Tag: critical thinking

Looks Like (AI) ChatGPT Makes People Stupid

Critical thinking isn’t taught except in private schools anymore. There aren’t enough people who can think straight to begin with. Now………

Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.

The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively. Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.

The paper suggests that the usage of LLMs could actually harm learning, especially for younger users. The paper has not yet been peer reviewed, and its sample size is relatively small. But its paper’s main author Nataliya Kosmyna felt it was important to release the findings to elevate concerns that as society increasingly relies upon LLMs for immediate convenience, long-term brain development may be sacrificed in the process.

“What really motivated me to put it out now before waiting for a full peer review is that I am afraid in 6-8 months, there will be some policymaker who decides, ‘let’s do GPT kindergarten.’ I think that would be absolutely bad and detrimental,” she says. “Developing brains are at the highest risk.”

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How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

How do significant life events or the passage of time influence your perspective on life?

I look back for patterns. It’s part of critical thinking that I have no control over. It just happens.

Stuff just comes together and I know something is right.

When they introduced the PC, no one knew what to do with it. The word on the street was that no one would buy these and there was no future. I saw a career move.

When they forced people to get jabbed for Covid-19, I knew I had to avoid it with everything I had.

So now, I’m not surprised when I see stuff starting to happen and I know what is the right thing to do. It just happens.

Harvard and Stanford MBAs Struggling to Find Jobs

When reading this, it could be deduced that AI is taking some of the jobs. In reality, they aren’t getting the education companies want. They are indoctrination centers producing unqualified thinkers. The kids used to get jobs through the network of graduates from the Ivy Leagues, but business has changed and there are only so many Wall Street or crony capable jobs. People want educated decision makers and that is not what an Ivy League MBA has morphed into.

In reality, these schools are turning out one-sided leftists who are not critical thinkers. They lack the ability to view both sides of the facts and accept that there is merit in many sides of an issue when making decisions.

In other words, they are tired fo the crap these elitest kids are spewing and there is talent elsewhere that is worth hiring first.

The job market has turned unforgiving, even for graduates from elite institutions like Harvard Business School (HBS). A staggering 23% of HBS’s 2024 MBA graduates were still job-hunting three months after graduation, according to The Wall Street Journal.

This sharp increase from the 10% unemployment rate in 2022 highlights a tough economic climate where prestige is no longer enough. “Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills,” said Kristen Fitzpatrick, HBS’s head of career development.

Harvard’s struggles are part of a larger trend. Institutions like Wharton, Stanford, and NYU Stern have reported their worst job placement figures in years. At Northwestern’s Kellogg School, 13% of MBA graduates remained unemployed three months post-graduation, triple the number from previous years.

Liza Kirkpatrick, assistant dean at Kellogg, reassured, “No one is left on the field,” as schools ramp up efforts to support graduates.

The tech and consulting industries, traditionally key recruiters, have reduced hiring significantly. Companies like Amazon, Google, and McKinsey have scaled back MBA recruitment. McKinsey hired only 33 MBAs from Chicago Booth in 2024, down from 71 in 2023, WSJ reported.

The fierce competition has left graduates like Ronil Diyora, a University of Virginia Darden alumnus, disheartened. Diyora, who switched careers to technology, applied for over 1,000 roles and attended numerous networking events but remains uncertain about the value of his MBA.

Others, like Yvette Anguiano, who secured a consulting role with EY-Parthenon, face delayed start dates. Anguiano, whose start was postponed until June 2025, said, “I was pretty devastated,” as she juggles mounting student loans.

Harvard and Stanford MBAs Struggling to Find Jobs

Nobody wants to put up with their liberal crap

Why To Kill The DOE – A Half Century of Miseducation

They’ve turned out robots instead of critical thinkers. They are restricting school choice, harming millions of kids. Not one accomplishment on behalf of the students since it was created. The NEA and Teachers Unions are going strong and pay themselves well for incompetence though.

The New York Times reported December 4 that math and science test scores for U.S. fourth and eighth graders have been essentially stagnant since 1995. Nor have they have been stagnant near the top — lots of countries outrank us — but rather in the middling middle. American elementary/middle school students perform behind Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, England, Ireland, and Poland.

“’This is alarming,’” opined a Department of Education commissioner.

Yes, it is, but perhaps not just for the reasons the article identifies.

The spin of the article is that scores are down and American kids have lost significant ground as a result of the pandemic. Author Dana Goldstein says the results corroborate “a large body of research showing significant academic declines since the Covid-19 pandemic began.” “Experts are debating potential causes,” reports Goldstein, including maybe the fact that American public schools were shuttered comparatively longer than in other countries.

Let me argue that spin is far too limited and selective.

While the “experts” debate, American kids continue to move through the public-school industry, advanced perhaps more for social promotion than mastery of skills. Eventually, they’ll hit college where freshman year will be spent in math remediation before they can undertake a required general education math or science course. I know. I worked as an associate dean at a private, tuition-driven Catholic university. One year, a fifth of the freshman class was in math remediation prior to regular college-level math classes.

You can argue the young people shouldn’t be admitted and it’s not a college’s role to make up deficiencies in elementary and secondary schooling. But somebody’s got to do it. These kids relied on what their schools told them, credentialing them with diplomas after going through multiple “proficiency tests” (that more often were “teaching to the test” than teaching). At some point, somebody’s actually got to teach them.

More here including how Covid held back public but not private schools

The Art Of Memorization – What Today’s Education Fails To Teach And How To Improve It

•Academic success is primarily based on one’s ability to memorize material. Unfortunately, the educational system rarely teaches students how to do that.

•Effective learning requires actively rather than passively engaging with the required material and being conscious of what is going on inside your body and mind so that you can determine which approaches are correct for you.

•Many of the same factors that determine overall health and neurological health (e.g., a healthy sleep cycle and adequate circulation throughout the body) also directly influence your capacity to study and memorize.

•In this article, I will review the various approaches and supplements that we have found to be the most helpful in improving memory retention and supporting academic success (along with increasing the lucidity of dreams if taken right before bed).

The primary mechanism our society uses to determine one’s eventual wealth and place in the social hierarchy is their academic performance. As such, many put forward an incredible sustained effort to succeed at each rung of the academic ladder, and in many cases, at the urging of their parents, begin that effort from a very young age. However, while a variety of justifications exist for the society adopting this convention, there are also major issues with it, such as:

•Far too many who go through it and put in a sustained effort to “succeed” end up with nothing to show for it.

•Because education has essentially established a monopoly on moving up the social ladder (which forces everyday citizens to participate in its rat race), it has no incentive to provide quality education to those it trains—particularly since unconditional federal support (e.g., student loans) subsidizes education and is allotted based on how many students attend each institution, not the quality of the education offered.

•Education primarily focuses on telling you what to do, not how to do it. As a result, those with inherent talent do much better than their peers, whereas many of those who simply try to do what they are told to do fall short regardless of how much effort they put in.

•By making people believe they need to be “taught to learn” through copying what the teacher does rather than encouraging the natural learning capacity of each student to emerge, the educational process makes students lose their inherent ability to learn or think critically.

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Critical thinking, one of the indicators of intelligence is rarely taught in public schools anymore. Take your kids out of it and put them in private schools, or home school them. Get the Government out of our schools.

Why People Fell For The Covid-19 Scam – A Lack Of Critical Thinking

  • Many important types of intelligence besides “intellectual intelligence exist.” Without them, we cannot connect to our deeper wisdom and are easily lead astray. Likewise, if our intelligence remains unbalanced, our knowledge will almost always be patchy and incomplete
  • A century ago, American education was hijacked by oligarchs like Rockefeller who replaced cultivating critical thinking and deep knowledge with training widespread compliance
  • Education trains us to have a very linear form of intelligence which often misses critical details because it lacks the ability to see the broader picture. This for instance characterizes many problems in medicine
  • Those trained to have excessive left brain thinking are often challenging to have a dialog with because they are both aggressive in asserting their ideology and simultaneously incapable of seeing anything which does not prove they are right
  • This article will discuss the importance of balanced intelligence and strategies for cultivating it

Over the last century, there’s been a systematic dismantling of the educational system as its focus shifted from creating an empowered electorate to producing subservient citizens who only existed to fill their pre-designated societal roles. To illustrate:

• In 1903 John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board,1 which over the decades (with Carnegie’s foundation) gave billions to schools around the country until in 1973, the Department of Education was created. These foundations reshaped American Education,2 transforming it from a locally managed process to a rigid and mandatory centrally controlled one.

Note: The director of Rockefeller’s “charity” admitted their goal was to have this new model of education train the populace to be compliant slaves who lacked critical thinking.3

• In the 1960s, one of my relatives was given documents by a group that preceded the World Economic Forum which detailed a global plan to impoverish America so that everyone would willing submit to low paying and backbreaking corporate jobs to get by (e.g., consider Corporate America’s recent vaccine mandates), hence ensuring the American people would be compliant and do whatever the ruling clash wished.

I learned about this as a child and have been astonished to see each part of the plan, such as removing critical thinking from American education gradually come to pass.

• Individuals at elite schools the ruling class sends their children to have repeatedly shared with me that the educational process there is very different (e.g., it fosters critical thinking).

• Award-winning teacher, John Gatto, extensively wrote about how American education had been transformed4 so that when children were in the prime of their life to learn and develop their own identities, they were instead locked into a rigid and sterile environment that disconnected them from all the interactions and experiences of life that allowed them to develop their own identities and become highly functional members of society.

Likewise, Ivan Illich made the salient observation5 that once people are “taught” within a rigid framework, they lose much of their inherent capacity to “learn.”

Counterproductive Cognitive Algorithms

Two approaches are often used to solve problems:

• “Right Brain” thinking — Engage the creative capacities of the brain (and unconsciousness), be able to see the broad picture in front of you, and then be able to arrive at an innovative solution to the problem you are facing. This allows immense insights to be gained, but simultaneously, those predisposed to it often struggle to address the practical day to day needs we face.

• “Left Brain” thinking — Memorize a series of lists, hyperfocus on a few reductionistic details, and then forcefully execute a chain of logic or algorithm that utilizes those lists to come up with a solution. This is effective at getting necessary things done but frequently locks the user into being unable to see critical details outside of their framework.

Note: I’ve also observed that the widespread neurological damage from mass vaccination predisposes those injured to left brained thinking.

Many in turn have argued excessive left brain thinking (which schooling drills into us) is the root cause of many ills in our society. I agree and believe balanced left and right brain thinking is essential for our society (e.g., this is why I try to show both the forest and trees while I write).

The problem with left brain thinking is that it tends to lock one into a “solution” which excludes the best answer from being considered. For example, in medicine, I frequently see brilliant doctors who are remarkably skilled at executing their clinical algorithms but cannot help patients their algorithms simply aren’t applicable for.

Likewise, I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve debated with whose logic starts from the premise there is no conceivable way any viewpoint besides their own could be right (which inevitably results in them concocting absurd arguments).

Debating Cognitive Algorithms

I’ve gotten into more debates than I can count with ardent defenders of the orthodoxy. In each case, I’ve noticed three salient features:

1. Their arguments are extremely repetitive, to the point I often can predict over 90% of what they will say by the time they finish their first few sentences (which is why I always subtly approach the argument from an angle they are not expecting rather than directly confront them). Remarkably, whenever I question them about this, they have little to no recognition they are regurgitating someone else’s talking points.

Note: Somewhat analogously, when patients see specific specialists (e.g., a neurologist) we can predict with high accuracy give or take everything the specialist will tell them.

2. Frequently when they engage these scripts, to varying degrees they disassociate and enter a hypnotic state where they lose awareness of many things outside the immediate point they are discussing — especially if they are confronted with evidence that overtly disproves their existing belief system.

3. Typically, the “algorithm” they follow is to quickly scan through everything you present to them until they find something that can attack (e.g., because they already know a script for attacking it) at which point, they become unable to see the rest of your argument and hyper focus on their point of attack.

In short, their focus is not on discerning what is true, but rather on finding a way to prove they are “right.” One of the most important things about this phenomenon is that, typically, the more educated or intellectually intelligent people are, the more aggressively and reflexively they do this.

source and so much more to help you understand why people fall for these things. For Covid-19, they lined up like sheep, or like Germans in the 1930’s. A lot of people think Global Warming is real despite the facts that prove it isn’t caused by humans.

The Trouble With People Today, This Close To The Election

I was having a conversation with my buddy George who claims he was perceptive. He was giving me the litany of reasons girls don’t like Trump, while standing firmly behind voting for him.

I did get a lecture as to how good JD Vance was because he was young and didn’t put out mean tweets.

I asked him if he’d investigated Tampon Tim Walz. He’d never heard of him. I’m wondering myself how can you be perceptive if you don’t know 1/4th of the Presidential election lineup.

This caused me to wonder about what Donald Rumsfeld said.

I was watching that press conference and it struck me how true this really was. Most people don’t know much outside of their little world and never see the big picture.

That took me to this well-known joke:

A guy was seated next to a 10-year-old girl on an airplane. Being bored, he turned to the girl and said, “Let’s talk. I’ve heard that flights go quicker if you strike up a conversation with your fellow passenger.”

The girl, who was reading a book, closed it slowly and said to the guy, “What would you like to talk about?”

Oh, I don’t know,” said the guy. “How about nuclear power?”

“OK,” she said. “That could be an interesting topic. But let me ask you a question first. A horse, a cow and a deer all eat the same stuff… grass. Yet a deer excretes little pellets, while a cow turns out a flat patty, and a horse produces clumps of dried grass. Why do you suppose that is?”

The guy thought about it and said, “Hmmm, I have no idea.”

To which the girl replied, “Do you really feel qualified to discuss nuclear power when you don’t know shit?”

Most people don’t know shit, yet they talk a lot of shit.

I caught a lot of shit from my cousin about Trump’s mean tweets and being an Alpha male, you know the kind that girls let them do stuff to that they wouldn’t a less rich or powerful type. Instead, she went out of her way to promote the disaster that was our current president and how our nation was wrecked by incompetence. She failed to understand the concept of hypergamy. She also ignored that girls sleep with who they want, (most) guys sleep with who they can, except alpha males.

I don’t have a moral to the story other than look at yourself. You probably don’t know as much as you think. You know what you’ve heard and your opinions are usually reflections of other people you’ve heard. That means we all need to get better educated as to the candidates.

Critical thinking is a lost art. They don’t teach it in schools anymore (other than private schools). We sure could use more of that in this election cycle to bring some common sense to how and who we should have run our nation. History for example is a great teacher. We have a lot of it telling us what is the right thing instead of the politically correct thing.

I think our lives would be a lot less difficult if we all thought through things a bit more than what social media and the MSM tells us to think. It’s why I dumped Fakebook and Twitter years ago.

So after lampooning those who claim to be perceptive, I’m not going to do it. I am a person who sees patterns. What I see is a bunch of sheep being told what to think instead of thinking for themselves

YMMV

Adulting Is Hard These Days, Especially At Universities

No one is teaching. Or, rather, the teachers are teaching the ego-tantrum, validating toddler politics with their own toddler politics. You have to have a cohort of adults to prepare the next cohort of adults. And so here we are. Anyone who objects to you making your encampment on campus a Jew-free zone is obviously a MAGA jerk.

Universities have to teach. Here’s the president of Yale, getting it right:

As a university dedicated to learning and the search for truth, we hold the exchange of ideas and the diversity of viewpoints to be fundamental. To claim control of a shared physical space and to impose an intellectual and ideological litmus test are not in keeping with our bedrock principles and values.

There aren’t many academic leaders who have passed this test.

If you don’t put a beverage in my mouth, I’ll die of dehydration. That comes from somewhere. It’s learned behavior, and we should be angrier at the people who taught it than we are at the students who learned it.

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The Universities are indoctrination centers, not institutions of learning. They should be taught critical thinking instead of Jew and conservative hating.

The Decline Of Education, Save Our Kids

We aren’t producing the best from our schools anymore. There are a lot of reasons, but the NEA and teachers union care more about themselves than they do our kids.

Home school your kids. Save them from the Government turning their minds into mush.

PJ Media reports:

Texas High School Postpones Graduation When Only 5 Students Meet Graduation Requirements

A small, rural high school in Texas has postponed graduation ceremonies after only five of the 33 seniors eligible met the state-mandated graduation requirements.

“Marlin High School has announced that high school graduation will be rescheduled for June,” the Marlin Independent School District said in a letter posted on Facebook. “The decision by the high school to postpone graduation will provide more time for students to meet necessary requirements for graduation.”

The district superintendent Daryl Henson did all he could, giving the failing students numerous opportunities to complete their classroom work. According to this story in the Waco Tribune-Herald, an additional 12 Marlin seniors became eligible since the announcement of the delayed graduation.

“Everything that we have done and will continue to do for the foreseeable future will always be for the benefit of our children,” Henson said. “So I’d rather have the emotions now. I want to have everyone be upset now. Instead of us calling you back in here in October or November or January of 2024 and telling you that your diploma is not worth the paper that is printed on.”

PJ Media

Some blame it on Covid, but you have to blame Randi Weingarten

A group of researchers from some of the country’s most prestigious institutions reviewed test scores and other data related to educational performance in K-8 across the US.

Their conclusion: There has been a ‘devastating’ level of pandemic-era learning loss throughout the nation.

The “educational harm” caused by the coronavirus pandemic has been “devastating,” according to a recent survey of 26 million K-8 students by researchers at Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth and Harvard. The researchers also found that the pandemic “exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality,” as lead authors Tom Kane of Harvard and Sean Reardon of Stanford wrote in a New York Times essay accompanying the release of their findings last week.

Standardized test results have similarly shown that American students are losing ground in math, reading, history and social studies. But the new findings, which are part of the Educational Recovery Scorecard, add important — and troubling — context while also calling for urgent action.
The top line

In a survey of 7,800 communities in 40 states and Washington, D.C., Kane, Reardon and their colleagues found that between 2019 and 2022, the average “U.S. public school student in grades 3-8 lost the equivalent of a half year of learning in math and a quarter of a year in reading.”

The numbers are staggering:

  • “Math, reading and history scores from the past three years show that students learned far less during the pandemic than was typical in previous years. By the spring of 2022, according to our calculations, the average student was half a year behind in math and a third of a year behind in reading.”
  • “Our detailed geographic data reveals what national tests do not: The pandemic exacerbated economic and racial educational inequality.”
  • “The pandemic left students in low-income and predominantly minority communities even further behind their peers in richer, whiter districts than they were.”
  • “In the hardest-hit communities — where students fell behind by more than one and a half years in math … schools would have had to teach 150% of a typical year’s worth of material for three years in a row just to catch up.”

Kane and Reardon sounded the alarm in a recent opinion piece in The New York Times. The researchers fear parents think their children are doing much better educationally than the numbers reveal.

They urge long-term planning to undo the damage the pandemic lockdowns caused among the nation’s schoolchildren.

School boards and state legislatures should start planning now for longer-term policy changes. One possibility would be to offer an optional fifth year of high school for students to fill holes in academic skills, get help with applying to college or to explore alternative career pathways. Students could split their time among high schools, community colleges and employers. Another option would be to make ninth grade a triage year during which students would receive intensive help in key academic subjects.

As enticing as it might be to get back to normal, doing so will just leave in place the devastating increase in inequality caused by the pandemic. In many communities, students lost months of learning time. Justice demands that we replace it. We must find creative ways to add new learning opportunities in the summer, after school, on weekends or during a 13th year of school.

If we fail to replace what our children lost, we — not the coronavirus — will be responsible for the most inequitable and longest-lasting legacy of the pandemic. But if we succeed, that broader and more responsive system of learning can be our gift to America’s schoolchildren.

The authors’ solutions require the pandemic-lockdown-policy-makers to take complete ownership of the epic disaster it turned out to be. I suspect that this will not happen.

The policy-makers will likely continue to focus on woke nonsense and blame the parents for the ensuing academic failures. This information will be swept under the rug, hoping everyone will forget.

However, it is gratifying to see someone taking a hard, analytical look at the consequences of the pandemic lockdowns on the children.

It’s time to take back the schools from the woke, the perverts, the racists (of many colors) and the groomers. We need critical thinkers instead of factory automatons, like Rockefeller wanted.

The teachers union, the NEA, boards of education who are after power and those who say the children belong to the government have to be stopped, or the future is lost.

Dumbing Down Harvard, Again – And How They Went Woke

I wrote about the decline of the education you get there a while back and thought it would improve. I guessed wrong.

You can read about it in the link above, but the old boys club is wearing off. Their most recently famous alums actually were drop outs. They also did the best in life.

Now to the rest of the story.

Of course, there is the Covid madness. The supposedly smartest students have had to go to class online again because of……you guessed it:

“In recent days, we’ve seen a steady rise in breakthrough infections among our student population, despite high vaccination rates and frequent testing”

These idiots have bought into the false narrative, despite the growing evidence (Israel, UK and the opposite in Sweden) that the inoculation (if it were a vaccine it would have worked) is the panacea.

Harvard University states on its website that 95% of students and 96% of employees are vaccinated, and notes that “COVID-19 testing requirements remain in place for every member of the community who is authorized to be on campus this fall, including those who come to campus infrequently. The Dashboard data is relative to individuals, living both on and off campus, authorized to participate in Harvard’s COVID-19 screening.”

From the same article linked above:

Data from Israel reportedly showed earlier this month that “’fully vaccinated’” people are 27 times more likely to be infected and develop COVID-19 symptoms than unvaccinated people with natural immunity,” and “‘fully vaccinated’ people are 8 times more likely to be hospitalized from a ‘breakthrough’ infection.”

WHY THIS MATTERS

Building relationships to take into the business world is the big benefit of going to one of these antiquated halls of ignorance. Harvard creates the biggest “Old Boys Club (including girls)” because of their interaction in group projects and going out together.

This just nixed the big benefit other than bragging that you paid too much to say that you went there.

We already knew in the real business world that outside of NY and Massachusetts, anyone coming in with a degree from Harvard meant that they were going to be a drag on productivity. Some finally came around to what real life teaches you, but we still had to put up with their nonsense until they either left or realized how the world actually works.

CANCEL CULTURE

The students have shown an inability to understand sarcasm from one of their own, a Law Professor with some actually creditable certifications:

Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School Professor And Intellectual Iconoclast:

This story of cancel culture would be laughable were it not for the fact that it is so serious. It involves an attempt by four Harvard Law School student groups to interfere in the employment of, and damage the career of, Professor Adrian Vermeule.

This reflects an ongoing attempt by l******g students to purge academia of viewpoints that do not perfectly align with the social justice and Black Lives Matter orthodoxy. Much like during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, students lead the way in belittling and trying to damage dissident professors, with public shaming and institutional ritualized denunciations preferred methods of intimidation.

Here was his crime, tweeting this:

For example, as unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud spread following the election, Prof. Vermeule tweeted “ Lol the election isn’t over until Team Joe fixes up your ballot for you ” and “Kids, not sure if you knew this, but missing ballots have magical properties that make them visible only between midnight and 6am .” His post-election retweets included statements such as “ Even a Saddam Hussein had to make some pretence of not getting 100% of the vote in an Iraqi election … ‘Baghdad on the Delaware .’” And these examples only scratch the surface. Prof. Vermeule may try to play off his statements as a joke, but they amount to a pattern of promoting demonstrably false conspiracy theories. His statements are harmful to democracy and unbelievably divisive. To work at Harvard Law School is to be granted a platform and a level of legitimacy. Prof. Vermeule is abusing this platform in order to undermine democracy and delegitimize the results of the election.

Are you kidding me? This stuff is funny, and even if it’s not funny to some Harvard Law students.

The whole story is here, courtesy of Legal Insurrection, but in quick summary it shows how quick they are to jump to conclusions against their indoctrination and one sided beliefs.

WHY THIS MATTERS

An intelligent mind can entertain both sides of an argument without taking sides to fully understand the context. Whether or not they choose to side with one or the other would result from critical thinking and the ability to judge based on facts and history.

This current group of woke automatons rushes to judgement before the facts are known and worse, believe they are right because of where they are studying rather than being smart.

ENTRANCE EXAM DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MINORITIES

This takes two different paths. They reduce the entrance standards for some minorities who then can’t keep up. They are then stuck with a huge amount of debt and no benefit. They are having to take remedial courses and drop out of STEM studies.

Conversely, Harvard discriminates against those with the ability to qualify, but don’t have the proper heritage.

Here is what I’m referring to:

Adam Mortara, another attorney representing Students for Fair Admissions, accused Harvard of giving Asian-Americans significantly lower ratings for certain personal qualities, such as leadership and compassion, than other races, according to the Washington Post.

“Harvard has engaged in, and continues to engage in, intentional discrimination against Asian-Americans,” Mortara said.

A Harvard University dean testified that the school has different SAT score standards for prospective students based on factors such as race and sex — but insisted that the practice isn’t discriminatory, as a trial alleging racism against Asian-American applicants began this week.

The Ivy League school was sued in 2014 by the group Students for Fair Admissions, which claims that Asian-American students, despite top-notch academic records, had the lowest admission rate among any race.

He said Harvard sends recruitment letters to African-American, Native American and Hispanic high schoolers with mid-range SAT scores, around 1100 on math and verbal combined out of a possible 1600, CNN reported.

Asian-Americans only receive a recruitment letter if they score at least 250 points higher — 1350 for women, and 1380 for men.

This discrimination has now reached the Supreme Court.

Exerpt:

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, now at the Supreme Court, has the potential to reshape the course of affirmative action in the United States — for the better.

The case positions a group of highly qualified Asian-American college applicants against the university to which they seek admission, Harvard. These applicants allege that Harvard has practiced longstanding admissions discrimination against them in favor of less-qualified minorities.

GOING WOKE

Being woke is a crime of idiocy. You shouldn’t expect that of an institution heralded (not anymore) for their intelligence and education. Harvard has managed to pull it off spectacularly.

Now, at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, ‘political correctness’ on campus is taken for granted. But what I experienced then was less the direct coercive tyranny of leftism than a pervasive culture of capitulation and pusillanimity, with everyone from administrators to deans and professors to students and even the campus police looking over his or her shoulder in fear of censure by others. The fear was only justified on the part of those being silenced: at one Harvard event, Ayaan Hirsi Ali required stricter security arrangements than did many heads of state.

The affirmative action that Harvard implemented required lying. Departments looking for the ‘best’ person to fill a position were obliged to demonstrate, not that they had conducted a fair and open search, but rather that they had interviewed an appropriate percentage of women and other ‘minorities’. Since individual merit and group diversity are contradictory goals, the entire process was corrupt irrespective of outcome. At one departmental meeting, when the chair asked us to supply arguments for a member’s candidacy for promotion, someone at the table hooted, ‘Why bother with all this? He’s Hispanic!’ I was the only one who laughed at this eruption of suppressed truth.

There is more at the link above, but political correctness claims another victim.

IN CONCLUSION BUT PROBABLY NOT

Those of us who have been in the real world know that real world experience trumps a diploma. Sure, it will get you in the door, but those with the ability to adapt, lead and have the above stated ability of critical thinking are the ones you want to keep.

If they keep up this idiocy, those outside of the Northeast (OK, California, Portland and Washington – both of them are just as woke and dumb) won’t want them if they intend on surviving.

Save your money unless you have a Wall Street connection ready. Everyone thinking alike and acting with the same wokeness is of little benefit to the concept of an ongoing concern of a business, a FASB standard.

Common Core Education, Failing our Kids

 

THE SETUP FOR THE DISCUSSION

I suppose every generation considers the learning of the next generation as inferior to theirs.  If we didn’t, why do millennials eat tide pods?  Why do parents talk about how better their education was and how soft they are on kids today?   There are many reasons for this including prejudice, standards, government intrusion into the learning system and deviation from what made our education system the one that led to more progress, inventions and breakthroughs than any in the history of man.

We’ve now potentially gone backwards and have therefore failed the following generations.

In working with public school kids, I observe that there are many reasons.  People are not equal and some are smarter and learn better than others.  Those with two parent families or with a single parent who is highly integrated in the student’s learning consistently outperform those who don’t.  The system has gone backwards due to interference from do-gooders, government (over)regulation and unions.  Note: that is my observation only.  I see kids rise above the system to achieve, but they have to swim upstream.  Most can coast their way through.

Conversely, children who learn under Classical Education have an advantage in learning as it is taught to a standard the kids must keep up with as opposed to teaching to the lowest common denominator so no one is left behind, penalizing those who could achieve more.

Further, Classical Christian education is an approach to learning which emphasizes biblical teachings and incorporates a teaching model known as the Trivium, which consists of the three stages of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

Classical education complements a child’s natural development stages. Young children can memorize information easily. So, in the early years, learning is enhanced by songs, body movement, recitation, and exploration. This sets them up for success in their next stage of learning, critical thinking.

The critical thinkers are what companies want to hire.  They look at problems differently and come to the table with better skills for success.

They also have a distinct advantage over the public school system and the below discussion of how we are destroying learning.

WHERE EDUCATION HAS FAILED OUR KIDS

The biggest failure I’ve observed is the Common Core learning system.  It threw away the standards of learning that has proved to produce educated kids by introducing a system that borders on the ridiculous.

It was implemented by those we thought were helping us, yet it may have set us back for years.

Behind a lot of this is none other than Bill Gates, a man I’ve met and have mixed thoughts about.  Microsoft is far more successful than his support of Common Core.

From the American Thinker, I read this snippet:

But Bill Gates should have felt some uneasiness.  Common Core was untested, unproven, and micromanaged by David Coleman, a man with limited credentials but reliably far to the left.  Nobody in the business world launches a big new product without years of research and refinement.  Instead, Common Core was wrapped in $1 billion’s worth of propaganda and dumped on the country as a fait accompli.

The late, great Siegfried Engelmann, a real educator, was asked what he thought of this approach: “A perfect example of technical nonsense.  A sensible organization would rely heavily on data about procedures used to achieve outstanding results; and they would certainly field test the results to assure that the standards resulted in fair, achievable goals.  How many of these things did they do?  None.”

Did Gates realize that Common Core, supposedly a new and higher instruction, incorporates all the dubious ideas from decades prior?  New Math and Reform Math were the basis for Common Core Math.  Similarly, Whole Language and Balanced Literacy were rolled into Common Core’s English Language Arts (jargon for reading).  Constructivism, which prevented teacher from teaching, has been undermining American schools for decades.  Nothing new and higher about these clunkers.

An earlier generation of Gates’s business partners had created so much illiteracy that Rudolf Flesch had to write a book to answer every American’s favorite question: “why can’t Johnny read?”

I don’t hold Gates responsible except for his funding and use of his status to push this, but I hold those who pushed this system on the generation suffering from this learning standard.

The Thinker sums it up like this:

We have to wonder if Bill Gates performed due diligence, that being the care that a reasonable person exercises to avoid harm to other persons or property.  In other words, before putting your business funds to work on anything, you should make yourself an expert.  That’s what we need in this country: everybody becomes an expert.  For sure, nobody should trust the official experts.  If Bill Gates had observed that simple rule, he would still have a billion or two he doesn’t have now.  And the country would have tens of millions of better educated students it doesn’t have now. 

We need to stop this disservice to our kids and have them learn properly, and to learn to think critically.

Here is a video that shows just how far we’ve deviated from the learning system that invented computers, vaccines, technology that has helped mankind and sent men to the moon.  Go to 1:24 under Decompose to see how far we’ve digressed.

CONCLUSION

It would seem the dumping common core and putting real learning would be best for the kids.  The world is getting tougher and we need to give them every advantage possible.