Tag Archives: education

Production-line Education

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“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

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Illiteracy in America

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“According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.[…] The current literacy rate isn’t any better than it was 10 years ago. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (completed most recently in 2003, and before that, in 1992), 14 percent of adult Americans demonstrated a “below basic” literacy level in 2003, and 29 percent exhibited a “basic” reading level.”

The Evangelical Brand

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“A generation ago, the Republican Party realized that Evangelical Christianity could be a valuable acquisition. “Evangelical” had righteous, “family values” brand associations, the unassailable name of Jesus, the authority of the Bible, and the organizing infrastructure and social capital of Evangelical churches. Republican operatives courted Evangelical leaders and promised them power and money—the power to turn back the clock on equal rights for women and queers, and the glitter of government subsidies for church enterprises including religious education, real estate speculation, and marketing campaigns that pair social services with evangelism.”

“As in any story about selling your soul, Evangelical leaders largely got what they bargained for, but at a price that only the devil fully understood in advance. Internally, Evangelical communities can be wonderfully kind, generous and mutually supportive. But today, few people other than Evangelical Christians themselves associate the term “Evangelical” with words like generous and kind. In fact, a secular person is likely to see a kind, generous Evangelical neighbor as a decent person in spite of their Christian beliefs, not because of them.”

Evangelical Christianity destroyed its own brand »