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As I’ve mentioned before, we’re in the weird situation of having pretty much bet the country on a former McKinsey consultant named David Coleman’s vision of education. First, Coleman sold his Common Core K-12 idea to Bill Gates, who has pretty much bought off most potential prestigious dissidents in the field of education. Then the College Board hired Coleman to rewrite the SAT college admission test.
From the NYT:
Grading the Common Core: No Teaching Experience Required
By MOTOKO RICH JUNE 22, 2015SAN ANTONIO — The new academic standards known as the Common Core emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization. So the standardized tests given in most states this year required fewer multiple choice questions and far more writing on topics like this one posed to elementary school students: Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.
But the results are not necessarily judged by teachers.
On Friday, in an unobtrusive office park northeast of downtown here, about 100 temporary employees of the testing giant Pearson worked in diligent silence scoring thousands of short essays written by third- and fifth-grade students from across the country.
There was a onetime wedding planner, a retired medical technologist and a former Pearson saleswoman with a master’s degree in marital counseling. To get the job, like other scorers nationwide, they needed a four-year college degree with relevant coursework, but no teaching experience. They earned $12 to $14 an hour, with the possibility of small bonuses if they hit daily quality and volume targets.
Officials from Pearson and Parcc, a nonprofit consortium that has coordinated development of new Common Core tests, say strict training and scoring protocols are designed to ensure consistency, no matter who is marking the tests. …
“You’re asking people still, even with the best of rubrics and evidence and training, to make judgments about complex forms of cognition,” Mr. Pellegrino said. “The more we go towards the kinds of interesting thinking and problems and situations that tend to be more about open-ended answers, the harder it is to get objective agreement in scoring.”
The article doesn’t mention that at his next job, Coleman dumped the essay-based Writing section from the SAT and is going back to the old 1600 maximum. Why? Because the essay hadn’t proven itself useful. The grading was too hit or miss (don’t make a typo in your first sentence!), the need to have readers slowed down the scoring process (in contrast, when you take the multiple choice-0nly private high school admissions test on Saturday you get your score in the mail the next Friday), the essay discriminated against kids with bad handwriting or poor typing skills, judging by scores by ethnicity the essay section on the SAT seemed to be gamed by Tiger Mothers even more than the other two sections, and so forth.
This isn’t to say that essays on standardized tests are always a terrible idea, just that they come with obvious tradeoffs. For example, the Advanced Placement tests put a sizable emphasis on having working high school teachers grade the essays over their summer vacations, but that means nobody gets their grades back until mid-summer.
In everything I’ve read about Coleman, I’ve never seen anybody claim he knows much about testing. You don’t have to be a professional psychometrician to have common sense about testing, and Coleman certainly has the raw brainpower to eventually come to grasp the ins and outs. But the education racket has a long history of reformers getting into it on the assumption that everybody who came before them must have been an idiot, then slowly reinventing the wheel before they get depressed and bored.
Putting this much untested power into the hands of one obscure individual with no track record sounds like a bad idea. On the other hand, in an era when honest discussion of the realities of American education is largely forbidden because it’s all about various Gaps, turning control over to a single guy who strikes Bill Gates as smart might be about as good as we can do.
Coleman and Gates clearly want to make education in the United States less girlish, although they can’t come out and say that.
Perhaps inevitably, Coleman has set about to transform American education into a system for churning out people who would have understood and liked the Michael Kinsley-era Slate Magazine. The reading selections on Coleman’s sample PSAT read like passages from Slate in 1999, which isn’t surprising since Gates hired Kinsley to found Slate, and Coleman’s high school debate partner, Hanna Rosin, is married to David Plotz, one of Kinsley’s successors as editor in chief of Slate. Granted, as one of Slate’s biggest names from the 1990s told me last week, it’s gotten awful twee lately, but back in the days when Gates owned it, it tried to be characterized by clever masculine logic.
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OT: the latest from Ta Nehisi Coates:
Everyone repeat after me: that’s what separate countries are for.
That actually sounds like what white people want, and what black people most definitely do not want.
So they are making $1 to $3 dollars less than the guy working the drive-through window at a McDonalds in LA, and they have a monetary incentive to get through each essay as fast as possible, I don’t see how this could go wrong.
That is not critical, it is not complex, and it doesn’t solve a problem. Maybe if we actually required “rote learning” of the English language, we could produce a generation of students who could think critically.
“Critical thinking” is the new “99% fat-free.”
IMHO, standards should be based on three levels.
1. What should a high percentage of the population know/be able to do without any aid? Let's call that the 75-80% level of success. For example, a person should be able to write and read at an 9th grade level and do basic math with some algebra. In other word, vocational abilities.
2. What should people who are going to be doing more cognitive type work? Probably looking at the top 20%. College level abilities.
3. High achievers in the top 5%. We just don't want to get in the way of these people but encourage them to be productive and conscientious citizens.
Basically it's back to tracking and an elite that isn't determined to discard everyone below the top tier.
Rote learning and memorization are the foundations of 'critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills.' If one has no knowledge how can he hope to make an informed or relevant decision. As it was said, 'no need to reinvent the wheel' by starting from scratch every time a decision has to be made.
In addition to EIC Julia Turner, wikipedia lists the “key executives” in editorial as
Jill Hunter Pellettieri (Managing Editor)
Rachael Larimore (Managing Editor)
Hanna Rosin (Founding Editor)
Allison Benedikt (Managing Editor)
So basically the five top editing spots are held by women. No wonder I stopped reading Slate!
Now when they talk about “bad schools” they might be right.
What does experience teaching children have to do with evaluating if the children’s writing is any good?
Just think of what more random grades could do for all kinds of gaps!
“The new academic standards known as the Common Core emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization. ”
This can’t possibly be true.
You can’t teach critical thinking and complex problem-solving, at least to the point where every student will understand it.
“Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.”
Every elementary school teacher in the inner city just cried out with rage thinking about how impossible this will be for the majority of their students. But maybe that is the point, to be built to fail. You can’t keep making money from new education projects if one actually works.
"Critical thinking" is the new "99% fat-free."Replies: @Dirk Dagger, @Terrahawk, @sean c, @Hubbub
Small world: I had some fat-free AND SUGAR-FREE pretzels at lunch, how do they fit all that freedom in such a little bag?
I wish they would add a passage by Lewis Grizzard like the now extinct Georgia High School Graduation Test did.
"Critical thinking" is the new "99% fat-free."Replies: @Dirk Dagger, @Terrahawk, @sean c, @Hubbub
For most people, rote learning is how they learn. Even a lot of what passes for “critical thinking” is actually rote learning/pattern recognition. The problem with most standards is that the people who come up with them are usually experts in their field. It results in too many requirements. The math guys want everyone to learn levels of math that most people will never need. The history guys throw in the kitchen sink. Science folks suddenly think that if you don’t understand biology at close to their level you are an idiot. Coleman thinks everyone should be towards the top end of the bell curve.
IMHO, standards should be based on three levels.
1. What should a high percentage of the population know/be able to do without any aid? Let’s call that the 75-80% level of success. For example, a person should be able to write and read at an 9th grade level and do basic math with some algebra. In other word, vocational abilities.
2. What should people who are going to be doing more cognitive type work? Probably looking at the top 20%. College level abilities.
3. High achievers in the top 5%. We just don’t want to get in the way of these people but encourage them to be productive and conscientious citizens.
Basically it’s back to tracking and an elite that isn’t determined to discard everyone below the top tier.
It’s pretty horrifying as well in the college admissions office. For example, the senior admissions officers at one of America’s most elite liberals arts colleges included former animal-control officers, former food-stamp caseworkers, and a guy who ran a camera shop. That’s partly because the pay was below that of public school teachers. One quite candid former Ivy admissions officer said that none of the admissions officers she knew could have gotten into the schools for which they were selecting students.
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ron Unz, @Charles Erwin Wilson, @rod1963
Reminds me of all those poorly paid recently graduated English majors who work at publishing houses, deciding whose manuscripts are worthy of being published.
Opportunity for an up and comer institution?
Coleman sold his Common Core K-12 idea to Bill Gates, who has pretty much bought off most potential prestigious dissidents in the field of education.
What does Gates see as the goal of American education? Perhaps turning out people who can program better than Indians while asking for less money.
Put differently, we should seek not a world where the black race and the white race live in harmony, but a world in which the terms black and white have no real political meaning.
That actually sounds like what white people want, and what black people most definitely do not want.
The average admissions officer is a twenty-something woman with a degree in something soft and a long-term boyfriend that does something that makes actual money. Any man you find in admissions is there to make rent until he can find something else.
“It’s pretty horrifying as well in the college admissions office. For example, the senior admissions officers at one of America’s most elite liberals arts colleges included former animal-control officers, former food-stamp caseworkers, and a guy who ran a camera shop. That’s partly because the pay was below that of public school teachers. One quite candid former Ivy admissions officer said that none of the admissions officers she knew could have gotten into the schools for which they were selecting students.”
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.
Take a bunch of very non-elite people who are poorly paid. Put them in charge of allocating an *extremely* valuable and scarce resource based on arbitrary and nebulous criteria. Does that suggest anything to you?
One eye-opening thing I discovered in reading the 4-5 first-hand accounts of the elite admissions process was that admissions officers were constantly being offered bribes---cash, cars, sometimes even houses. Occasionally when they stubbornly argued for a particularly low quality applicant, the other admissions officers would only half-jokingly ask "How much are they paying you?"
I'd guess that the average elite admissions officer allocates slots for which people would pay something around $100M per year and gets paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds. Does this make sense?Replies: @Clyde, @Nico
If you care about our nation, and had thought about what this means your laughter would have been brought up short.
Trust me, we all have an enormous stake in this game. We all pay the price for elite stupidity. And right now stupidity seems to be the coin of the realm.
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ron Unz, @Charles Erwin Wilson, @rod1963
Richard Armour, professor of English at Pomona and wit, noted that the Admissions Department is in charge of admitting the college’s mistakes.
One quite candid former Ivy admissions officer said that none of the admissions officers she knew could have gotten into the schools for which they were selecting students.
Reminds me of all those poorly paid recently graduated English majors who work at publishing houses, deciding whose manuscripts are worthy of being published.
"Critical thinking" is the new "99% fat-free."Replies: @Dirk Dagger, @Terrahawk, @sean c, @Hubbub
Most of what goes for critical thinking in schools is just uninformed opinion.
Rote learning is learning.
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ron Unz, @Charles Erwin Wilson, @rod1963
Sure, but there are also obvious “structural” problems.
Take a bunch of very non-elite people who are poorly paid. Put them in charge of allocating an *extremely* valuable and scarce resource based on arbitrary and nebulous criteria. Does that suggest anything to you?
One eye-opening thing I discovered in reading the 4-5 first-hand accounts of the elite admissions process was that admissions officers were constantly being offered bribes—cash, cars, sometimes even houses. Occasionally when they stubbornly argued for a particularly low quality applicant, the other admissions officers would only half-jokingly ask “How much are they paying you?”
I’d guess that the average elite admissions officer allocates slots for which people would pay something around $100M per year and gets paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds. Does this make sense?
This is getting surreal. Every generation of reformers “puts less stock in rote learning.” In Orwell’s 1984, they just say they’ve always been at war with East Asia. In the Edu Reform Biz, they’ve actually been at war with East Asia for something like a century now, to no apparent benefit. At this point even Sisyphus might look at our educational establishment and say, “There but for the grace of gods go I…”
You can’t teach critical thinking. You can show smart students some examples of what it looks like, try to engage their attention, and hope for the best. You can, however, drill 95 IQ students in, say, the dates of important historical events. They might remember them for the rest of their lives, which would be a powerful upgrade to their bullshit detectors.
Are education reformers all bachelors and spinsters without much experience with young children? They love memorizing facts. They don’t like learning abstract “rubrics.” They don’t like thinking about thinking.
I agree with you that there’s been too little vetting, but “betting the country” is overstating it; all conceivable standardized tests will produce similar rank-orderings of the kids.
‘Today’s organization . . . is . . . principally a knowledge organization. It exists to make productive hundreds, sometimes thousands, of specialized kinds of knowledge . . . the bulk of workers are hired not to do manual work but knowledge work.’ [Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity]
Logic would suggest a growing and high profit press doing knowledge work. Instead we have a press in decline and an educational system going bankrupt with a trillion in student loan defaults. It’s murder out there.
I don’t remember what Slate was like back in the day, not because I wasn’t around then but just because it didn’t impress me enough to form any memories. But Slate today is definitely oriented toward 20 something unmarried liberal women. They hit all the college “rape” stories from a feminist angle and the Jackie story probably ended up in RS and not in their magazine just by luck (or because RS pays better).
Anyone remember when Salon used to have a regular column by Camille Paglia? LOL. That was before the SJW clickbaiters and tweet-slingers turned the internet into one big gray-gooey pile of “problematic.”
“Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.”
This is by far the worst thing I have read about the Common Core.
I don’t know who is worse: the people who came up with it or the people who approved it.
If there is a point to asking all elementary school kids to do work 4-6 grades ahead of their grade level, I do not know what it would be.
$12-$14 as a fulltime job wage for college educated temps who had taken education courses is shamefully low.
Do the elites who pushed for Common Core realize that if all public school kids really were adults in small bodies — as they seem to believe — they’d be out on the rears in no time? Why would kids that smart put up with an elite that dumb once they grew up?
One way to kill a love of learning and literacy is to make it painful and humiliating for children.
This is what Common Core is about. It will destroy children's love for learning and literacy due to the way it's designed. It's designed to induce failure, uncertainty, confusion and learned helplessness among children.
I shudder to think how it affect their emotional development when you're continually f**ked with by the teaching materials for 12 years.
But it's for a good cause.
Look society doesn't need skilled workers anymore. I've read some of the old education books by Conant and others, our public education system was originally designed to produce skilled workers for the factories and offices(but not leaders or decision makers, that's for the elites). All that stuff is moved to Asia or automated out of existence. Most service jobs are now so simplified a campesino could learn to perform them in a short period of time. Jobs that demand a college level education are also becoming rare. Most graduates work at jobs that do not require a college level education.
Forecasts show perhaps another 20-30% of jobs in the near future being automated out of existence.
And lets be blunt, if you are part of the elite, you sure as hell don't want this mass of people being literate and loves to read and think. They might start thinking about their sorry lot in life and how the elites raped them and might start a revolution and eat the elites. So what better way to nip it in the bud by stunting the intellectual and emotional development of children.
It's one scenario. Considering how the elites view us, it would not surprise me.Replies: @Lurker
Correction — I left out a word. My second paragraph should have read:
“This ARTICLE is by far the worst thing I have read about the Common Core.”
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ron Unz, @Charles Erwin Wilson, @rod1963
Do you laugh because you think this does not affect you? It does.
If you care about our nation, and had thought about what this means your laughter would have been brought up short.
Trust me, we all have an enormous stake in this game. We all pay the price for elite stupidity. And right now stupidity seems to be the coin of the realm.
To get the job, like other scorers nationwide, they needed a four-year college degree…They earned $12 to $14 an hour”
What better incentive is there to spend $50-200k and 4 years of your life
partying and drinkingstudying than the potential for a $12/hour job?You can't teach critical thinking. You can show smart students some examples of what it looks like, try to engage their attention, and hope for the best. You can, however, drill 95 IQ students in, say, the dates of important historical events. They might remember them for the rest of their lives, which would be a powerful upgrade to their bullshit detectors.
Are education reformers all bachelors and spinsters without much experience with young children? They love memorizing facts. They don't like learning abstract "rubrics." They don't like thinking about thinking.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @Jonathan Silber
This comment deserved the golden border.
I work in higher ed myself, and it’s hard to communicate the horror with which the word ‘rote’ is typically regarded. It’s used as an epithet.
In fact, there’s a whole litany of tropes one hears in education theory in reaction to even mild suggestion that students might, you know, be asked to remember some stuff. Rote learning/memorization is treated as taboo, triggering frantic signalling of aversion and hygiene-maintenance. Traditional teaching and learning are excoriated in coarse alimentary metaphors in which lecturers ‘spew’ pointless facts at students who are expected to ‘digest’ and ‘regurgitate’ them on exams.
I’ve been in the higher ed business for 25 years, and see no flagging in the preaching of this gospel. The even sadder truth is that this supposed ‘revolution’ in learning that will leave behind stale traditional methods and result in all children engaging in ‘critical thinking’ has been going on for over a century, with the same old shibboleths hauled out for ritual condemnation, and the same (slightly repackaged) miracle methodological tonics peddled to each new class of ed students.
If it means mindless drilling of certain data and facts, it is dull, dull, and dull. And useless.
For example, it makes no sense to learn a foreign language just by memorizing a lot of words. You're sure to forget them besides.
The only way to learn language is by learning the grammar, its inner logic, its forms, and its usage. Of course, you have to memorize words as you go along, but the memorization has to follow the usage and practice. If you memorize things organically through practice, you won't forget them.
Same with math. Unless you know how the system works, memorization of whole bunch of questions and answers won't do any good.
So, East Asian nations that over-emphasize rote are more into drilling mental discipline and rigidity than fostering thought.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, you have 'progressive' types in the West who seem to have little use for practice, study sessions, and memorization of facts.
This is stupid since how can anyone take a test unless he or she remembered stuff?Replies: @Sparkling Wiggle
I think it’s reasonable to say that I engage in more critical thinking than most people, and I’ve always found that it’s directly related to my ability to remember more detailed facts than most people.
“In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life.
But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion — the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou shalt.” On every scale of this scaly beast, a “thou shalt” is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning’s headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the “thou shalts,” the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.
And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its “thou shalts” overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.
For the camel, the “thou shalt” is a must, a civilizing force. It converts the human animal into a civilized human being. But the period of youth is the period of self-discovery and transformation into a lion. The rules are now to be used at will for life, not submitted to as compelling “thou shalts.” It comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion-deed. You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist.”
Exactly. ‘Critical thinking’ as it exists in education theory is either a phantom (i.e. its evocation is pure hot air that’s only useful for inflating some trial balloon) — or it’s the no-think application of an ideological hammer to whatever issue is dumped upon the anvil.
Real critical thinking requires grist for the mill. It’s one reason I still find E D Hirsch’s cultural literacy approach attractive. Yes, it’s not perfect, but at least it acknowledges that students’ reading and perhaps real critical thinking will benefit, somewhere down the road if not immediately, if they can remember some useful stuff about the world.
Speak, memory . . . .
If you're the one teacher who doesn't stamp an A on anything even vaguely coherent then you're the bad guy - actively harming some kid's credential for performing poorly in a class he probably doesn't give an iota of a shit about. Professors usually perpetuate the system because they're good people who don't want to disproportionately penalize students taking classes they have to take (or were told they have to take). At the same time, they're tacitly admitting that the whole thing (the entire edifice of American higher education) is a sham rigged to harvest tuition and churn out diplomas.Replies: @IBC
Here in China, rote learning is big, very big, even on university level. Doesn't mean that the students actually learn much. I have no idea how the Shanghai students can do so good in PISA. From my experience, when they start university they don't know much about anything (at least the language students). Even about Chinese history they only know the usual propaganda crap (like "5000 years of history"), but few real facts. Mathematics? Almost non-existent. After 7 to 10 years of learning English (basic through high school) their English level is mostly still very basic. Don't know what they learn, but after Gaokao there is virtually nothing left.
Rote learning may be good for basic knowledge, but students have to go beyond that. & yes, you can teach "critical thinking", although the level to which a student is able to put that into practice is also very much dependent on the individual.
Hehe, but I see poetic justice.
The non-elites get to choose the elites.
Hehe.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Ron Unz, @Charles Erwin Wilson, @rod1963
It’s deliberate.
The Ivies serve multiple functions. One of which is to serve as social mixer for kids of the elites so they marry into power and not out of it. Secondly as a place where indoctrination occurs. They learn the correct take on things. Consider that the Ivies are literally the centers of the PC/MC movement. So they come out more brainwashed than those middle-class kids who went to state U.
After graduation, a select few assume positions of power in law, communications, politics and finance. Others go back into education to brainwash the next generation.
These are the people responsible for keeping the mental shackles on the rest of the population.
And why is admissions open to bribery? Well if you had a bunch of hard nosed test evaluators and admission officers, I bet money that not a lot of the elite kids would make it in. Look at the Bushes, John Kerry, Paulson, Summers, Cass Sunstein and many other mandarins that have graduated from them. These aren’t bright men and dollars to donuts their spawn are probably some serious dullards and bubble kids.
Lets be clear smart people don’t need the Ivies. The didn’t produce a Richard Branson, Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, Seymour Cray, let alone a Claude Shannon. The Ivies are a school for the insiders/elites at this stage in the decay of the United States and West, nothing else.
Your denigration of the Ivies sounds like sour grapes. Again you might disagree with their ideology but they are still places with a lot of intellectual horsepower and most of the students there still get in on merit and not on what Daddy did.Replies: @FUBAR007, @dearieme
Kind of makes my point about the anti moneyball of elite universities. They are selecting the least likely to donate. Pretty shocking admissions workers are so low paid. Bet administrators are throwing a party somewhere.
Opportunity for an up and comer institution?
In education, higher education specifically, everyone senses but fails to address that grade inflation means holding kids to standards or trying to actually teach them things does more harm than good.
If you’re the one teacher who doesn’t stamp an A on anything even vaguely coherent then you’re the bad guy – actively harming some kid’s credential for performing poorly in a class he probably doesn’t give an iota of a shit about. Professors usually perpetuate the system because they’re good people who don’t want to disproportionately penalize students taking classes they have to take (or were told they have to take). At the same time, they’re tacitly admitting that the whole thing (the entire edifice of American higher education) is a sham rigged to harvest tuition and churn out diplomas.
I think it's probably a good thing that students have some sort of official way to register feedback on their experiences with specific professors, and especially of those who teach required courses. But I wonder if there's any correlation between the widespread introduction of student evaluations and the trend towards grade inflation over the past few decades. Does anyone know when those became common? And were they introduced in response to the student unrest of the late '60s, or do they have a longer history at some schools?
Take a bunch of very non-elite people who are poorly paid. Put them in charge of allocating an *extremely* valuable and scarce resource based on arbitrary and nebulous criteria. Does that suggest anything to you?
One eye-opening thing I discovered in reading the 4-5 first-hand accounts of the elite admissions process was that admissions officers were constantly being offered bribes---cash, cars, sometimes even houses. Occasionally when they stubbornly argued for a particularly low quality applicant, the other admissions officers would only half-jokingly ask "How much are they paying you?"
I'd guess that the average elite admissions officer allocates slots for which people would pay something around $100M per year and gets paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds. Does this make sense?Replies: @Clyde, @Nico
Poorly paid by your standards but adequately paid by theirs. The jobs market is not exactly stellar. Plus they are selected for this job because they do as they are told. They follow guidance. More intelligent people will not. My speculation anyway.
Micky D's wages for everyone: the wave of the future.Replies: @Clyde
“Rote memorization” of facts becomes extremely useful when trying to determine the honesty of a particular statement – in a speech, an article, a book, etc. It can also be useful in helping to discover new truths.
It is impossible to fully evaluate every statement made by a politician, newspaper, commercial, or whatever in real time. That’s the usefulness, among other things, of rote memorization.
Given that the Left controls the media, it’s perfectly understandable why they may not be too keen on memorization of facts. It makes the people more difficult to deceive. And a wide variety of surveys – Pew’s annual news quizzes, for example – consistently show that conservatives tend to be better informed.
This is by far the worst thing I have read about the Common Core.
I don't know who is worse: the people who came up with it or the people who approved it.
If there is a point to asking all elementary school kids to do work 4-6 grades ahead of their grade level, I do not know what it would be.
$12-$14 as a fulltime job wage for college educated temps who had taken education courses is shamefully low.
Do the elites who pushed for Common Core realize that if all public school kids really were adults in small bodies -- as they seem to believe -- they'd be out on the rears in no time? Why would kids that smart put up with an elite that dumb once they grew up?Replies: @rod1963
“If there is a point to asking all elementary school kids to do work 4-6 grades ahead of their grade level, I do not know what it would be.”
One way to kill a love of learning and literacy is to make it painful and humiliating for children.
This is what Common Core is about. It will destroy children’s love for learning and literacy due to the way it’s designed. It’s designed to induce failure, uncertainty, confusion and learned helplessness among children.
I shudder to think how it affect their emotional development when you’re continually f**ked with by the teaching materials for 12 years.
But it’s for a good cause.
Look society doesn’t need skilled workers anymore. I’ve read some of the old education books by Conant and others, our public education system was originally designed to produce skilled workers for the factories and offices(but not leaders or decision makers, that’s for the elites). All that stuff is moved to Asia or automated out of existence. Most service jobs are now so simplified a campesino could learn to perform them in a short period of time. Jobs that demand a college level education are also becoming rare. Most graduates work at jobs that do not require a college level education.
Forecasts show perhaps another 20-30% of jobs in the near future being automated out of existence.
And lets be blunt, if you are part of the elite, you sure as hell don’t want this mass of people being literate and loves to read and think. They might start thinking about their sorry lot in life and how the elites raped them and might start a revolution and eat the elites. So what better way to nip it in the bud by stunting the intellectual and emotional development of children.
It’s one scenario. Considering how the elites view us, it would not surprise me.
One way to kill a love of learning and literacy is to make it painful and humiliating for children.
This is what Common Core is about. It will destroy children's love for learning and literacy due to the way it's designed. It's designed to induce failure, uncertainty, confusion and learned helplessness among children.
I shudder to think how it affect their emotional development when you're continually f**ked with by the teaching materials for 12 years.
But it's for a good cause.
Look society doesn't need skilled workers anymore. I've read some of the old education books by Conant and others, our public education system was originally designed to produce skilled workers for the factories and offices(but not leaders or decision makers, that's for the elites). All that stuff is moved to Asia or automated out of existence. Most service jobs are now so simplified a campesino could learn to perform them in a short period of time. Jobs that demand a college level education are also becoming rare. Most graduates work at jobs that do not require a college level education.
Forecasts show perhaps another 20-30% of jobs in the near future being automated out of existence.
And lets be blunt, if you are part of the elite, you sure as hell don't want this mass of people being literate and loves to read and think. They might start thinking about their sorry lot in life and how the elites raped them and might start a revolution and eat the elites. So what better way to nip it in the bud by stunting the intellectual and emotional development of children.
It's one scenario. Considering how the elites view us, it would not surprise me.Replies: @Lurker
Excellent point. I’ve come to believe that’s the purpose of much of the MSM as well, for adults and children.
Take a bunch of very non-elite people who are poorly paid. Put them in charge of allocating an *extremely* valuable and scarce resource based on arbitrary and nebulous criteria. Does that suggest anything to you?
One eye-opening thing I discovered in reading the 4-5 first-hand accounts of the elite admissions process was that admissions officers were constantly being offered bribes---cash, cars, sometimes even houses. Occasionally when they stubbornly argued for a particularly low quality applicant, the other admissions officers would only half-jokingly ask "How much are they paying you?"
I'd guess that the average elite admissions officer allocates slots for which people would pay something around $100M per year and gets paid like an assistant manager at McDonalds. Does this make sense?Replies: @Clyde, @Nico
By the same standard, though, any alumni donation would amount to little more than a legal bribe. It isn’t quite as flagrant as it once was – there HAVE been instances of admissions officers rejecting candidates who had the support of the Board of Trustees – but the school certainly knows on which side its bread is buttered. But as has been pointed out on this thread, we have gone so far down the spiral of decay that even the elites no longer value genuine excellence in their progeniture. Any talk of corruption is too little, too late.
This. Really, it’s all just Dewey bis, recycled over and over.
Shout out to ‘Education Realist’ (the HS math teacher and blogger): if you have the time and inclination, I’d love to read your views on Steve’s post.
I’m more disturbed that they’re making $12-$14 and that the job requires a bachelors. This country is going downhill quicker than I thought, at 37 I may actually live long enough to see it implode.
I’m convinced that standardized education is essentially a tool for elite universities to identify elites-and nothing else.
The vast majority of universities in the country are essentially open admissions. This doesn’t simply mean community colleges: there are state flagship universities, as well as state second tier universities (think Iowa State and Kansas State under Iowa and Kansas) that are open admissions, (open: a certain minimum education level-often a few years of language, a minimum GPA, and so on). In the vast majority of institutions: standardized tests serve simply to filter grant/scholarship money: NOT to filter admissions.
Which means that standardized tests are used for admissions in a small subset of universities-that small subset being elite schools (Ivy League and the others-from Stanford to Notre Dame and so on), and crowded schools (California, Texas, Virginia, perhaps other southern States).
I’ve discussed this at Education Realist’s website before: alot of educational concerns/theories/processes are oriented around the hypercompetitiveness of a small subset of elite/crowded colleges: without THEIR filtering requirements, education decisions really haven’t changed that much in 50 years (in other words: the same kids getting into community colleges, the University of Vermont/Kansas State/New Mexico/etc got in in 1960), with much the same effort (take SAT in junior year with no prep; apply to state school because that’s where dad went and we like their football team; enjoy a life and career-as a local engineer, or local midlevel manager, or local lawyer, or whatever).
In other words, 90 million kids are being subjected to standardized tests throughout 13 years of schooling*, so that perhaps 50 institutions (out of several thousand) can justify their decisions to accept perhaps 100,000 applicants.
joeyjoejoe
*my son had his first standardized test this year-in kindergarten
BTW, your estimate of 100,000 for the top 50 sounds high. While Cornell takes 3,000 freshman, many of the other schools are quite small - Dartmouth and MIT are around 1,000. Cal Tech is only a couple of hundred.
For some of the top schools, the SAT is too easy, esp. since it has been dumbed down. At a place like MIT, essentially everyone there (except for maybe a few affirmative action admits) is close to the ceiling. What those schools really need is an even harder test but there's no way they are going to get it because the harder the test the worse NAMs will do on it (and the better Asians will perform). The last thing they want is something that gets them even more Asians and fewer NAMs.Replies: @spare armadillo
You can't teach critical thinking. You can show smart students some examples of what it looks like, try to engage their attention, and hope for the best. You can, however, drill 95 IQ students in, say, the dates of important historical events. They might remember them for the rest of their lives, which would be a powerful upgrade to their bullshit detectors.
Are education reformers all bachelors and spinsters without much experience with young children? They love memorizing facts. They don't like learning abstract "rubrics." They don't like thinking about thinking.Replies: @The Last Real Calvinist, @Jonathan Silber
In real life, most of us don’t need to “think critically” about, for example, math, we need to be able to add and subtract and multiply and divide, and that’s about it.
Also, it seems to me that, if you’re going to “think critically” about anything, you have to master all the facts about it first, you have to know something to think about it: that is to say, you have to first learn by rote, you have to memorize.
Educators themselves, those hapless dupes of crackpot fad and fashion, are the best example of people who undertake to “think critically” without mastering the hard facts of their subject.
And I would think that the ability to memorize is a function of intelligence, so dullards would be no good at it.
What's really funny is that these PC pushers do NOT want anyone to think critically.
After all, genuinely critical thinking on race and sex makes everyone nervous.
PC is anti-criticism of the holy orthodox.
What they are really trying to push is 'creative thinking', not 'critical thinking'. Creative thinking may be useful for fiction writers or culture critics, but it's not necessarily about logic and reality.
This is classic 'creative thinking':
"Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person."
It is an interesting question but requires more imagination and tangential thinking than clear logic or proof.
Also, the question and theme are so oblique that it would be difficult to grade objectively or critically. It calls for creative grading. If Ebert and Siskel couldn't agree on thumbs up and thumbs down, how could anyone agree on the validity of answers to such a question?
Educators who decry rote learning and memorization are akin to boot-camp sergeants who, assigned the task of making raw recruits into soldiers, forego the drilling of their charges, and in place of it assign them to read the Cliff Notes to War and Peace for a midnight bull session.
You are mixing apples and oranges here. The recent Bushes and Kerry are the tail end of once great dynasties – living examples of regression toward the mean. You might disagree with the other guys’ politics or their choice of professions but that doesn’t make them stupid. Summers was the youngest man ever to be made a full professor at Harvard. You don’t achieve that by being stupid.
Your denigration of the Ivies sounds like sour grapes. Again you might disagree with their ideology but they are still places with a lot of intellectual horsepower and most of the students there still get in on merit and not on what Daddy did.
I can't find the specific source at the moment, but I distinctly remember someone associated with Harvard once flatly admitting that 90% of their applicant pool had the intellectual horsepower, as demonstrated by GPA and test scores, to succeed academically at the university. But, since Harvard and the other Ivies aren't willing, or arguably able, to enlarge with population growth, they rely on fuzzier, subjective criteria. YMMV as to whether those criteria constitute "merit"; IMO, they don't necessarily.
The Ivies pick who they like. That's all there is too it. Since they're private institutions, strictly speaking, they're under no obligation to do otherwise.
Anecdotally, having interviewed, hired, and worked with Ivy grads, I've found that, yes, they're typically above average intellectually, but not to super-genius levels. In terms of base level competence, they're about on par with any college grad who did 3.0 or better for a GPA. What distinguishes them is a generally higher level of self-confidence, a lack of concern for achieving typical middle class material goals (i.e. secure job, nice house and car, etc.), a decidedly globalist as opposed to nationalist outlook, and, most importantly, an ability to speak the social language of the elite. They don't spend much time indulging in pop culture, either.
The whole “education reform” thing is about disguising the fact that most people are not very smart (and as the population gets browner and taught by an increasingly dumb group of teachers it gets even dumber – Idiocracy here we come). “No Child Left Behind” was supposed to achieve the literally impossible – make all children above average. Of course that did not pan out. So if you can’t get all children to a passing level on a real test of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic, then you give them some other test that tests their “critical thinking” or some other ill defined quality so that you can fudge the results however you want.
Oh you mean THAT David Coleman from Bill Gates – momentary confusion…
I though you meant THIS David Coleman, the Demographer from Oxford University
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00324728.2015.1017346
THAT David Coleman is the one who the USA is betting on being RIGHT;
THIS David Coleman is the one that the West is betting on being WRONG
(Plus there is ANOTHER DC – the most famous ever sports commentator in the UK, notorious/ loved for his colemanballs –
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/telegraphsportnews/10532492/David-Coleman-dies-Top-20-Colemanballs.html )
Just the phrase ‘critical thinking’ gives me the shivers.
It seems to be the education system’s great goal… crank out a bunch of ‘critics’ who’s greatest joy is standing outside of, and being ‘critical’ of thier own society.
It doesn’t come off as constructive criticism either. Destruction seems to be the aim.
The vast majority of universities in the country are essentially open admissions. This doesn't simply mean community colleges: there are state flagship universities, as well as state second tier universities (think Iowa State and Kansas State under Iowa and Kansas) that are open admissions, (open: a certain minimum education level-often a few years of language, a minimum GPA, and so on). In the vast majority of institutions: standardized tests serve simply to filter grant/scholarship money: NOT to filter admissions.
Which means that standardized tests are used for admissions in a small subset of universities-that small subset being elite schools (Ivy League and the others-from Stanford to Notre Dame and so on), and crowded schools (California, Texas, Virginia, perhaps other southern States).
I've discussed this at Education Realist's website before: alot of educational concerns/theories/processes are oriented around the hypercompetitiveness of a small subset of elite/crowded colleges: without THEIR filtering requirements, education decisions really haven't changed that much in 50 years (in other words: the same kids getting into community colleges, the University of Vermont/Kansas State/New Mexico/etc got in in 1960), with much the same effort (take SAT in junior year with no prep; apply to state school because that's where dad went and we like their football team; enjoy a life and career-as a local engineer, or local midlevel manager, or local lawyer, or whatever).
In other words, 90 million kids are being subjected to standardized tests throughout 13 years of schooling*, so that perhaps 50 institutions (out of several thousand) can justify their decisions to accept perhaps 100,000 applicants.
joeyjoejoe
*my son had his first standardized test this year-in kindergartenReplies: @Jack D
This is not quite how it works. While it is true that once you get past the top tier with their sub-10% admit rates, it gets much easier, you can’t just walk into any college with any test scores beyond the top 50. Even in the state systems, your SAT/ACT (mostly ACT beyond the coasts) determines whether you can get into the flagship land grant state U or the 2nd tier schools (the former state teacher’s colleges) or the 3rd tier community colleges, etc. So even if you took the top 50 out of the equation there would still be a need for a test to sort the men from the boys. In fact that’s what the ACT was until recently – the test for the non-elites.
BTW, your estimate of 100,000 for the top 50 sounds high. While Cornell takes 3,000 freshman, many of the other schools are quite small – Dartmouth and MIT are around 1,000. Cal Tech is only a couple of hundred.
For some of the top schools, the SAT is too easy, esp. since it has been dumbed down. At a place like MIT, essentially everyone there (except for maybe a few affirmative action admits) is close to the ceiling. What those schools really need is an even harder test but there’s no way they are going to get it because the harder the test the worse NAMs will do on it (and the better Asians will perform). The last thing they want is something that gets them even more Asians and fewer NAMs.
How do you know what their standards are? They told you? If the jobs market isn’t “stellar” then that contradicts the previous sentence; they’re taking what they can get, not according to what their supposed standard are. Everyone with a job does what “they are told”. Saying “more intelligent people will not” is confusing. Intelligent people “will not” do what, “follow guidance”? Intelligent people do their own thing on the job?
Micky D’s wages for everyone: the wave of the future.
Amen. Grizzard died way too soon.
The good Lord in His mercy took Lewis so he wouldn’t have to see all this.
It would have broken Lewis’s heart to see how the newspaper business ended up as well.
Ed Hirsch argued that students needed actual knowledge “hooks” to hang more knowledge on, before they could become critical thinkers. You can’t think critically if you don’t know anything.
Anyway, all these years I thought the Common Core was inspired his work, and was promoted via the Fordham Institute. I used to read their blog years ago. Yet the movement turned into its opposite? The ol’ John Dewey-Wm Kilpatrick agenda? Are the kids assigned “projects” too?
essay grades for standardized tests are bogus….writing is largely a window into a person’s IQ and literacy. …when a less well-read person grades a more well-read person, that ain’t fair. And it does not work.
Also, the man we bet the country UPON? Umm…is that supposed to a joke, or something? It’s idiomatic, Steve. Bet the country ON…
That is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put…to quote Churchill…
LOL!
Doesn’t the US have back-up plans? The best educationalists from Princeton, Yale, UCLA, ready to step into the breach if Coleman SAT fails.
I always like how they’re “admissions officers” like they what? … hold office? … are some kind of leader?
Nope. Both rote learning & critical thinking need to be applied, more or less depending on the subject.
Here in China, rote learning is big, very big, even on university level. Doesn’t mean that the students actually learn much. I have no idea how the Shanghai students can do so good in PISA. From my experience, when they start university they don’t know much about anything (at least the language students). Even about Chinese history they only know the usual propaganda crap (like “5000 years of history”), but few real facts. Mathematics? Almost non-existent. After 7 to 10 years of learning English (basic through high school) their English level is mostly still very basic. Don’t know what they learn, but after Gaokao there is virtually nothing left.
Rote learning may be good for basic knowledge, but students have to go beyond that. & yes, you can teach “critical thinking”, although the level to which a student is able to put that into practice is also very much dependent on the individual.
Can you explain what the golden border means?
“In real life, most of us don’t need to “think critically” about, for example, math, we need to be able to add and subtract and multiply and divide, and that’s about it.”
What’s really funny is that these PC pushers do NOT want anyone to think critically.
After all, genuinely critical thinking on race and sex makes everyone nervous.
PC is anti-criticism of the holy orthodox.
What they are really trying to push is ‘creative thinking’, not ‘critical thinking’. Creative thinking may be useful for fiction writers or culture critics, but it’s not necessarily about logic and reality.
This is classic ‘creative thinking’:
“Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.”
It is an interesting question but requires more imagination and tangential thinking than clear logic or proof.
Also, the question and theme are so oblique that it would be difficult to grade objectively or critically. It calls for creative grading. If Ebert and Siskel couldn’t agree on thumbs up and thumbs down, how could anyone agree on the validity of answers to such a question?
Rote has different meanings.
If it means mindless drilling of certain data and facts, it is dull, dull, and dull. And useless.
For example, it makes no sense to learn a foreign language just by memorizing a lot of words. You’re sure to forget them besides.
The only way to learn language is by learning the grammar, its inner logic, its forms, and its usage. Of course, you have to memorize words as you go along, but the memorization has to follow the usage and practice. If you memorize things organically through practice, you won’t forget them.
Same with math. Unless you know how the system works, memorization of whole bunch of questions and answers won’t do any good.
So, East Asian nations that over-emphasize rote are more into drilling mental discipline and rigidity than fostering thought.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, you have ‘progressive’ types in the West who seem to have little use for practice, study sessions, and memorization of facts.
This is stupid since how can anyone take a test unless he or she remembered stuff?
Your denigration of the Ivies sounds like sour grapes. Again you might disagree with their ideology but they are still places with a lot of intellectual horsepower and most of the students there still get in on merit and not on what Daddy did.Replies: @FUBAR007, @dearieme
Ivy admissions are a mixture of: a) legacy, b) affirmative action to meet shifting, informal quotas for political and public relations purposes, and c) subjective evaluation criteria centering around various types of extracurricular activities that ostensibly reflect character and drive but really have more to do with how interesting an applicant is to the university’s evaluators (translation: the college admissions equivalent of “fit” as a criterion in job hiring). Academic merit, while a factor, is only a partial consideration.
I can’t find the specific source at the moment, but I distinctly remember someone associated with Harvard once flatly admitting that 90% of their applicant pool had the intellectual horsepower, as demonstrated by GPA and test scores, to succeed academically at the university. But, since Harvard and the other Ivies aren’t willing, or arguably able, to enlarge with population growth, they rely on fuzzier, subjective criteria. YMMV as to whether those criteria constitute “merit”; IMO, they don’t necessarily.
The Ivies pick who they like. That’s all there is too it. Since they’re private institutions, strictly speaking, they’re under no obligation to do otherwise.
Anecdotally, having interviewed, hired, and worked with Ivy grads, I’ve found that, yes, they’re typically above average intellectually, but not to super-genius levels. In terms of base level competence, they’re about on par with any college grad who did 3.0 or better for a GPA. What distinguishes them is a generally higher level of self-confidence, a lack of concern for achieving typical middle class material goals (i.e. secure job, nice house and car, etc.), a decidedly globalist as opposed to nationalist outlook, and, most importantly, an ability to speak the social language of the elite. They don’t spend much time indulging in pop culture, either.
If you read sample SAT essays and the grades assigned to them by ETS it’s easy to figure out how to get a 6. It boils down to: 1) Take a definite position on the topic in your first sentence; don’t be wishy-washy. 2) Nonetheless, acknowledge a counter-argument or two and refute. 3) Throw in one literary and one historical reference. 4) Tie it up at the end.
After I told this to my daughter, she raised her score from 3 to 6.
Figure out the rubric and hit all the points.
When it comes to mass-grading of essays, you can probably get by with throwing in the rubric lumps – the nouns instead of the verbs, as it were. They don’t have to be doing anything particularly graceful; they just have to show up.
Don’t worry; the evidence is that education doesn’t really do anything anyway.
Your denigration of the Ivies sounds like sour grapes. Again you might disagree with their ideology but they are still places with a lot of intellectual horsepower and most of the students there still get in on merit and not on what Daddy did.Replies: @FUBAR007, @dearieme
“Summers [didn’t] achieve that by being stupid.” And yet for all the good he’s done, he might as well be stupid. Sad.
I though you meant THIS David Coleman, the Demographer from Oxford University
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00324728.2015.1017346
THAT David Coleman is the one who the USA is betting on being RIGHT;
THIS David Coleman is the one that the West is betting on being WRONG
(Plus there is ANOTHER DC - the most famous ever sports commentator in the UK, notorious/ loved for his colemanballs -
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/telegraphsportnews/10532492/David-Coleman-dies-Top-20-Colemanballs.html )Replies: @dearieme
Best Colemanballs, of a 400m runner: “He’s opened his legs and pulled out the big one.”
"Critical thinking" is the new "99% fat-free."Replies: @Dirk Dagger, @Terrahawk, @sean c, @Hubbub
“… emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization.”
Rote learning and memorization are the foundations of ‘critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills.’ If one has no knowledge how can he hope to make an informed or relevant decision. As it was said, ‘no need to reinvent the wheel’ by starting from scratch every time a decision has to be made.
It takes a bit of practice, like anything. I’m sure there are teachers who are not very good at evaluating essays, but there are people who suck in every profession. So it makes sense to hire people (i.e. teachers) whose job it is to do the task for which you’re hiring.
The property line between McDonald’s and Taco Bell.
This Coleman was born after the Coleman Report came out. Yet I still confuse the two Colemans.
From the article in your previous post:
That would have been quite a feat, considering Mom ran Bennington College, and the family lived in Manhattan. That’s 180 miles.
Yes you have to know how to conventionally think before you can critically think. In thus spoke zarathustra Nietzsche’s parable always seemed to me to be about the artist, who has to master the rules before he can know when to break the rules:
“In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, “Put a load on me.” This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life.
But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion — the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is “Thou shalt.” On every scale of this scaly beast, a “thou shalt” is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning’s headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the “thou shalts,” the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.
And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its “thou shalts” overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.
For the camel, the “thou shalt” is a must, a civilizing force. It converts the human animal into a civilized human being. But the period of youth is the period of self-discovery and transformation into a lion. The rules are now to be used at will for life, not submitted to as compelling “thou shalts.” It comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion-deed. You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist.”
Micky D's wages for everyone: the wave of the future.Replies: @Clyde
You will only be paid if you can undercut the robot’s wages. Robots will set the human pay scale. Of course robots do not get wages. The cost of robots will be measured in other ways.
I have no doubt that what you lay out is true. None! The edu. establishment: what banal, pathetic, pedantic, plodders. Hey, its a paycheck and pays well for the most part. I like all the gays, lesbians, females who have found hidey holes in college administrations, all edu. administrations. They only hire their own kind. OK, I am exaggerating a bit but I have captured the essence of this self-serving racket.
Think of all the rote memorization required to learn a new language — not only vocabulary, but verb forms and grammar too. Critical thinking only starts to become useful when you’re familar enough with the basics to be able to notice patterns that allow you to fill in the blank when you’d otherwise be at a loss. And sometimes irregular verbs and idiomatic expressions confound even that.
Or consider cooking: You need to be familiar with the ingredients before you can follow a recipe. And only after learning how ingredients and techniques come together in several different recipes, can you apply critical thinking to recognize patterns that allow substitutions and the creation of worthwhile new recipes. In cooking, memorization is reinforced by doing, but an experienced cook still has lots of information and rules of thumb committed to memory which allows them to work efficiently and to avoid drifting when venturing into uncharted waters.
BTW, your estimate of 100,000 for the top 50 sounds high. While Cornell takes 3,000 freshman, many of the other schools are quite small - Dartmouth and MIT are around 1,000. Cal Tech is only a couple of hundred.
For some of the top schools, the SAT is too easy, esp. since it has been dumbed down. At a place like MIT, essentially everyone there (except for maybe a few affirmative action admits) is close to the ceiling. What those schools really need is an even harder test but there's no way they are going to get it because the harder the test the worse NAMs will do on it (and the better Asians will perform). The last thing they want is something that gets them even more Asians and fewer NAMs.Replies: @spare armadillo
“What those schools really need is an even harder test but there’s no way they are going to get it because the harder the test the worse NAMs will do on it (and the better Asians will perform). ”
I think MIT likes its applicants to give scores on AMC 12 and/or AIME and/or USAMO. Those are in increasing order of difficulty, and the AMC 12 is MUCH harder than anything on the SAT.
http://www.maa.org/math-competitions
One of my kids did very well on the USAMO. He got 800 on the math SAT when he was 12, and thought it was absurdly easy.
If you're the one teacher who doesn't stamp an A on anything even vaguely coherent then you're the bad guy - actively harming some kid's credential for performing poorly in a class he probably doesn't give an iota of a shit about. Professors usually perpetuate the system because they're good people who don't want to disproportionately penalize students taking classes they have to take (or were told they have to take). At the same time, they're tacitly admitting that the whole thing (the entire edifice of American higher education) is a sham rigged to harvest tuition and churn out diplomas.Replies: @IBC
I’m amazed at how many reviews on RateMyProfessors.com say things like: “Love Prof. _____ , easy, guaranteed ‘A’.”
I think it’s probably a good thing that students have some sort of official way to register feedback on their experiences with specific professors, and especially of those who teach required courses. But I wonder if there’s any correlation between the widespread introduction of student evaluations and the trend towards grade inflation over the past few decades. Does anyone know when those became common? And were they introduced in response to the student unrest of the late ’60s, or do they have a longer history at some schools?
Many people educated in the best of schools when standards were apparently more rigorous than they are today have swallowed the PC narrative to the extent that you wonder if they were ever taught critical thinking, or if this is something that can be taught to everyone.
Harvard does not appreciate undocumented students.
https://www.yahoo.com/parenting/genius-girl-fakes-admission-to-harvard-stanford-122277519087.html
Gee, she was only going to go there for a better life.
It is impossible to fully evaluate every statement made by a politician, newspaper, commercial, or whatever in real time. That's the usefulness, among other things, of rote memorization.
Given that the Left controls the media, it's perfectly understandable why they may not be too keen on memorization of facts. It makes the people more difficult to deceive. And a wide variety of surveys - Pew's annual news quizzes, for example - consistently show that conservatives tend to be better informed.Replies: @IBC
I mostly agree with you, but in my experience it seems like many people who identify as “liberal” do in fact, seem to be mentally sharper and more knowledgeable than those who identify as “conservative.” Of course that’s just my impression and even if it really did turn out to be true, it still wouldn’t mean that those who identify as liberal are always or even mostly right about certain issues. As several famous people have observed, humans are not so much rational as they are rationalizing. But it’s the power of reason that allows us to rationalize, and that means that the stronger one’s reasoning skills are, the easier it becomes to rationalize whatever position –no matter how deluded or unabashedly self-interested.
If it means mindless drilling of certain data and facts, it is dull, dull, and dull. And useless.
For example, it makes no sense to learn a foreign language just by memorizing a lot of words. You're sure to forget them besides.
The only way to learn language is by learning the grammar, its inner logic, its forms, and its usage. Of course, you have to memorize words as you go along, but the memorization has to follow the usage and practice. If you memorize things organically through practice, you won't forget them.
Same with math. Unless you know how the system works, memorization of whole bunch of questions and answers won't do any good.
So, East Asian nations that over-emphasize rote are more into drilling mental discipline and rigidity than fostering thought.
On the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, you have 'progressive' types in the West who seem to have little use for practice, study sessions, and memorization of facts.
This is stupid since how can anyone take a test unless he or she remembered stuff?Replies: @Sparkling Wiggle
Well, sort of. You need the first 2000-5000 most common words and then you can start learning organically. And yes, rote memorization aided by flash cards really is the best way.
But words are most easily learned when used/practiced in sentences.
That creates mental images and associations.
I wonder if PC and 'racist' methods might work best because they get emotions involved.
Things are more memorable when one's feelings are engaged.
Imagine a PC class that teaches sentences like
EVIL PRIVILEGED WHITE MALE KKK CHASE A BLACK GUY UP A TREE.
How can a kid not remember that?
But 'racist' sentences would be memorable too.
LOOK AT NEGRO ROB WHITE PERSON. LOOK AT NEGRO BURN DOWN CITY.
He must be a bright boy. My daughter only got a 730 on the math SAT when she took it at age 12. I don’t recall that she submitted any math scores to MIT other than her SAT Math Level 2 achievement test (800) but they took her anyway.
“Well, sort of. You need the first 2000-5000 most common words and then you can start learning organically. And yes, rote memorization aided by flash cards really is the best way.”
But words are most easily learned when used/practiced in sentences.
That creates mental images and associations.
I wonder if PC and ‘racist’ methods might work best because they get emotions involved.
Things are more memorable when one’s feelings are engaged.
Imagine a PC class that teaches sentences like
EVIL PRIVILEGED WHITE MALE KKK CHASE A BLACK GUY UP A TREE.
How can a kid not remember that?
But ‘racist’ sentences would be memorable too.
LOOK AT NEGRO ROB WHITE PERSON. LOOK AT NEGRO BURN DOWN CITY.