Dec

29

I'd like to make a couple of points on education.

1. I don't think that the US is capable of making a decision as a nation to pursue proper education. The concept itself is highly collectivist, so it's unlikely to work in anything but a dictatorship, and even then it's hard to implement. Individual people have to make a decision to value education, and however flawed the present system is, the children of many Asian immigrants, for example, have no trouble getting educated extremely well. Culture determines educational achievement to a much greater degree than the available infrastructure, unless it's extremely poor.

2. The country is still capable of attracting the best minds in the world if the conditions are otherwise suitable for entrepreneurship. Any shortages of highly educated workers can be fairly easily solved. There are not millions of engineering and programming jobs that are unfilled because of the lack of suitable candidates. There certainly are some, and the unemployment rate is much lower among the educated, but being a good place to do business will do wonders. That and not having "free trade" with centrally planned economies.

Ralph Vince writes:

That argument assumes my dog can learn calculus. It assumes that dopes can be meliorated to be not dopes."Education," only goes so far. You cannot take your average bozo and make him into a brilliant mathematician any more than I can train hard enough to run a mile in under 6 minutes.

Isn't going to happen– and the fallacy perpetrated by the NEA is that other countries are "Investing in education," and getting results like they are trying to have us believe we can achieve here in the states.

The rest of the planet is bunch of dopes too– only, oddly, more naive than what you find in this ever-so-sophisticated society of America.

Further — jobs aren't being hemorrhaged because the rest of the world outside the states is so smart. They're finding their way to the bottom, to slaver labor present in places elsewhere, and in the case of commodities (like steel) to places with the softer currencies. I propose that education– teaching dogs how to integrate functions– isn't moving jobs around the planet.(Incidentally, the notion that torts cost society I take issue with. Torts cut into insurance company profits, and profits never, ever EVER flow downward. If they did, those pimpy running shoes that cost $150 bucks would be available for $10).


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