Friday, September 9, 2022

School Loans? School? Why?

I've been thinking about the school loan fiasco.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who proposed public schools for the poor (there were none in the US at the time), consisting only of three years -- just enough to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Back then, kids would study and go home to help with what it took to keep the family alive. They would usually apply what they learned immediately, which made what they learned meaningful.

Beyond that would be scholarship funding for the exceptional capable learners and apprenticeship for those interested in a trade. Education would continue basically at the interest and will of the individual and his or her family.

There is something to be said for making education available and egalitarian, as we have. But we have gone way too far. Education has lost a lot of meaning, and has become more of a (potentially useful) recreational activity in general, and in some ways just another market to compete in.

I am thinking we should go back, if possible, to making education something that happens at the interest and will of the family (when children are young) and the individual (from the beginning), and back to making it something we do concurrently with making a living.

Why at the interest and will of the family and individual? Because people learn best when they are not being force-fed or spoon-fed things they did not choose to learn.

OH! BUT THINK OF ALL THE LOST OPPORTUNITIES!!!!!!!!!!!

or whatever the argument. No. Just No. Wrong on every level and from every angle.

Educators have always had the ability and opportunity to influence their students to widen their horizons. On the converse, far more damage is done trying to force people to widen their horizons than any benefits gained -- other than benefits to those at the top of the social hierarchy who think they have a vested interest in keeping their position there.

(Not all at the top have such delusions, although forced education does seem to bubble more such deluded people to the top.)

Why concurrently with making a living? Because then we wouldn't need to take loans out to take a mix of classes that are more than half not even relevant to the individual's interests, and more than 90% irrelevant to making a living -- and more than half of which are likely to induce false ideas and ideologies that actually interfere with making a living.

Making a living is not the ultimate goal of education, but opening possibilities to make life interesting while making a living is close to the ultimate goal of education.

The ultimate goal should be something like to help make whole human beings, but people who don't understand what I mean might argue with me instead of looking for a different way to word the goal. The words are not important, and argument may or not be useful, but it would be a distraction from today's rant.

So I'm going to leave the question of the ultimate goal open and focus on the goal of making it possible to keep life interesting while making a living.

Suggesting something systematic is always going to result in promoting non-optimal ideologies, but I'll toss a few ideas out here for examination:

  1. Make day-care and pre-school optional again, both in terms of legal enforcement and in terms of requirements for entering primary school grades.
     
  2. Limit in-school time to half a day during the first three plus-or-minus years while the students achieve, at their own pace, basic proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

  3. Part of the reason for limiting in-class time is to allow the students time to apply what they've learned outside of class, as much as possible in natural situations. 

In order to get this to work, we're going to have to find ways to promote appropriate places for very young children to play. 

Constructing a market for Japanese-style 塾 (juku) and お稽古 (o-keiko), and similar activities seems to be a partial solution, and may not be out of the question, but it's just pushing the problem off to another version of the same thing. 

Ultimately we need to have the parents involved. Presently, most of what we do "for the children" involves taking the very people who ought to have the most motivation to keep the children safe, happy, and constructively occupied out of the equation. (I know, this is partly because a small number of parents are not conscious of what will happen in the future if they abuse their kids. But it is far more because all too many parents seem not to know how, and seem to be afraid of learning how.)

But where are parents going to get the time to be involved?

Walk with me down a side-path for a ways. What if we got all the people who are on the welfare rolls and had them work two-to-four hours a day on something useful to society?

Competition for jobs would get stiffer, right?

What if we got rid of all the non-essential jobs?

Competition for real jobs would become brutal, correct? 

Why?

Because seven out of eight working hours for most people are spent in things that are not essential, and at least half of our working hours are spent in things that have no benefit to society. (Not including emergency medical workers and such here.)

What are we doing all day long? Fighting the modern equivalent of warfare -- market competition.

Parents should have the time.

That parents don't may be partly on the parents themselves, but it is at this point in our modern society mostly on the people who insist on, having made enough for their own retirement ten times over, or tens of thousands of times over, insist on keeping in the game. 

Somebody donates a quarter or a half of his n-billions of dollars to charity, but doesn't take himself completely off the payroll, off the board, out of management? He is being duplicitous. He should be shamed and shunned. 

If they want to stay in the game? Divest, divest, divest. Get their tanks off the playing field, get out of their power-assisted robot shells and Kevlar body armor and play friendly football like the rest of us.

We have to be willing to get our superstars out of the way -- if they won't move over voluntarily, move them out -- boycott and such.

Cut back on the things we do for senseless competition, and no one, I repeat, no one would need to work for hire more than four hours a day five days a week. Max. 

And with the extra time, there would quickly be plenty of people training to do emergency medical work and such, so even the emergency medical workers, firefighters, and so forth would be able to get their daily working hours way down.

Back to the topic of education.

So what do children do outside of school? That has to be between them and their parents, really.

When does the first year start? That's another thing that parents and children have to work out between them, on an individual basis. 

Oh, and how do you decide when to end the first three plus-or-minus? Again, on an individual basis. 

ALL THESE DECISIONS!!! CAN WE TRUST PARENTS TO MAKE THEM RIGHT?

First, there is no single right decision that can be specified in general. It's going to be case-by-case, and the people in the best position to make these decisions are the parents and the children themselves. No one else has close to enough information. Not government. Not the schools. Nobody else. 

(Think about this. What's the first thing that happens when government and/or schools take these decisions over? Tests. Tests. Evaluations. And more tests. Because they don't have the information. Unless they take over the DNA along with the evening meals and bedtime, they can't have enough information, and not really even if they do that. Institutions bigger than family are too big to be able to work with at the necessary level of detail.)

Second, if we can't trust the parents' decisions in most families, we've already lost our society. Same thing as innocent until proven guilty; we have to trust them until and unless they prove irreparably that they will deliberately make too many wrong decisions that result in repeated serious abuse.

I'm getting off-the topic. 

But I'll note that, if the primary language is not English, more than three years may be necessary. Japanese, for instance, will need another year because they will start with the 仮名 (kana) writing system first, but then they also have to get the basics down for the 漢字 (kanji) writing system, as well. And to make it work in just another year, a new, more regular approach to the kanji is going to have to be developed. Other languages exist in which grammar and character forms interact, and I have to assume those will take extra time.

There's a lot more to think about here, but I need to talk about what happens after the first three (plus or minus) years.

This is where we have to get really creative.

Before we do, no, we don't have to require children who can read, write, and handle numbers to continue institutional education or equivalent. Once they have the foundation, they can continue on their own. The whole reason we have been requiring children to stay in school is that too many haven't been getting the foundation. 

That said, institutional education can be done in a meaningful way. And if we do it in a meaningful way, the reason some kids won't want to continue will be that they have some better option more appropriate to the educational path they want to take. And that's not a bad thing.

How do you make school meaningful?

What has more meaning to children than the real world?

  1. Bring the real world into the school.

  2. Half of the day can be retained for guided instruction -- lecture, practice, labwork and etc.
     
  3. But the guided instruction part should be entirely elective.

  4. Students need meaningful problems to solve anyway because humans are problem-solving animals.

  5. But students who have meaningful problems to solve will generally choose naturally what topics they need to solve them. That's why students can be allowed to choose their own course.

How do you give them meaningful problems to solve?

  1. The school should operate as a microcosm of the students' real world. Give them opportunities to experience things they will experience in the real world as adults.

Sure, cleaning and helping in the cafeteria if there is one. But manufacturing, setting up and operating stores, working with money, operating in-school postal systems, making and enforcing rules, the whole thing.

Under adult supervision, of course. Parental involvement, of course. Probably using an in-school currency to reduce temptation to the supervising adults. But, to the extent that it can be relatively safely done, letting the students apply the things they are learning in real-world ways.

In middle school, a similar approach would continue, but the currency of the real world would replace the in-school currency, the internal postal system would integrate with the external system and so-forth.

In high school, most students would begin to learn trades and/or begin to work on actual research projects coordinated with local colleges and research institutions.

College/university would become integrated with industry, such that most students would actually be working their way through school.

Yes, this would require that the current totalitarian intellectual property regimen would have to be significantly weakened, but that is a given. Published works that remain under copyright for the life of the author plus seventy years is insanely beyond the control for a limited time that the Constitution granted, and basically gives the artists' associations powers that the government is restricted from, powers that the government should not be capable of giving. 

And the patent mess, where the threat of suit is of more consequence than actually going to trial and getting a decision allows invalid and expired patents to be wielded with as much effect as valid, original, new patents also must be resolved.

Just as important, the existing databases have to be fixed. You can't attribute when you can't trace where your ideas came from.

You can't teach and you can't learn if every day becomes a trip through an IP minefield. This is no small part of the current cost of education.

Loans and their repayment are the tip of the iceberg here.

Friday, June 24, 2022

Thoughts on Dobbs vs. Jackson (clinic)

I had not intended to take time on this, but I think, in the aftermath of Dobbs vs. Jackson (clinic) it's important for voices for sanity to be heard.

(I should not be understood to assert that I am, myself, especially sane, but I think my voice for carefully considered response is a voice for sanity.)

First, Roe vs. Wade was right but wrong. It used bad legal reasoning to come to a conclusion that was expedient and probably even necessary at the time. Also, the legalistic guidelines in the decision did constitute judicial legislation.

Likewise, Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, while it sort-of fixed the judicial legislation problem, attempted, but failed, to fix the legal basis of Roe vs. Wade

And we need a legal basis. 

Without a legal basis, we have have the nation riding a seesaw that is threatening to come off its fulcrum or just break because too many people are riding it too hard.

I do not like the idea of amending the Constitution. Amendments tend to turn out to be atomic bombs when wrenches or hammers should have been sufficient.

The Constitution would allow Congress to pass a bill that 

  1. encourages the States to refrain from creating a legal framework or even an environment of repression against women in laws regulating abortion, 
  2. encourages the States to pass the actual duty and authority for regulation down to individual communities, and
  3. prohibits any state from punishing anyone who crosses state or community boundaries to obtain, assist, or perform an abortion in another state or community.

Yes, when I say "encourage", I do mean that we must give the states and communities room to try to figure out the best approaches for their people. 

(Really, this is what should have happened immediately after the decision in Casey at the very latest.)

Note that I am not taking a middle-of-the-road approach here. I am firmly of the conviction that abortion, while not exactly murder, is close enough to killing that the current anything-goes attitude has become a moral albatross, and an indirect contributor to the public ennui that breeds violence in general. 

(Don't kid yourself. Ennui does breed violence, and is the primary driver in the current expansion of violence. This world was never intended, by nature, evolution, or any other creative force by which it may have come into existence, to be completely friction-free. 

By whatever means we came into existence as a species or race, we are problem-solvers. We need problems to solve. This is, in fact, one of those great chances for us to act together to actually work to solve a problem instead of just trying to throw money and legalistic rules at it.)

I am also firmly of the conviction that a woman must know that she has means of recourse against incest, rape, serious health issues, and even seduction. 

Abortion should not be the first suggestion. The technology may be safer now for the mother than in the past, but it still is not risk-free. And, really, it runs against the human drive to preserve the species, even if you don't find any other moral issue with it. (Among other moral consequences, consider that men who encourage the women they have sex with to have abortions do not learn self-control any more than the women who resort to abortion to appease them learn how to say no.)

Abortion should remain available as one option. 

Other options need to be presented at a much higher priority, such as support for women who are pregnant and/or raising children without a support system. Yes, we need to revisit the welfare system of the welfare state we have created.

You just can't have a national welfare system that works. Too many of the details can't be determined without context, and the context does not exist at the national level. Even the States are too large these days, but they have a better chance of being able to set up a framework for the individual communities to work within.

One thing we can do at the national and state level is provide incentives (both negative and positive) to corporations and individuals who cross state lines to make excessive profits to let social conscience become a greater motivation in employment, work environment and scheduling. (What? am I attempting a radical change in topic? Nooo --)

Among other things, here's one idea that many hypercompetitive types seem to think has gone out of style, but --

Yes, employees raising children and/or taking care of elderly parents (etc.) do deserve at least equal effective pay compared with single employees because, even if they need more time off, they are helping maintain the economic ecology within which the company makes its profits. The taxation and corporate regulation systems could be fixed to encourage corporations and their investors to do so.

The problems we are facing as a society are deeply, deeply tangled, and trying to fix any one of them with a quick, big ideological band-aid is just not going to work.

Sunday, March 20, 2022

On the Russian Manifest Destiny

A FB friend, Carolyn Rabe Tinney, has been sharing some analysis pieces with me, 

One is an analysis of Putin's strategy in the Ukraine that explains his state of mind in more clear terms than simply "delusional":

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/398089.php?fbclid=IwAR2ZI6Z-VUN0cmXNVobEarGC98JrLUT8L1e8bpoKvVVlT6y9s63TZmB3n9c#398089
Another is an explanation of the mindset he has expressed, of carrying on the destiny of a thousand year-old empire:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/12/putins-thousand-year-war/?utm_source=pocket-newtab&fbclid=IwAR11zm_yHHdPPCtywXutJDDd_HYKzgIVnDZliGkg883HMFz6FdMcVQTE-x4

So I am finding myself of the opinion that the best prayer I can pray for the people of the Ukraine -- and the people of our world -- is for the leaders of Russia to have their hearts softened and their minds enlightened as to the futility of power politics.

On power, I reference a peculiarly Mormon scripture from the book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price, Abraham chapter 3. Read the whole chapter, note especially v. 19, in context.

https://abn.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/pgp/abr/3 

No matter how big you get, there is always someone bigger to take you down. 

And ultimately, there is God.

Even if you don't believe in God, there is nature -- time and death. 

Fighting them is futile.

Nothing we build in this world can ever be permanent. Not empires, not our own strength. Empires fall. Humans, every human, eventually gets weak and dies. 

Believing in your own superhumanity is exactly the same as taking the comic books of the western world seriously. This is the fatal sin of the very Nazism they despise.

So we need God to find someone to sit Putin and the members of the Federal Assembly down and ask them, what will Russia do after they die? Where do they expect to find someone to carry on the destined legacy they have convinced themselves is theirs? 

Why do they think they have a chance to succeed in building a permanent Russian empire when every Tzar before them has failed? 

And what use is it to build an empire that will ultimately crumble to dust?

But that is precisely the question that ultimately leads, not to Democracy, but to governments that recognize that the freedom and sovereignty of the individual citizen -- the will of the people -- is the only real, viable basis for government.

And it seems to be the question they refuse to face, I suppose because they think it will cost them their glorious destiny to admit it is just dust. If they could only face the question and find a real answer, how much greater a destiny could they fulfill?

Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Notes to Self on the Value of Jobs

These are some notes to myself on the value of jobs:
 
There is no such thing as unskilled, just unpopular skills. 
 
Some unpopular skills are unpopular for good reason, but there are also a lot of things people do to hold society together that they can't get people to pay them to do.
 
The longer I live, the harder it is for me to find truly lazy people. It is easy to find people who, for various reasons, waste a lot of energy doing things that don't add value to the world, but many of those get paid a lot for what they do anyway. (And then we find ourselves back at the question of why some skills are popular.)
 
Money is a proxy for value. It's a poor proxy, but it isn't money itself that is the problem until the causality inverts and money starts defining value. 
 
Also, it is hard to have things of value unless you can exchange them, and it's hard to exchange them without a proxy of some sort.
 
And it is impossible to contact without interfering. You can't move without contact at some level. Not interfering is not really an option.
 
Refraining from exploitation is closer to being possible, but that requires understanding one's own value system, and it is the lack of understanding the value system that causes problems with proxies for value.
 

Monday, November 22, 2021

Was Kyle Rittenhouse an Underage, Out-ofstate Imported Gun-nut Vigilante?

Here are some things i have been able to find out:

According to evidence at trial, Rittenhouse's father lived in Kenosha at the time. Kyle Rittenhouse lived with his mother in Illinois and worked as a lifeguard in Kenosha, something like a half-hour away. He was not an outsider, even though he was repeatedly portrayed as such.

He has been portrayed as a white supremacist without evidence. Many real things about him have been mostly ignored, including that he was a cadet in a firefighting/EMT program.

The morning before he killed two men and seriously injured another, he had gone downtown with his sister to see what damage had been done in the protests the night before. He spent some time cleaning up graffiti at a high school.

The weapon was not carried across state lines, and it was legal for him to carry it in Wisconsin. This is a technicality, and you can argue about whether Wisconsin law should allow a seventeen year-old to carry even a long-barrelled rifle of that sort. You can argue about the morality of a friend buying and keeping the gun for him -- apparently in Wisconsin, since he did not carry the gun across state lines after all. 

But he has been portrayed as carrying it illegally, and that is not true.

These facts make a difference when you start trying to talk about him as a "gun nut" or an imported underage vigilante.

You can argue about whether he should have been out there that night trying to help his friends and relatives keep damage from the protests from escalating further. You can argue about whether carrying the gun openly was wise.

The evidence shown at trial does not show that he was out there looking for a fight. Far more, unless the evidence was seriously manipulated, it definitely shows that he was attacked, and can be interpreted without any contortions that he was attacked for trying to defend his friends' and relatives' property. 

(Notes to self:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/media-must-learn-covington-catholic-story/581035/

Andrew Coffee IV

Ahmaud Arbery)

 

Monday, July 26, 2021

Reparations, Reparations

A friend posted a link to (moderate? maybe) right-wing media coverage of some of what underlies BLM and other current attempts at fixing the race problem in the USA. In it, I found this article talking about the reparations bill and (implied ironic) support it gets from the billionaire community: https://www.businessinsider.com/bet-founder-billionaire-calls-for-reparations-black-americans-2021-6?fbclid=IwAR3HW4oLhq2_WFsFDacHuRwY3KVkKAUzJbaLE_FbGT7SDaJTbuDRL_TJ_n4 

My problem with this is that I grew up in a town where we actually had a moderate level of success in required desegregation. 

 (Forced would be a bit too strong of a term. Most of the community was okay with it. And, on the other hand, there were a minority who resisted, many of them real-estate agents and others who tried hard to keep some neighborhoods exclusive -- I assume so they could charge higher prices for land that really wasn't that significantly different.)

I was in a middle class neighborhood, with various cultures (and races) represented on our street and most streets in the neighborhood. Even the exclusive community on the north edge of town had something of a mix. (I'm not sure how the exclusivists made it work. You had to have a certain income to even get properties there shown to you as a potential buyer, among other things, and I think that the non-white members of the community had a certain agreement with the majority white members that they wouldn't try rocking the boat too much. Token non-whites? But the word "token" itself comes from the contexts in which such exclusive communities are assumed to be justified, so be careful how you use it.)

I did not realize it, but it was a very progressive community for the time.

Apparently, that kind of community was not common. And it really didn't work on an ongoing basis, even though the cultural mix is still there.

Particularly, there were a lot of, especially black, football players who rode into college with the expectation that a football scholarship was all they needed to be set for life. And discovered the hard way the difference between the small pond and the big pond relative to how good they were.

If we (royal we) had really wanted them to succeed, we had to teach them the work ethic that was necessary in the larger community. We had to teach both them and their parents that the football scholarship, for all that they were working their hearts out for it, was not going to be enough to keep them out of the ghetto unless they used it to get other education, other degrees. Athletic scholarship students working in parallel on non-sports degrees needed to become the rule, not the exception.

But that work ethic conflicted with the culture they were raised in. Not with the black culture, but with the white ghetto culture.

In a very real sense, Odessa was/is the ghetto to Midland's middle/upper-class.

The whole concept of paying one-time reparations is part of that white ghetto culture. When you give people money like that, most of them use it to solve their immediate problems instead of setting even part of it aside to provide a path out. USD 300,000? For half of those who receive it, it'll be gone in a year, most of it spent on stuff that adds to the profits of the worlds richest people, adding to inflation and adding to the income gap. For another thirty percent, it'll be gone in another three years.

Less than ten percent will attempt to use it for education or investment and such, and the resulting inflation will eat away at that, too.

That people want to do something is, I suppose, commendable. 

That they don't want to figure out what needs to be done is being lazy -- Throw money at the big problem instead of giving time and attention to all the little problems that are the social calculus that produces the big problem.

What we need is middle- and upper-class folks deliberately cutting their workweeks down to twenty hours so they can go out to the ghettos to mentor people who need mentors more than money.

But before they go, they need to learn the difference between do-gooding (trying to teach lower-class people their own false ideals) and actual helping -- reaching out to actually help people get what they need to solve their real -- not ideal -- short-term problems first, then staying with them for the middle and long term, and refraining from pushing solutions on them. 

Forced solutions are non-solutions. 

It's kind of like the difference between doing the math for a student and helping the student learn the math, except the solutions that keep people out of the ghettos require helping them to invent their own math and their own tests. Teaching them your math will only help the ones who can make the logically jump from what you teach them to what they need.

(And, in keeping with that thought, I'll do as I usually do and refrain from trying to draw a lot of conclusions for you. You figure out what conclusions make sense for you.)

Saturday, June 5, 2021

About the Texas Heartbeat Act

Well, as usual, I found myself embarrassed that I have believed news reports without doing my own research. 

Here is a link to the actual bill, so you can also read it yourself:

https://legiscan.com/TX/text/SB8/id/2395961

Having read this law, here's my analysis:

This law does not criminalize abortion in any sense. Most news sources I read at least got this much right. At least one did not.

It specifically prevents using its provisions from becoming basis for suing a woman who receives or considers an abortion. It also specifically prevents use of the provisions by a rapist or abusive boyfriend/spouse, etc. Many news sources I read failed to see this at all. 

I even assumed it wouldn't have properly disallowed this kind of misuse of the law, so I guessed it wrong, too.

It specifically provides for exceptions in case of medical emergency. Multiple news sources missed this.

What this law requires is

1) that medical abortion providers or assistance groups (in other words, clinics, Planned Parenthood, etc.) be qualified and properly inform people of their qualifications;

2) that medical abortion providers perform proper medical examinations and explain the dangers and negative health effects specific to that person in getting an abortion;

3) and that medical abortion providers and assistant groups also inform those seeking abortions of the options to abortion, including the availability of financial support through government and other sources and the father's legal duty of support.

The sixth week is a minimum -- even the above three requirements are not required until the sixth week.

This bill is mostly about establishing minimum best practice. 

[JMR202106070407 -- edit]

Which, as a friend points out, does leave the problem of who certifies the certifiers, which is a variation of the who watches the watchers conundrum, and the conundrum can be exploited by bad-faith actors.

Exploiting law is a separate problem, and the conundrum is not unique. It essentially applies to all of law. Various philosophers, lawyers, and mathematicians have worked it out, and there is no solution other than for all members of the community to watch the watchers. I guess I need to explain that conundrum in a blog post some day.

Note to myself -- I think I noticed some possible ex-post-facto issues in the bill, which would be a particular vulnerability to exploit.

[JMR202106070407 -- end-edit]

As near as I can tell, that's all.