What is the IQ of a zombie? Close to 0? Would they be subject to No Child Left Behind? Because, if we had more zombies, we could retain our average IQ (estimated by Lynn and Vanhaven as 97) while propelling the non-zombie population to heights of brilliance, allowing the U.S. to retain its #1 status in the world, woo hoo!
This is not terribly different from current thinking, except the zombies are imaginary. We're going to educate our children to hitherto unimaginable levels of engineering and entrepreneurial brilliance, and the rest of the world can just clear out of the way.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Blogging vs. journalism, there are people doing yeoman work on gathering information, juxtaposing various sources to present a picture that isn't emerging from either the general press or the opinion-mongers. Citizen Carrie at Carrie's Nation is one such, and her most recent post, More Light Reading, falls squarely into that category.
Cutting through the clutter of traditional media doesn't seem all that difficult (they actually make it easy), but it must be, as so few are doing it. This, from Carrie, based on a Detroit Free Press article, doesn't seem hard to grasp:
Carrie uses another article as a springboard to discuss the number of students who, for whatever regrettable reason, have no interest in education and aren't going to get any. There are such people, and we pour amazing resources into them for little gain, and most of them go on to get jobs that need doing anyway. Do we really believe that leaving them behind is so bad, especially when attempting to salvage them diverts resources from those who are equipped to take advantage of them? (I hasten to add that I do not see those people as somehow worth less, they're simply people who are not academic in mind or in temperament; forcing them into that box is actually more cruel and insensitive to them. And we need a more enlightened view of adult education, as people can well change their attitude over time.)
The Carrie post has more invaluable links, more than I wish to discuss right now, but it is excellent at moving the discussion from the education of children to the machinations going on to deprive those children of real opportunities. When you read her sources all together, you will be struck by the pathetic inability of learned people to understand the basic economics behind this.
All of our solutions to the job "crisis" come on the supply side. If we can just churn out infinite numbers of well-educated young people, even if there are no jobs left in those fields for them (the demand side), everything will turn out great.
But, despite what the Gates's and the Fred Smith's say, there is no mechanism to balance those things. What we will end up with are garbage collectors with graduate degrees in mechanical engineering, drug store clerks with PhDs in computer science, and so forth.
Some will say that these highly-educated people will create jobs through innovation, and there probably is some slight positive effect there, but there are two problems with that argument. First, how much innovation can we really get from a cadre of marginal students whom we cajole and tutor and mentor into getting that STEM sheepskin? Second, how much of that innovation is truly commercializable (you might be able to sell a new iPod to someone every year or so, but it's unlikely that you can do so every month)?
No matter how many self-interested billionaires tell us that education will lead to magical growth, we are not losing the majority of the jobs we are because we're poorly educated - we're losing them because we cost more. Sending more kids to college at $45K a year is not going to change that, not when the Indian Institute of Technology is charging $750. Believing anything else is to believe in magic, and we do enough of that in this country.
This is not terribly different from current thinking, except the zombies are imaginary. We're going to educate our children to hitherto unimaginable levels of engineering and entrepreneurial brilliance, and the rest of the world can just clear out of the way.
As I mentioned in my previous post, Blogging vs. journalism, there are people doing yeoman work on gathering information, juxtaposing various sources to present a picture that isn't emerging from either the general press or the opinion-mongers. Citizen Carrie at Carrie's Nation is one such, and her most recent post, More Light Reading, falls squarely into that category.
Cutting through the clutter of traditional media doesn't seem all that difficult (they actually make it easy), but it must be, as so few are doing it. This, from Carrie, based on a Detroit Free Press article, doesn't seem hard to grasp:
If I understand things correctly, our nation is in full crisis mode because less than 100% of our students will go on to work in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) or "new economy" career fields. We can't even provide enough decent jobs for the top half of the student population, and we need even more students to graduate with top honors?But these are commonly-held beliefs, that, if we can just get more information into kids' heads, they'll really be well-prepared for the retail clerk and health care aide jobs that we will have for them (I'm not derogating those jobs, they're important, too, it's just not clear to me that four years of traditional liberal arts education is appropriate training, less so rigorous STEM education).
Carrie uses another article as a springboard to discuss the number of students who, for whatever regrettable reason, have no interest in education and aren't going to get any. There are such people, and we pour amazing resources into them for little gain, and most of them go on to get jobs that need doing anyway. Do we really believe that leaving them behind is so bad, especially when attempting to salvage them diverts resources from those who are equipped to take advantage of them? (I hasten to add that I do not see those people as somehow worth less, they're simply people who are not academic in mind or in temperament; forcing them into that box is actually more cruel and insensitive to them. And we need a more enlightened view of adult education, as people can well change their attitude over time.)
The Carrie post has more invaluable links, more than I wish to discuss right now, but it is excellent at moving the discussion from the education of children to the machinations going on to deprive those children of real opportunities. When you read her sources all together, you will be struck by the pathetic inability of learned people to understand the basic economics behind this.
All of our solutions to the job "crisis" come on the supply side. If we can just churn out infinite numbers of well-educated young people, even if there are no jobs left in those fields for them (the demand side), everything will turn out great.
But, despite what the Gates's and the Fred Smith's say, there is no mechanism to balance those things. What we will end up with are garbage collectors with graduate degrees in mechanical engineering, drug store clerks with PhDs in computer science, and so forth.
Some will say that these highly-educated people will create jobs through innovation, and there probably is some slight positive effect there, but there are two problems with that argument. First, how much innovation can we really get from a cadre of marginal students whom we cajole and tutor and mentor into getting that STEM sheepskin? Second, how much of that innovation is truly commercializable (you might be able to sell a new iPod to someone every year or so, but it's unlikely that you can do so every month)?
No matter how many self-interested billionaires tell us that education will lead to magical growth, we are not losing the majority of the jobs we are because we're poorly educated - we're losing them because we cost more. Sending more kids to college at $45K a year is not going to change that, not when the Indian Institute of Technology is charging $750. Believing anything else is to believe in magic, and we do enough of that in this country.
2 comments:
Well said, Andro. And as economists who understand the importance of producing stuff are trying to get us to understand, innovation requires a physical and intellectual infrastructure. Engineering creativity without factories, without research labs, without supporting personnel, without paychecks. Riiiight.
Norman Matloff had an interesting post about this topic at VDARE:
http://blog.vdare.com/archives/2008/05/06/norm-matloff-writes-on-american-students-and-science/
According to the authors of a Nature magazine article, "In absolute numbers, the U.S. has more top-scoring kids in math and science than any other country studied–by far. The authors point out that it is mainly these kids who become the innovators later as adults, and we’ve got an excellent supply of them. This is completely counter to what one constantly sees in the popular press."
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