The early days of third world country...
Sep. 27th, 2010 08:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsIn this morning's newsfeed, two articles back-to-back only showed me that we are in the early days of becoming a third-world country. The first article is from USA Today, and it stares us in the face and we flinch, terrified. Entitled Poor science education impairs U.S. economy, the article shows that science education has declined over the past five years and there's nothing in the pipeline intended to improve it. 49% of Americans don't know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the sun; US mathematics teaching is 48th in the world; China has replaced the US as the world's top exported of high technology.
And we are doing nothing to turn that around: we are arrogant in our assumption of exceptionalism, we are cowardly in our unwillingness to face the truth, we are self-destructive in our tolerance for foolishness.
Foolishness like the second article, Speakers challenge Darwin’s theory, in which Southern Methodist University's campus newspaper reports on how Stephen Meyer moderated a panel among Intelligent Design proponents without any input from a competing viewpoint, and ended with this quote from a student at the business school: "We can have a positive future if we can convince people that Darwin's theory is just a theory like any other and not a fact."
It's a fact and a theory, just as gravity is a fact and a theory. Just as chemistry is a fact and a theory. Germs are a fact and a theory.
I'd like to ask the business student: "I can point to several successful pharmaceutical, zoological and agricultural research programs that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being true in order to be successful. These research programs have resulted in new businesses and billions of dollars in revenue. Can you point to a single similar initiave that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being incorrect or incomplete?"
Nobody can.
SMU is an accredited university. It's motto is "The Truth Shall Set You Free." Today, SMU administrators ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing this kind of tripe. They'd never allow yoga instructors to claim they can levitate, or acupuncture woomeisters to give a symposium on how they cure cancer, and that's the level of respectibility "Intelligent Design" deserves.
And we are doing nothing to turn that around: we are arrogant in our assumption of exceptionalism, we are cowardly in our unwillingness to face the truth, we are self-destructive in our tolerance for foolishness.
Foolishness like the second article, Speakers challenge Darwin’s theory, in which Southern Methodist University's campus newspaper reports on how Stephen Meyer moderated a panel among Intelligent Design proponents without any input from a competing viewpoint, and ended with this quote from a student at the business school: "We can have a positive future if we can convince people that Darwin's theory is just a theory like any other and not a fact."
It's a fact and a theory, just as gravity is a fact and a theory. Just as chemistry is a fact and a theory. Germs are a fact and a theory.
I'd like to ask the business student: "I can point to several successful pharmaceutical, zoological and agricultural research programs that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being true in order to be successful. These research programs have resulted in new businesses and billions of dollars in revenue. Can you point to a single similar initiave that depended upon Darwin's theory of evolution being incorrect or incomplete?"
Nobody can.
SMU is an accredited university. It's motto is "The Truth Shall Set You Free." Today, SMU administrators ought to be ashamed of themselves for allowing this kind of tripe. They'd never allow yoga instructors to claim they can levitate, or acupuncture woomeisters to give a symposium on how they cure cancer, and that's the level of respectibility "Intelligent Design" deserves.
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would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 04:01 pm (UTC)49% of U.S. adults don't know how long it takes for the Earth to circle the sun.
Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 04:14 pm (UTC)Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 04:21 pm (UTC)Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 04:58 pm (UTC)Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 05:35 pm (UTC)Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-27 08:51 pm (UTC)Re: would it be mean to ask what percentage having reading comprehension issues? XD
Date: 2010-09-28 07:25 am (UTC)Also, when looking at the bottom 18% of the bell curve, that's where you find the blazing idiots. *Someone* has to frame houses and clean toilets, after all.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 07:13 pm (UTC)And with the Texas State Board of Education strongarming US school textbook publishers, expect things to only get worse…
no subject
Date: 2010-09-28 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 05:55 pm (UTC)Don't waste your breath. Especially since you mentioned gravity in the previous line. The pull-string parrot will only start nattering ignorantly about how much stuff is based on Newtonian Physics which is broken and doesn't match up with Einstein which is broken and doesn't match up with Quantum Theory. They will most likely not have any real comprehension of any of these systems or be able to think outside the carefully crafted bullshitology that has been programmed into them by the bleating faithful, but if you happen to know they're full of crap and attempt to set them straight on any of them, you can be certain they will merely stick their fingers in their ears and scream and call you names until you go away. Then they'll declare themselves smarter than you and the victor.
It gets tedious after a while. Seriously, if that's the best personality interaction code their God can write, it's better he not be in charge of the universe. His bots are tediously predictable and don't have a chance in Hell of passing the Turing test.
Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-27 06:54 pm (UTC)Why is thinking (in contrast with remembering) given such a bad rap and avoided so studiously? How did we end up with that particularly toxic attitude? I'm pretty sure that was not always the case. When did it change? And why?
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-27 07:32 pm (UTC)When Ronald "Facts are stupid things" Reagan was in office, the last death blows to the economic well-being of the Soviet Union were enacted. It took a few years for something that big to finally keel over, but it did a year while his successor, George H. W. Bush, was in office. After that we had ten years of relatively little challenge: a very successful combat operation in Kuwait and the Clinton technology bubble basically led to an attitude on the part of the American people that hard work wasn't really necessary, that The System could take care of itself without input, and that we never needed to look outside our own borders for potential challengers. We'd taught the Commies and the Ayrabs a lesson, and that was that.
After 9/11, we were told that The Government Would Take Care of Everything, and all we had to do was "go shopping." That's it. We stopped being citizens and became consumers, propping up an economic system that is spiraling out of control. Half our country spends its days being scared of bogeyman, and when it's not being scared, it's being angry because the other half isn't scared enough.
Michael Leeden of the American Enterprise Institute (a Koch-brothers funded noise tank) once wrote, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." We did that in Iraq. After 9/11, we did it to Afghanistan and again to Iraq. We've become bullies, kicking around the smaller nations to mask our own fear. Bullies don't need to study: we steal other kids' lunch money and class notes, and turn them in as they were are own.
But the first Iraq war was 19 years ago. The world has moved on. And now the bully at 19 looks at the world and realizes he doesn't have the skills needed to prosper.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-27 09:34 pm (UTC)The other side of this is that if rhetoric is "too hard" for Johnny than it needs to be removed from the requirements because Johnny needs to go to a good college.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-27 09:44 pm (UTC)Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 06:35 am (UTC)Avoiding active thought cannot be laid at the feet of either Ray-gun or Bush. The reverse may be true, though.
And somehwere - somewhen - we-the-people came to the conclusion that it was somehow ok to let government do the thinking for us. (At least it doesn't spend tax dollars, or something.)
Being fiercely individualistic, that strikes me as a disastrous decision.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-27 08:03 pm (UTC)Think about it: All of the colloquial terms in American English for someone who's smart — egghead, geek, nerd — have negative connotations. Not so in other countries. Anyone with expertise based on education and knowledge gets attacked. I once tried to explain to South Asian coworkers how smart kids in this country are viciously tortured in school by their peers. They didn't believe me, saying, "But that's just jealousy; back home, the smart guys got teased." We who grew up in the US all remember what happened to the "geeks" in our schools. That was sheer hatred, not jealousy.
No, the only reason why Americans recently put up with intelligent people was the Cold War. We needed our atomic scientists. Oh, let's not also forget: the reason why we even had such an excellent collection of minds here at the start of the Cold War was because they all fled here from Europe before and during World War II. Prior to that? Most of the cutting edge research was in Germany, France, and England. While I was in grad school, it became clear to me that, at least in my own field (physics), the US had been thought of, worldwide, prior to 1930 as, say, South Korea was in the 1990's: there was some good work happening, but it's not a hotbed of the world's best minds.
No, the US benefitted from the early 20th-Century European brain-drain. That, and that alone, I'm convinced, is what turned the US into the world leader in science research. But those refugee-professors are long since gone, and the grad students of their grad students are getting long-in-the-tooth. During the last decade, I came across more than one article quoting researchers from outside the US who were saying, basically, "Wait … tell me again why we're coming here?" So, the US is simply reverting back to what it's always been.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 06:42 am (UTC)Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 01:31 pm (UTC)Had there been no Cold War, then US universities would have become world-class research institutions … for a generation or two. But those coming to the US to learn from the Great Minds would have returned home. Had some other nation, say Brazil, been the recipient of the European Brain-Drain, then the Cold War panic wouldn't have by itself turned the US into the leader in science and technology. Oh, sure, there would've been some developments, but not enough to leave the rest of the world in the dust, like America did in the latter half of the 20th Century.
There. That's what I should've been more careful to clarify in my previous comment.
But back to Elf's post: There is this belief in American Exceptionalism that is, of course, flat-out wrong. It's not Being America that produced the status that the US gained last century. It's a series of exceptional events, a combination of singular circumstances, that produced that history.
And, getting back to your comment,
Oh … speaking of which: can you name anyone from before 1930 who was admired for his/her intellectual achievements? Not famous because of, mind you, but admired for. I ask because I don't know of any. Really … I don't.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 04:27 pm (UTC)Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 04:52 pm (UTC)Einstein would be "famous because of" his intellect. Everyone knows the name Albert Einstein, and associates the name with, "Very Smart." However, the majority of people would have difficulty explaining why he's famous for being smart.
Carl Sagan is "famous because of" saying "Billions and billions," but is being slowly forgotten, as are all of the things he did, both for space exploration and science education.
Stephen Hawking is "famous because of" his intellect and, "His Achievements Despite His Handicap," but almost nobody outside of physics would be able to say what those achievements are, beyond that he overcame them even though he has ALS (if they even know that he has ALS). They may also know that he's "the Lucasian Chair at Cambridge, a position once held by Isaac Newton," but few will know why.
Anyone who majored in physics as an undergrad will know who Richard Feynman is because they admire him for his achievements, both within physics and outside of it. Few people outside of physics will even know who Richard Feynman is, let alone what his achievements were.
There are people who not only know who Hawking, Einstein, and Sagan are, but also admire them for their respective achievements. A subset of those people will even be critical of Einstein's or Hawking's work, and/or critical of Carl Sagan outside of his scientific achievements.
Sorry if I came across as preachy or harsh, there. But that's the distinction I'm making.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 06:00 pm (UTC)Within the Quaker community (at least in the PNW), there seems to be great appreciation for intellectual achievement and a sense that this has always been so.
Jesuits (not a single name, but rather an order dedicated to education) - very acceptable in the U.S., certainly carrying their tradition forward here.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 01:01 am (UTC)I was raised Catholic, so I already knew about the Jesuits. I also know that other Catholics see the Jesuits as just one of the monastic orders. The Jesuit dedication to education does not, alas, represent the church laitey at-large. The parish where I was confirmed was unusual in that it had a priest who was of a more scholarly nature. But that was just one priest, in one parish. No others I attended before I left had clergy who did more than parrot dogma.
Getting back to those you named: You're right in that they all made great contributions to human knowledge. I'm glad that you admire them for their intellectual achievements, and not merely their fame. For my part, I certainly admire Ben Franklin for all that he did. But Edision… I prefer Nikolai Tesla. And I used to know who Booker T. Washington was, and what he did, and once knew what Mr. Brandeis accomplished. But now? I'd have to hit wikipedia. And I'm a fairly well-educated guy who cares about knowledge.
How would the average American react to these names? (You and I,
They'll know Thomas Alva Edison for being a famous inventor, and most will know that he invented the light bulb. A few will know that he invented the phonograph. Only a few will know that he promoted residential DC electric power over AC. But I have to wonder if any of those people will really admire Edison for his intellectual achievements, or because he got rich inventing things.
Most Americans, I expect, won't recognize the name, "Booker T. Washington." Or they'll think he's the guy that invented peanut butter.
What about everyone else? How far back do you think hostility to intellectual pursuits goes in the US?
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 04:53 pm (UTC)Now, _Candide_, to respond to your points.
Quakers are a very interesting group. One of the structural parts of their worship is silent contemplation with the occasional speaking. It seems to me that building lots of *time* to think right into their religious/communal worship has led to lots of actual thinking and discussion.
The Jesuit dedication for education does not represent the Catholic laity at-large, but it constitutes an acceptable and respected stream of Catholicism. In other words, there is an acceptable path for people with intellectual leanings and aspirations - within a broad framework of Catholic religion.
When you say that certain famous figures are famous for being famous, rather than for their achievements, you nullify a priori any name I mention - because if I know their name they're famous, which makes the admiration of them suspect.
But it is not their celebrity which makes the people I mentioned interesting.
Here are a few more: Ralph Waldo Emerson, admired for his essays and thinking; Walt Whitman, admired for his poetry (writing poetry counts as an intellectual achievement, I think.)
Robert Frost, also a giant of poetry. Louisa May Alcott, whose books for girls provided role models (including intellectual ones) for generations of young women.
I keep writing and deleting Thomas Jefferson, but I guess I won't delete him this time: he is renowned and celebrated for his intellectual writing as well as for the political roles he had.
Might I mention Harriet Beecher Stowe? She is widely admired for the effect that her writing-of-stories had on the world and on the country.
Now, I am at a bit of a disadvantage here, because not only am I not an average American in nearly any way, I did not grow up here. Not only do I not know what other Americans of my generation admire, I was never exposed to the names of many great people, celebrated for their intellectual prowess. Any knowledge I have is eclectic, grabbed magpie-style due to their noticeable twinkling. This was not part of a well-ordered education.
My children, however, are being raised here, and they have been informed admiringly by their schools of some wonderful figures, ones who inspire both of them to excel. This is now, in both public and private schools, in a tiny town at the very edge of the continental 48.
Now, I like to think that this city is unusual. I'd hate to live in a dull, flat space, indistinguishable from any other McCity. But it is not *that* unusual! I know this because I speak with parents from across the U.S., and their kids are having the same kind of experiences - both in terms of being fed factoids rather than learning to think, and in terms of seeing intellectual giants as worthwhile figures.
As to that average American and her response to the names I mentioned: good question. I just don't know. I've been blessed with having met only two "average" people in my life, and I suspect that even they were using that as a facade.
In summary: I don't see hostility to intellectual pursuits. I see a very disturbing way of delivering education (factoid rather than frameworks of thought), and indeed, a culture of celebrity rather than substance and of replacing contemplation with memorization. I read that as a misunderstanding of what education is, rather than a hostility to it.
Thanks for the stimulating conversation so far!
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 10:48 pm (UTC)People who achieve great things will become well known. But the question is: do they become well known for those achievements? Or do they merely become famous?
I discussed this with
So, I'm saying that famous people should be famous for what they achieved, but that in the US, that's not the case. In the US, if your achievements are intellectual or artistic (instead of sports, movies, TV, or pop-music), it is extremely unlikely that you will become well-known. For the rare few that become famous for intellectual achievements, their fame will be all that's remembered, the achievements ignored and forgotten.
This makes sense. You wouldn't send your kids to a school that didn't do this. And, I have to wonder if you'd give parents who didn't value knowledge and learning any time. (Note that I say "knowledge" and "learning", not "education." Everyone thinks "education" is important. But do they encourage their kids to play chess, read, or do math puzzles? Or encourage them to take up football?) I know that I certainly wouldn't!
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-30 04:28 pm (UTC)About the parents - well, I was on the PTA for one memorable year (I was VP, so much of what we did was my fault). This meant I got to spend a great deal of time trying to understand what parents wanted, and get them involved. Some were much more interested in sports. One of the fundraisers involved having our kids run around in circles, where the school got paid for each "lap". Another involved mass-sale of junk food. All the parents, including the ones who supported those bizarre-in-my-opinion fundraisers cared about their kids' learning. Not necessarily the way I care about it (more about having an education than doing the actual learning), but they cared. And that caring was the point at which we met and achieved things for the school.
Following that year I kept my daughter in public school until she finished working with one of the immensely awesome teachers, then pulled her into a private school more aligned with my values. This may support your point ::grin::
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 01:23 am (UTC)I did vaguely recollect Mr. Washington's association with the early African-American Civil Rights Movement. I'd forgotten that he'd helped found Tuskegee University. And I never realized the extent of his work towards educating African-Americans in the latter half of the 19th Century.
I dimly recalled that Louis Brandeis was Jewish and thought that he had to fight the rampant antisemitism of his day to achieve what he did. But I didn't remember at all that, "what he did," was become the first Jewish Supreme Court Justice, at the beginning of the 20th Century. I never knew that he was a child of immigrants, or that he completed a law degree at Harvard at age 20. Nor did I know that he took so many cases, for free, backing, "the little guy," against the powerful industrial and banking interests of the Gilded Age (and later).
Both men are, indeed, worth of admiration for their deeds — and equally worthy of admiration for their intellectual prowess.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 04:00 pm (UTC)(And thanks for looking them up; I do love their stories and it feels good to know that I have been the catalyst for further sharing of them.)
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 04:28 pm (UTC)Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-29 04:54 pm (UTC)Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 07:18 am (UTC)In a properly funded public system, there would be no need for that kind of nonsense.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 01:48 pm (UTC)At the high-school level, the local property taxes fund everything. They fund the science program. They fund Quiz Bowl. They fund the sports teams.
So, in some (many?) school districts in the US, the football team drains money from the science programs.
At the university level … HoooooooBoy.
The university I attended for grad school has a large, lavishly-funded football team. It was an open-secret that research grant-money paid for that team. The physics buildings has a tower that overlooks the football stadium. The department lounge was at the top floor. "Our grant money at work," the physics department faculty used to ruefully say as they looked out the physics lounge windows at the stadium. They'd then point out that the football teams luxurious, private gym was built by skimming money off of the physics+chemistry+biology+other research grants.
And this was also a huge bone of contention even between the football team and the rest of the sports teams at that university. (Not that those other sports teams were that much better. While I was there, an infamous incident occurred involving the women's basketball team. You see, there was an arena that doubled as a lecture hall. The first-year Spanish finals were taking place in one such arena, and the women's basketball team kicked them out in the middle of the final so that they could practice.)
So, no. It's the intellectual pursuits which have funded the university sports. Sports in the US not only outranks intellectual pursuits, and is more popular than intellectual pursuits, it sucks the life out of intellectual pursuits.
Re: Why is there such an aversion to thinking?
Date: 2010-09-28 08:30 pm (UTC)I love that section of the book (in the excerpt). And it was published in 1958. It seems that little, if anything, has changed in some 50-odd years. It probably has a lot to do with how high school isn't really meant for education as much as it's meant to keep teenagers out of the workforce. Sure, there's good reasons for doing that: it helps create jobs for adults with families to feed. It helps reduce the number of occupational injuries. It also kind of almost prepares people for trade school.
But as education, it's crap.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-27 07:13 pm (UTC)(I'd add a grin, but this is too depressing of a situation to grin about.)
Hilarious
Date: 2010-09-29 05:25 am (UTC)And of course, nothing else really matters. It doesn't matter how good or bad the curriculum is, if the teacher sucks. And most teachers in the US suck.
Only morons think that the morons on the Texas State Board of Education are the problem. The National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers are the problem.
And who gives them the power? Who do THEY give power to, in return?
Yeah, them. You know who they are.
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Re: Hilarious
Date: 2010-09-29 05:37 am (UTC)I pride myself on continuously questioning my assumptions, and in this case, I didn't do that well enough.
My mistaken assumption in this case was that the dominance of education by the State was some kind of metaphysical given. It isn't, of course.
So I'd like to revise my comments by pointing out that the even more important problem is that most parents don't accept or fulfill their responsibility to manage the education of their own children.
If more parents did the right thing, it wouldn't really matter that teachers suck.
But of course, most parents have been told that the State is responsible for raising their children, and once the society has been through a couple of generations of this kind of brainwashing, it's pretty much too late.
And we all know who's behind this whole Nanny State thing-- teachers and the evil politicians who support them.
So I'm really back to the same problem, but I think I got there more honestly this time.
. png
Re: Hilarious
Date: 2010-09-29 10:51 pm (UTC)Re: Hilarious
Date: 2010-09-30 04:04 am (UTC)Do you think the Texas State Board of Education is the biggest problem facing US education?
Or are you confessing that you're ON the Texas State Board of Education?
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