Day 111 of 1000
The kid’s friends, Mike and Nestor, came over to the house yesterday to study for their multi-variable calculus test for 4-5 hours. I got to talk to them a bit. Both of them want to be engineers, but neither of them took a traditional educational path, Nestor having come to the U.S. a few years ago and Mike having taken some extended time in Iraq. They are both impressive people and they work very hard at hard classes. My Russian buddy, Stepan and his wife are leaning hard toward what he calls “Home Education” for his two daughters. After looking it over they have decided they do not want the educational system, public or private, to get their hands on his daughters.
Then Eric G. sent me a link to an article on the bankruptcy of the Western educational system. The article, titled “Educated” people, is spot on. There is lots of stuff like this in the article:
We are not where we are because we were privileged; oh no. We got ahead because we work harder and just had a knack for that education thing.
This forgets of course that education in the United States and Europe at this point is a certification program more than anything else. It tests basic intelligence in some areas; in other areas, such as the liberal arts, it increasingly tests nothing but political allegiance and the ability to recite dogma in different forms (such “A Feminist Analysis of Cetacean Symbolism in Public Policy”).
Even in the sciences, we do not test intelligence so much as obedience, memorization and application of rote. This enables us to stop relying on smart people and to instead promote lots of interchangeable cogs.
I completely resonate with that whole quote. The problem now is to figure out how to educate one’s kids rather than “Educate” them in the sense described at the Amerika blog. Every day, we are more thankful we homeschooled our kids. We have turned more and more of the responsibility over to our kids. We will try to help them, but they will increasingly have to navigate the educational morass on their own. I wish I knew the answer.
We used Igor’s temperature differential minimization technique to cook our turkey this Thanksgiving and came out perfect. I would like to say that the results were conclusive, but I do not think I can. It is going to take a whole lot more experimentation. Here are the reasons: