Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
I also appreciate you making comparisons beyond simplistic racial categorization, focusing instead on where the U.S. overall is falling down in basic education. That's why on my recent appearance on The Glenn Show (with FAIR advisory board member, Glenn Loury), I mentioned that, one, among OECD nations, the United States is 28th out of 38 nations with regards to STEM education, and, two, that according to a U.S. News & World Report study, the U.S. is 26th in terms of Quality of Life.
Being the wealthiest nation in the world won't mean much if the overall quality of life is down the tubes.
We agree, Michelle: it's time for us to start getting our priorities straight.
Yes, good. It is long past the time the US public started to get its head around the failure in basic domestic education for all its citizens problem, instead of being distracted by St Ives type considerations which are the simplistic racial categories (I assume you know the old nursery rhyme which goes when I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats and every cat seven kits -- kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives? The answer is of course 1 -- the speaker). If you have 100 students, and 25 do not have basic skills. It doesn't matter how you parse their make up or ancestry, at the end you still have 25 who remain in need of a basic education. It goes down to whether or not you want a gold , silver and sewage for the rest education system or one which enables all citizens to become active contributors to society's overall quality of life.
Immigration and the immigrant's drive to succeed to a certain extent has allowed the US to be distracted from the decades long domestic failure in providing adequate public education to its native citizens, but ultimately how long US society can rely on draining brains from other countries is an open question.
It is also about improving occupational mobility -- providing the skills which will enable citizens to move to jobs which provide a better lifestyle -- this is a slightly different emphasis than social mobility. I think this is what you are getting it as well. Occupational mobility allows for people to improve their quality of life.
One only has to look at ancient Rome and the slide into the so-called Dark Ages to see what happened when the skill sets of the native population started to decrease significantly.
I did enjoy the readout of your conversation with Lloury -- WEIRD is a great acronym. As an aside, you were the second intellectual to talk about so-called French Theory I have read this week. History Reclaimed had a good article about deconstructing French theory. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/deconstructing-french-theory/ in case you have not seen it. History Reclaimed is a Robert Tombs/ David Abulafia project (both Cambridge professors) and an interesting resource.
Thank you, Michelle. Yes, yes: basic literacy should be a primary focus. I also think that helping young people learn emotional management and regulation is key. Some call this "soft skills"; I prefer Seth Godin's term: real skills to enhance civil dialogue and interpersonal relationships.
I also appreciate you making comparisons beyond simplistic racial categorization, focusing instead on where the U.S. overall is falling down in basic education. That's why on my recent appearance on The Glenn Show (with FAIR advisory board member, Glenn Loury), I mentioned that, one, among OECD nations, the United States is 28th out of 38 nations with regards to STEM education, and, two, that according to a U.S. News & World Report study, the U.S. is 26th in terms of Quality of Life.
Being the wealthiest nation in the world won't mean much if the overall quality of life is down the tubes.
We agree, Michelle: it's time for us to start getting our priorities straight.
Yes, good. It is long past the time the US public started to get its head around the failure in basic domestic education for all its citizens problem, instead of being distracted by St Ives type considerations which are the simplistic racial categories (I assume you know the old nursery rhyme which goes when I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives, and every wife had seven sacks, and every sack had seven cats and every cat seven kits -- kits, cats, sacks and wives, how many were going to St Ives? The answer is of course 1 -- the speaker). If you have 100 students, and 25 do not have basic skills. It doesn't matter how you parse their make up or ancestry, at the end you still have 25 who remain in need of a basic education. It goes down to whether or not you want a gold , silver and sewage for the rest education system or one which enables all citizens to become active contributors to society's overall quality of life.
Immigration and the immigrant's drive to succeed to a certain extent has allowed the US to be distracted from the decades long domestic failure in providing adequate public education to its native citizens, but ultimately how long US society can rely on draining brains from other countries is an open question.
It is also about improving occupational mobility -- providing the skills which will enable citizens to move to jobs which provide a better lifestyle -- this is a slightly different emphasis than social mobility. I think this is what you are getting it as well. Occupational mobility allows for people to improve their quality of life.
One only has to look at ancient Rome and the slide into the so-called Dark Ages to see what happened when the skill sets of the native population started to decrease significantly.
I did enjoy the readout of your conversation with Lloury -- WEIRD is a great acronym. As an aside, you were the second intellectual to talk about so-called French Theory I have read this week. History Reclaimed had a good article about deconstructing French theory. https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/deconstructing-french-theory/ in case you have not seen it. History Reclaimed is a Robert Tombs/ David Abulafia project (both Cambridge professors) and an interesting resource.