Category Archives: Education

Business Is Already Mounting Pressure To Import Cheap Labor

Business, Donald Trump, Education, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Morality, Paleolibertarianism

On August 31st, President Trump signed an “executive order to boost retirement savings.” It’ll allow “small businesses to band together to offer 401(k)s.”

But what do you know? A businessman present lamented “a very tight labor market, which is tight because of the success of [the president’s’] economy. And we’re all grateful for that, but it is causing us a little bit of problems.”

There we go again.

Replied Trump obediently:

We have so many companies coming back to our country, which nobody thought was going to happen. And they want to be where the action is. And we’re going to — I can tell you, we’re going to start looking at, very seriously, merit-based immigration. We have to do it, because we need people. We need people to run these great companies that are coming in.

Big or small, American business is focused above all on elephantine-like expansion and greed.

It is not enough to do well and train American talent, so that fellow Americans can become part of the success story: this is never an option. If business is able to petition The State to import the world at a price subsidized by the American taxpayer—why not?

Again: It’s not enough to be doing smashingly well with the labor available. Or, with a view to training American talent. Or, with a view to paying more for American labor. Oh no. Greedy American Business is forever poised to pull one over the American worker.

The New York Times has featured the “heartbreaking” story of “Rob Hurst, manager of Edgartown Commons on Martha’s Vineyard, has had to scrub bathrooms this summer because five Jamaican workers who had long worked at the hotel couldn’t get visas.”

It concluded:

In practice, businesses say the increased red tape has made it harder to secure employment-based visas. That has added to the difficulty of finding qualified workers with the unemployment rate falling to 3.9 percent.
A recent analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research group, found that the denial rate for H-1B visa petitions for skilled foreign workers had increased 41 percent in the last three months of the 2017 fiscal year, compared with the third quarter. Government requests for additional information for applications doubled in the fourth quarter, a few months after Mr. Trump issued his order.

See: “Companies Say Trump Is Hurting Business by Limiting Legal Immigration.”

Isn’t this about growth per capita, too—and perhaps community? And not just about GDP growth.

School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem

Education, Kids, Logic, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Psychology & Pop-Psychology

The NEW COLUMN IS “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem.” It’s now on WND.com. An excerpt:

The tele-experts assert that to do what he did—kill 10 and maim 13, at Santa Fe High School, in Texas—Dimitrios Pagourtzis had to be insane.

Likewise, Nikolas Cruz—killer of 17 in Parkland, Florida—and many shooters before him: All were victims of mental disorder. Or, so say the experts.

Come to think of it, the structure of argument coming from conservative and progressive corners is the same:

Conservatives blame mental health.

Progressives blame the National Rifle Association.

Both factions see the locus of responsibility for these murder sprees as beyond the reach and bailiwick of the individual and of what were once formative and corrective institutions: the church, for example.

As the language deployed in the culture might suggest, crimes aren’t committed, but are caused. Perpetrators don’t do the crime, but are driven to do their deeds by a confluence of uncontrollable factors.

The paradox at the heart of the disease theory of delinquency is that causal theoretical explanations are invoked only after bad deeds have been committed. Good deeds, however extravagant, are in no need of extenuation.

The evidence our tele-therapists advance for a killer’s “madness” is … the murder or murders he has committed.

Whatever the logical fallacy the psychiatrists commit—circular reasoning or backward reasoning—thinking people can agree: This is bad logic.

Fact: When they suggest a shooter is sick, they do so based on the fact that he committed murder.

Let’s run with this “logic”: The reductio ad absurdum of what the mental-health mavens are saying is that to kill, an individual must be deranged.

Does that not imply that the default condition of humanity is goodness?

Indeed, evil has been cast as a symptom of illness. It’s certainly so if to judge by the language used by the experts. …

… READ THE REST. “School Shootings: A Moral-Health, Not Mental-Health, Problem” is on WND.com. And on The Unz Review, Constitution.com., etc.

It’s Hard To Believe It, But The French STILL Educate Their School Kids

Education, Europe, Intelligence, Kids, Political Philosophy

Still on the topic of education (previous post is “St. John’s: The Most Rigorous College In America & What Every Young Mind Needs”):

What’s of interest in the Economist article, “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq,” are these tidbits:

Attendance rose this year at the annual Paris book fair. Regional literary festivals are thriving. Philosophy is still a compulsory part of the school curriculum.
And last year the French elected a president who has a degree in philosophy and can cite Molière by heart. France may have lost its great intellectuals, but it has certainly not lost its intellectualism.

So French kids must still study philosophy. I wonder if it’s a rigorous course? And President Macaroni knows some good stuff, aside globalism and multilateralism. Molière is brilliant. So funny.

While there is pressure to dumb down, the French have not yet replaced history with social studies agitprop.

I’ll leave you with this hint at how good French schooling may be: “France is one of the countries where a pupil’s social background is one of the strongest predictors of his or her subsequent achievement.”

The French have not yet done the educational leveling we in America do to ensure that 43% of marks handed out in university are As.

Other than the educational information, the writer of “The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houllebecq” disdains France’s few “reactionary essayists” and thinkers (namely right-leaning thinkers).

So much so that, having mentioned his disappointment at the rise the likes of “Éric Zemmour, a reactionary essayist, and Alain Finkielkraut, a formerly left-wing philosopher turned critic of multiculturalism”—the writer concludes that “France may have lost its great intellectuals.”

Better good schools for the kids, than the likes of that lefty degenerate, Mr. Sartre.

UPDATED (10/30/018): St. John’s: The Most Rigorous College In America & What Every Young Mind Needs

Education, Human Accomplishment, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Literature, Logic, Technology

According to data reported by Tucker, only 31 percent of Americans who graduate from college can read a complex text/book.

By the same data’s telling, American kids are the dumbest in the developed world (facts I was reporting 14 years ago, already. In addition to the two hyperlinks provided, click “Education” to go back in time).

While our kids know less and less, their grades are only getting higher. The vaunted GPA is meaningless, except to give an idea of a student’s grades in relation to the inflated marks of his peers.

The most common grade given (the statistical mode?) in American college courses is an … “A.” “Forty-three percent of all letter grades are As.”

An exception to the rule is St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico (there is a Campus in Annapolis, MD, too), whose core curriculum is centered around what we call The Western Canon:

The great books (and works of art and music) upon which nobody contemporary has improved. (Everybody needs to be humbled by these works. I recently read some Plato abbreviated, after which I felt very small indeed. It’s all been said and thought-out before by the Greats. For example, an insight articulated and carefully thought-out in Into The Cannibal’s Pot; it was there. Plato said it already. Of course I was chuffed; it felt good. But how sad that this heritage—and with it the humility that comes with a recognition of true genius—is not being handed down.)

The video begins 4:22 minutes into the Tucker segment. (Tucker is a gem. The only gem on Fox News.)

St. John’s College admits only 800 and is producing the renaissance men and women of America.

ALL “freshmen must learn ancient Greek. ALL seniors struggle with quantum physics, along the way, as do they have to grapple with calculus, learn how to do differential equations, study Hegel and Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Adam Smith.”

“St. John’s is sailing against every trend in American higher education.”

Their “students read 200 serious books over the course of their education.”

Only 800 students qualify in admission and all must undergo this rigor.

This is the traditional liberal arts education that our greatest minds (thinkers, scientists, Founding Fathers) would have undergone 100 plus years ago. (Was not Thomas Jefferson a scientist and a philosopher and an all-round genius? Indeed he was.)

It’s an all-required curriculum. Everyone is required to take courses of equal rigor. There are no majors, no minors. No hiding. No skewing the grades Bell Curve.

Minds thus enriched can go on to become whatever they want, having been given the intellectual wherewithal to think, and the tools to both appreciate intellectual history, draw on it and from it.

American education is an exercise in egalitarian idiocy. In my opinion, educational egalitarianism and idiocy does the greatest harm to the gifted child.

And isn’t that the aim? To give all children the feeling they are equally gifted?

Ultimately, wonderful young minds should not be abandoned to the evaluation standards of what are mostly sub-intelligent, near-illiterate educrats, who’ve been disseminating dumbed-down subject matter, in institutions of “learning” in which everyone is a winner.

UPDATED (10/30/018): Rotting young minds.

And when I refused to partake in mobile-device mania I was called a Luddite (backwards). When I tell friends their kids (essentially) don’t know how to READ; I am dismissed.

See: “‘Screens are Poison’: Tech Elites Keeping Devices Out of Their Children’s Schools“