Too much education makes people economically dumb

[OakRidgeStars]

From Bookwormroom.com

I’m not boasting when I say that I move in very rarefied circles. It’s a fact that became glaringly obvious to me today when I started reaching out to legal colleagues via LinkedIn. I’m launching a new business enterprise, and those connections will be useful.

For those unfamiliar with it, LinkedIn is the professional equivalent of Facebook. Rather than chit-chatting about children, sports, and the minutiae of their lives, people use LinkedIn to post their resumes, boast about their professional accomplishments, and network with other professionals to whom they can be useful or who can be useful to them. So, as I said, I’m working on using LinkedIn to touch base with lawyers I’ve met over the years, whether high school classmates who went into law, law school classmates, professional colleagues, or people whom I’ve met through PTA and the neighborhood who also happen to be lawyers.

As with Facebook, LinkedIn examines your friends’ friends and, if two of them share a common friend, LinkedIn will suggest that person to you as a possible link in your own professional network. This is where I get to the rarefied bit. When I scroll through my LinkedIn contacts (who currently number less than 100, because I’ve never paid that much attention to cultivating these contacts), I get suggestions that run the gamut from high stratum A to rarefied stratum B: ambassadors, corporate CEOs, senior counsel at major corporations, managing partners of huge law firms, etc. In my circles, these titles are predominant amongst the various professional friendships LinkedIn identifies for me.

Read more here: http://www.bookwormroom.com/2012/11/17/ ... ally-dumb/

[dorminWS]

Lot of truth in that. Lawyers are for the most part parasitic "free riders" that bleed productivity out of the system whatever side they work for. Teachers and professors are insulated from the real world and therefore not obliged by the marketplace to be relevant OR accurate in what they espouse; and, as the author says, are steeped in progressive bullsh!t. Doctors (most of them) are also elitists who know a great deal about a very narrow field but expect to call the shots in all the world because they are doctors. Doctors are, as a group, the world's WORST business people; closely followed by lawyers - who don't lead the teachers in that dubious distinction by very much. It's largely because they all assume that whatever they don't already know and what doesn't impact their own circumstances is unimportant. And all those folks out there in fortune 500 companies and on Wall Street? They got there by virtue of their MBAs. Most of them lear\ned just enough to game the system. They are, in my opinion, closely analogous to those 18th-century British officers whose rich daddies PURCHASED their commissions. They don't usually know a DAMN thing - they just bought a ticket and got it punched by the conductor; and everyone else is obliged to assume they know their @sses from first base - while their incompetence and ignorance (coupled with their disastrously short-term outlook) wreaks havoc.

[Reverenddel]

As I told a liberal before, "A concert pianist has a marketable skill... everywhere, but the deepest darkest Amazonian rainforest, because then a redneck is a commodity."

When the world falls apart, and justice is held by the end of a barrel/point of a sword, they're all useless.

[lukertin]

I can assure you the majority of those people who voted for Obama did not care about the "economic" picture. They were probably concerned about other things (cough abortion, gay marriage, immigration). As you state yourself these guys are highly educated and have high paying jobs. They are highly motivated and will succeed no matter the financial climate.

Also Massachusetts and New York and Connecticut may be in debt but they have this country's BEST public education systems while your "fiscally sound red states" have the country's WORST education systems. So your lsi basically shows that a bunch of blue states (with the exception of california which is its own little microcosm) are borrowing tons of money to ensure their high school students know how to do math and spell. I think they have their priorities straight.

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[gunderwood]

I can assure you the majority of those people who voted for Obama did not care about the "economic" picture. They were probably concerned about other things (cough abortion, gay marriage, immigration). As you state yourself these guys are highly educated and have high paying jobs. They are highly motivated and will succeed no matter the financial climate.

Also Massachusetts and New York and Connecticut may be in debt but they have this country's BEST public education systems while your "fiscally sound red states" have the country's WORST education systems. So your lsi basically shows that a bunch of blue states (with the exception of california which is its own little microcosm) are borrowing tons of money to ensure their high school students know how to do math and spell. I think they have their priorities straight.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

It depends on how you qualify best. From here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2012/16src.h31.html it seems pretty well balanced between political divisions. If you're looking at individual schools, at least according to US News, you're incorrect: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-hi ... l-rankings The top spots are held in "red states."

Yes, the NEA ranks blue states higher, but if I recall correctly a decent portion of their ranking system includes teacher pay scales, which will favor rich and/or blue states that have let public unions run wild.

The real problem is that in general the public school system is in shambles after 3 generations of being run by liberals. You wanted your Prussian system and now we all suffer because of it. Money isn't the issue either, the system is systemically flawed. Ignorance helps win elections though.

[ShotgunBlast]

On an international stage the US ranks 25th in math and 18th in science. Countries like Estonia, Denmark, the Slovak Republic, and Luxembourg outrank us.

One reason I'm not a fan of teachers unions is because I don't think we're getting the most bang for our buck and I don't think throwing more money at the problem is going to fix it. We've had 30+ years of the Department of Education... where has that gotten us?

[GeneFrenkle]

On an international stage the US ranks 25th in math and 18th in science. Countries like Estonia, Denmark, the Slovak Republic, and Luxembourg outrank us.

One reason I'm not a fan of teachers unions is because I don't think we're getting the most bang for our buck and I don't think throwing more money at the problem is going to fix it. We've had 30+ years of the Department of Education... where has that gotten us?

We have a school system forcing children to memorize answers to a standardized exam to which money is attached.

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[gunderwood]

On an international stage the US ranks 25th in math and 18th in science. Countries like Estonia, Denmark, the Slovak Republic, and Luxembourg outrank us.

One reason I'm not a fan of teachers unions is because I don't think we're getting the most bang for our buck and I don't think throwing more money at the problem is going to fix it. We've had 30+ years of the Department of Education... where has that gotten us?

We have a school system forcing children to memorize answers to a standardized exam to which money is attached.

[ Post made via Mobile Device ]

+1 to both.

We teach knowledge without understanding because we want "worker drones" who can do, but lack critical thinking skills. Look up the Prussian system of education, that's the whole point, so in a way, it's highly successful.

[GeneFrenkle]

Competely agree. Things are getting so bad Colleges and Universities need to run Freshmen through remedial subjects. Add to the school failures social pressures promoting ignorance, teachers having authority stripped, teachers ignorant of their subject matter, promoting feelings about answers rather than correctness, elimination of competition, and the "sanitization" of curricula.

Over the years, I've also noticed an increasng inability of young people being able to assemble a cogent resume. During interviews, there is a tendency towards them expecting gratitude for actually answering a phone for the initial screening.

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[ShotgunBlast]

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

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[lukertin]

It depends on how you qualify best. From here: http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2012/16src.h31.html it seems pretty well balanced between political divisions. If you're looking at individual schools, at least according to US News, you're incorrect: http://www.usnews.com/education/best-hi ... l-rankings The top spots are held in "red states."

I qualify "best" based on objective scoring. The US Government has been keeping track of these statistics for over a decade: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/
With the exception of Texas and North Carolina the entire "red state" education system is a joke.

USNews is a joke of a ranking system, you aren't honestly using that as an authoritative source of ranking information, are you? (http://www.usnews.com/education/high-sc ... ethodology)
They don't even rank these schools against each other on a national level. And even if their list were accurate, the fact that 5 schools in Texas are the best in the country doesn't mean Texas has the best public education system in the country.

Yes, the NEA ranks blue states higher, but if I recall correctly a decent portion of their ranking system includes teacher pay scales, which will favor rich and/or blue states that have let public unions run wild.

The NCES data I linked doesn't rank based on such meaningless criteria. However, USNews uses meaningless ranking factors like teacher:student ratios, minority performance for blacks and hispanics (who the hell cares?), and AP exam participation (never mind the fact that some schools FORCE students to take AP exams). China has teacher:student ratios of 1:50 and they do calculus by grade 9, meanwhile kids in our schools can't even grasp basic algebra.

The real problem is that in general the public school system is in shambles after 3 generations of being run by liberals.

Massachusetts is "liberal". Yet, if it were its own country, it would be ranked internationally as the 9th best country for its public education.

You wanted your Prussian system and now we all suffer because of it. Money isn't the issue either, the system is systemically flawed. Ignorance helps win elections though.

I don't know what that is. Money isn't the issue, agreed. Taking all the money they're throwing at education and using it to reward children with cash for getting A's is a better idea than anything they've been doing for the past twenty years.

We have a school system forcing children to memorize answers to a standardized exam to which money is attached.

You ever taken one of those standardized tests? forcing children to memorize answers? haha, that's a funny joke.

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

I'm pretty sure Rockefellar was a Republican. Whose mission was accomplished, exactly?

I'm not exactly sure what you're alluding to, but I'll end with this: not everyone has the drive, ambition, or intelligence to do well in school and learn things. High school should function as setting a baseline "you must be capable of doing these things" as a responsible adult. The handing out of federal loans to students pursuing college, graduate, and professional schools needs to stop, as it is doing little more than driving up tuition costs for everyone and creating a class of college graduates who are burdened with massive debt and can't find jobs to pay that debt down.

Going to college to get a good job, even the mere suggestion that college is necessary to make a living in this country is the biggest lie Democrats and Obama have told this country's millennial generation and they are just eating it up. The educational racket (and I call it a racket) has absolutely ruined everyone with a bachelor's degree and beyond. There is no incentive to go to school for eight years to become a doctor when you don't even need to graduate from college to have the same purchasing power: http://www.investmentnews.com/article/2 ... /110309903

You want to talk about economic "common sense", look at what the DoE has done with its Stafford loans. 50 years ago people would be shocked.

[gunderwood]

I qualify "best" based on objective scoring. The US Government has been keeping track of these statistics for over a decade: http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/states/

Thanks for the laugh. Government scoring and ranking is NEVER objective; just like inflation or any other data they pump out. There's always some bureaucrat with an agenda, because remember they're tasked with managing "the system," aka the people's affairs. All scoring systems are designed to measure something, good scoring systems are intended to measure what you think is important...if they do or do not is an interesting matter.

I'm sorry, but I don't worship at the alter of the state. There are good and bad things our government does, but I missed the commandment that said they were objective.

The NCES data I linked doesn't rank based on such meaningless criteria.

Yes because standardized tests are the end all be all to education...that and who offers the most free lunches.

You wanted your Prussian system and now we all suffer because of it. Money isn't the issue either, the system is systemically flawed. Ignorance helps win elections though.

I don't know what that is. Money isn't the issue, agreed. Taking all the money they're throwing at education and using it to reward children with cash for getting A's is a better idea than anything they've been doing for the past twenty years.

I suggest you educate yourself on the historical, philosophical, and systemic aspects of how the "modern" US public education came into being. Wikipedia is an OK place to start, but I suggest you read deeper into the issue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

The cliff notes version is...

Prussia, for many reasons including the recent war, wanted more hands capable of fulfilling factory jobs. I.e. doers, not thinkers. Thus, for the good of society, they set up the education system as a giant social engineering experiment designed to turn out mostly able technicians (aka doers) who responded well to doing exactly what they were told. To a lesser extent they needed people who actually understood how things worked (aka engineers/scientists) and to an even lesser extent leaders (aka politicians) who's job it would be to direct the whole. Thus, they set up a system that broke education up into age groups (aka classes), structured learning as a pursuit of knowledge rather than understanding, separated the subjects so the teaching of a unified whole was shunned (look at the etymology of university...~one-whole; not to mention historical education as such an institution), and even went so far as to structure the time as disjoint "periods" which are switched between by a bell. It's no accident that the modern US education system resembles a factory.

This system does not want nor need independent, critical thinkers.

You ever taken one of those standardized tests? forcing children to memorize answers? haha, that's a funny joke.

I'm relatively young and yes, I've taken a bunch of them...all jokes as far as measuring true understanding and critical thinking, don't consider them funny though. More like sad.

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

I'm pretty sure Rockefellar was a Republican. Whose mission was accomplished, exactly?

Political parties are not a good measure of one's ideology. Rockefeller was a progressive as any liberal democrat on such issues (all statist are really regressive in the larger classical sense, but the terms been co-opted lately). The focus really is statism, although we do argue about the details of how the state will control everything.

I'm not exactly sure what you're alluding to, but I'll end with this: not everyone has the drive, ambition, or intelligence to do well in school and learn things. High school should function as setting a baseline "you must be capable of doing these things" as a responsible adult. The handing out of federal loans to students pursuing college, graduate, and professional schools needs to stop, as it is doing little more than driving up tuition costs for everyone and creating a class of college graduates who are burdened with massive debt and can't find jobs to pay that debt down.

Going to college to get a good job, even the mere suggestion that college is necessary to make a living in this country is the biggest lie Democrats and Obama have told this country's millennial generation and they are just eating it up. The educational racket (and I call it a racket) has absolutely ruined everyone with a bachelor's degree and beyond. There is no incentive to go to school for eight years to become a doctor when you don't even need to graduate from college to have the same purchasing power: http://www.investmentnews.com/article/2 ... /110309903

You want to talk about economic "common sense", look at what the DoE has done with its Stafford loans. 50 years ago people would be shocked.

At least we have some common ground now. The government is incapable of producing a good educational solution. The history of government intervention, in nearly everything not just education, is one of massive social engineering in an attempt to breed a "useful" populace. So much for the government serving the people...

[FiremanBob]

Lukertin, you're new here. Are you posting from the White House or DNC headquarters?

I have lived in Connecticut. I know that the "best education" is solely because of very high achievers in the wealthiest towns in Fairfield county. And those kids do so well because their parents are the best and brightest performers on Wall Street and other high-level industries. The excellence is not in the spending, it is in the families. My wife used to teach in eastern CT, and I can tell you the children there were as dull, unmotivated, and obsessed with pop culture as the kids in any urban backwater in the Bronx.

The high test results in wealthy parts of CT are due to the wealth and motivation of the families who live there, not because of how much the state spends on education.

The claim that the level of government spending on education is in any way responsible for outcomes is a Democrat/teachers union fallacy. It is complete BS. New York City, Chicago and Washington, DC also have very high per-student spending - but when you spend that money on controlling student crime, it isn't available for educational activities.

[grumpyMSG]

We have a school system forcing children to memorize answers to a standardized exam to which money is attached.

That can't be 100% true, memorizing multiplication tables is possible, doing the actual math takes thought and reasoning.
The bigger thing is, they aren't teaching the subjects/ standards that you wish they would. Would you have a problem if part of the testing required them to have knowledge of the Constitution and it's amendments?

Going to college to get a good job, even the mere suggestion that college is necessary to make a living in this country is the biggest lie Democrats and Obama have told this country's millennial generation and they are just eating it up. The educational racket (and I call it a racket) has absolutely ruined everyone with a bachelor's degree and beyond. There is no incentive to go to school for eight years to become a doctor when you don't even need to graduate from college to have the same purchasing power: http://www.investmentnews.com/article/2 ... /110309903

You want to talk about economic "common sense", look at what the DoE has done with its Stafford loans. 50 years ago people would be shocked.

It isn't just today's kids who were fed this line, people have been saying "the only way to get a good paying job is to go to college...", I started hearing it as a kid in the '70s and it was probably before that. Most people fail to understand that increasing demand will cause an increase in prices. The easy student loan/ grant money actually triggered the inflation in education costs.

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

We teach knowledge without understanding because we want "worker drones" who can do, but lack critical thinking skills. Look up the Prussian system of education, that's the whole point, so in a way, it's highly successful.

I don't know what schools and parents you have been dealing with, and yes, I am including parents. A lot of young folks I have dealt with over the last quarter of a century were fed this line of crap about being special and how they were going to change the world. Very few made the conscious choice to be "worker bees". In my opinion, most of the "worker bees" are more successful financially and happier than those whose parents drove them to get a college degree. Some of today's college grads have such a sense of entitlement that they won't stoop to doing manual labor no matter how well it pays. Nothing like working in a warehouse and making more money than someone with a Masters in Social Work.

[GeneFrenkle]

Certainly some level of education is based upon memorization just like the multiplication tables... but they are not really being taught in favor of using calculators. Interpolation for log tables is gone, geesh, log tables are gone.

"Doers" and "thinkers" are fine and both are worthwhile. The issue is whether or not the individual has the ability to make their own choices and to decide on their own future.

Agreed that parents are part of it. Ones that are involved are becoming more rare and schools reject parental participation.

>> Would you have a problem if part of the testing required them to have knowledge of the Constitution and it's amendments?

That used to be called civics. Now, is's just a chapter in social stdies. Yes, they go over it, recite the 1st paragraph, but that's about it. This is why folks let the 4th Ammendment slip when approached by Police - "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" fallacy is in full swing. Folks miss the point!

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[gunderwood]

We have a school system forcing children to memorize answers to a standardized exam to which money is attached.

That can't be 100% true, memorizing multiplication tables is possible, doing the actual math takes thought and reasoning.

Certainly memorizing multiplication tables is important (as is addition, subtraction, and division), but many adults have a hard time balancing their check-book despite knowing how to add/subtract.

Most people fail to understand that increasing demand will cause an increase in prices. The easy student loan/ grant money actually triggered the inflation in education costs.

Exactly.

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

We teach knowledge without understanding because we want "worker drones" who can do, but lack critical thinking skills. Look up the Prussian system of education, that's the whole point, so in a way, it's highly successful.

I don't know what schools and parents you have been dealing with, and yes, I am including parents. A lot of young folks I have dealt with over the last quarter of a century were fed this line of crap about being special and how they were going to change the world. Very few made the conscious choice to be "worker bees". In my opinion, most of the "worker bees" are more successful financially and happier than those whose parents drove them to get a college degree. Some of today's college grads have such a sense of entitlement that they won't stoop to doing manual labor no matter how well it pays. Nothing like working in a warehouse and making more money than someone with a Masters in Social Work.

First, do not confuse intent with process. That was their intentions and they've generally succeeded. There are variations on the process theme, such as you mentioned. Second, do not confuse college educated with "thinker." The two are not synonymous. I've said it before, but I've known people with multiple degrees who I would not hire to mow my grass and others without a single degree who I would hire in an instant. College is as much a part of this this educational myth now as the actual public education systems. Once government is allowed to set a standard, nearly everyone falls in line because if you want access to students with grant/loan money, you'd better be accredited. The government controls the monies, so they get to make the rules.

[dorminWS]

"I don't want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers."
John D. Rockefeller

Mission accomplished.

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>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

WRONG. Most of them won't work and don't know how to think.