The Value of Education
I was cruising through the internet yesterday when I stumbled across this great meme of General Mattis.
General James Mattis on his experience in Cambodia.
It is simple, and ultimately better said by “Mad Dog” himself. I just want to throw it up there to continue to stress how important education is. Whether it be institutional or otherwise. An institutional education signals to employers that you have accomplished the base level requirements to enter into a specific field of employment. Which is huge, it is also the single greatest investment anyone can ever make.
The most important thing that anyone should learn from any education, wherever they received it, is the ability to learn. It is the ability to absorb information and analyze it in a way that promotes understanding, not simply retention. That is the kind of weapon that all governments should fear. When we, as an educated population, have the ability to ask questions–that is power.
Promote education, regardless of age, if we want to ensure that those we leave behind are a truly free people, that is how we do it.
Category: Politics
Thank you Adam. I listened to a “man on the street” interview online. The reporter asked young college students first, can you name a US Senator. None could of the dozen or more asked. Next question was, how many Senators does each state have. The answers ranged from 8 to 123. (This is the absolute truth!) None could answer these two questions. The reporter kinda said to a couple of them in a friendly manner, “So you’re just not into the whole politics, America thing eh.” They answered “uh…no I stay out of the, you know, politics and you know the…uhm…America stuff”. (giggling and laughing) He then asked each if they knew the name of the lead song from the movie “Frozen”. (a Disney flick) EVERYONE of them knew it and answered immediately. I was to say the least appalled. I could not believe these young people, in college, not being able to answer these simple and essential questions about THEIR country and government. God help America and God, please, don’t let them vote! It makes me wonder what has happened to the quality of education being offered, no… demanded of students today. TAH’s own HS Sophomore puts all of them to shame. But he is an example of a sharp mind who goes after education with a passion. He questions what he is taught and applies reasoning to what he hears. Today it comes down, not to the education system anymore to hold high standards. It comes down today to the individual in school, wanted and seeking more. Their determination to learn is what sets them head and shoulders above the “Disney Movie Experts”. Okay off the soap box now.
You are right. Education is a two part problem, one is the individual’s choice to take it seriously. But the source of that opinion, what drives them to take their education seriously is how it was supported in the home when they were young. The investment a parent or guardian puts into a child’s education is the foundation of everything to follow.
Adam, again you are correct and I failed to mention, this issue begins at home. That is where in my community, like most around the nation, the breakdown occurs. With uninvolved parents, regarding the quality of their kid’s education, a child is doomed to a poor education of spoon fed…nothing much at all. I am sad to say. It use to be, in my day that even without much support at home, teachers TAUGHT. The basics and then advanced. Standards were higher and adhered to. They were applied and expected for promotion to the next grade. Now it is all “social promotion” and no standards to be held to. There are good teachers, (some exceptional) and then state, civil service teachers marking time till retirement. Unfortunately in my community there are far more of the latter than the former. They use the state curriculum which is the minimal of standards. They could care less about education, it is just a job. In parent, teacher conferences the race is on to see who can point the finger at who first, the teacher at mom and dad or mom and dad at the teacher. There was an old saying my two aunts who were teachers use to say. “Just as a preacher should be CALLED to preach, so a teacher should CALLED to teach.” Sums it up for me.
I would agree that there’s bad teachers, but that could be a misdiagnosis. Part of the problem is with No Child Left Behind. Basically, with its emphasis on average test scores, it’s hitched the fortunes of kids who refuse to take school seriously to the fortunes of those who do. Teachers are in a catch-22 because they only see these kids for a couple hours a day. The simple truth is that if the kids have no work ethic and no support at home, there’s really not very much teachers can do. They can’t punish because the disciplinary system has been pussified to the extreme (and even if they did, you simply can’t reach a lot of kids this way). No matter where the failure lies, these kids will ultimately come back to bite teachers with their test scores. In a lot of ways, it’s a no-win situation. Also, any mention of this subject can’t go without talking of the tyranny of AP classes. The fruits of success, or rather what must be done to achieve them, are not appealing to many students. In the past twenty years, high school has been almost completely redesigned around the new AP craze. It’s far, far he Arden than it was before. Ap classes are what colleges look for, and they’re what high schools push. The pressure is immense. I can attest to it. I had Lyme Disease for two years, and I was not a tithe as miserable or as tired then as now. I’ve been sleeping four and five hours a night for this year and most of last year. And I’m better off than some. This year, I’ve seen several people-my friends-put in psych wards because they just snapped out. We had a suicide. The pressure was just too intense. People abuse ADHD prescriptions, which are basically amphetamines, to fuel study sessions (see here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/education/seeking-academic-edge-teenagers-abuse-stimulants.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0). Adderall abuse is incredibly common. Nobody has any life outside of school. Most people can’t get their licenses until they’re way past sixteen because they’re too busy. Hell, there’s still seniors who ride the train… Read more »
Sophomore, I’ve seen a good amount of what you’ve seen. It comes with being a senior at my High School. I have a good friend who tends Adderall both as medicine and as a boost. I can’t personally say to the efficiency of such tactics, but I can say it’s insane how far people are willing to go for a good grade.
There is a lot wrong with our schooling system. A lot of teachers don’t care anymore, far too many are using tenure status as a “get-out-of-jail-free” card, the AP system is broken (the test matters to colleges, but not the class?)… My mother is a teacher’s assistant, with a degree and everything, but she has to sit on her hands and bite her tongue as if she were to speak out against any of the propaganda being taught, she could be fired.
It’s a mess, it’s a real mess. To top things off, not enough parents realize how stressful it all is. I feel like the general underplaying of the stress by the parents also leads to general cynicism and poor behavior found in high schools. I’m speaking generally, I’m no expert, but…
Keep the faith, Sophomore, and get into a good college. I’m going to Hillsdale in the fall, and that’s going to make up for all the insanity the Illinois Board of Education, or whatever they’re called, put me through.
Congrats; enjoy Hillsdale! Aye, American education is indeed a broken system in more than a few ways. In Illinois especially. California is little better off. The CTA, the California Teacher’s Association, is one of the most powerful unions in the country. And their pension fund, CALSTRS, is hundreds of billions in the red. You should see the kind of battles that creates in the halls of the Capitol. I dunno; sooner or later it’ll get so bad that they’ll have no choice but to actually fix the problem. Let’s just hope our states are not Detroit before we get there.
Thanks! One of these days I’ll find a way to shout out to TAH, but…
It can get hectic over here. The textbooks they have are jokes, and it’s mostly indoctrination in every class but Math, German, or, strangely enough, Advanced Physics (I had a really cool teacher, though, and I felt like I learned something).
English and Social Studies are the worst, though. AP Language and Composition was essentially us reading one liberal sob story after another: Mississippi (a non-fiction story of a black man going back to his home and being, oddly enough, quite derogatory to almost everyone there), Maggie-A Girl of the Streets (the dark side of the Gilded Age, of course), and a few others. This year’s class is much better, thankfully.
And social studies is right out… Geez, it was just sorta weird looking at them whitewashing one guy and blacklisting the next, all because of politics. I could swear there was an error or two, and I could have taught them the chapter on World War II, but… I digress.
I know the type. The problem isn’t really that the stuff’s there; of course it’s an important, albeit grim and despicable part of our history that everyone needs to be aware of. What bothers me is how nobody ever talks about the immense amount of progress we’ve made. Like how the percentage of black business owners is actually bigger than the proportion of A,ericans who are black. Or how voter fraud and suppression has been virtually eliminated in places it was formerly rampant in. Also, have you ever noticed the “end of history” type tone your history books take towards civil rights? It’s like as far as they’re concerned, the movement ended with the passing of LBJ’s civil rights legislation. There’s no kention of how it is very much an ongoing, albeit oft exploited, struggle today. And why do those sob stories always, always have to depict the South? Why are little things like the Ku Klux Klan’s most active areas were in Indiana and the rest of the Midwest? Or how many states in the South are actually more consistently racially integrated as opposed to northern and left coast states where segregation by custom and by the tyranny of inflated property values is the order of the day? It’s not a balanced picture. The simple truth is that it’s a hard subject to teach. You have to keep it understandable to kids, but presenting a black and white (no pun intended) picture of what is a grey and very complicated and abrasive issue does more harm than good IMHO.
HS Sophomore: The ol’ memory hole. Or, maybe you’re too young to know better. No Child Left Behind wasn’t ever the real problem/issue. Prior to NCLB, there was no standard. Kids were being pumped out of high school just to pump them out of high school. Illiteracy was damned near the norm. It did differ school to school, of course. There are good teachers out there. But, there are also craptastic teachers, and the industry of education does attract those who have no skill or ability to function in the real world. I know this because both my parents were teachers and I was raised in that “social circle”. The teaching professions is rife with non-functionals. NCLB was sabotaged from the outset. I know of one school site where the principal went, daily, classroom to classroom, making sure that every teacher was on the same page of the approved lesson plan every day. No variance allowed at all under any conditions or circumstances. The NEA railed against NCLB not because of what it was, or what it called for as requirements, but because of where it originated. Over time, NCLB was blamed for so much badness that it simply became assumed that the entire motivation was evil to begin with. And, for many in that industry, it was evil. Accountability for educational production was anathema to a large segment of those within that industry. I’m not arguing in favor of NCLB, but that program was not the problem. No program that attempted to actually force accountability for educational product by teachers is doomed. Yes, there are good teachers. But, in most school districts, good teachers have to carry a lot of weight at their school site other than their own classroom loads. Burnout is not uncommon among good teachers. The crap teachers coast and don’t really give a shit. I know of one teacher, teaching middle school math, that had her classroom walls and cielings covered with strings of chrismas lights, had 2 large over-stuffed recliner chairs in which the kids were free to lounge in whenever the mood hit… Read more »
Thanks for the shoutout, Sparks. However, I would say this: the US doesn’t measure up to countries like China and France in terms of testing, but the areas where we knock it out of the park are in work ethic and inventiveness. Nobody except Asian workers will work as hard as Americans (and we’ll display far more out of the box thinking). And then there’s just the sheer number of patents filed. Nobody can touch the US in terms of sheer numbers of successful inventions every year, and even most foreign companies do their research here. Seriously-name one new groundbreaking, widely adopted technology anywhere in the past fifty years that hasn’t come out of the US. Other nations, especially European ones and South Korea, Japan, India, Singapore, and Taiwan have done a great amount of refining of current technologies, but they’ve created very few truly new ones for themselves. As long as we have those advantages, I can sleep at night. Long hours of intense study sessions doth not maketh creative and critically thinking workforces prepared for the real world (looking at you, China, India, UK, etc.).
HS Sophomore again thank you for your post. Very good points indeed and true. I will still take good ‘ole “American know how”, perseverance and ingenuity any day over any nation. Your last point was very good. Lack of creative studies and thought in the education produce may produce a walking engineering text book but they will be very one dimensional in terms of applying what they know.
Pardon the mistype. Lack of education I guess! 😀
And I’ve always questioned those “jaywalking” and “watter’s world” segments. I get the distinct feeling those are rigged somehow. Do you actually know anybody who’s so stupid they can’t name any US senators? I can honestly say I know maybe one or two-and this is high school. I have a feeling they edit out the ones where people answer correctly (hey, if Ed Schultz can have the Zimmerman 911 tape edited to make Zimmerman look more racist, that should be easy and acceptable by comparison). Scandal sells, after all, and people, especially from the older generations who make up the largest part of the news-watching demographic outraged at how American civilization is about to go to pieces when it gets handed over to these whippersnappers (and making said older people look better by comparison without even doing anything) sells better than “hey, look, there are a couple dumbasses who can’t name any US senators walking among us!” Note: not saying anything about you older folks who watch the news, just pointing out that the media is interested in profits, too, and they go with the stuff that sells. Sometimes we see through it, sometimes we don’t. Just my humble suspicion.
Good point HS. It could have been edited just as you said for shock value. The ones they did show however, even if they were the minority to ones not shown who answered correctly, were beyond…ignorant and without care about anything except their next BFF’s text.
Eh, I’m more than familiar with the fact that there are prodigous idiots in the world. I am in HS, after all. Also, my cousin worked the graveyard shift in the 911 dispatch center to pay his way through college. Holy moly-deal with grandma having a heart attack one minute and the guy who’s calling because he doesn’t feel like he has the energy to get up to turn off his TV. Yes, that did happen. The guy called multiple times during the night, complaining of chest pain the third time. My cuz knew he had to be faking, but he sent the paramedics anyway. When they got there, the guy said it was just a little indigestion and asked them to shut his TV off so he could sleep. My cousin sent by a cop the next day to hit the guy with a ridiculous fine for abusing the 911 hotline. He ended up becoming the local court system’s worst nightmare, filing FOIAs trying to get my cousin and the officer’s info so he could sue them, appealing his ticket as far as he could, making abusive phone calls from pay phones to the 911 hotline. He finally got found to be in possession of child pornography when the cops pulled him over for a traffic stop and searched his car and found that shit. The campaign of pointless revenge for problems his own dickery created thankfully ended there. Other career highlights involve the schizophrenic lady who called to say that Jesus was returning to Earth in her backyard and she wanted him arrested for trespassing, the guy who thought that the bank repossessing his trailer constituted an emergency worthy of sending in Delta Force (Yeah, that’s right; after a six week training course, my cousin has tier one special operations forces at his beck and call. What did YOU get to command when you were in :D), and of course the guy who asked for an armed police officer to come with a gun and shoot the blue-bellied lizard he found on his back porch. Bottom line is,… Read more »
Hey, why aren’t my mega smiley faces working?! 😀
Well it worked there. Strange.
HS Sophomore the smiley face has to have a space in front and behind. The period you have there, stops it. 😀 .
Ah. That would explain it 😀 😀
Welcome to my world.
only problem: academics (faculty) get angry when you question/challenge them.
And these are the ones doing the teaching.
Just an observation.
Problem is, all too often INDOCTRINATION is substituted for education in the halls of academia.
Critical thinking is discouraged. Finding one’s own path is frowned upon, particularly if it diverges from the liberal hive mind. The result doesn’t matter, and even if the little snowflakes are wrong, it’s important that they FEEL good, lest their fragile egos be damaged from being told they are not correct.
IMO, some of the best education I ever got was nowhere near a classroom.
YMMV.
The left has seized the academy and are perverting it to try and serve their purposes. Don’t believe that? Read this-http://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-red-line/article/2014/2/18/academic-freedom-justice/
That editorial is the result of decades of Marxism being the dominant worldview in academia (the idiot Marx was the most frequently cited author in academic papers in the 1990s). The left finds fertile ground for recruitment among the young, who lacking real world experience, are susceptible to the seemingly high minded abstractions put forth by the left.
But those abstractions don’t stand up to scrutiny and so, as in Lysenkoism, views that contradict the Marxist worldview must be banished, lest the lie be exposed. And so we have the perverted academy that exists today. Mattis is right about education, but it’s not just the Khmer Rouge that recognize free inquiry as a threat.
I agree on how widespread leftism is in academia (even in HS this is the case, thought doesn’t come up as frequently because there are fewer people interested in politics and economics), but I also have to wonder about how idolized Marx really is versus simply studied. Like it or not, Marx created the ideology that changed the course of history (not in a good way, but I digress). And hey, if you want to understand what is wrong with Communism, how it changed history, and where it is now, you would have to study Communism itself, right? He also permanently changed the way we think about socioeconomics. The mere fact that American politicians can go on stage and have a debate about the best policies for the welfare of the middle class is a sample of Marx’s legacy. The idea of class distinctions and policies to benefit specific classes started with Marx, and it’s even had a profound impact on our politics. Medicaid, Medicare, the New Deal, and everything else sprang from Marx’s promotion of class consciousness. It’s also worth noting that at the time, only Communists were promoting compulsory public edication, something we consider a basic right today. These ideas didn’t exist on a large scale before him. Now, I’m no Marxist advocate, but the effect he had is undeniable. He is probably the single most influential person on modern history and social sciences. So, I suppose that the fact that he’s present in academia might be justified.
HS Sophomore-it’s true that Marx had a profound impact on how we look at issues of inequality and that his ideas might be worth consideration if the social sciences would limit themselves to only that (and I still think he is profoundly mistaken about issues of inequality especially given how wrong he was about the effects of industrialization on inequality), but I would say that he is “probably the single most influential person on modern history and social sciences” only insofar as his misapplication of the Hegelian dialectic (itself only a limited metaphysical argument about the nature of truth) argues that there is a “scientific” path to social evolution with the Communist utopia as the end result.
The left fell for that nonsense and have been working to implement Marx’s vision for decades and the overwhelming wealth of evidence that such efforts inevitably end in disaster on a monumental scale has not deterred them in the slightest. The academic left (please excuse the redundancy) quote Marx because his writings are the holy text of their faith based worldview.
In short, they are mostly not looking at “what is wrong with Marxism”, they are trying to prop up his idiocy in spite of the lessons of history. They further push their foolishness on the impressionable young and, in so doing, perpetuate a legacy of failure and tragedy.
True. Marxism is definitely a fatally flawed system of belief. I was merely wondering how many acolytes versus scholars of Marxism there are. But you are, unfortunately, definitely correct that there are a lot of people who try to prop up Marxism even in spite of everything. I can’t speak with the voice of one who’s been through college, but I can say that from what I hear, those voices seem to be mainly present in the social sciences rather than business (though I’m sure they’re there to an extent). They also seem to be the ones who, being social scientist, have a very wolly understanding of economics. But, hey, if you know your stuff, you can drive them crazy by out debating them 😀
Yes education is important. Hopefully the colleges and public schools that indoctrinate today, will actually teach in the future.
Fun fact- I went to the same High School General Mattis went to (according to wikipedia) from 2003 to 2007. Go Bombers!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mattis
You nailed it. Education focuses on remembering things, it doesn’t teach us to think critically, or how to think for ourselves.
That is pretty cool, I’m sure some of his old teachers would have some stories about him, if they were still around at that time. Probably long since retired though.
Education is not quite as effective when students are taught what to think instead of how to think, but the system we have here still is better than what most around the world can access. The opportunity to learn remains in place even though the left took control of the curriculum several decades ago.
You are right, teaching someone how to think is much more valuable than teaching someone what to think. Of course it is also much harder. That kind of education should be in the home. Leaving it up to school system leaves too much room for error.
Unfortunately, educators are themselves taught in the mostly liberal vacuum that is today’s University and College system. They then go out into the real world and reinforce the “set in stone” methods of teaching which exacerbates the problem and suppresses critical thinking and innovative ideas. Then we wonder why we are steadily losing ground to other countries.
Maybe I ignore it, or maybe I’m just in the right part of college (Business School). But I see so little of the liberal impact.
Critical thinking and the ability to think for oneself shouldn’t be placed entirely on the institution. That needs to come from each person individually, seeking out that ability and knowledge. Too many people are content to simply be sheep.
Try taking a course or two in the humanities or social sciences, Adam. Or a creative writing course. Or maybe a history course. I think you’ll have a different experience in those. (I won’t suggest a journalism or political science course as I draw the lines at the absurdly obvious.)
The business and hard science sectors tend to be much less affected by the left’s influence than the other academic departments on most campuses. IMO that’s probably because they focus on how the real world works.
That may be why I am happy in the Business department. When i took my core classes, I had a great English teacher who supported critical thinking and alternative viewpoints. But she had also not spent enough years in academia to get brainwashed by it. And my history classes were 6 or 7 years ago. I was a bit slow, took me 6 years to get my Associates. I also deployed a few times in there, I forget a lot of things that happened in that time. Other things to worry about I suppose.
Back in the dark ages, we learned critical thinking in all our classes no matter what our home life might be. Especially in math and the sciences, but to a lesser degree in every class. That is just no longer true. We have tutored youngsters and have neighbor children/grandchildren currently enrolled in the public schools. What they call lessons now would be laughable were it not so very sad.
Of course there are still some teachers of the highest caliber still in the education system, but they must teach what they are instructed to teach. Period. Reality is that most of them are there to draw a check and go home.
Gone are the days that as a child I spent many hours helping my mother grade papers after school hours. She graded papers well into the night more often than not. No such thing as doing any it during school hours.
Am afraid that students in college today have been so indoctrinated with the leftist perspective that most are unaware that they are steeped in it.
To a great extent, that is indeed the problem. The emphasis on AP classes and test scores is not conducive to critical thinking or applying lessons in real life.
There are certain cultures in which the type of tyrant who heads up a country regards the intelligensia as useless, if not dangerous, creatures. History is replete with examples of this and Pol Pot’s regime was a doozy. Equally dangerous, but bloodless, is the tyrant whose power depends upon the support of the intelligentsia, the thinker/teacher class. In the USA, Obama’s chief supporters and apologists seem to be of this class. He and they disdain the Bible readers, the gun owners, and the beer drinkers. Dail;y, it seems, they twist, ignore, and undercut the only thing that stands between us and victims of Pol Pot: the Constitution. I do not share Mattis’s belief that education necessarily begets freedom. We are a free people (relatively speaking) because of the Constitution and honorable men who have by and large respected its constraints. As for the matter of formal education itself, I’m with Twain, the brilliant but little-schooled writer who said, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
Education doesn’t itself beget freedom. But it promotes it by holding its leadership accountable. I’m also a huge fan of Twain, as a human and an author.
Right on.
Okay, so I don’t make it impossible to distinguish responses, I’m going to post this bit here. True story about my younger brother from a few years ago. Okay, the scene is a elementary school gymnasium, Earth Day, a few years ago. My brother is forced to sit and watch as a bunch of First Graders put on a play about… *Global Warming*! My brother is a smart kid, and he knows what is what; watching this is about as pleasant to him as grinding his face against a cheese grater, and that’s without kid actors involved. His mind races, debunking each and every bit of liberal exposition the teachers wrote for these quite literal babes (your guess is as good as mine if they’re in the woods) to spew before a captive (and that is also literal) audience. “This is all lies!” He thinks, frustrated. “Why do I have to sit through this!” But the play keeps going. And going. And going. All the while, his mind continues to think, “lies, lies, lies, lies!” Then, finally, it happened. His mouth caught up with him, and with the volume far surpassing the timid squeaks of the First Graders comes the yelp “*Lies!*” One Second: The room is frozen silent. All eyes are turning towards him. Horrified looks are beginning to show on the faces of the First Graders as their young minds scramble to process. Five Seconds: With coordination, almost all of the teachers in the gym stand. All eyes are on my brother. Fifteen Seconds: With ruthless efficiency, the teachers from a circling maneuver around my brother’s row of schoolchildren. He is trapped-all escape routes are closed to him, but his mind is still processing what just happened. Laughter starts to emerge from the quickest thinkers. The First Graders still don’t know what my brother means. Twenty Seconds: My brother is grabbed by the teachers and is dragged out into the hall, laugher completely destroying the mood of the gym. It is pandemonium, though likely it will be short lived as the remaining teachers attempt to control the situation.… Read more »
I’m in favor of just taking all mention of global warming out of textbooks, or at least treating it as an undecided issue. I got those talks, too. Of course, that will never happen, but, eh, we can hope.
The “Educational” system of the US is nothing more than a self-destructive bomb whose fuse was lit by the Communists during the cold war in the 1960s.
They infiltrated the universities, now we have generations of them who are deans, professors and politicians.
It goes back much further than the 60’s. the NEA back in 1934 was already advocating a socialist agenda for education, to destroy all aspects of conservative, traditional values. It has snowballed since then, with the NEA having unprecedented access to Congress and using it’s power and influence to bring about the education system we have today. They are hellbent on making sure the U.S. is subverted and our citizens become, in their words “world citizens with allegience to the inevitable world government”. This comes from the pages of the NEA’s own documents, including the Journal of the NEA.
We need to dismantle the Dept of Education, defang the NEA and return control of education to the several states. This also means getting rid of this Common Core idiocy.