I've used the 1964 Pulitzer prize book title for this thread. Reviewers rate that book just as relevant today and better than all the re-confirming works since. Me too. Intellectualism means the delight in learning itself, not because it will get you rich in the next five minutes but because of the innate curiosity that made Homo Sapiens the winner in the evolutionary struggle of man.
The reason for mentioning it along with related research was the maliciousness we have experienced from teaching our kids to read by ourselves. It not only worked, but to our delight our oldest just passed his 6th grade reading test. He won't be eligible for kindergarten until next academic year. Who knows where he will be then, but reading worked so well that we've been doing math, history, geography, and most of all science. Chemistry and cosmology - he is further ahead in those than he is in general reading. The younger boy is reading at first grade level already three years ahead of his peers. The gap is going to widen with him too, just like it did for the first.
It has been the greatest joy of our lives and the kids love school. Friends and family are behind us in a big way. But most who don't know our family well have something really nasty to say about it like "ruining their childhood", "pushing too hard", using the kids as "experiments", how it is a really bad thing to be thought of as smart, how they are socially handicapped, etc. The last is especially interesting because the most common observation people make about our kids when they meet them in person is how advanced they are socially.
This maliciousness was so striking that it brought back memories of being bullied as a boy for being the smart kid. Needing to defend myself against much older and bigger boys led me to a career in combat sports. Winning a state title for my school in a faux gladiator sport made everyone forget about my handicap of being smart. It was always a shocker to people when they discovered I was a straight A student in a college prep track. But it was okay because I was destroying their enemies, rah rah. If your five year old can play blues guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn - that's wonderful. But if he is reading the Periodic Table of Elements, that is abuse.
Our local school's last State Education Department report ranked them tied with the youth lock-up facility on their combined score. 46% flunked writing. 43% flunked science. 34% flunked math. Reading was their strength, with only 20% flunking. They have a 7:1 student teacher ratio and average salaries around $70K. As I look around, my micro-culture is self explanatory: education is not important to the families around us that are attending the public school. It doesn't make any difference what the funding is. Double or triple it, and the results will be about the same because they are downright hostile towards intellectualism in the first place.
It seems obvious to me that America's appalling slide in international education rankings is simply an anti-learning/anti-rationalist culture along with a "teach to the bottom" value system. Common Core isn't going to change that, and actually has a perverse incentive they call "teaching to the bubble" or "cheating at the bubble".
The shocking Atlanta trials proved out the logic of cheating: the standard says x% of kids must pass, and you are below x. Whose scores do you change so as to best evade detection? The kids just below the cut-off, because you don't have to change many answers.
Thousands of Atlanta teachers got sanctions for cheating besides the felony charges from the administrator-staff "eraser parties" changing test answers. They watched over their students and would say things like "check your work" for a student on the bubble that had a wrong answer. Some just bent down over the student and put their finger on the correct answer.
What isn't illegal is teaching the kids on the bubble and ignoring the bright ones who are going to pass anyway and also ignoring the kids you think will fail no matter what you do. The logic is straightforward: maximum % passed per hour of instruction.
If you look at the trends on attitudes about cheating for the students themselves, the attitude seems to have evolved that it is stupid not to cheat. All of this makes sense from the cultural perspective of America as first described by Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer prize-winning book. He did not describe nor foresee the culture of cheating arising because the "teach to the bottom" type of test standard has arisen since he wrote the book.
The top 5 scoring regions on the Program for International Student Assessment test are all East Asian. Since we're homeschooling, we studied the pedagogy of the top dozen or so countries. It included for example perennial high-scorer Finland that sends the parents home with two books at birth: one for the parents on how to teach reading. One for the kids that the parents use to teach from. They enter school later (7), but already know how to read.
It has little to do with pedagogy in these countries. They just have cultures placing high value on learning. They can recruit the best people as teachers because they pay them well enough to attract the best and the position is held in high esteem socially. The parents put their kids in cram schools instead of faux-gladiator sports and glamour contests, the first of which is sending millions of kids to US hospitals, killing up to and over a hundred per year in battle & maiming tens of thousands for life.
My God - I broke my nose twice, 5th metacarpal, 5th metatarsal, middle finger, two concussions and am headed for total hip replacement like two of my college team-mates so far. I had to quit teaching my combat sports because of a neck injury which, as the doctor said, would mean "you'll end up a cold slab of meat on the mortuary table." Yet I recall seeing a film about how horrible the Asian kids' lives were because they studied hard. As a faux gladiator, everyone saw me starving and dehydrating myself to make weight - something perfectly acceptable. Kill yourself for our gang colors, red and blue.
In the book The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley talks about the top performing regions opening their stock markets and businesses late to clear the roads for the students on exam day; examinees being cheered on by the rest of their school as they enter the building to take nine hours of exams - it's like the state football or basketball championship game to them.
In following their histories, places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. simply made the decision the future depended on scoring high internationally on education, especially the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) areas. These were culture-wide phenomena: a law cannot change an unwilling population. I think it notable that regions with high immigrant populations show this proclivity for judging themselves by international standards instead of the blind nationalism we see in others.
Look at the contrasting philosophy in the "No Child Left Behind" law (the successor of which is called Common Core). That term is merely political rhetoric because yes, they absolutely do leave children behind - the special ed kids can't pass the tests so the cut-off is somewhere above special ed.
It is a "teach to the bottom" philosophy. Our funding reflects that priority. In my state there is zero federal funding of Talented and Gifted, and no State funding (strictly up to the locality) - but millions in federal funding aimed at the bottom along with mandates imposed on the state and the locality. Disabilities too. I am not criticizing for caring about those groups, it's just that we are competing against people who have the goal of being the best in the world.
I don't see anything in the American culture big enough to turn the rudder on this ship. Not Congress or the executive. The state Governor's Association fronted Common Core, and they're no help. Homeschooling has gotten a boost from Common Core, but it is just too insignificant against the mass of public schools, which are captives of their culture. There are micro-cultures that are doing just fine, like Asian-Americans, lol. Our kids are half-breed Asian-Americans.
There are others that are shockingly bad - numerous high schools in the USA are graduating students without a single one of them passing proficiency testing in math. These top Asian performers, the Finns, etc. aren't graduating people who can't multiply and divide. They hold the kids responsible: if you don't learn the material you don't pass.
We call it "social promotion" where we pass kids to the next grade without them having earned it. The cumulative effect of that philosophy in 13 years of schooling is catastrophic even if you are only cheating a little bit each time. Suddenly requiring everyone to pass a qualifying exam to receive a high school diploma after 13 years of social promotion is politically untenable.
We're already seeing states withdrawing from common core. Consider Oregon where 65% of the students are expected to fail. Oregon is not going to flunk 65% of its students. With No Child Left Behind, all the states with any problems got waivers. To get the waiver they had to promise to do better under common core. So what is the point of standards where everyone gets waivers and you can just withdraw from the requirements? I expect nothing different with Common Core.
The Secretary of the Interior just visited Kivalina, Alaska on an environmental propaganda trip. On the last set of state tests, 96% of the students flunked science. 82% flunked math. 78% flunked writing. 75% flunked reading. The school has been required to shut down in the past because of violence against teachers and there is a zero % retention rate for K-8.
Kivalina kids are important only as pawns in the environmental political war. Apparently we need to spend hundreds of millions relocating a tiny village from the barrier island the Caucasians made them settle upon in the first place - for a BIA school built in 1907! More than a century of education later, we have these appalling results and cries for staggering amounts of money to be spent on relocating them, including a $40 million new school for the 146 students.
After all the money is spent, what good is it when the kids don't have an education worth the paper their diploma is printed on? I can't think of a more idiotic spectacle than this highly politicized visit, feigning concern for their sacred indigenous way of life - that we forced them to abandon in order to educate them in a BIA school in a place they didn't live in to begin with. Talk about anti-intellectualism.
What to do? In a future where education and STEM fields in particular are so important, our continued decline is pretty well assured. China is already ahead of us in GDP, after we've sneered at them the same way I remember Japan being sneered at with "Made in Japan" being such a pejorative when I was a boy. We make the excuse that they are behind us in GDP per capita, which places us more like 9th instead of 2nd if you want to measure how great we are in that way.
Leading the world in a couple of things for sure: jailing more of our own citizens in absolute and relative terms than any other country. World leader in destroying other countries. To me these are huge signs of anti-intellectualism. Bush was proudly ignorant and appealed to the electorate for just that reason. Obama was supposed to be a reprieve from that but sounding intelligent does not cut it for me: Libya especially was monstrously stupid but who cares. We love painting ourselves as knights on white horses, and demonizing all who ask reasonable questions like what happens after we overthrow a government. We have no need to evaluate the actual consequences of our actions and learn from them. No need to learn from the disasters in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Viet Nam, etc. No need for Habeas Corpus and other centuries-old principles of enlightenment. Back to the Dark Ages for us!
The reason for mentioning it along with related research was the maliciousness we have experienced from teaching our kids to read by ourselves. It not only worked, but to our delight our oldest just passed his 6th grade reading test. He won't be eligible for kindergarten until next academic year. Who knows where he will be then, but reading worked so well that we've been doing math, history, geography, and most of all science. Chemistry and cosmology - he is further ahead in those than he is in general reading. The younger boy is reading at first grade level already three years ahead of his peers. The gap is going to widen with him too, just like it did for the first.
It has been the greatest joy of our lives and the kids love school. Friends and family are behind us in a big way. But most who don't know our family well have something really nasty to say about it like "ruining their childhood", "pushing too hard", using the kids as "experiments", how it is a really bad thing to be thought of as smart, how they are socially handicapped, etc. The last is especially interesting because the most common observation people make about our kids when they meet them in person is how advanced they are socially.
This maliciousness was so striking that it brought back memories of being bullied as a boy for being the smart kid. Needing to defend myself against much older and bigger boys led me to a career in combat sports. Winning a state title for my school in a faux gladiator sport made everyone forget about my handicap of being smart. It was always a shocker to people when they discovered I was a straight A student in a college prep track. But it was okay because I was destroying their enemies, rah rah. If your five year old can play blues guitar like Stevie Ray Vaughn - that's wonderful. But if he is reading the Periodic Table of Elements, that is abuse.
Our local school's last State Education Department report ranked them tied with the youth lock-up facility on their combined score. 46% flunked writing. 43% flunked science. 34% flunked math. Reading was their strength, with only 20% flunking. They have a 7:1 student teacher ratio and average salaries around $70K. As I look around, my micro-culture is self explanatory: education is not important to the families around us that are attending the public school. It doesn't make any difference what the funding is. Double or triple it, and the results will be about the same because they are downright hostile towards intellectualism in the first place.
It seems obvious to me that America's appalling slide in international education rankings is simply an anti-learning/anti-rationalist culture along with a "teach to the bottom" value system. Common Core isn't going to change that, and actually has a perverse incentive they call "teaching to the bubble" or "cheating at the bubble".
The shocking Atlanta trials proved out the logic of cheating: the standard says x% of kids must pass, and you are below x. Whose scores do you change so as to best evade detection? The kids just below the cut-off, because you don't have to change many answers.
Thousands of Atlanta teachers got sanctions for cheating besides the felony charges from the administrator-staff "eraser parties" changing test answers. They watched over their students and would say things like "check your work" for a student on the bubble that had a wrong answer. Some just bent down over the student and put their finger on the correct answer.
What isn't illegal is teaching the kids on the bubble and ignoring the bright ones who are going to pass anyway and also ignoring the kids you think will fail no matter what you do. The logic is straightforward: maximum % passed per hour of instruction.
If you look at the trends on attitudes about cheating for the students themselves, the attitude seems to have evolved that it is stupid not to cheat. All of this makes sense from the cultural perspective of America as first described by Richard Hofstadter in his Pulitzer prize-winning book. He did not describe nor foresee the culture of cheating arising because the "teach to the bottom" type of test standard has arisen since he wrote the book.
The top 5 scoring regions on the Program for International Student Assessment test are all East Asian. Since we're homeschooling, we studied the pedagogy of the top dozen or so countries. It included for example perennial high-scorer Finland that sends the parents home with two books at birth: one for the parents on how to teach reading. One for the kids that the parents use to teach from. They enter school later (7), but already know how to read.
It has little to do with pedagogy in these countries. They just have cultures placing high value on learning. They can recruit the best people as teachers because they pay them well enough to attract the best and the position is held in high esteem socially. The parents put their kids in cram schools instead of faux-gladiator sports and glamour contests, the first of which is sending millions of kids to US hospitals, killing up to and over a hundred per year in battle & maiming tens of thousands for life.
My God - I broke my nose twice, 5th metacarpal, 5th metatarsal, middle finger, two concussions and am headed for total hip replacement like two of my college team-mates so far. I had to quit teaching my combat sports because of a neck injury which, as the doctor said, would mean "you'll end up a cold slab of meat on the mortuary table." Yet I recall seeing a film about how horrible the Asian kids' lives were because they studied hard. As a faux gladiator, everyone saw me starving and dehydrating myself to make weight - something perfectly acceptable. Kill yourself for our gang colors, red and blue.
In the book The Smartest Kids in the World, Amanda Ripley talks about the top performing regions opening their stock markets and businesses late to clear the roads for the students on exam day; examinees being cheered on by the rest of their school as they enter the building to take nine hours of exams - it's like the state football or basketball championship game to them.
In following their histories, places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, etc. simply made the decision the future depended on scoring high internationally on education, especially the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) areas. These were culture-wide phenomena: a law cannot change an unwilling population. I think it notable that regions with high immigrant populations show this proclivity for judging themselves by international standards instead of the blind nationalism we see in others.
Look at the contrasting philosophy in the "No Child Left Behind" law (the successor of which is called Common Core). That term is merely political rhetoric because yes, they absolutely do leave children behind - the special ed kids can't pass the tests so the cut-off is somewhere above special ed.
It is a "teach to the bottom" philosophy. Our funding reflects that priority. In my state there is zero federal funding of Talented and Gifted, and no State funding (strictly up to the locality) - but millions in federal funding aimed at the bottom along with mandates imposed on the state and the locality. Disabilities too. I am not criticizing for caring about those groups, it's just that we are competing against people who have the goal of being the best in the world.
I don't see anything in the American culture big enough to turn the rudder on this ship. Not Congress or the executive. The state Governor's Association fronted Common Core, and they're no help. Homeschooling has gotten a boost from Common Core, but it is just too insignificant against the mass of public schools, which are captives of their culture. There are micro-cultures that are doing just fine, like Asian-Americans, lol. Our kids are half-breed Asian-Americans.
There are others that are shockingly bad - numerous high schools in the USA are graduating students without a single one of them passing proficiency testing in math. These top Asian performers, the Finns, etc. aren't graduating people who can't multiply and divide. They hold the kids responsible: if you don't learn the material you don't pass.
We call it "social promotion" where we pass kids to the next grade without them having earned it. The cumulative effect of that philosophy in 13 years of schooling is catastrophic even if you are only cheating a little bit each time. Suddenly requiring everyone to pass a qualifying exam to receive a high school diploma after 13 years of social promotion is politically untenable.
We're already seeing states withdrawing from common core. Consider Oregon where 65% of the students are expected to fail. Oregon is not going to flunk 65% of its students. With No Child Left Behind, all the states with any problems got waivers. To get the waiver they had to promise to do better under common core. So what is the point of standards where everyone gets waivers and you can just withdraw from the requirements? I expect nothing different with Common Core.
The Secretary of the Interior just visited Kivalina, Alaska on an environmental propaganda trip. On the last set of state tests, 96% of the students flunked science. 82% flunked math. 78% flunked writing. 75% flunked reading. The school has been required to shut down in the past because of violence against teachers and there is a zero % retention rate for K-8.
Kivalina kids are important only as pawns in the environmental political war. Apparently we need to spend hundreds of millions relocating a tiny village from the barrier island the Caucasians made them settle upon in the first place - for a BIA school built in 1907! More than a century of education later, we have these appalling results and cries for staggering amounts of money to be spent on relocating them, including a $40 million new school for the 146 students.
After all the money is spent, what good is it when the kids don't have an education worth the paper their diploma is printed on? I can't think of a more idiotic spectacle than this highly politicized visit, feigning concern for their sacred indigenous way of life - that we forced them to abandon in order to educate them in a BIA school in a place they didn't live in to begin with. Talk about anti-intellectualism.
What to do? In a future where education and STEM fields in particular are so important, our continued decline is pretty well assured. China is already ahead of us in GDP, after we've sneered at them the same way I remember Japan being sneered at with "Made in Japan" being such a pejorative when I was a boy. We make the excuse that they are behind us in GDP per capita, which places us more like 9th instead of 2nd if you want to measure how great we are in that way.
Leading the world in a couple of things for sure: jailing more of our own citizens in absolute and relative terms than any other country. World leader in destroying other countries. To me these are huge signs of anti-intellectualism. Bush was proudly ignorant and appealed to the electorate for just that reason. Obama was supposed to be a reprieve from that but sounding intelligent does not cut it for me: Libya especially was monstrously stupid but who cares. We love painting ourselves as knights on white horses, and demonizing all who ask reasonable questions like what happens after we overthrow a government. We have no need to evaluate the actual consequences of our actions and learn from them. No need to learn from the disasters in Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Viet Nam, etc. No need for Habeas Corpus and other centuries-old principles of enlightenment. Back to the Dark Ages for us!
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