Pleasant Hill School (Lineville, IA)

(Wikipedia) “The Pleasant Hill School, also known as the Little Red School House, is a historic building located north of Lineville in rural Wayne County, Iowa, United States. It was built in 1881 on land that had been purchased for educational purposes in 1873, and it housed a one-room school until 1958. The Grand River Independent School District donated the school building to the Wayne County Historical Society. They maintain it as it was when it served as a schoolhouse. The interior furnishings are authentic, if not original to the building. The school yard is maintained as a roadside park along U.S. 65. The building follows a rectangular plan that is three bays long and two bays wide. It is capped with a gable roof. A small entryway is located on the south side of the structure. The school building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.”

Took these photos one a road trip in 2013.

Production-line Education

“The Industrial Revolution has bequeathed us the production-line theory of education. In the middle of town there is a large concrete building divided into many identical rooms, each room equipped with rows of desks and chairs. At the sound of a bell, you go to one of these rooms together with thirty other kids who were all born the same year as you. Every hour a different grown-up walks in and starts talking. The grown-ups are all paid to do so by the government. One of them tells you about the shape of the earth, another tells you about the human past, and a third tells you about the human body. It is easy to laugh at this model, and almost everybody agrees that no matter its past achievements, it is now bankrupt.”

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Freedom became free-dumb in America

From an article about New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (The New Leader of the Free World)

Americans don’t have decent healthcare, retirement, education, incomes, governance. Trust and happiness have plummeted, and suicide and hopelessness are skyrocketing. Freedom became free-dumb in America. But in places like New Zealand, it evolved. It became the idea that we are freer when we all have expansive public goods, like healthcare, education, retirement, and so on. […] Americans are regressing backwards in time at light-speed — fast becoming a nation of “low-wage service workers”, an economists’ euphemism for “servants.”

Rolling School Buses

“Google today announced an expansion of its Rolling Study Halls initiative to over 16 additional school districts, giving “thousands” of students access to Wi-Fi and Chromebooks on their buses. […] Google contributes mobile Wi-Fi routers, data plans, and Chromebook devices. Each Rolling Study Hall also has an “onboard educator” who’s able to provide direct assistance.”

A Dying Town

The tagline for this story is: “Here in a corner of Missouri and across America, the lack of a college education has become a public-health crisis.”

1. This is a long-ish story. 2. This is not a happy story. Damned depressing, in fact. I share it because it’s about Kennett, Missouri, the small town where I grew up in the 50s and 60s and to which I returned as an adult in the 70s.

Kennett was a swell (yes, we used words like ‘swell’ back then) place to grow up. The good example of small town America in the mid-twentieth century. It was fraying around the edges by the time Barb and I left in the early 80s and these days I hardly recognize it on my infrequent trips back.

This story (from the Chronicle of Higher Education) paints a bleak picture of Kennett and thousands (?) of little towns like it across the country. The focus of the piece seems to be the link between education and health.

“People with less education are twice as likely, for instance, to die of lung cancer or COPD. Heart attacks and strokes are far more common for those without much schooling — one study found that heart-attack rates for middle-aged adults who hadn’t finished high school were double those with a college degree.”

Lots of well-documented factoids like this and while they’re hardly surprising, the author does a nice job of putting human faces on the data.

But for one fateful phone call back in ’84, I might still be living in Kennett, MO. Some of my lifelong friends still do. So this is a “what might have been” story for me in some ways.

Scott Adams: Quotable

I started this blog in 2002. Since then I have quoted Scott Adams — from his blog, his books or other publications — 114 times. More than any other writer, blogger, or public figure. I found his insights fresh, provocative and brilliant. Topics included: robots; reality; education; the universe; immortality; free will; the economy; war; religion; politics; voting; government… and a bunch more. I stopped following and quoting Mr. Adams near the end of 2015. That was around the time he became — it seemed to me — obsessed with Donald Trump and his presidential campaign. It was “All Trump all the time” on Mr. Adams’ blog and I stopped following. As did many others. This week I’ve been doing a bit of housekeeping on this blog and had occasion to reread Mr. Adams’ posts. Many of his predictions about technology were eerily prescient. Most of his pre-Trump ideas still resonate with me.

Less white and Christian than ever

Just forty years ago 81 percent of Americans identified as white and Christian, the majority (55 percent) Protestant. Today only 43 percent identity of white Christians, 30 percent claiming Protestantism.

America’s youngest groups are non-Christian: 42 percent of Muslims, 36 percent of Hindus, and 35 percent of Buddhists are under thirty.

While the old guard is aging, the religiously unaffiliated is ticking up. Fifty-eight percent consider themselves secular, with 27 percent claiming to be atheistic or agnostic. Sixteen percent state they’re religious while claiming no particular affiliation

When it comes to education, the three biggest groups of post-graduate degree holders are Unitarian-Universalists (43 percent), Hindus (38 percent), and Jews (34 percent). Researchers note that one-third of Muslims hold a four-year college degree, compared to one-quarter of white evangelical Protestants.

Source: Big Think

Kahn Academy


While googling “permutations” I happened upon a Khan Academy tutorial (PRECALCULUS > PROBABILITY AND COMBINATORICS). A guy named Sal explaining the permutation formula and how to use it. I have not given this topic a thought since high school and while familiar with Kahn Academy, I never watched one of their tutorials. Wow. This seems like a great way to learn. Math was really hard for me but if I had had access to these I think I would have done much better.

Technocracy in America: Rise of the Info-State

“American democracy just isn’t good enough anymore. A costly election has done more to divide American society than unite it, while trust in government–and democracy itself–is plummeting. But there are better systems out there, and America would be wise to learn from them. In this provocative manifesto, globalization scholar Parag Khanna tours cutting-edge nations from Switzerland to Singapore to reveal the inner workings that allow them that lead the way in managing the volatility of a fast-changing world while delivering superior welfare and prosperity for their citizens.” Amazon »

Switzerland is so decentralized it does not have a president (or head of state), but rather a Federal Council of seven members whose chairman rotates each year. (Most citizens cannot name even three of the seven.)

(Info-states) define their geography by their connectivity rather than just their territory; their supply chains are as important to their map as their location.

Their only ideology is pragmatism.

As with natural selection, governance models evolve over time through adaptation, modification, and imitation. The more the world becomes connected and complex, devolved and data-saturated, the more the info-state model will rise in status. Global political discourse is shifting into a post-ideological terrain where performance—based on citizen satisfaction and international benchmarks—is the arbiter of success.

We are coming to appreciate that the difference between successful and failing countries today is not rich versus poor, left versus right, or democratic versus authoritarian, but whether they have the capacity to meet their citizens’ basic needs, empower them as individuals, and act or change course when needed. Everything else is window dressing.

Here then is a key reason to pay attention to technocracy: Because it is Asia’s future. Technocracy becomes a form of salvation after societies realize that democracy doesn’t guarantee national success. Democracy eventually gets sick of itself and votes for technocracy.

China’s spectacular rise versus that of democracies such as India has shown the world that it is better to have a system focused on delivery without democracy than a system that is too democratic at the expense of delivery. For democracy to be admired, it has to deliver.

In the long run, the quality of governance matters more than regime type.

“Chinese people don’t love their government, but they trust it.”

“The Swiss no longer believe in churches and religion,” muses Reto Steiner, a professor at the University of Bern. “They put their trust in deliberation, academics and experts.

Watches and knives, pharmaceuticals and chocolate, precision tools and encrypted hardware—almost everything Switzerland makes is better than anything anyone else can offer. This is because rather than shun vocational education, Swiss overwhelmingly prefer apprenticeships as a mode of skill-building for the global marketplace.

The top three most competitive economies in the world according to the Global Innovation Index (GII) are Switzerland, South Korea and Singapore, all of which have vocational educational systems and worker retraining programs and near-zero unemployment.
The state-builders, urban planners, and economic strategists of the 21st century all take their inspiration from (Singapore’s founder) Lee Kuan Yew, not Thomas Jefferson.

Singapore’s civil service is a spiral staircase: With each rung you learn to manage a different portfolio, building a broad knowledge base and first-hand experience. By contrast, American politics is like an elevator: One can get in on the bottom floor and go straight to top, missing all the learning in between.

At no point in the past decade has any official or academic in a foreign country told me they want their country to look like “America.” They want to have a Silicon Valley, a New York City and a Boston—hubs of innovation, finance, and knowledge.

The notion that western societies rule by reason and eastern societies by despotism is a tired cliché in a world of constant data feedback.

In the coming decades, global competition will punish the sentimental. A society that could do something better but doesn’t is either stupid or suicidal—or both. For political systems this means less emphasis on democracy and more on good governance. Success is measured by delivering welfare domestically and managing global complexity, not by holding elections.