Tag Archives: education

The genetic downside of female higher education

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Alphagameplan compares the Iranian and the American approach to female higher education and concludes that the Iranian approach is more sustainable:

“The USA, and most of the West, has taken the approach that encouraging female participation in advanced education will strengthen their economies. Events have thus far failed to confirm those assumptions, and indeed, are increasingly calling them into question. That may be one reason Iran feels emboldened to take the opposite approach:

Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. ‘The Oil Industry University, which has several campuses across the country, says it will no longer accept female students at all, citing a lack of employer demand. Isfahan University provided a similar rationale for excluding women from its mining engineering degree, claiming 98% of female graduates ended up jobless.’ The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences. Senior clerics in Iran’s theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women.”
According to the mainstream Western assumption, this should weaken Iran’s economy and impoverish its society. So, barring a war that will render any potential comparisons irrelevant, this move by Iran promises to make for an unusually informative societal experiment in comparison with the control group of the USA. If Iran sees non-immigrant-driven population growth along with greater societal wealth and scientific advancement, it will justify the doubts of those who questioned the idea that encouraging women to pursue science degrees instead of husbands and careers instead of children would prove beneficial to society at large.

Of course, the Iranian action presents a potentially effective means of solving the hypergamy problem presently beginning to affect college-educated women in the West. Only one-third of women in college today can reasonably expect to marry a man who is as well-educated as they are. History and present marital trends indicate that most of the remaining two-thirds will not marry rather than marry down. So, by refusing to permit women to pursue higher education, Iran is ensuring that the genes of two-thirds of its most genetically gifted women will survive in its gene pool.

No doubt the Iranian approach will sound abhorrent to many men and women alike. But consider it from a macro perspective. The USA is in well along the process of removing most of its prime female genetics from its gene pool as surely as if it took those women out and shot them before they reached breeding age. Which society’s future would you bet on, the one that is systematically eliminating the genes of its best and brightest women or the one that is intent upon retaining them?”

A Columnist Asks What’s Wrong With India

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Chetan Bhagat at The Times of India:

“Countless articles, books, thesis, papers and research reports have tried to answer the question, ‘what is wrong with India ?’ Global experts are startled that a country of massive potential has one of the largest populations of poor people in the world. Isn’t it baffling that despite almost everyone agreeing that things should change, they don’t? Intellectuals give intelligent suggestions – from investing in infrastructure to improving the judicial system. Yet, nothing moves. Issues dating back thirty years ago, continue to plague India today. The young are often perplexed. They ask will things ever change? How? Whose fault is it that they haven’t?

Today, i will attempt to answer these tricky questions, although from a different perspective . I will not put the blame on everyone’s favorite punching bag– inept politicians. That is too easy an argument and not entirely correct. After all, we elect the politicians. So, for every MP out there, there are a few lakh people who wanted him or her there. I won’t give ‘policy’ solutions either – make power plants, improve the roads, open up the economy . It isn’t the lack of such ideas that is stalling progress. No, blocking progress is part of the unique psyche of Indians. There are three traits of our psyche, in particular, that are not good for us and our country. Each comes from three distinct sources – our school, our environment and our home.

The first trait is servility. At school, our education system hammers out our individual voices and kills our natural creativity, turning us into servile, coursematerial slaves. Indian kids are not encouraged to raise their voices in class, particularly when they disagree with the teacher. And of course, no subject teaches us imagination, creativity or innovation. Course materials are designed for no-debate kind of teaching. For example, we ask: how many states are there in India ? 28. Correct. Next question -how is a country divided into states? What criteria should be used? Since these are never discussed , children never develop their own viewpoint or the faculty to think.

The second trait is our numbness to injustice. It comes from our environment. We see corruption from our childhood. Almost all of us have been asked to lie about our age to the train TC, claiming to be less than 5 years old to get a free ride. It creates a value system in the child’s brain that ‘anything goes’, so long as you can get away with it. A bit of lying here, a bit of cheating there is seen as acceptable. Hence, we all grow up slightly numb to corruption. Not even one high profile person in India is behind bars for corruption right now. This could be because, to a certain extent, we don’t really care.

The third trait is divisiveness. This often comes from our home, particularly our family and relatives, where we learn about the differences amongst people. Our religion, culture and language are revered and celebrated in our families. Other people are different – and often implied to be not as good as us. We’ve all known an aunt or uncle who, though is a good person, holds rigid bias against Muslims, Dalits or people from different communities. Even today, most of India votes on one criterion – caste. Dalits vote for Dalits, Thakurs for Thakurs and Yadavs for Yadavs. In such a scenario, why would a politician do any real work? When we choose a mobile network, do we check if Airtel and Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then, why do we vote for somebody simply because he has the same caste as ours?

We need mass self-psychotherapy for the three traits listed above. When we talk of change, you and I alone can’t replace a politician, or order a road to be built. However, we can change one thing – our mindset. And collectively, this alone has the power to make the biggest difference. We have to unlearn whatever is holding us back, and definitely break the cycle so we don’t pass on these traits to the next generation. Our children should think creatively, have opinions and speak up in class. They should learn what is wrong is wrong – no matter how big or small. And they shouldn’t hate other people on the basis of their background. Let us also resolve to start working on our own minds, right now. A change in mindset changes the way people vote, which in turn changes politicians.

And change does happen. In the 80s, we had movies like “Gunda” and “Khoon Pi Jaaonga”. Today, our movies have better content .They have changed. How? It is because our expectations from films have changed. Hence, the filmmakers had to change.

If we resolve today that we will vote on the basis of performance alone, we will encourage the voices against injustice and we will place an honest but less wealthy person on a higher pedestal than a corrupt but rich person. By doing so, we would contribute to India’s progress. If everyone who read this newspaper did this, it would be enough to change voting patterns in the next election. And then, maybe, we will start moving towards a better India. Are you on board? “

My Comment

This is an interesting and, within its limits, accurate piece about the character traits that contribute to the rampant socio-economic problems India faces. Those problems are in sharp focus right now, thanks to the ongoing bungling involved in the hosting of the Commonwealth Games at Delhi.

To many libertarians, these sorts of  generalizations are specious, collectivist, and possibly racist.

I disagree.

Granted, cultural generalizations are just that and shouldn’t be misapplied, it’s still possible for an acute observer to identify cultural problems with a degree of objectivity.

Chetan Bhagat manages this quite succinctly.

But if Bhagat had wanted to be even more succinct, he could have summarized his entire thesis in one word: dharma.

Dharma is often incorrectly defined as “duty,” in the Kantian sense.

While it can encompass that too, it’s more accurate to define it as “the way things should be” (social order)…or “the way we’re wired” (nature).

Dharma is perhaps a unique composite of duty, social and natural order, and individual destiny.

In its essence, then, it is a concept of the highest refinement and wisdom.

But even supernal ideas lose their value as civilizations lose touch with their sources.

Dharma, for many Indians, has ended up being “the way things are,” or, alternatively,  “que sera sera.”

It ends up inducing passivity. Which leads to the first two flaws identified in the article –  servility and apathy toward injustice.

That passivity also reinforces people in their instinctive tendency to prefer kith and kin over strangers.

If I had to pick just one character flaw that holds up India’s development, this would be it – dharma,, in its negative mode,  as slavish passivity.

However, the odd thing is that if I had to pick one thing that constituted a special strength in the Indian character, it would also be dharma.

But dharma in its positive mode – noble acceptance.

Doing Well By Doing Good: Corporate Brand Teaching

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In the old days, people who did things for love of their community, for idealism, or for a cause they believed in, were in it just for that. They deserved the respect they got. Today, volunteer work has been festooned with all kinds of goodies, and, not unnaturally, it’s drawing people more interested in the goodies than the good. And not unexpectedly, the king of “doing well by doing good” –  Goldman Sachs – is in the thick of it. Continue reading →

Frank Lloyd Wright: Education Today Provides Conditioning…

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This is a brief excerpt from a live interview with legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright (June 18, 1957), when he was ninety. The audio isn’t very clear, so I’ve provided a transcript. The words are pungent and speak succinctly to the task of weaning people from dependence on the state:

“Education has been unrealistic.
Education has not seen the nature of the thing we needed as a people.
Education has not provided enlightenment. It’s provided conditioning
By way of books, by way of what has been, by way of the past,
By the habituation of the human species to date.
And it hasn’t taken the views of the men who are capable of looking beyond
and seeing what the nature of the thing was.
What is the nature of this thing we’re in.
Now that’s the grace(?) of seeing in, not seeing at.
And all education today is a seeing at.”

John Gatto On State-Controlled Consciousness

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Toward the end of this video, John Taylor Gatto, the iconoclastic critic of compulsory education and state schools and ardent advocate of “unschooling,” has an especially memorable passage.
He points out that while the state can violently coerce a few people at a time (through arrest and shooting), there’s no way (outside war or genocide, I presume) to coerce large masses of people over time, except through controlling their minds.

Or more accurately, through creating the habits and attitudes that make them obedient to puppet strings in their own minds.

Compulsory schooling by the state, he argues, is a way to colonize the minds of children to make them their own police-force, eager to report other deviants.

[Preparing them to become tax snitches, as I blogged earlier, or political informants, or supporters of  biometric ID legislation].

In “Dumbing Us Down”, Gatto argues that state schooling causes the following in a child’s mind:

1) Confusion, with its jumbled ensemble of tests, memorized and then forgotten

2) Dependence on class position

3) Indifference/apathy

4) Emotional dependency

5) Intellectual dependency

6) Provisional self-esteem that needs the assurance of experts to maintain

7) Habituation to constant surveillance and the denial of privacy

Cow College Versus Ivy League

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I’ve been thinking about the psychological roots of the anger between the two parties.
It’s not simply political, that’s clear. It’s ethnic, demographic, geographical and many other things that have been explored by a lot of people.

One element that hasn’t attracted that much attention though is one that’s always struck me quite strongly – the anger directed toward people with Ivy League or elite school educations by those who attended humbler schools. The “cows and the ivies” is where some of the class-warfare of today is played out.

We hear a lot about how the poor and middle-class envy the rich, but I’m not thoroughly convinced by the thesis. Most of the people I’ve talked to seem to admire the rich in the most uncritical sort of way. They ape their life styles as best they can. And they ascribe to rich people all sorts of virtues they think they lack themselves, when in point of fact, great wealth (I’m talking about tens of millions and more) is usually the result of many other things besides hard work and skill. It also takes luck, contacts, and some money to start with. It takes a certain kind of personality – a not very admirable one, often. Everyone knows Balzac’s line about there being no great fortune without a crime behind it..

The truth is money alone doesn’t confer enough status to provoke envy. Who envies a rich garbage man? No one.

And no one envies bankers these days, no matter that they keep making money. They’ve lost their status. It’s status that provokes envy.

And today, the most obvious and common insignia of status is graduating from an elite school. The left side of the political spectrum is associated, rightly or wrongly, with the high status universities – with Ivies like Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and Wellesley – as well as with all the other universities, which, though not Ivy, are considered elite, such as, Brown, Columbia, Duke, Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, or Wellesley. Cornell.

On the elite list are also some public universities, like Berkeley, and a couple of more conservative schools, like Chicago and Dartmouth.

But, in general, the elite schools are associated with liberal-left politics and with internationalism. The cow-colleges (and we’re fond of cows ourselves) have become the terrain of a kind of chip-on-the-shoulder nationalism and conservatism (of course, I’m simplifying this terribly).

This leads to a lot of hilarious posturing by the cow crowd – about effete elites (read Boston Brahmins, Jews), decadence (not sure what that’s supposed to mean – perhaps feminists and homosexuals?), affirmative action (read, Hispanics and Blacks) etc. etc. – although by and large these schools are as – or more – likely to have middle-class students than the state universities. And though affirmative action – if one were to include women and legacy students – surely benefited whites far more than it ever did non-whites.

I recently came across an example of this envy in a bit of resume-massaging. Someone who studied at a locally respectable state university (Georgia State), was a very mediocre student (C’s and low B’s), and then paid for a year’s study at Oxford – or was it at Heidelberg? (something anyone with money can do), inverted the order of their studies on their resume thus:

“Studied politics at Oxford and at Georgia State…”

This mean little ruse gives the false impression that the student was admitted competitively to the rigorously selective undergraduate program at Oxford – an academic achievement of a much higher caliber than mere attendance.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the Georgia State student might not be smart or might not do very well in life. He might. But the deception betrays a certain envy – the same envy that, unfortunately, I detect in some of the populist hatred of liberal “elites.”

I say that objectively, since I’ve no great love for those elites myself. But I have even less love for the anti-intellectualism of some parts of the right. For its open contempt for scholarship, intellectual striving, cosmopolitan sympathies, and international standards – things that to me are the essence of decent liberalism.

That’s the kind of liberalism with which I have no quarrel, no matter if its politics differs from mine. No matter if it embraces the state more than I do. I am any day closer to that liberalism than to the yahoo know-nothing right.

And, as always, the ever insightful – if often spiteful – Anne Coulter manages to find an example of the envy I’m talking about not in a conservative, but in the kind of liberal I don’t like – Keith Olberman.

Quote:

“Finally, you can stop pretending that you went to the hard-to-get-into Cornell.
Now you won’t have to quickly change the subject whenever people idly remark that they didn’t know it was possible to major in “communications” at an Ivy League school. No longer will you have to aggressively bring up Cornell when it has nothing to do with the conversation. Relax, Keith. Now you can let people like you for you.”

That’s on Olbermann’s constant derision of cow-college graduates and his name-dropping about the “Ivy” he went to, when he actually studied “communications” at the agricultural school affiliated to Cornell.

Update: Correction. Cornell contradicts Anne Coulter’s description of Olbermann’s alma mater.

Here is a latter written to someone who asked about the criticism:

Dear Tammie,

Many people have contacted us about the false and negative statements about Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences being made by Ann Coulter in the media recently.

Cornell as a whole–and all of its colleges–are considered “Ivy League.” The term “Ivy League” was initially used by sportswriters, and became the official name in 1954 of the NCAA Division I athletic conference to which Cornell belongs. The “Ancient Eight” are Cornell, Princeton, Brown, Yale, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, and Harvard. Additionally, CALS admits 1 out of every 5 applicants, as does the College of Arts & Sciences.

Please feel free to watch Mr. Olbermann’s response on his Countdown show at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/29539156#29539156

Thank you for your concern about the College.

Sincerely,

Ellen Leventry
Web Communications Specialist
College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Cornell University

Apologies. Ms. Coulter was apparently off-base on that. Hmm. Why am I not surprised? But her larger point stands, I believe.

Karen de Coster on Matt Yglesias on Public School Funding…

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Hmm..some flying fur:

Matt Yglesias has a blog post called “School for Rich Kids Isn’t Charity” to which Karen de Coster administers several unkindest cuts.

The gist of Yglesias’ argument is that private school tuition money should be taxed because it’s money that really ought to be going to public schools, if those varmint parents only knew their duty to the state.

Well, first, as Ms. de Coster points out, those private school parents (and everyone else) are already paying for public schools through property taxes. So what Yglesias is asking for is a punitive second tax, for the sin of opting out (with your own money) of the free goodies the state wants you to have to make you yet another dependent. A dependent who will then be a reliable vote for expansion of the state.

Ms. de Coster is a CPA who’s probably (?) never taught in a school, private or public. I have.
[Note: this seems to have come off as a brush-off. It’s not meant to be. Just explaining why I think I have something to add, from anecdotal experience, to a theoretical debate].

So let me toss my two cents in.

From my experience (and it’s not extensive), public schools have problems but they’re not caused by lack of money primarily For my part, I made better money teaching in a public school for troubled inner-city children than I ever did teaching in private schools. There was grant money coming to the school. Whether it was usefully spent or not I don’t know. Everyone worked, but the students came from such difficult backgrounds (routine gun fights in their neighborhood, missing parents, pervasive drug addiction, an AIDS patient in one case, malnourishment, street life with its attractions and traps, it was an uphill and probably futile task. The school folded up in three months when the funds suddenly vanished.

Private school wasn’t always much richer but it was different. One of my first jobs teaching in the US was teaching music at a private boy’s school. It was supposedly part-time but I got into the classroom at 6:30 and left only at 3:00, with my time entirely taken up by classes and prep. I was paid $4000 a semester for that. (Fortunately it was only one of three jobs I held at the time). It was probably the hardest work I ever did. There were between 20-35 rather rambunctious boys between the ages of five and 14 who didn’t take kindly to choral instruction, music theory, or my accent. One asked me with disdain why I didn’t look like Vanna White, his heroine (he was nine). Another was so disruptive I had him stand in the corner, where he created more disruption by announcing sotto voce that the art teacher was being undressed by the geography teacher, and he could see it through a hole in the wall. (There was no hole in the wall. Like Saki’s heroine, he was a specialist in romance at short notice).

He was all of five, had a tow head and a face like a cherub, but it didn’t stop him from calling everyone a “d*** face” whenever he had a chance. I finally had to talk to his mother, who received my complaints frostily. Angel-face had already told her that naughty teacher has used the word “wimp” to his preciousness (I’d jokingly told him not to be a wimp but to come up and join the rest of the band)…. which had left him too shaken, poor darling, to continue.

As for “d*** face,” she was sure he would never use such language, she said, in a tone that let me know she was sure I would…..

What I’m saying is that private school can be as tough and underpaid as any public school. And there can be just as uncooperative parents and difficult children.

Money isn’t the main problem with public schools. The problem in the inner cities is the environment in which the school and the children are forced to function; the administrators who have no conception of what’s needed; and a culture that doesn’t support learning.

My high school in India was half-built and lacked running water in one of the labs. I remember sitting on sand in one class. We had no xerox machines, no computers, no type-writers or calculators in the class. There was a broken-down piano (an enormous luxury in India), old books sent to us from America for the library. We loved them for the glossy pictures, lively text and smooth pages. Our own Indian text-books were printed smudgily on cheap paper, rarely had pictures, and tended to be litanies of facts. It was in those old discarded text books that I first read about Robert Fulton and the steam ship and the duel between Burr and Hamilton. It didn’t make a difference that I read it leaning against an old pile of bricks, doodling in the sand, while a nineteen-year old, in a green sari and a huge rose in her bun, sang out the endless details of the Tree-tee of Ver-sigh-liz, while the boys tried to catch her eye.

It didn’t make a difference to our education because there was a culture of learning. The students came from households that were often struggling to pay the bills, for whom uniforms and books and lunch boxes on small middle-class Indian salaries was an enormous sacrifice. But those households placed an extremely high value on learning and accomplishment. They were largely professional or academic families. If a teacher scolded or punished us, our parents took the teacher’s side (for the most part). We didn’t have television to distract us. We had structured time to study at home. We had standards demanded from us. We had people who had a firm grasp, if not of their subject, of the role they had to play in the class room.

Matt Yglesias often has interesting things to say. But on this one, Ms. de Coster is right. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Money isn’t the central problem in public schools. I doubt that it’s even really a major problem.