What for an education?

Are we hastily "tracking" children onto a college-bound path right from their high school freshman years, and perhaps even from middle school on?

Over the last couple of years, I have gotten into a habit of chatting with students, especially those in my freshman-level classes, about their reasons for attending college. It never surprises me when I find out that most would be doing something else, if they really had a say in the matter.

But, they end up in college because of the tremendous pressure on them to have a college plan from the moment they enter high school, or even earlier. It is not difficult to imagine that most fifteen year olds have the vaguest idea of career plans, and yet they are forced to think about college and, sometimes, even the kinds of subjects they would like to major in the undergraduate program. As one student recently put it, "I didn't even know how to drive and these people were telling me I had to know what to do in college."

Interestingly enough, similar thoughts about the role of higher education are beginning to preoccupy at least a few educators and parents in India, too.  Spending a hundred days there, and observing the American scene from the other side of the planet, was a learning experience, in this context also.

For instance, the director of the Madras campus of the Indian Institute of Technology, which is recognized as one of the ten best universities in India, noted, tongue-cheek, that the public would prefer a college major even for children in kindergarten!  Meanwhile, he is opening up to the idea that engineering students could take literature classes also during their undergraduate programs.

This need for breadth was echoed by a college classmate, who, unlike me, continued on with a career in engineering, and is now a senior executive at a leading outsourcing firm, and oversees nearly 30,000 employees. His complaint is that it is getting harder for them to recruit college graduates with good thinking and communicating abilities.  He reasons that the system is failing right from the early years of schooling, and worries about the future if schools continued to focus on tests as the pathway to college.

Despite our own healthy experiences of the past, when high schools and colleges promoted thinking and creativity, and despite those from faraway places like India, we tell thousands of Oregon children, explicitly and implicitly, that K-12 schooling is nothing but the road to college.  Even worse is the notion that they are losers in life if they do not go to college immediately after graduating from high school, and many students I have talked with are keen on avoiding that "loser" tag. A new "scarlet letter" that we have created through the schooling process.

We push teenagers to higher education by scaring them about the earnings they could lose. Here, we commit two huge mistakes. First, we simply equate higher education to nothing but a passport to a job, instead of instilling in the young a joy for lifelong-learning as a path towards understanding their own respective potentials, of which earnings is merely one. On top of this, by constantly dangling the dollar sign in front of them, we are almost brainwashing teenagers to think that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is nothing but the pursuit of money.

Instead, the young ought to understand something entirely different--life entails making decisions all the time, and that this will mean difficult tradeoffs, which sometimes can be expensive. Thus, we would not simply push teenagers to college because they would otherwise be losers, but we would help them think and act every time they reached a fork in the road of life.  The tradeoffs that Robert Frost so elegantly articulated as "the road not taken."

By focusing on an economic argument, which is weak at best, in order to get students out the high school doors into college, we are rapidly reducing them to mere worker bees who have to compete against those in India and elsewhere.  Is that really what we want from the billions we invest in education?

We are the global elite who could have done things differently

Doesn't the following chart tell one heck of a story:

[The] take of the very rich peaking in the late nineteen-twenties, at close to twenty per cent of total income, then falling sharply for forty years, only to turn back up in the late nineteen-seventies, and peak again in 2007.

Cassidy links to this paper, where the authors provide a similar looking chart for changes in the top income decile:

The question is always the same, right: why bother about income distribution?  Among other reasons, we want to understand how much of the national income goes to the top one and ten percent because of:

their impact on overall growth and resources, their impact on overall inequality, and their global significance.

At the same time, keep in mind that:

In the grand scheme of things, even the poorest 5% of Americans are better off financially than two thirds of the entire world

So, at the end of it all, could we have done things differently since the late 1970s, which is when we notice the sharp uptick in the graphs?

Yes, without thirty years of rising inequality, and with the same overall national income, income of the middle class would have been greater. People with middling incomes have many more priority needs to satisfy before they become preoccupied with the best investment opportunities for their excess money. Thus, the structure of consumption would have been different: probably more money would have been spent on home-cooked meals than on restaurants, on near-home vacations than on exotic destinations, on kids’ clothes than on designer apparel. More equitable development would have removed the need for the politicians to look around in order to find palliatives with which to assuage the anger of the middle-class constituents. In other words, there would have been more equitable and stable development which would have spared the United States, and increasingly the world, an unnecessary crisis.

Video of the day: Holi. Yes, the festival of colors

ht

Damn illegal aliens!

Quote of the day (Ashley Judd fights back)

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women. ...

The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women. In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood. It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings. Join in—and help change—the Conversation.

 All because Judd did not look her usual stunning best.  Her puffed up face, Judd writes, was from being "sick for more than a month and on medication (multiple rounds of steroids),"

You go, girl!

Play ball! Obama v. Romney

BTW, notice that the magazine newspaper cover says "excluding UK" .... so, what is the cover for the UK version you ask?

I wish the UK cover had been a cricket version of the Obama v. Romney caricature :)

Cartoon/comic of the day. Wait, the story of my life?

We pay taxes. So, ... where does that money go?

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (ht):
At the federal level:

And at the typical state:

Here in Oregon, where we pay "income taxes pay to educate, medicate and incarcerate Oregonians" the trend has been to pay more for incarceration than for education:

Quote of the day: On Václav Havel

“Ten years ago,” Černý told me, Havel “would probably immediately give them a pardon. But that asshole in the Castle won’t.” 

That was the final sentence in this short piece on protest art in the Czech Republic.  The "conservative Czech President Václav Klaus" is the one referred to by that anatomical metaphor, in contrast to the liberal intellectual Havel, who died a few months ago.  Yes, Klaus the pen stealer :)

Until I read the essay, I had no idea about this:

In April 2007, Czech artist David Hons replaced the human silhouettes in 48 Prague crosswalk signals with figures engaged in decidedly less pedestrian activities. One signal depicted a man urinating; another had a bottle raised to his mouth. A man squatted to defecate; another appeared to be falling down drunk. “I wanted to show people, they don’t have to walk or stand when the system says so,” Hons wrote on his website.

That is bloody creative, and what a wonderful way to convey that idea.

What was even more exciting was when I read the following:

In May 2010, as the country was preparing for a nationwide election, Roman Smetana, a 29-year-old bus driver from the city of Olomouc, defaced some 30 campaign posters, scrawling, “Liars,” “Idiots,” “Corruptioneers,” and “Prostitutes” across them in Magic Marker. After the election, the victorious center-right Civic Democrats took legal action. Smetana was found guilty of vandalizing private property, fined $800, and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. He complied with the fine (to avoid debt collectors) but resisted the second half of the punishment. His graffiti, he told the court, “was the free expression of opinion by a citizen who, unlike political parties, does not have huge funds for publicity at his disposal.” For refusing the community service, he was sentenced to 100 days in jail. Yet this month, Smetana refused to show up at the prison to begin his sentence; he could now spend three years behind bars for defying the court’s orders.

Not only is the protest format itself neat, I even know this place, Olomouc; it was where I visited my old friend almost fourteen years ago :)

The trillion dollar question: When my salary is financed by student debt ...?

Not a new topic in this blog, and yet the following graphic (ht) made me pause and think:

Of course, since that 2011 Q3, the amount has crossed the one trillion dollar mark.  It is one thing if a medical school student takes on a $100,000 debt, because of the potential earnings.  But:

individuals risk being over their head when their loan debt exceeds their annual income. Take a former student with a $50,000 debt with a $40,000 income. While the future interest rate on student loans is uncertain let us assume one of 5 percent, lower than what the law for the next fiscal year requires but more than President Obama wants. A person with a $40,000 income might have only $28,000 of what the Feds define as discretionary income. Devoting 10 percent of that income to debt servicing (the maximum required under an executive order), a debtor would pay $2,800 annually in debt service, $2,500 of which would go for interest, and only $300 for principal. Since federal policy puts a 20-year time limit on repayment, and it is likely it might take more than 20 years to repay the loan, it likely will never be fully repaid—the government will take a hit. When the debt-income ratio is under one, that is much less likely to occur. My wife, a retired guidance counselor, talked to a former student of hers recently with a six-digit debt incurred while in undergraduate and law school that is perhaps three times her income, and she literally has health problems from worrying about the crushing burden. This is not rare these days.

Scary!

Even scarier? Like this:

According to the College Board’s 2011 Trends in Student Aid report, 13 percent of people who started at a four-year institution in 2003-04 but did not complete their bachelor’s degree by 2009 have more than $28,000 in student loan debt.
For some, the debt burden can be far worse. Jim VanNest, 30, has been struggling with more than $100,000 in student loan debt since he dropped out of Boston’s Berklee College of Music in 2005, where he had been studying voice and audio engineering for three years. Since then, he has worked as a customer service representative for a telecom company, a receptionist, a janitor, and “hit a low point” when he got a job at Petco.

 Not looking good .... :(

Axe murderers explain the significance of philosophical novels

[The] puzzles and paradoxes of philosophical reflection are not best aired in the narrow, arid corridors of philosophical tracts; and that Plato was wrong to think that literature had nothing to offer philosophy. It is one thing to study John Stuart Mill’s defence of utilitarianism in ethics; quite another to read the passage in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), where Raskolnikov tests utilitarianism to its limits by taking an axe and cleaving an old lady’s head in two. Illustrations of this sort might even persuade us that moral philosophy needs the novel for the fullest possible expression of its aims.

 That was the best part of this essay, which is on  the rapidly disappearing field of philosophical novels.

Even with that wonderfully rich treasure trove of philosophical novels, it appears that academia routinely misuses and abuses them.  If ever a Russian literature (in translation) course, for instance, is offered at most colleges and universities that are not the big-time research universities, it seems like that the focus is on the stories and rarely ever on the philosophical issues.  

I spent three years in college and wrote three and a half stories but I read everything I could get my hands on. White Teeth is really the product of that time; it's like the regurgitation of the kind of beautiful, antiquated, left-side-of-the-brain liberal arts education which is dying a death even as I write this. Generally, an English Lit degree trains you to be a useless member of the modern world

When increasingly students are not led towards reading and understanding some of those masterful and insightful works, well, it becomes difficult for them to appreciate many other things in life, including this awesome satire from The Onion:


Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Competition, altruism, and social darwinism, in biology and US politics

Slowly catching up with issues of the New Yorker that I had missed reading, thanks to the sabbatical--I had to wait until now to read the articles that are paywalled at the magazine's site. 

Jonah Lehrer's essay on the genetics of altruism is one of those inaccessible behind the paywall.  The essay is very much a story of the scientific method, as much as it is about altruism and selfishness.  From Charles Darwin, who regarded altruism "as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection" to William Hamilton, in 1964, explaining that as a cost/benefit equation, rB > C, where "genes for altruism could evolve if the benefit (B) of an action exceeded the cost (C) to the individual once relatedness (r) was taken into account."  This was born the "inclusive fitness theory."

Lehrer writes that E.O. Wilson was the biggest champion of this neat little equation, though it was not an idea that was easy to sell.  But then, Wilson himself begins to question the validity of this equation--a classic example of the scientific method to forever question any explanatory framework, even if it is your own favorite one.  Wilson came up with a dramatically different framework about relatedness that it is "a consequence of eusociality, not the cause."

But, what about the evidence for this? In 2010, Wilson co-authors a paper in Nature that presents a lot more complicated mathematical model on the evolution of eusociality, which apparently has ignited one hell of a firestorm amongst biologists.  "Wilson is the only one who seems to be enjoying the controversy.  His appetite for scientific brawls seems, if anything, to be increasing with age." 

Wilson continues with an essay in The Daily Beast, on what drives humans to form tribes and then make wars of many types with other tribes. 

The drive to join is deeply ingrained, a result of a complicated evolution that has led our species to a condition that biologists call eusociality. “Eu-,” of course, is a prefix meaning pleasant or good: euphony is something that sounds wonderful; eugenics is the attempt to improve the gene pool. And the eusocial group contains multiple generations whose members perform altruistic acts, sometimes against their own personal interests, to benefit their group. Eusociality is an outgrowth of a new way of understanding evolution, which blends traditionally popular individual selection (based on individuals competing against each other) with group selection (based on competition among groups). Individual selection tends to favor selfish behavior. Group selection favors altruistic behavior and is responsible for the origin of the most advanced level of social behavior, that attained by ants, bees, termites—and humans.

He concludes with this:

Civilization appears to be the ultimate redeeming product of competition between groups. Because of it, we struggle on behalf of good and against evil, and reward generosity, compassion, and altruism while punishing or downplaying selfishness. But if group conflict created the best in us, it also created the deadliest. As humans, this is our greatest, and worst, genetic inheritance.

Now, compare such complex analyses of how humans behave, and how we might have evolved, with the President casually tossing out highly flammable rhetoric when criticizing the GOP budget plan:

 Reigniting his clash with Republicans over how to tame the debt and deficits, President Obama delivered a blistering attack on the House Republican budget Tuesday, calling it “thinly veiled social Darwinism” and a “prescription for decline.”

To some extent, this is a kind of war between two tribes, right?  And such a war is also an example of how our greatest genetic inheritance is also our worst inheritance :(

Robert Reich runs fast with the President's comments:

We are likely to hear a lot more about social Darwinism in the months ahead. It was the conservative creed during the late 19^th century – legitimizing a politics in which the lackeys of robber barons deposited sacks of money on legislators’ desks, and justifying an economy in which sweat shops were common, urban slums festered, and a significant portion of America was impoverished.

Seriously?  Come on; Social Darwinism?  Even if the President uses it as battle rhetoric, for Reich the academic to re-use that?

Professor Linda Hirshman's column is a lot more substantive than is Reich's.  I agree with her bottom line about the election: "Let the wild rumpus begin."