That anti-intellectual thing

[SeattlePioneer]

Hello Beavah,

 

 

It sounds like we can agree that the student loan business is a bubble waiting to burst.

 

 

It also illustrates why no one intervenes when bubbles develop. Bubbles like the home real estate bubble make money for a variety of interest groups as long as they last. They tend to develop momentum and years of growth make it hard to imagine and argue successfully for retrenchment and restraint.

 

So you usually have to wait until the bubble bursts. After that, it's easy to see the weaknesses that were being ignored.

 

The real estate bubble has now been exposed for the rotten foundation that was ignored for years. The student loan bubble is on its way to failure and bailouts on a massive scale.

 

Now for an added comment you will not agree with---

 

 

Federal spending and borrowing is also an unsustainable bubble. In theory we could cut back on that and avoid disaster, and I suggest that is what the Tea Party has tried to do (certainly imperfectly).

 

But as with most bubbles, arguments for restraint are ignored. People can't give up making money off a system that still works, so more of the same is the usual agenda.

 

In your case you are arguing that this is a splendid time to expand our borrowing and spending. In the light of the bubble theory I have outlined here, perhaps you can understand why I might view this as unsound.

 

Your idea of the attractions of more borrowing and spending reminds me of the people who observe the sea go way out before a tsunami, and run out on the exposed ocean bottom to gather up the fish that have been beached.

 

Yes, the fish are there for the taking. But the smart thing to do is to be running for high ground.

 

 

 

 

[Beavah]

Yep, SP, I can agree with most of that, eh? Bubbles happen because of greed and abusive speculation, aided by structural economic or policy features. College costs risin' at many times da inflation rate supported by government guaranteed lending might well fit da bill, especially when yeh factor in da emergence of for-profit providers (da surest sign of a bubble is when yeh get lots of people making money on stuff that never worked before and is generally a low-quality product. Like derivatives on sub-prime loans).

 

I can even see da point with a concern with da government not being responsible about scaling back future spending as the economy recovers. We all know that all politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, are addicted to their earmarks and beholden to their lobbyists.

 

What doesn't make any sense to me is choosing to be completely irresponsible now just because yeh worry we might be irresponsible later. Especially when being irresponsible now makes da situation later worse. It's like saying that there might be a hurricane in a few years so we're goin' to shut down the business and board up the windows now.

 

Not understanding good business decisions and expecting da government to be "magical" is Democrat-style thinking, and that's what you're doin'. It doesn't work that way. There's no magic, either for cutting or spending. Just good business decisions. And good business decisions depend on timing.

 

Beavah

[Hal_Crawford]

I think it is a great idea to force all students into careers in engineering or sciences, even if they have no talent or passion for it. Without these sub-par engineers and scientists who is going to design the next Takoma Narrows Bridge (Google the video if this isn't familiar to you), decide that it is fine to fill a space capsule with pure oxygen or decide that thalidomide is a perfectly safe treatment for morning sickness.

 

I have a cousin who flunked out of three fine engineering schools only to join the navy and discover that he had a gift for foreign languages.

 

The needs for various fields fluctuate. From Sputnik through Apollo there was a big push for engineers then they were suddenly a glut on the market. I dropped out of engineering and majored in Drama--design and technology. My college roommate majored in engineering eventually working on the Shuttle program. Over the years he has earned more than I when he worked but he has had more and longer periods of unemployment. On the whole I think we have probably been about even as far as income and I am a whole lot happier. I would have been a crappy engineer.

 

My son dropped out of college and works in tech support. He earns a decent living telling some of the smartest scientists in the country how their computers, Blackberries and iPads work. He is good at what he does largely because he communicates well; something that he learned in part by hanging out with theatre people from a very young age and also through Scouting.

 

My uncle, a surgeon, used to advise young people who wanted to be doctors to major in English. "We have plenty of fine clinicians and scientists but few of them have the writing skills to publish the advances they have made or the techniques they have discovered. Learn to write, then study medicine". Liberal arts and science together. Who'da thunk?

 

To each his or her own talents and abilities. We need engineers and scientists but we also need artists, musicians, linguists and historians.

[vol_scouter]

For most students, the junior year in college marks the time when they become somewhat committed to a field and career path. Prior to beginning my junior year as a Physics major, the department chairman had a meeting with all sophomore Physics majors to discuss what the job market was and what kind of training was required. Then as now, the entry level degree in physics is a PHD and the job market is poor. That allowed everyone to realistically size up their chances of getting a job.

 

It seems to me that it would be a good idea to have some sort of a program in high schools and in the first two years of college to talk to students about the job prospects in the various fields. That way, they can make informed decisions about careers. I have met far too many young people who were seeking jobs and had no real idea of the education required to secure their dream job or the likelihood of achieving it. Forcing kids into fields or limiting choices artificially is a mistake.

[packsaddle]

I have a theory about the original topic of this thread.

 

I think we can all agree that we have - at various times - had some marginal leadership at many, if not all, levels of government. We probably don't agree on who those were. That's ok.

Here's the basis of the theory: The founding fathers created a system of government that is so capable of surviving lousy leaders, so full of self-correcting mechanisms, so inherently stable, that we can hire morons to lead us and the system will continue to work. Perhaps not perfectly but well enough to survive hundreds of years of assault by those morons.

 

Still agreed?

My theory is that this allows us the freedom to actually ELECT morons, figuratively speaking. And our understanding of this fundamental strength of our system causes us to conclude: "Hey, what's the need for high standards of education, if even morons can get elected to positions of leadership?" or something along those lines. And therefore, as a society, we tend not to think of intellect as something that is necessary or even all that desirable.

In short, the wisdom and intellect of the founding fathers led them to create a system which has unintentionally spawned a society that sees little value in intellect. Nice.

[vol_scouter]

Pack,

 

I think that you have hit on only a part of the anti-intellectual direction of our society. The other parts come from society worshipping celebrities who often do not even possess a high school education and athletes who possess cheapened college educations. How many times will we see some idiot celebrity talking about science on a so called news show? The society worships these two groups and spends most of their time talking about them. How often do the new Nobel Prize winners get asked to be on the news shows?

[packsaddle]

Heh, heh, not often. You do have a point regarding celebrity. I would add that the concept of celebrity itself, and what we identify as celebrity, is symptomatic as well - that might be your point.

But a few of the prize winners are also really good at communicating to the public...or at least entertaining in various ways. I remember listening in shock to Shockley, admiration to Feynman, fascination to Watson. But most of them would be too boring for a public which mostly expects Jerry Springer.

[Eamonn]

Back in the day just slightly before my time, in the UK there was an 11 + Exam.

Kids took this standard exam and those who did well went to the Grammar Schools and those who didn't went to the Secondary Schools.

Grammar Schools groomed their students to follow a career in an academic field, while Secondary Schools groomed their students for a trade.

Kids could leave school at 16 and become apprenticed to a trade, working with a qualified tradesman and attending a trade school or college on a part time basis.

While it was unfair that a kids entire life might be determined by how well or how badly he did at an exam when he was 11 years old and it was a fact that the grammar schools had the best and better qualified teachers. A lot of the time it worked.

A Lad who wanted to be a brick layer could work his way to become a Master Brick layer attend a school where he learned brick laying and got the practical skills from on the job training.

While I do believe that every kid deserves a good and quality education, I don't believe that every kid deserves or needs a four year degree.

I haven't been very impressed with my dealings with the American education system.

That might be because I'm of an age when kids were seen and not heard and maybe there was a greater respect for teachers and adults?

My son was never the type of kid that would ever be termed "Top of the class" Or an A student.

In fact he was a lazy little toad who got away with doing as little as was needed just to get by.

His senior year in High School was a joke, not only was he hardly ever required to be at the school, but the classes he had were what I call Mickey Mouse classes.

His first year at college was more about redoing stuff that he had or should have done in H.S than anything else.

While I do understand that the way we now teach kids has changed from back in the dark ages when I was teaching.

I'm not as yet sold on the idea that not teaching kids to study and just entertaining them is such a good idea?

 

Used to be that when the list of important jobs were listed, farmers were at the top. - Not sure if that's still the case?

Truth is that I'm starting to think that no matter what job you have that there's a good chance that your big boss will find someone somewhere to do it for less.

For about ten years Dell was a very big employer in Ireland, but when the Irish workers started to catch up in wages with the rest of the EEC, Dell pulled out and moved to Poland.

Already we see what's happening in China, we think that India will be next and then of course there is Brazil.

Ea.

[packsaddle]

"His first year at college was more about redoing stuff that he had or should have done in H.S than anything else." This resonates with me because I see it often.

The engineering program has an entire 'academic success' effort to try to help students overcome the deficiencies, primarily in math, physics, chemistry. If I get fired, it's probably because I opened my big mouth once too often on this subject. My opinion is that those students should not be admitted at all. And here's the dirty little secret: a lot of them are home-schooled. We don't usually find out about this until much later and I don't know if good statistics are kept but that is what I'm told.

But if they don't measure up to the admission standards which would place them in a path to success in regular courses, they should not be admitted, no matter who they are.

 

[Mr. Boyce]

The economy's changing, and in a bad way. So it is prudent to advise a young person to see how they can fit into a vocation.

 

It's important to make a living.

 

It's also important to live well. The liberal arts are what it takes to fully enjoy the richness of life. So you need this, too.

 

I don't see it as "either-or." I see it as "both."

[drmbear]

Wasn't it the communists that thought social engineering and directing people into what the government thought they were "best" at, was a good idea? That worked out real well, didn't it? I'm an engineer - guilty of pursuing one of those "practical" degrees...

[SeattlePioneer]

Hello Drmbear,

 

 

[CalicoPenn]

"Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" which relates the political and philosophical underpinnings of fascism, communism, socialism and American progressivism."

 

Speaking of anti-intellectualism.....

[Mr. Boyce]

Without getting so much into politics, in my area it has been the business establishment, the manufacturers association, that emphasize the "social engineering"/get a practical degree, kind of thing.

 

But that's not entirely unreasonable.

[CalicoPenn]

Yep - getting that "practical" degree is a boon, until your field is either overwhelmed with people with the same degree or there are changes in your field.

 

How many folks who earned computer sciences degrees 20 years ago have been pushed out of their jobs to be replaced by younger folks with newer and different skills because of changes in how programming is done (Not many people use Cobol or Fortran to program with anymore, and Java, the wonder programming language of 10 years ago is on a downward usage slide).

 

There was great demand for teachers not that long ago, and now teachers throughout the country are being laid off.

 

There is currently a great demand for nursing degrees - expected when a large population cohort starts to reach their 70's, but what happens 20 years from now when the boomers are no longer such a large group of people?

 

Where is the need for degrees and technical school degrees for manufacturing when manufacturing is increasingly off-shored?

 

This call for practiciality has existed for quite some time - and has been resisted because the American people used to be smart enough to realize that, at the end of the day, that although we needed engineers and other "practical" people, we (and they) also needed people with liberal arts degrees who learned to (to use the over-used phrase - my apologies in advance) "think outside the box".

 

Engineers, scientists, accountants (to any engineer here, I hate to break it to you but a single CPA can out-retentive all of you combined - I'd rather argue a fine point with an engineer than try to convince a CPA that a difference of $0.01 in a $500,000,000 budget just doesn't matter) are great at what they do - they have a laser like focus on details that most of us envy - yet that laser like focus sometimes blinds them to alternative solutions that, once pointed out, lead to the self-inflicted slap on the head and a Homer-esque exclamation of "Dohh!"

 

I've spent a lot of time listening to anecdotal stories of WWII vets about how "American Ingenuity" (read "practicality") amazed our allies and enemys alike. One of the things that our allies were most impressed with was our ability to "jury-rig" something up to make vehicles that stopped working, work anyway - without following some kind of manual on how to do it. Anecdotally, it was often said that if you needed to get your Humber (a British armored scout car) fixed, find an American soldier and hand him a screwdriver, hammer, baling wire and chewing gum, then don't bother getting a "permanent" repair because this jury-rigged repair will last longer.

 

That kind of practicality is the fore-runner of the liberal arts programs - these were designed to give people a well rounded education that would allow the holders to be flexible enough to take on an assortment of projects or job opportunities.

 

I think back to the Victorian and Edwardian era's and when I think of intellectuals of the time, I think of the doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers. I think of the folks meeting to discuss the issues of the day and the scientific and technological advances of the day. I think of Darwin, and his detractors - all "intellectuals". I think of the various "royal societies" and "American societies" of scientific thought. I don't think of poets, and writers. I don't think of Edgar Allen Poe as an "intellectual" (though he was, I believe, quite intelligent).

 

I'm not sure when we shifted our ideas from intellectuals being of the so-called "professional" class and becoming the so-called "liberal academic" class. When did poets, writers, journalists, historians, and the like supplant doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists as the "intellectual" class?

 

I suspect, though can't prove, that there is a connection with the contemporary thinking among many, chiefly conservatives and neo-cons, that "liberal education" is somehow about liberal politics rather than broad-based education and the increasing success of those calling for "practicality" in education (as if it were the opposite of "liberal" in education) and the redefinition of 'intellectuals".

 

Unfortunately, I do believe that there is also a broad hint that being anti-intellectual is the new goal of the people. Somehow, being a "high-information" (and therefore "intellectual") voter - one who gets information from a variety of sources (including the "dreaded" NPR) and who also has the skepticism and curiosity to check out what they're being told by their media sources, even those they trust) is being considered less desirable among the people themselves (not just the politicians and media pundits) than the "low-information" voter that tends to get their news information from just one source or from sources they already believe in, regardless of whether it's factual or not.

 

It's come to the point that many of us will actually believe the revisionist rantings of people like Jonah Goldberg instead of saying "this guy is nuts".