This is a little long, a bit rambling, but it's either that or 37 posts. I looked at the article on foreign students in the U.S. and it confirms what I said, that graduate science is being carried in this country by foreign students. After a downturn following the Patriot Act (if ever there was a word dripping with communist baggage, it's the word patriot), the numbers of foreign students are moving back up again. So, we agree at least on that. And yes, those who promote teaching creationism in addition to, or even instead of, evolution, are among those who are decreasing the number of scientists that this country turns out, by definition. As far as business majors experiencing a downturn because of the economy, that's hard to argue with, but everything is experiencing a downturn. Jobs in general just aren't plentiful. Businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars and not hiring (while paying no taxes). As painful as it is to a lot of people, the shakeout in the economy may in the long run prove beneficial in that the way things were going was not sustainable. However, it will take a lot more pain than is currently being experienced to make any meaningful change. A bit off the subject, but all efforts at the moment in terms of energy (the basis of all of life) are to maintain the status quo and that is just not possible. There has to be a huge, huge rethinking of our way of life from the ground up in order to wind up with anything approaching sustainable, i.e., there has to be a major reduction, contraction, over the way things are done now. And in fact Ken Rogoff, a Harvard economist, one of the few economists who makes any sense, says we are currently in a contraction, not a recession, that will last for years. So basically, if all jobs are down, then business major jobs will be down too. John makes a great point, that societal polarization is driven by poor education, and both are in the short-term interests of the elites (in the long term, who's going to buy their products?, but they don't think that far into the future). The polarization has been going on for decades (the two preceding sentences are not contradictory). Reagan really pushed it off a cliff. What I'm not sure about is whether there's a deliberate concerted effort to get there, or if they're just exploiting people's innate laziness in a, what's the word, ad hoc way. I started out a few years ago thinking that the economy, energy, the climate were in such bad shape that it had to be a conspiracy of elites. There was no way it could just be happening. But, it turns out that there really is no conspiracy. The elites are as clueless as anybody. They're as invested in yesterday and yesterday's way of doing business as anybody, and yesterday is a model that doesn't work anymore. It's like fighting WWII in Iraq. Basically, CEO's don't want to stand up in front of shareholder meetings and say, resources are running down, we have to lower our expectations for returns, whatever, but they know that shareholders don't want to hear it and they'll get another CEO who will tell them what they want to hear. Likewise consumers want to hear that it's morning in America, they don't want to hear reality, so CEO's, corporate and governmental, paint rosy pictures that don't comport with reality. I heard interviewed a top executive of an oil company. He was talking about the state of the oil market, and I was struck by how clueless he was as to the big picture. He saw his part of the supply chain and that was it. Either he knew and wasn't saying, or didn't know, but his talk was not well informed. It's not hard to imagine the businesses that are doing business as usual are the ones hiring business majors to crunch numbers and write reports. They're the corporations going the way of the dinosaurs, like the oil industry. Having said that, it's a no brainer that if people knew what was going on in say, the climate or food, they would demand change, and change is expensive to those at the top, so information is deliberately suppressed. In other words, the economic situation may be the result of cluelessness at the top, but full blown conspiracies by top corporate leadership have happened in the past and are happening. Dismantling the nation's light rail system and replacing it with cars, for example, was deliberate and systematic. Here's a link to a documentary on that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAc4w11Yzys Food is an example of a probably inadvertent but no less real conspiracy of interests converging, and possibly promoted on golf courses. Food, Inc. is a movie by Michael Pollan on that topic. Coincidentally I saw King Corn last night, and I was struck by the line that ground beef today is basically fat disguised as meat. (Food, Inc. and King Corn are both worth watching.) For Veronica, those are excellent points. The transnational corporations live on focus groups. Selling us products is done with great deliberation and care, involving psychologists and sociologists and every manner of behavior experts. Every move they make deliberately pushes one or another of our buttons, making their products irresistible. What they've done to our expectations of food is exhibit A. Planned obsolescence is another. It's been going on since the 30's (yes, the 30's) to the point where we can't imagine another way of living, even if it's literally destroying the planet. Changing that is part of the fundamental rethinking I referred to above, which is not going to happen short of catastrophe. Most business majors, at least as I see it, are in the smaller and mid capitalized firms, the ones that aren't doing so well. Just real quick on creating utopia. The only way to make things a lot better, if stopping short of utopia, is to take child rearing seriously, and that's a fact. Even more than science or anything else, kids need to be taught how to be parents and that there's more involved than just plunking 'em out. Child rearing has to stop being a right and turned into a privilege, putting the interests of the future adult over the interests of the plunker outer to have a baby bump or whatever nonsense passes for reason to have a child. However, that's been discussed extensively, and needless to say, nothing will ever change. Andy ________________________________ From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, November 5, 2011 4:29 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: education Andy wrote >> A major thing, probably the major thing, that drives most people today is money, how to get more of everything. >>[snip] >> >>Wall Street was such a big draw until the crash that there was a visible >>drain in the sciences, and the slack was picked up by foreign students. >> >> >>*[How] did you find this out?... >> >>Andy: I didn't reason this, I read it, and not just once. Math and science >>is not our strong point, at least at the high school level. Graduate science >>is being taken over by foreign students. Their (sic) own systems are >>catching up, and they're here in great numbers, in the MIT's and other places. *On the value of foreign students coming to the US to study science: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11500/ In the meantime, we're not cranking out scientists. If anything, we're still chomping at the bit to teach creationism instead of evolution. However, Wall Street was a magnet. That's just a fact. *When you say that 'we' are chomping at the bit to teach Creationism, to whom does 'we' refer? Certainly not to the same 'we' who are not 'cranking out scientists.' Andy: This might be true, I can't speak from experience. However, businesses still want MBA's, not liberal arts graduates per se. If someone isn't going on to get an MBA, they'll major in business, which happens a lot. If an employer has a choice between an English major and a business major, which one do you think he'll probably hire for his marketing department? That business as a major has proliferated speaks for itself. >> Well, you might want to browse these sites and see whether they confirm your view that there has been a proliferation of business majors. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/21/freshmen http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/13/business http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/blog/the_decline_of_the_business_ma.php http://daniellesayz.com/2011/02/poor-economy-triggers-a-decline-in-business-majors/ http://daniellesayz.com/2011/02/poor-economy-triggers-a-decline-in-business-majors/ http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2011/09/14/the-decline-of-the-mba&view=comments http://www.cavalierdaily.com/2011/09/16/applications-for-mbas-decrease/ Robert Paul