Riggery, you have put your finger on exactly the problem. Education as historically constituted was never meant to help people think, learn (in an appreciable sense of the word), OR problem-solve. It was meant to produce technically proficient, compliant "citizens" and workers. The gold standard would be someone who could solves complex equations and amenably work on teams making the "betters" who run society richer and more powerful. Universal, compulsory education nationwide (and its "core" standards) in the U.S. (I don't know about the U.K. and other places) was basically determined top-down from a handful of elites from a handful of universities (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, etc.) and then basically imposed on a populace. This was awash with the zeal for "efficiency" (whatever that means) and internalization of orthodoxy. What you are proposing is the technical equivalent of meta-learning ("learning how you learn") and not learning what they want you to think and do. Your exercise is subversive precisely because it poses a simple physics problem (who could protest that!) as a tool to critical engagement with how the world works and the foundational PRACTICAL as well as theoretical principles that guide perception and lead to sound conclusions. All the tripe about "critical thinking" in colleges which became just another shallow exercise in syllogism and logic, only underscores what, by contrast, you pose as an alternative: REAL and APPLIED analysis that gets to the sense of things and what makes them tick. This requires operationalized independence of thought, perception, and relationship and a discovery/experimental mindset to see how these independent things coherently relate. Right now we have neither. Nothing is independent. It is "captured" (i.e. the Covid policy and pronouncements). Nothing is related. We have stacked statistics pulled out of context to prove the opposite of what the complete data set confirms (i.e. younger people, especially boys are FAR more likely to be injured by vaccines than helped, if they are helped at all, since there has never been a single study showing benefit for those basically under that age of 30). How can we educators compete with a monolith of social media, academia, legacy media, governmental agencies all operating as a megachurch? We do it by going to the basics of sanity and sense UNDERNEATH the hype. We do it by educating the whole person, not just the compliant citizen and worker. We do it by showing the cartoonish errors of captured orthodoxy, and we do it with our own choices to stand up and tell a plain truth without flinching.
Beautifully said, thank you Zeus Yiamouyiannis Ph.D. I am reminded of a book I read, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. In it, 2 men grow up together, and many of their expliots are detailed. One thing they do with great frequency is practice a sort of trick basketball shot together. They even called it 'the shot'. One of the men was very small, and he is lifted up by the larger man so that he can make the dunk. It was a very strange and apparently unneeded skill, with no application to life other than some humor perhaps. But they got very good at 'the shot' and perfected it. Years pass, they separate and meet again, and end up working together at a care home for kids or the like. Due to a random terrorist attack, a grenade is thrown into the school, through a high small window. It is here that their much practiced 'shot' becomes central to the story, for the short fellow is able to grab the bomb and the tall fellow lifts him up where he throws it out the window, saving the children. Now, when I read this book it didn't really make much sense to me, for years even. But lately I think about it, how honing one small, commonly overlooked skill to perfection (such as thinking, perhaps) is indispensable when it's needed, ie now. I am so grateful to my teachers in life who pushed me to actually think, and I can count them on one hand with fingers left over. Best from Oregon
Nicely rendered Jacquelyn. Yes, in your example is the seed of virtue moving forward. We are guided in certain ways by our intuition and creativity to engage in things that seem to have no practical purpose, until their deeper need and meaning is revealed down the road. This is true of writing on Substack and affecting only a handful of people perhaps, but allowing and midwifing a new resistance and creativity and bull crap detection that serves to "throw the grenade through the tiny window" in a future that one can only sense but not see. It is this act of serendipity and faith, depth over breadth that may just rescue humanity and a beseiged misled planet. I am coming to believe that the role I play may be key, but unknown, even til past my own death, but still very much vital and essential. This again takes great faith in the energy and intelligence coming up through "teachers" and your own heart, mind, body, and soul. It is a new "education" which means in Greek: e- (out) duct (lead)-- to "lead out" the spirit and a deeper intelligence.
Well, since teachers (like me) are to be called pedagogues nowadays, at least here in Sweden, we seem to have come full circle, given the meaning of pedagogue in the original greek.
If you bother to look it up (or already know it) do look up the original meaning of teacher. It's a hoot and a half.
It does recall images of a pied piper. “One who leads” (gaigos) a “child” (peda) to school. This became a leader of children in actual instruction which then became unfortunately degraded into babysitting. Quite like demagogue (leader of people) it’s meaning has taken a somewhat pejorative connotation along the lines of inferring pedantry. What we need is not a pied piper but a Socratic facilitator to educt or lead out the knowledge and talent children already have.
This brings to mind a new(ish) model of learning that's taken off in the last decade (and especially the last 2 years); started in the US and expanded internationally. It's a learner-led model similar to Montessori with 'guides' instead of teachers, yet different in its overarching theme of the Hero's journey, incorporating Socratic discussion instead of lectures, and demonstrations of mastery through real-world projects instead of grades. All of it designed to foster problem-solving skills and the 4 C's: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication. This quote from their website sums it up best: "Acton Academy offers a mythical world where students are Heroes, learning is a Quest, and adults are Guides for the journey." https://www.actonacademy.org/
It's places like this (and the people involved and participating in them) that give me hope for humanity's future.
In fairness to the students, depending on their education before college, they may barely have been taught to read. The decline in education has been precipitous. My own pre-university education even in the 60s and 70s was appalling (possibly due to my social and economic circumstances). It’s a wonder I made it through university; in retrospect I had absolutely no idea how to even think.
In more recent times, the education of children has been defined by its almost universal, grinding mediocrity except possibly for a few islands of light, and even they are being systematically destroyed.
State-run, unionized, education is going to turn out to have been a grave mistake. Wokeness will be the final mail in the coffin for much of what passes for civilization until the next Renaissance.
The educational system at least the US is set up to produce non thinkers even though they pretend the opposite is true. The more they talk about critical thinking, the less critical thinking occurs. Remember Bill Gates managed to weasel his way into US education!
Funny coincidence. Yesterday, I was doing a little woodwork and I open a small box that was deceased husband’s. A small metal object flew out and from a distance, it looked like a bullet. He did occasionally have them in random containers. On closer inspection, I discovered it was only rusty screwdriver bit.
I am constantly holding my kids’ pencils hostage until they are able to tell me what they understand the problem to be, what their plan is, and whether that method will ultimately answer the question when it comes to more complicated problems. It’s nice to think that this isn’t just an academic skill, but also a prophylactic against social pressure and dumb life decisions.
That sounds so familiar. I had the same issues teaching about most any subject that involved logic and math. The "plug and play" mentality limited any attempts at understanding the larger aspects of any matter. The conceptual problem with covid "vaccines" can be expressed by comparing human DNA programming with computer operating systems programming. By accepting the jab a person alters the core and the registry of their personal operating system while having no idea what the effects will be, and at the same time having neither backup nor recovery options. I'll pass on that, thank you.
Well, you pretty much covered the topic, and without profanity to boot, well done that man I say!
Here's an anecdote from a swedish math & physics teacher, of what lack of understanding causes: the problem was two-fold. Calculate the rate a given volume of water (pressure and so on were also given) passes through a pipe (again,diameter and length given), and with a given time after which the container is emptied.
Easy-peasy for 18-year olds in their third year on the tech/engineering-prep track? (A right horror for me but then I do teach the fuzzy subjects.)
Funny thing was, 19/20 did the math correctly. About half remembered that prssure drops as the container emptied and factored that. 2 also tried to take into account that unless air can get into the container, that also affects rates. But only a quarter of the class spotted the "sludge crawler"*-type implicit: if the time was fixed, 10^68 liters/secod would pass through the pipe.
That's some pipe, that can stand that stress. (I might have mangled the anecdote a bit, it's been 25 years...) See, point being, regardless of field, the ability to spot absurdities is cogent not on the field in question but on something in the individual, is the argument I'm fumbling about for.
Look at economics: are the economists fabulously wealthy magnates and business genii? Nopers, they aren't. But listening to them, economy is a solved science. Hard science. (Might be a local thing though, econ here are desperate to be clumped in together with engineers and chemists and maths - it gets really pathetic sometimes considering that econ is social science plus compulsory school math.)
Look at psychology. Name one thing psychology has actually proven. IQ? Yeah, until one looks up how it's calculated (and what other species gets higher scores than humans... octopi are magnitudes better than us when it comes to pattern recognition. Don't see many octopi being offered Mensa-membership. Maybe it's the eugenicist roots of Mensa they object to.)
Heck, look at pedagogy! The sum total of how the human race learns can be summed up on a postcard. (For youngsters, a postcard is like an mms that you put in a box and then the uniformed man what visits mum when dad's at work and slots it in the box...)
Lit science? Sure, if you're 50+ you may have taken actual real courses where you get to study literature starting with The Book of the Dead, but if you're in your 20s? Fuggeddabahtit!
In the before-time, compulsory school level (age 5/6-16 dep. on where you lived and exact time period) took care of all the "how to do it" you needed for voluntary and vocational school levels (16-21 dep. on courses taken and school form) teaching you why and when to do it, and then university trying to enable you to attain understanding of what "it" is, and what more you could make it into.
Since 1990 or so, the dogma is to teach "understanding" the subject. That way, when you need to calc'late the tolerance for a type of steel under a set of conditions, all the formulae will just manifest themselves to you due to your "understanding" of the subject.
The logic behind this is particularly profound: scientists understand their subjects. Therefore, anyone understanding their subject will know as much about it as a scientist.
As a friend of mine, a bricklayer and former stir/fry cook, is fond of saying: "Square wheels spin too".
Edit: *Sludge-crawler is me doing a blind idiot translation of the swedish idiom for the type of question that requires one to actually think, not just follow instructions an going through the motions. They are considered unfair, unjust and badwrongevil. By teachers...
Having studied Physics at 'O' level only and no further (I did pass it quite well, and that was in 1984!), I knew it had something to do with speed, acceleration and time and whatever the equation was going to be. But there is lateral thinking going on in the problem you set and that is where the issue is. It is mostly rote-learning and very little else. There are very few teachers who have the time or inclination to teach these kids how to understand and therefore solve, problems. Too many targets to reach. There are too few inspirational teachers around (and both my kids were lucky in that there were one or two in both their schools, who inspired them), but the rest?
In dog school, we learn that all that matters is the BALL. Somebody throws the ball, and you RUN LIKE HELL until you can bite it and take it back to the beginning place, chewing it well until you get there, because it feels gooood to chew. My ball coach said, GIT DA BALL, JDOG! So I did.
How fast we go to chase the ball depends on three variables: One, who throws it; two, how heavy is the ball; and three, I forgot because I see a ball... But four legs better than two.
Yep, same case for controlled demolition on 911, and the magic bullet theory for the JFK assassination - on that latter one, I nailed my uncle, who was hired by Allen Dulles in 1946 to "practice law", at Christmas dinner in 1968... With Mark Lane's book as preparation, too. He finally said that "OK, Oswald didn't do it, it was a mob hit by Sam Giancana" which was what is known as a "limited hangout". Not bad for an insistent 11-year-old, but it got me a "talking to" - "what gets said at the table stays at the table... No one else has a need to know about that, understand?" What's notable is when the government tells the truth.
As an aside, I used my class notes from my undergrad physical chemistry course to tie for second place on the physical chemistry written qualifier for the PhD - tied with this guy who'd been there for 3 years - they only passed one person that time. By the time the test was offered again, I'd passed the three exams for the PhD in organic chemistry, and once qualified for a PhD, you're done... The undergrad course was taught by this guy who hadn't taught for 20 years and was using 1960 standards - half the class flunked out - I ended up with a "B" and that was the hardest class I'd had in undergrad.
You mean to say that understanding understanding is harder than solving physics problems? Now you know exactly how some of your former physics students felt -- and how most of our various government functionaries felt when faced with a wholly unfamiliar and (to them) alarming problem. It's a wonder that things didn't turn out even worse.
The eternal optimist! But yeah with standards and decision making this low one does wonder how we haven’t simply collapsed into primal stupidity and survival. I just hope we are near the bottom of this one-two lunacy between two sides who are both hopelessly insane.
In a former life I was tasked with mentoring new engineers.
These engineers had masters degrees from places like MIT, Robert Gordon's, Edinburgh, Texas A&M etc.
Most had almost no critical thinking skills, could hardly read and write, couldn't formulate a coherent report and if a problems was outwith their university learning or not explicitly the exact same as what was "in the book" they were totally stumped.
2 examples:
- in the morning report a number of daily and total RPMs had to be entered to keep track for replacing it before it failed which was a known figure. The maintenance report gave the average RPMs and the running time in hours and minutes. One morning this box was blank on our report. The reason? The new engineer couldn't work out an approx number for the day's RPMs from the data given.
- contractor was a Romanian company and all Romanian crewed. their senior supervisor asked me to help with his English so we agreed he would write his report as a draft so the engineer on nights could write our report and once I had accepted it the Romanian supervisor would rewrite his report and learn the correct phrases, spelling and so on so he could get it better in future. New engineer comes on the job, in morning hands me a report that is word for word including spelling mistakes, nonsensical phrases etc as the Romanian submitted. When asked why didn't he actually write a proper report and fix the spelling and so on he said he couldn't see anything wrong with the initial report the way it was as the spelling was better than his.
One word: "Yikes!" This brings up the dissolution of clear thought so foreseen in Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" and Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy". Next thing you know we will be watering our crops with sports drinks, because "it's so much better than water."
Yes, the politically correct “smart ones” at the brilliant opening of Idiocracy who are over cautious are just as dumb as the “yeehaw” ignoramuses if not more so. Reminds one of the people still wearing masks outdoors when they go jogging. Dumb and dumberer. Read Galapagos by Vonnegut. The dumb are actually advantaged because the so called smart are using their intelligence to destroy the planet corruptly just like alleged scientists are today.
Riggery, you have put your finger on exactly the problem. Education as historically constituted was never meant to help people think, learn (in an appreciable sense of the word), OR problem-solve. It was meant to produce technically proficient, compliant "citizens" and workers. The gold standard would be someone who could solves complex equations and amenably work on teams making the "betters" who run society richer and more powerful. Universal, compulsory education nationwide (and its "core" standards) in the U.S. (I don't know about the U.K. and other places) was basically determined top-down from a handful of elites from a handful of universities (Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, etc.) and then basically imposed on a populace. This was awash with the zeal for "efficiency" (whatever that means) and internalization of orthodoxy. What you are proposing is the technical equivalent of meta-learning ("learning how you learn") and not learning what they want you to think and do. Your exercise is subversive precisely because it poses a simple physics problem (who could protest that!) as a tool to critical engagement with how the world works and the foundational PRACTICAL as well as theoretical principles that guide perception and lead to sound conclusions. All the tripe about "critical thinking" in colleges which became just another shallow exercise in syllogism and logic, only underscores what, by contrast, you pose as an alternative: REAL and APPLIED analysis that gets to the sense of things and what makes them tick. This requires operationalized independence of thought, perception, and relationship and a discovery/experimental mindset to see how these independent things coherently relate. Right now we have neither. Nothing is independent. It is "captured" (i.e. the Covid policy and pronouncements). Nothing is related. We have stacked statistics pulled out of context to prove the opposite of what the complete data set confirms (i.e. younger people, especially boys are FAR more likely to be injured by vaccines than helped, if they are helped at all, since there has never been a single study showing benefit for those basically under that age of 30). How can we educators compete with a monolith of social media, academia, legacy media, governmental agencies all operating as a megachurch? We do it by going to the basics of sanity and sense UNDERNEATH the hype. We do it by educating the whole person, not just the compliant citizen and worker. We do it by showing the cartoonish errors of captured orthodoxy, and we do it with our own choices to stand up and tell a plain truth without flinching.
Beautifully said, thank you Zeus Yiamouyiannis Ph.D. I am reminded of a book I read, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving. In it, 2 men grow up together, and many of their expliots are detailed. One thing they do with great frequency is practice a sort of trick basketball shot together. They even called it 'the shot'. One of the men was very small, and he is lifted up by the larger man so that he can make the dunk. It was a very strange and apparently unneeded skill, with no application to life other than some humor perhaps. But they got very good at 'the shot' and perfected it. Years pass, they separate and meet again, and end up working together at a care home for kids or the like. Due to a random terrorist attack, a grenade is thrown into the school, through a high small window. It is here that their much practiced 'shot' becomes central to the story, for the short fellow is able to grab the bomb and the tall fellow lifts him up where he throws it out the window, saving the children. Now, when I read this book it didn't really make much sense to me, for years even. But lately I think about it, how honing one small, commonly overlooked skill to perfection (such as thinking, perhaps) is indispensable when it's needed, ie now. I am so grateful to my teachers in life who pushed me to actually think, and I can count them on one hand with fingers left over. Best from Oregon
Nicely rendered Jacquelyn. Yes, in your example is the seed of virtue moving forward. We are guided in certain ways by our intuition and creativity to engage in things that seem to have no practical purpose, until their deeper need and meaning is revealed down the road. This is true of writing on Substack and affecting only a handful of people perhaps, but allowing and midwifing a new resistance and creativity and bull crap detection that serves to "throw the grenade through the tiny window" in a future that one can only sense but not see. It is this act of serendipity and faith, depth over breadth that may just rescue humanity and a beseiged misled planet. I am coming to believe that the role I play may be key, but unknown, even til past my own death, but still very much vital and essential. This again takes great faith in the energy and intelligence coming up through "teachers" and your own heart, mind, body, and soul. It is a new "education" which means in Greek: e- (out) duct (lead)-- to "lead out" the spirit and a deeper intelligence.
Well, since teachers (like me) are to be called pedagogues nowadays, at least here in Sweden, we seem to have come full circle, given the meaning of pedagogue in the original greek.
If you bother to look it up (or already know it) do look up the original meaning of teacher. It's a hoot and a half.
It does recall images of a pied piper. “One who leads” (gaigos) a “child” (peda) to school. This became a leader of children in actual instruction which then became unfortunately degraded into babysitting. Quite like demagogue (leader of people) it’s meaning has taken a somewhat pejorative connotation along the lines of inferring pedantry. What we need is not a pied piper but a Socratic facilitator to educt or lead out the knowledge and talent children already have.
This brings to mind a new(ish) model of learning that's taken off in the last decade (and especially the last 2 years); started in the US and expanded internationally. It's a learner-led model similar to Montessori with 'guides' instead of teachers, yet different in its overarching theme of the Hero's journey, incorporating Socratic discussion instead of lectures, and demonstrations of mastery through real-world projects instead of grades. All of it designed to foster problem-solving skills and the 4 C's: critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, communication. This quote from their website sums it up best: "Acton Academy offers a mythical world where students are Heroes, learning is a Quest, and adults are Guides for the journey." https://www.actonacademy.org/
It's places like this (and the people involved and participating in them) that give me hope for humanity's future.
Thanks, I'll look it up.
Better, or worse, than CHASING a child to school, like us dogs do...
Arrrrrrrfwoooof! ;)
In fairness to the students, depending on their education before college, they may barely have been taught to read. The decline in education has been precipitous. My own pre-university education even in the 60s and 70s was appalling (possibly due to my social and economic circumstances). It’s a wonder I made it through university; in retrospect I had absolutely no idea how to even think.
In more recent times, the education of children has been defined by its almost universal, grinding mediocrity except possibly for a few islands of light, and even they are being systematically destroyed.
State-run, unionized, education is going to turn out to have been a grave mistake. Wokeness will be the final mail in the coffin for much of what passes for civilization until the next Renaissance.
The educational system at least the US is set up to produce non thinkers even though they pretend the opposite is true. The more they talk about critical thinking, the less critical thinking occurs. Remember Bill Gates managed to weasel his way into US education!
Funny coincidence. Yesterday, I was doing a little woodwork and I open a small box that was deceased husband’s. A small metal object flew out and from a distance, it looked like a bullet. He did occasionally have them in random containers. On closer inspection, I discovered it was only rusty screwdriver bit.
I am constantly holding my kids’ pencils hostage until they are able to tell me what they understand the problem to be, what their plan is, and whether that method will ultimately answer the question when it comes to more complicated problems. It’s nice to think that this isn’t just an academic skill, but also a prophylactic against social pressure and dumb life decisions.
That sounds so familiar. I had the same issues teaching about most any subject that involved logic and math. The "plug and play" mentality limited any attempts at understanding the larger aspects of any matter. The conceptual problem with covid "vaccines" can be expressed by comparing human DNA programming with computer operating systems programming. By accepting the jab a person alters the core and the registry of their personal operating system while having no idea what the effects will be, and at the same time having neither backup nor recovery options. I'll pass on that, thank you.
Well, you pretty much covered the topic, and without profanity to boot, well done that man I say!
Here's an anecdote from a swedish math & physics teacher, of what lack of understanding causes: the problem was two-fold. Calculate the rate a given volume of water (pressure and so on were also given) passes through a pipe (again,diameter and length given), and with a given time after which the container is emptied.
Easy-peasy for 18-year olds in their third year on the tech/engineering-prep track? (A right horror for me but then I do teach the fuzzy subjects.)
Funny thing was, 19/20 did the math correctly. About half remembered that prssure drops as the container emptied and factored that. 2 also tried to take into account that unless air can get into the container, that also affects rates. But only a quarter of the class spotted the "sludge crawler"*-type implicit: if the time was fixed, 10^68 liters/secod would pass through the pipe.
That's some pipe, that can stand that stress. (I might have mangled the anecdote a bit, it's been 25 years...) See, point being, regardless of field, the ability to spot absurdities is cogent not on the field in question but on something in the individual, is the argument I'm fumbling about for.
Look at economics: are the economists fabulously wealthy magnates and business genii? Nopers, they aren't. But listening to them, economy is a solved science. Hard science. (Might be a local thing though, econ here are desperate to be clumped in together with engineers and chemists and maths - it gets really pathetic sometimes considering that econ is social science plus compulsory school math.)
Look at psychology. Name one thing psychology has actually proven. IQ? Yeah, until one looks up how it's calculated (and what other species gets higher scores than humans... octopi are magnitudes better than us when it comes to pattern recognition. Don't see many octopi being offered Mensa-membership. Maybe it's the eugenicist roots of Mensa they object to.)
Heck, look at pedagogy! The sum total of how the human race learns can be summed up on a postcard. (For youngsters, a postcard is like an mms that you put in a box and then the uniformed man what visits mum when dad's at work and slots it in the box...)
Lit science? Sure, if you're 50+ you may have taken actual real courses where you get to study literature starting with The Book of the Dead, but if you're in your 20s? Fuggeddabahtit!
In the before-time, compulsory school level (age 5/6-16 dep. on where you lived and exact time period) took care of all the "how to do it" you needed for voluntary and vocational school levels (16-21 dep. on courses taken and school form) teaching you why and when to do it, and then university trying to enable you to attain understanding of what "it" is, and what more you could make it into.
Since 1990 or so, the dogma is to teach "understanding" the subject. That way, when you need to calc'late the tolerance for a type of steel under a set of conditions, all the formulae will just manifest themselves to you due to your "understanding" of the subject.
The logic behind this is particularly profound: scientists understand their subjects. Therefore, anyone understanding their subject will know as much about it as a scientist.
As a friend of mine, a bricklayer and former stir/fry cook, is fond of saying: "Square wheels spin too".
Edit: *Sludge-crawler is me doing a blind idiot translation of the swedish idiom for the type of question that requires one to actually think, not just follow instructions an going through the motions. They are considered unfair, unjust and badwrongevil. By teachers...
Having studied Physics at 'O' level only and no further (I did pass it quite well, and that was in 1984!), I knew it had something to do with speed, acceleration and time and whatever the equation was going to be. But there is lateral thinking going on in the problem you set and that is where the issue is. It is mostly rote-learning and very little else. There are very few teachers who have the time or inclination to teach these kids how to understand and therefore solve, problems. Too many targets to reach. There are too few inspirational teachers around (and both my kids were lucky in that there were one or two in both their schools, who inspired them), but the rest?
In dog school, we learn that all that matters is the BALL. Somebody throws the ball, and you RUN LIKE HELL until you can bite it and take it back to the beginning place, chewing it well until you get there, because it feels gooood to chew. My ball coach said, GIT DA BALL, JDOG! So I did.
How fast we go to chase the ball depends on three variables: One, who throws it; two, how heavy is the ball; and three, I forgot because I see a ball... But four legs better than two.
ROOFING is my bidniss, now FRO DA BALL.
Seems like we have a worthy rival to El Gato Malo!
You're going to compare my dogness to a CAT?????????????????
;)
More of a dog person myself. Though cats can be cool and zen. I have had a couple. :0)…
Oh, I'm in character quite often... I like cats, just don't tell the other dogs I said that...
And what happens when you factor in the squirrel variable?
Yep, same case for controlled demolition on 911, and the magic bullet theory for the JFK assassination - on that latter one, I nailed my uncle, who was hired by Allen Dulles in 1946 to "practice law", at Christmas dinner in 1968... With Mark Lane's book as preparation, too. He finally said that "OK, Oswald didn't do it, it was a mob hit by Sam Giancana" which was what is known as a "limited hangout". Not bad for an insistent 11-year-old, but it got me a "talking to" - "what gets said at the table stays at the table... No one else has a need to know about that, understand?" What's notable is when the government tells the truth.
As an aside, I used my class notes from my undergrad physical chemistry course to tie for second place on the physical chemistry written qualifier for the PhD - tied with this guy who'd been there for 3 years - they only passed one person that time. By the time the test was offered again, I'd passed the three exams for the PhD in organic chemistry, and once qualified for a PhD, you're done... The undergrad course was taught by this guy who hadn't taught for 20 years and was using 1960 standards - half the class flunked out - I ended up with a "B" and that was the hardest class I'd had in undergrad.
You mean to say that understanding understanding is harder than solving physics problems? Now you know exactly how some of your former physics students felt -- and how most of our various government functionaries felt when faced with a wholly unfamiliar and (to them) alarming problem. It's a wonder that things didn't turn out even worse.
The eternal optimist! But yeah with standards and decision making this low one does wonder how we haven’t simply collapsed into primal stupidity and survival. I just hope we are near the bottom of this one-two lunacy between two sides who are both hopelessly insane.
In a former life I was tasked with mentoring new engineers.
These engineers had masters degrees from places like MIT, Robert Gordon's, Edinburgh, Texas A&M etc.
Most had almost no critical thinking skills, could hardly read and write, couldn't formulate a coherent report and if a problems was outwith their university learning or not explicitly the exact same as what was "in the book" they were totally stumped.
2 examples:
- in the morning report a number of daily and total RPMs had to be entered to keep track for replacing it before it failed which was a known figure. The maintenance report gave the average RPMs and the running time in hours and minutes. One morning this box was blank on our report. The reason? The new engineer couldn't work out an approx number for the day's RPMs from the data given.
- contractor was a Romanian company and all Romanian crewed. their senior supervisor asked me to help with his English so we agreed he would write his report as a draft so the engineer on nights could write our report and once I had accepted it the Romanian supervisor would rewrite his report and learn the correct phrases, spelling and so on so he could get it better in future. New engineer comes on the job, in morning hands me a report that is word for word including spelling mistakes, nonsensical phrases etc as the Romanian submitted. When asked why didn't he actually write a proper report and fix the spelling and so on he said he couldn't see anything wrong with the initial report the way it was as the spelling was better than his.
One word: "Yikes!" This brings up the dissolution of clear thought so foreseen in Kurt Vonnegut's "Galapagos" and Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy". Next thing you know we will be watering our crops with sports drinks, because "it's so much better than water."
The start of idiocracy sums up where we are at present I think.
Yes, the politically correct “smart ones” at the brilliant opening of Idiocracy who are over cautious are just as dumb as the “yeehaw” ignoramuses if not more so. Reminds one of the people still wearing masks outdoors when they go jogging. Dumb and dumberer. Read Galapagos by Vonnegut. The dumb are actually advantaged because the so called smart are using their intelligence to destroy the planet corruptly just like alleged scientists are today.
Don't be stupid. We started the idiocracy a loooong time agooooooowoof! ;)
(just kitten!) arf a joke is bedder than none...
It turns out there are strikingly different ways people understand things, ways seemingly bred into the bone. Here's a new substack post summarizing recent research on how this affects American politics: https://larryturner.substack.com/p/american-politics-well-past-the-time
Have a look at these old AQA exam papers to see how far education standards have fallen:
https://papers.xtremepape.rs/AQA/GCSE/Biology/4411/2008-Mar/AQA-BLY1AP-W-QP-MAR08.pdf
https://papers.xtremepape.rs/AQA/GCSE/Chemistry/4421/Foundation/2008-Mar/AQA-CHY1AP-W-QP-MAR08.pdf
https://papers.xtremepape.rs/AQA/GCSE/Physics/4451/Foundation/2008-Mar/AQA-PHY1AP-W-QP-MAR08.pdf
No wonder AQA seem to be limiting how far back the past papers go - or is that just me searching their website wrong?
2018 seems as far back as they go - here's one I found, 2 part GCSE chemistry exam:
https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2018/june/AQA-84621F-QP-JUN18.PDF
https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2018/june/AQA-84622F-QP-JUN18.PDF
having seen these college clowns i dont hold out much hope
https://youtu.be/cV0AgB88JE4?t=38
It's where young humans go to learn how to drink until they pass out on the ground.
A+ if you git arresticled first.