Category Archives: Education

The Data Are In: Even American PhDs Are … Dumber

America, Education, Intelligence, Literature, Science, Technology

I’ve been saying it for years, based on my encounters with a relatively smart cohort, through this column. My husband, a South African PhD (received at the age of 24), has been saying it for a long time based on encounters in his field. Barely A Blog correspondent Myron Pauli, a physics PhD from MIT (of which he thinks poorly), has been saying it over these pixelated pages:

American millennials, in general—but even with masters degrees and doctorates—are unimpressive, to put it charitably. They do, however, score high in self-esteem, which is part of the problem. From a 2007, Ottawa Citizen article I wrote:

Paradoxically, while our high school students score near the bottom in international competitions, when asked to rate themselves, they consistently give themselves top marks. But then so do their parents and teachers. Thanks to constant, unwarranted worship, and no moral or rigorous intellectual instruction, American schools are full of lame and lazy megalomaniacs.

The Washington Post cites a recent report by “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, better known as the OECDU.S,” according to which “millennials with master’s degrees and doctorates did better than their peers in only three countries, Ireland, Poland and Spain. Those in Finland, Sweden and Japan seemed to be on a different planet.”

Top-scoring U.S. millennials – the 90th percentile on the PIAAC test – were at the bottom internationally, ranking higher only than their peers in Spain. The bottom percentile (10th percentile) also lagged behind their peers. And the gap between America’s best and worst was greater than the gap in 14 other countries. This, the study authors said, signaled America’s high degree of inequality.

The “daunting” PIAAC Test showed that “U.S. millennials performed horribly.”

That might even be an understatement, given the extent of the American shortcomings. No matter how you sliced the data – by class, by race, by education – young Americans were laggards compared to their international peers. In every subject, U.S. millennials ranked at the bottom or very close to it, according to a new study by testing company ETS.

“We were taken aback,” said ETS researcher Anita Sands. “We tend to think millennials are really savvy in this area. But that’s not what we are seeing.”

By the way, note how forthrightly readers of the liberal WaPo discuss the well-documented racial differences in scholarly achievement. Alas, could the “dumbassery” documented in the WaPo article be manifesting in the reading and comprehension skills of its readers? For the article explicitly states that results were consistent across “class” and “race.” Yet many readers missed this crucial tidbit.

The information comes courtesy of Vox Day, who also quips as follows about the findings:

This isn’t surprising to me. Generation X had to understand its toys in order to play with them. There is nothing creative about a tablet or a smartphone. You can’t do anything on it. It’s basically a dumb terminal on the mainframe of the Internet. These digital natives are actually digital cargo cultists, comfortably familiar using things they don’t actually know the first thing about. As far as they’re concerned, it might as well be magic.

Academic Disintegration From Homer To Homo

Affirmative Action, Education

By Myron Robert Pauli

President Obama has proposed making college education free for everybody. It used to be considered that college education was for people with IQ in excess of 110 – e.g. 20% of the population; however, the solution to that problem is, of course, to dumb down college. Apparently, college reading levels are now at the 7th grade level [1]. It is interesting to see what was required for completion of 8th grade in “lowly” Kentucky with the modern curriculum [2]. I would hardly be surprised if Masters Students were reading “Run Spot Run” in 2015.

There are still a few isolated spots of higher education left. I have admiration for serious students of “fine arts” who wish to be next Vladimir Horowitz or Enrico Caruso. Aside from the Church of Global Warming, political correctness has often left the hard sciences and engineering alone. Here is a sample of the 61 graduate students studying Materials Science at Columbia University [3]: Cao, Chang, Chen, Chen, Chen, Chuang, Duan, Gao, …, Li, Li, Li, Liang, Liao, Lin, Lin, 3 Lius! , Lu, Lu, Luan, … ,7 Wangs!, Wong, Xu, Xu, Yang, Yang, Ye, Yue, Zhang, Zhang, Zhao, Zhen, Zhen, Zheng, Zhong, Zhou. Those damn Xu’s are running things! Affirmative action means that for every 2 students from Shanghai, one is chosen from Beijing!

Arguably, many of our enlightenment-era leaders such as Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton received a thorough “liberal arts” education which included history, philosophy, the sciences, geography, logic, and literature classics such as Homer and Shakespeare. But a few blocks away from the Chens and Wangs working on understanding nature and producing products, Columbia is also teaching English [4]. Check out the link to find that in our “top 10 University”, the kids/parents/taxpayers shelling out over $200,000 are paying for courses in LGBT Lit (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender), “Clarissa”, “Frankenstein”, “Postmodern Poetries”, and “Medieval Women Adventurers” (and G-d knows what junk is even in the normal-sounding offerings?).

Remember that the English Department is a “classical” department. How about Ivy League University of Pennsylvania’s course offerings in the “Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies [5]? I guess you can first earn a Bachelors in Bitchery and rise higher with a Masters in Male-Hating and a Doctorate of Dyking.

Here is what passes for advanced Social Sciences “Research” at elite Cornell University: “Network Evolution and the Beauty Advantage”, “Innovation Through Imitation”, and “Failing to See or Failing to Seize Opportunities to Build Social Capital? The Role of Neuroticism” [6]. I’m NOT making phony Ivy League websites!!!! No sense picking on the “second rate” schools who merely follow in the footsteps of the elite.

Recently, there was an academic “scandal” involving the football and basketball players at the (30th ranked nationally) University of North Carolina [7]. The “scandal” is that talented players like Julius Peppers did not actually “attend the classes” of moronic phony parasitical blowhards like faux-Injun Ward Churchill [8]. In other words, guys like Michael Jordan did not sit and watch Lone Ranger and Tonto re-runs. Can anyone seriously tell me that ATTENDING seminars in “White People Really Really Suck” is a productive use of anyone’s time? Failing to attend is a “scandal”?!!

Sure, send EVERYONE to college [9]! Why not??! Here is a one minute advanced look at an elite American university education in the 22nd Century. When I was 11, I read “Planet of the Apes” by Pierre Boule mistaking it for fiction instead of prophesy. And I am talking about white Americans also – they are merely following in the politically correct footsteps as their minority brothers and sisters.

REFERENCES

[1] http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/education/item/19867-education-expert-says-college-freshmen-read-at-7th-grade-level
[2] http://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
[3] http://matsci.columbia.edu/materials-science-engineering-graduate-students_6653
[4] http://english.columbia.edu/files/english/content/Spring%202015%20Course%20Distribution%20Vrs%202.4.pdf
[5] http://www.sas.upenn.edu/gsws/pc/term/2015A/GSWS
[6] http://sdl.soc.cornell.edu/research
[7] http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/acc/2012/12/20/north-carolina-basketball-football-julius-peppers/1782113/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonzo_Goes_to_College

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

The Stepford Students

Britain, Education, Intellectualism

I’ve written about the deadened Millennial Mind. Comedian Chris Rock has stated that he avoids doing his stand-up before Millennials. Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator calls them “The Stepford Students,” and details how he was swarmed by these idiotic automatons for violating their right … to feel comfortable. The youth is definitely not the future:

Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up.

I was attacked by a swarm of Stepford students this week. …

… Barely a week goes by without reports of something ‘offensive’ being banned by students. Robin Thicke’s rude pop ditty ‘Blurred Lines’ has been banned in more than 20 universities. Student officials at Balliol College, Oxford, justified their ban as a means of ‘prioritising the wellbeing of our students’. Apparently a three-minute pop song can harm students’ health. More than 30 student unions have banned the Sun, on the basis that Page Three could turn all those pre-rapists into actual rapists. Radical feminist students once burned their bras — now they insist that models put bras on. The union at UCL banned the Nietzsche Society on the grounds that its existence threatened ‘the safety of the UCL student body’.

Stepford concerns are over-amplified on social media. No sooner is a contentious subject raised than a university ‘campaign’ group appears on Facebook, or a hashtag on Twitter, demanding that the debate is shut down. Technology means that it has never been easier to whip up a false sense of mass outrage — and target that synthetic anger at those in charge. The authorities on the receiving end feel so besieged that they succumb to the demands and threats.

Heaven help any student who doesn’t bow before the Stepford mentality. The students’ union at Edinburgh recently passed a motion to ‘End lad banter’ on campus. Laddish students are being forced to recant their bantering ways. Last month, the rugby club at the London School of Economics was disbanded for a year after its members handed out leaflets advising rugby lads to avoid ‘mingers’ (ugly girls) and ‘homosexual debauchery’. Under pressure from LSE bigwigs, the club publicly recanted its ‘inexcusably offensive’ behaviour and declared that its members have ‘a lot to learn about the pernicious effects of banter’. They’re being made to take part in equality and diversity training. At British unis in 2014, you don’t just get education — you also get re-education, Soviet style. …

MORE.

‘Defining Deviancy Down’: Dr. Pauli Diagnoses

BAB's A List, Constitution, Education, Feminism, Gender, Individual Rights, Political Correctness, Race, Republicans, Terrorism

“More toleration and respect for humanity can be found at a bowling alley or meat-packing plant than in most liberal-arts departments or law schools at modern American universities,” says Myron Pauli, PhD.

Today is the 289th Birthday of George Mason, a man as forgotten as the Bill of Rights he fought for. Those antiquated notions are inapplicable to today’s world full of evil such as “terrorists”, “rapists”, and “racists”. To the zealot self-anointed Torquemadas, you are either “with us” or with the “evildoers.” Zero tolerance must prevail over rights, liberty, due process, rules of evidence, truth, or any semblance of self-restraint.

With the CIA torture revelations coming out, some conservatives posted some nonsense from Dinesh D’Souza that American torture is “better than” ISIS beheading! Boy, talk about defining deviancy down! Great, what’s next “Stalin Better Than Hitler”? The point that these people don’t get is that “WE” (it is MY country as well as Dick Cheney’s country) are doing the torturing which is far worse than worrying what Garbagecanistan is doing 10,000 miles away. The message in Judgment at Nuremberg is for current and future generations, not just “let’s piss on the old dead Nazis” – and we should heed it lest we turn ourselves into Garbagecanistan (listen to the 6 minute speech from Spencer Tracy).

Then we have the Rolling Stone expose of campus gang rape which, I must shamefully admit, I found somewhat credible. Do frat guys drink and like to get laid? Well, apparently, the expose is, at best, partially true – but with gaping untruths. According to Zerlina Maxwell of the Washington Post, truth and evidence must take a back seat to the rape narrative. Even when the accusations are untrue, the accusers “must be taken seriously”. When it comes to rape, there is no such thing as “bearing false witness”. Zerlina, have you ever heard of the Scottsboro boys?

And then there are the various tragedies affecting blacks: Only 1 out of 9 black babies conceived in America will get born to a married couple. Over 6000 blacks die from homicide each year, 93 percent from black criminals. Five million blacks were slaughtered in the Congo by other blacks. So what motivates outrage? Answer: Michael Brown, a convenience store bully/robber who decides while unarmed to take a gun away from a cop. A hoodlum becomes the cause celebre. And “justice for Michael Brown” gets translated into “burn this down” as well as crowds shouting “kill whitey” attacking and killing A Bosnian. Do black lives matter? Apparently ONLY if they die at the hands of whites.

And zero tolerance begets a war mentality – WAR on drugs, WAR on obesity, and even a WAR on intolerance. Let’s record all calls and e-mails, stop-and-frisk the “usual suspects,” and have no-knock SWAT teams to crack down those who smoke dope, eat fries, sell cigarettes, wear ghetto garb, won’t conduct homosexual weddings, don’t wear seat belts, stare at women, speed, draw a cartoon disliked by Muslims, or whatever politically incorrect evil rouses up the mob. “Sentence first and verdict afterwards”.

Of course, with government using Grubers to lie in order to “sell” healthcare and Curveballs to lie in order to “sell” war, perhaps little can be expected of civilians who take their cues of truthfulness from the so-called leaders.

All of this would be tragic enough if the zero tolerance insanity was the product of white rednecks at the bowling alley or black dropouts in the ‘hood. However, many of the loudest justifications for torture, denial of due process, speech codes, unlimited wiretapping, and strong>results-based justice often come from lawyers and academicians. More toleration and respect for humanity can be found at a bowling alley or meat-packing plant than in most liberal-arts departments or law schools at modern American universities.

Finally, we have the ratings-driven media to whip Americans into hysterical frenzy. Terrorists eeek! War on women! Genocide of blacks! Ebola epidemic! Vladimir Putin! Mushroom clouds! Runaway Greenhouse! Democrats!Republicans! Benghazi! Daycare child abuse! Racists and rapist and terrorists – oh my! Unfounded fear statistics such as 25 percent of all college women get raped, which if true, then we should scratch co-ed learning and have sex separate schools. Enough hobgoblins to make every day a near-death experience and antiquated nonsense like the Bill of Rights standing in the way of protecting us from the Epidemic of Eternal Evil.