[lit-ideas] Re: education
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 6 Nov 2011 03:18:15 -0800 (PST)
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
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