become the great inventors and problem-solvers of tomorrow, our schools shouldn't stifle innovation, they should let it thrive.”
http://usliberals.about.com/od/education/a/ObamaEdPlan_5.htm