A must-read on the Finnish education system.

[ What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? | wsj.com ]

Links

[ Drop the Degree and Go With the Cert | wsj.com ]

The national average score on this quiz is 50%, and for those below 30 it’s 30%. I scored a 91%.

Where do you fit?

Links

[ Where Do You Fit? | pewresearch.org ]

The rift between us…

RIFT.

Reads In Free Time

Those who are not in intellectual (see lucrative) professions have a strong inverse correlation with reading for fun. So the next time you hear an adult speaking like they’ve never been to school, while serving you fast food, think about the odds that they have books at home. Or the odds that they’ve read anything other than a pop culture publication outside of being assigned to do so in school.

RIFT.

People who read in their free time (because reading is fun) are far more likely to be “successful”. Yes, I know, citations needed. I’ll get some as the idea develops. For now I just like the acronym and the concept that goes with it.

Thoughts?

Here’s an excerpt from a great piece on American elite education in The American Scholar.

he first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race.

With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals.

At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.

Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

Links

[ The Disadvantages of an Elite Education | theamericanscholar.org ]

An interesting study has come out of the National Science Foundation (NSF) that found that fluid memory (a type of short-term memory) is key to I.Q., and that training this type of memory can significantly improve I.Q. scores.

Chalk one up for nurture.

Links

[ Fluid Memory Training Improves I.Q. | nsf.gov ]

This is insane. The United States of America in the 21st century, and one in four people in NYC has genital herpes. And the breakdowns are even more staggering.

36% of women have it, but only 19% of men. 49% of blacks have it, but only 14% of whites. 49% of blacks? Half? Are you kidding me? WTF is going on with the black folks and the women in that town? Who are these people? Where do they hang out? Where did they go to school? What caused this?

This is an example of a culture problem that needs addressing — especially since herpes isn’t the only negative outcome of sex that can often result in an STD. And the approach to this problem doesn’t call for an “equal but different culture” theme, but rather a “what the fuck are you doing” theme. We’re talking about ignorant, adult-age children hurting themselves, not equals making informed decisions.

Society suffers when people suffer. It’s our responsibility to keep those within our society from hurting themselves. The question is, how do we do this without becoming the culture police? How do you do it without infringing on basic freedoms? And given the numbers we’re dealing with, combined with a political correctness backdrop, how do we even begin to address the issue without being labeled racist and sexist?

Links

[ Genital Herpes in NYC | yahoo.com ]

Summary: White University professor denied tenure at a Black University because he failed too many students that deserved to fail. He was essentially told to pass approximately 70% of his students regardless of what they do. He refused and was punished.

This has been a theme of mine lately: pretending to help people by artificially lowering the standard does NOT help them. All it does is make the person lowering the standard feel better. But the student/child still suffers because they remain equally unable to compete in society.

Sickening.

[ How NOT to Equal the Playing Field | insidehighered.com ]

I try and preface entries with this as little as possible, but this link I’m about to share is a “must see.” It’s a talk given by Malcolm Gladwell for New Yorker Magazine about how people are vetted to determine how they will perform in various roles such as professional sports, teachers, lawyers, etc.

Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite thinkers. If he’s not already one of yours he may very well be after this. Set aside 20 minutes and watch this as soon as possible; you will love me for making you.

[ The Combine Doesn't Work | Malcolm Gladwell ]

One final thing: Gladwell is an economist, but with him you have to stop thinking about this term as purely financial. Between Gladwell and Scott Adams I’ve come to a new appreciation and understanding for the discipline. My new understanding of the word is, “The study of causes and effects.”

This new type of economist attempts to figure out, quite simply, the inputs that go into an outcome. And quite often they end up shattering the ideas we’ve long held about why things happen the way they do. Case in point: Roe vs. Wade lowered the crime rate in the 90’s.

Our country is crumbling before us as a direct result of relaxing our standards for excellence. This is true in many areas of American life but it’s most obvious in our education system. We’re abandoning the pursuit of excellence in favor of the pursuit of equality. This is more than foolish; it’s literally suicide.

CNN is reporting that American universities are moving from the SAT and ACT exams as requirements for entry. The justification? Not enough people with poor scores on those exams are making it into college.

Wake Forest made the move as part of its efforts to increase socioeconomic, racial and ethnic diversity in the student body, said Martha Allman, director of admissions. Research has shown that SAT performance is linked with family income, and that the test by itself does not accurately predict success in college, she said.

Making the test optional “removes the barrier for those students who had everything else,” like scholastic achievement and extracurricular activities, but who “maybe didn’t do as well on a specific test,” she said.

A specific test? That’s what we’re calling the SAT now? Just some random test? High SAT scores are linked with family income for a good reason — because high IQ is linked with family income¹. That’s why the SAT is used to test for college admission, because those with higher IQs do better on the SAT², and because IQ is strongly correlated with success both in college and in life.

If minorities aren’t scoring high enough on the SAT then find out why this is the case and help them. If you care about the quality of your group you don’t abandon a standard because not enough people are reaching it. The limited number of people achieving a high standard is the reason for and definition of a high standard.

If you lower the standard for medical school graduates you get lower quality doctors. And the same goes for a country where the college graduates don’t compare to those abroad — we end up with a lower quality population.

Bottom line: if you can’t read, write and do math at the 12th grade level then you shouldn’t be allowed to go to college. The answer isn’t lowering university standards; it’s raising the standards in high school.:

References

¹ [ Beyond the Bell Curve | nytimes.com ]

² Meredith C. Frey, Douglas K. Detterman (2004) Scholastic Assessment or g?. The Relationship Between the Scholastic Assessment Test and General Cognitive Ability Psychological Science 15 (6) , 373–378 doi:10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00687.x

[ Dropping SAT and ACT | cnn.com ]