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Monday, May 5, 2008
Cinco de Mayo
1330: When I got my blood drawn last Thursday I discovered that there was a warrant out for more of my blood, and since I have an upcoming appointment with Dr. Rodriquez, the oncologist, and he'll want to see that as well as the internist who ordered it, I went out this morning at 0800 to get my blood drawn.
Choosing a Monday wasn't smart. It took a long time. Also they wanted a urine sample, and I had already done that task before driving out there, so while waiting between registration when I found out and getting to the technicians -- about 20 minutes, which was about how long I stood in the registration line -- I told you choosing a Monday wasn't smart -- I kept drinking water, and then after that I went to the cafeteria for coffee, breakfast, and a pint of tea. So about 10 AM I was able to give the urine sample and come home. By then I was nearly exhausted, but I sat down at the breakfast table and read the papers. There was a lot to read, much of it relevant to the day's work, which is the column including the International Edition.
Debt and Education
There were also two articles relevant to education that need comments, both in the Wall Street Journal although there was no indication that the WSJ editors recognized that they had much to do with each other.
The first was an editorial on student loans.
http://www.nasfaa.org/publications/
2008/aweditorial050508.html
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB120994278813866099.html
You and I now own a lot of them.
Recently we told you about Congress's feverish effort to clean up the mess it made in the student loan market. Convinced that private lenders were making too much profit on federally insured loans, Democrats enacted changes last fall that rendered most new student loans unprofitable. As numerous firms abandoned the market amid the credit crunch and just before the peak of college financing season, the anxious pols realized their blunder and are now seeking a bailout of the same lenders they had just finished punishing.
This follows the disastrous experiment of having the government be the direct lender back in Clinton's time as President. The problem then was that the bureaucracy wasn't able to process the loans in time for the students taking out the loans to pay their tuition and expenses.
You will note that whoever owns the loans, they are loans, and those who graduate having taken out those loans enter life under a burden of debt that many will never escape.
I also note that while I went through undergraduate education by way of the GI Bill (3 years benefits for each 2 years in the Korean War army) and Board Jobs (1 hour waiting on tables for 1 meal off the menu at Reich's Cafe in Iowa City; no longer possible under the minimum wage act), and my wife worked her way through college as an office worker with New York Life in Seattle, nowadays it is pretty difficult to work your way through college -- big lifetime devouring loans are often required, even if you manage to go to a state university under resident tuition. (The reason I went from Iowa to the University of Washington was that my parents were legal residents of Alaska when I got out of the Army, and in those days residents of Alaska were legal residents of the State of Washington for tuition purposes; and resident tuition was important to me given that the GI Bill didn't pay a lot and my work hours were limited by my class and work schedules. Fortunately I managed to get assistantships at both Iowa and UW, and those helped a lot.)
I also lived a rather Spartan life. In Iowa I had a single room in a private home; it had a gas ring but no refrigerator, so the only way to preserve food other than in deep winter when a window box was good enough was to keep a pot of soup simmering at all times. That soup became legendary among my friends: what went into it was anything including stuff I could collect at supermarkets when they were cleaning out the produce at closing time, stale (officially day old) bread, and any meat or protein I could collect. It all went into the pot, and my main meal at night was a big bowl of that soup/stew and a chunk of "day old" rye bread so hard that it had to be dipped in soup to be edible; and of course my daily meal at Reich's Cafe.
Spartan the life was, but it worked until I impressed my professors enough to get an undergraduate assistantship doing lab technical work at Iowa. At UW I was "animal room manager" which consisted largely of conveying huge garbage cans full of rat dung and dead rats down three flights of marble stairs (in Smith Hall; the lab was in the attic) a couple of times a week, and generally cleaning up the animal cages. It wasn't fun, but it paid me; I didn't have to go into debt.
Nowadays the notion of working your way through college seems bizarre.
Now even resident tuition in a state university plus the cost of living near campus comes to more than most undergraduates can make. It's true that bright students who can prove they're high up on the right side of the Bell Curve can manage "scholarships" and "grants" that serve to cut the costs, and some do escape huge debt loads on graduation: but then those well out to the right side of the Bell Curve usually manage one way or another.
It's the IQ 80 - 120 who end up debtors for the rest of their lives.
Of course many of them ought not be in college to begin with. If our high schools and junior (community) colleges were anything like what they ought to be, anyone to the left of IQ 115 wouldn't bother with college. What they learn in a 4 year college isn't going to be all that much help; what they need to learn can be taught for a lot less money than our Universities charge. And those out to the right of the Bell Curve find themselves in classes taught by immigrant grad students who speak incomprehensible dialects said to be English; the Universities have to have jobs for these people (whose governments often pay full tuition) and the size of classes leaves the university little choice.
That brings us to the second article in today's WSJ:
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB120995103004666569.html?
mod=opinion_main_commentaries
Often it seems as though American higher education exists only to provide gag material for the outside world. The latest spectacle is an Ivy League professor threatening to sue her students because, she claims, their "anti-intellectualism" violated her civil rights.
Priya Venkatesan taught English at Dartmouth College. She maintains that some of her students were so unreceptive of "French narrative theory" that it amounted to a hostile working environment. She is also readying lawsuits against her superiors, who she says papered over the harassment, as well as a confessional expos�, which she promises will "name names."
The trauma was so intense that in March Ms. Venkatesan quit Dartmouth and decamped for Northwestern. She declined to comment for this piece, pointing instead to the multiple interviews she conducted with the campus press.
Two things worth noting here: she left Dartmouth for Northwestern; one expensive university for another; and secondly, she taught Freshman Comp, otherwise known as Bonehead English. One wonders why Dartmouth or Northwestern accept students who need Bonehead English. The existence of Freshman Comp classes is an indictment of the whole college prep education system.
Note that Bill Gates and many experts claim that the goal of our high schools should be to guarantee every child in the nation a "world class university prep education". Note that if that were accomplished the demand for university education, already far too high (and the major factor in the spiraling costs that end up with half the middle class saddled with lifetime debts), would grow by more leaps and bounds, forcing the costs still higher.
Note also that the higher incomes the universities get let them afford Priya Venkatesan who teaches "French Narrative Theory" and Deconstruction in Bonehead English class.
Now I have to confess: When I went to the University of Iowa, they had tests for incoming freshmen, and my results got me relieved from both Freshman Comp and Freshman Speech; I was able to start the "core courses" Iowa was famous for in those days, and took Greeks and the Bible (a literature course involving a couple of dozen Greek plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and that gang; the Laurence of Arabia translation of the Odyssey; and a very literary translation of the Bible; as well as Plato's Republic). I found that a lot more useful than Bonehead English would have been, but I suppose it disqualifies me for much commentary on the value of Freshman Comp and Freshman Speech. Still, from what I observed, those who did take Freshman Comp did not usually shine in the more advanced seminars in upper division work. Note that "did not usually" does not mean never and no one. I am sure that some -- perhaps many -- got bad secondary training and Freshman Comp helped them get where they ought to be.
But one thing I am certain of, "French Narrative Theory" in Freshman Comp doesn't accomplish that result. No one ever had problems in advanced courses because of a lack of French Narrative Theory or Deconstruction in high school -- and Bonehead English is supposed to remedy high school education defects, not teach college level Deconstruction theory. Note also that my Southern Catholic high school was able to teach me enough that I had no trouble getting exempt from Bonehead English.
The points here are two: first, pretending that everyone is competent to go to university drives the cost of university education up to the point that many will have to go heavily into debt in order to afford a university education; and secondly, the major universities are so awash in money now that they can afford -- and WANT to afford -- Priya Venkatesan to teach French Narrative Theory in Freshman Composition.
Many go to University who ought to have learned their career skills in high school -- or at least in junior college. It is not necessary for all the citizens of a republic to have gone to university and learned French Narrative Theory. One need not know know anything at all about Foucault or Deconstruction to be a good citizen, vote in elections, pay taxes; and indeed I put it to you that being without debt is probably preferable to knowing French Narrative Theory.
I think you will have no trouble drawing more inferences from the above pair of articles. And in case you were wondering, this is not my long delayed essay on education, although it has been inspired by that essay's conclusions. I'll do that essay when I get caught up on computer related stuff. This diatribe just flowed out; it's first draft, surely full of flaws, but I hope worth your time.
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14:30 It is now time to get started on this week's column which must also include the International Edition for Japan, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, and points east and west...
Is there any program other than rar itself that will open .rar files?
Hi Jerry,
The free windows program "universal extractor" will open rar and a lot of others. http://www.filehippo.com/download_universal_extractor/.
Cheers,
Peter Cupit
Thanks!!
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On requiring every child to be above average.
http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/ The-age-of-educational-romanticism-3835
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May 1, 2008
You'd think James Watson would be pretty good at apologizing by now. Last October, the then 79-year-old Nobel Prize winner was quoted in the Sunday Times of London Magazine as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" given that "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours�whereas all the testing says not really."
http://science-community.sciam.com/
blog-entry/Sciam-Observations/James-Watson
-Six-Months-Later/570001601
Of course Watson is a well known idiot of no intellectual capability or value. It wasn't always that way, but last October it became obvious. And science doesn't permit certain subjects to be discussed as if they were amenable to scientific method.
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