Also, lol at someone in tyool 2012 pretending that there are still jobs that require no education. Even understanding the marketing plan for a chain retailer requires more literacy than most people get from high school. If you want to solve what you see as a market failure (the waste of resources on unnecessary education) you probably shouldn't start your idea with a snipe hunt.

Edit: also, a degree is pretty obviously a Nash equilibrium, so unless your plan involves making it illegal for degree holders to work certain kinds of jobs there is literally nothing you can do to change this situation. If you add a new certificate between an associates degree and a high school diploma, you're just making another new thing that a high school graduate needs to get in order to assemble sandwiches. gg.

[LEFT]

No, Ryan, it's just that your party is clearly better at/more willing to gerrymander the house. There were a lot more democratic votes cast for house members than republican ones.

[/LEFT]

Well, you see Freelancer, the reason the republicans didn't win is because they weren't conservative enough. They gotta double down on that winning strategy.

If they manage to lose 2016 they'll probably collapse into a mass of pure rage and right wing extremism.

(In case you haven't seen this)

Wait, what? You are just dismissing or disregarding factors that make your position seem valid and unique.

Firstly, on what possible basis do you make the assertion that you can't competently perform a decent job with out college education? If you look at the intersection of all degrees you are left with a pretty meager skill set. I don't know where you went to school, but at the state school I went to, STEM kids had fairly pathetic writing skills, people who did write could usually get away with learning to bull****, and the non-stem kids could get away with mathematical skills that I wouldn't consider acceptable to pass high school. Compared to real experience, the skill intersection of a four year degree isn't all that useful.

Really what we need to do is improve high school so that it prepares kids going into relatively low skill, low pay jobs without saddling them with so much debt. Overall, I think we do need more post secondary education, because without it our economy simply won't be competitive in the long term. However, we need to focus more on imparting useful skills and helping kids match their college education to a career plan. Our generic message of "just getting a degree" is pretty stupid, and end up promising kids way more than it will deliver.

Or we could teach people how to sort through information, think critically, and solve problems creatively in high school, and then they can do whatever the **** they want after that.

Because now we teach people to not sort through information, to find a source they trust and accept it's viewpoints without question, and to chip away at problems with a spoon instead of the best tool, and they still do whatever the **** they want after that. Except the first group would probably contribute a lot more good to the world doing whatever the **** they want.

All I know is, YOLO ************s, I don't have time to get a real education cus its fer squares. N ****.

That's what I said, essentially. High school is really a waste of time, and that's stupid. I would be happy with letting the kids who just won't care simply fail if that meant that we could offer a marginally decent education to everyone else. Really, unless your parents makes you care, I don't see that there is a lot that a school can do institutionally to change that.

No. When you helicopter post so you don't have to write a reasoned retort you lose the right to accuse anybody of dismissing anything. (Don't say you were busy, I saw you online and it's not like you have to do a lot of research for this gold.)

Yeah, we totally need more education to prepare people for jobs!

Yeah, we totally need less education!


Wait, what?

Which STEM kids?

The STEM kids who had to write mathematical proofs in English (and often Russian or German if they are serious), the STEM kids who had to write research papers, the STEM kids who had to write analyses and business reports, or the STEM kids who can't read a post on the internet defending liberal arts degrees without bloodily ****ting his pants in rage and ignoring the content of the post (i.e. you)?

Because, wow, you must have gone to a bottom-tier university if STEM majors leave without being able to write inside their own domain. We're talking mail order here.

o no, however will I survive if I can't have a serious discussion about pumping lemmas with the secretary?? If someone doesn't learn what you did they must be a moron. Gotcha.

Improved literacy and critical thinking is not useful to employers(TM)(R)(C) Obi_Kwiet, 2012

Okay, I'm with you so far.

Okay, jobs that don't exist. Seems a little crazy-go-nuts but I'm still following you.

Which totally happens because of post-secondary, and not because of guaranteed government student loans. Okay. So instead of going to university they graduate high school, get [??????] low-paying job, and get saddled with debt because housing/basic sustenance is more expensive than their salary/they don't have health insurance/etc.. Is this what you were getting at?

Yeah. Totally. All of these dumb ***got students who go into school to get some dumb **** like philosophy, english and communications are just taking dumb bull**** so they can graduate early. They totally aren't thinking about their careers at all or what opportunities are available to them, like working as a staff writer, paralegal or going to law school. This is obviously true, I mean I know at least one person who mills through degrees because they have no direction in life, and if I know one it means that everybody knows one, and that means there are like hundreds of millions of these lazy people out there!! The government should step in and force people to take a good, useful STEM degree, like bio sci/premed. We have a serious premed shortage!!

Yeah that's right, we need more high school drop-outs. Because if a high school diploma is hard to get it'll totally force employers to value a high school diploma more instead of just creating a new barrier to entry for young, poor, (predominantly black) Americans. ****ing awesome idea.

"I dropped out of high school because even though I was good at learning and taking tests, I wasn't good at homework" is an example of why you should push back against having an educational system so focused on piecemeal evaluation (what the blogs call "feminized") rather than a criticism of the educational content like Obi_Kwiet is saying.

Basic literacy, mathematics, an understanding of history, geography, politics and the natural sciences. These are the things that everybody should be forced to learn, whether they move on to become a professor of mathematics or if they're doomed to mop the floors at a McDonalds, because nobody should want to live in a country where purestrain morons are allowed to vote.

"Let's create more poor, stupid people who are suitable only for menial work." ****ing great idea.

Yes. One of the biggest tragedies of my own education was the obsession with measuring how much me and my peers had learned. But they were measuring totally useless **** and we spent the bulk of our time doing pointless busywork or ****ing around, when we could have been actually developing good habits of inquiry towards information coming towards us.

The culture in which I educated was also tainted something terrible with a specific worldview, so that I was damn sure that I was very literate, and had a good understanding of history, geography, politics and natural sciences. Math was nothing I cared about because I attached a huge amount of anxiety to it despite being very good at computing at a young age. Unfortunately, I didn't like 'showing my work' as they love to put it, so I attached a loathing to everything involving numbers that I'm just starting to get over. Which is too bad because I missed out on a lot of cool ideas for years.

Of course, I didn't actually know anything about the world or how to filter information to look at it in a useful way, because I grew up in an intellectual culture of checking boxes. These boxes aren't worth that much anyway if you don't have the mental hygiene to support them, and it turns a lot of people off to learning and growing for the rest of their lives.

Or maybe I dont understand what you're saying because of the large amounts of brain damage from military recreation (substance abuse)

In all honesty, the box-checking aspect of education is probably the least offensive to me because studying for a comprehensive exam (or writing a cheat sheet for one) is really the most pedagogically useful part of the western educational system. The part of evaluation that's toxic is the on-going incremental evaluation, quizzes and projects that measure knowledge in such a small chunk that it's impossible to separate memorization from competence.

There's a reason it's called "feminization". You're asking hyperactive, pre-pubescent boys to sit quietly in a desk at school for 6 hours a day, and then go home and sit quietly in a desk doing homework for another 6 hours. I don't agree with the term because I think it implicitly overestimates gender differences, but it can to a large extent explain the growing gender education gap.

While we're talking about the educational system failing us, I think it would be a lot more helpful to start here than to talk about how high school isn't preparing kids to work a lumber mill or a steel foundry or some other job that's extinct.

I'd like to see more mandatory environmental education. When I patrol as a ranger in backcountry areas, I see a lot of people camping in the woods who are completely unaware of their environmental impacts. It gets pretty bad sometimes, particularly the litter at campsites, cut down trees for firewood, erosion of shorelines and riparian areas, and food left out and unattended. There is simply no environmental ethic, or any sense of what it really means to be sustainable and why it's important. And this is from people who claim to "love the environment"- those who hike, backpacking, camp, etc, and who are generally the most vocal about wanting to protect it. They simply don't know how to do it, and even worse, they don't know that they don't know how to do it.

Wanting to protect to environment isn't enough, and our education system completely fails to provide adequate knowledge about how to live a sustainable life style. IMO, this is a major shortcoming in the grade school education system.



It doesn't change your point, but lumber mills are far from extinct.

How about the Boy Scouts?

Some scout groups are great and do an excellent job minimizing their impact in the woods. Unfortunately, this is far from the norm. Scout groups have earned a reputation for being among the worst hiking groups in terms of the impact they leave behind. They tend to have large group sizes, they have huge fires and often cut down standing trees for fuel, and the scout masters are often incredibly out of shape and are unable to keep up with/control the kids in their charge.

I heard a story about scouting a few years ago; I have no idea if it's true or not, but it makes sense. Apparently, during the first years that boy scouts existed, there was an intense debate among those in the higher echelons of the organization over whether scouting would follow the Native American model of woods craft and lore, or the Daniel Boone pioneer model. The pioneer model of "conquering the wilds" obviously won out.

Regardless of whether the above is true, most scout groups on trips into the woods do strongly emphasize short term survival over long term sustainability. It's unfortunate, because there are some really great resources available within the scouting organization to overcome this, but few scouting groups take advantage of them (largely, I think, due to an unwillingness among male scout masters to even consider that they might not be that well skilled when it comes to recreational activities like hiking, camping, and backpacking). Again, this isn't true for every scout group, but it's definitely something I've seen more often than not.

In my experience, 4-H is a much better program for kids that provides education in environmental topics. The 4-H program deals significantly with agricultural topics, and most kids involved in 4-H are those who are likely to be employed in the agricultural and environmental fields after high school/college. Sustainability is definitely an important aspect of much of the 4-H program. 4-H is pretty big in the southern US- I wish it was more predominant up here in the northeast.

haha, this is incredibly accurate.

My troop was really good about zero-impact camping/hiking. Small group, leaders knew what they were doing. I've also been a part of one of those large monster troops where zero-impact is laughable at best, but I got the hell out of there after a few years.

Yeah, I think it's worth noting that within the scouting organization, resources do exist to help troops with these kinds of activities. The voyageur program is one great example- basically trained guides that are available for troops to use to facilitate backcountry trips. Unfortunately, though, not every troop takes advantage of those resources. It's not like the scouting organization itself is majorly flawed. But there is some room for improvement.

Some would argue that the scouting organization is significantly flawed institutionally. E.X. - their anti-homosexual views, or their insistence on forcing religious views on young people. Admittedly, the former stems from the latter, but both of these examples are abhorrent to the truly civic minded.

I have to say that during my entire time in the, first cub scouts, then boy scouts, I never experienced any instances of religious views being forced on me. unless you count instances like the pledge of allegiance that include the word "God"... or the occasional "native american" quasi religious activities. However i am with you on the part about their exclusion of homosexuals from the organization being pretty terrible.

You must believe in a higher power.

Not to mention their history of sex abuse:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scouting_sex_abuse_cases#United_States
http://www.kellyclarkattorney.com/files/

While we did have one Scoutmaster who got wrung up for messing with kiddies (never followed up on it, this was after I left that troop) I've never come across the anti-gay part of it. While the organization as a whole recently had their viewpoints upheld as legal, enforcement comes down to the individual units. Some troops follow DADT rules, others just don't give a damn.

While religion wasn't a non-issue, it wasn't pushed as "you need a religion". Yeah, my last couple troops met at churches, and that alone would be enough to steer some kids away, but there was never a sense (in my experience) that you had to belong to any given faith. Even prayers such as grace, the first day of a long campout, whatever, within my last troop at least it could be as generic as the speaker wanted (although naturally most people took a Christian direction).

Atheists have been kicked out. The official policy is also to use the word "God" to generically refer to whatever "spiritual force" the individual scout worships, which is intensely hostile to anybody who does not adhere to an abrahamic religion. There's no excuse.

Official policy does not mean everyone enforces it or gives a **** what those writing the rules at the top think, and again in my experience there was not requirement to say "God", "Father", or what have you.

The Scout promise is to do your duty to God, to your country, and (in Commonwealth countries) to your queen. All Scouts have to make this promise, it is required. You may optionally substitute the word "God" for a different spiritual power, but you are required to believe in one in order to be a member.

This is fact. This is the way Scouts have been since Baden-Powell. If you did not take the promise, you were never a Scout.

I equate saying "my duty to God and my country" the same as "one nation under God" and "in God we trust".

Maybe not in your troop. But it does happen.

...which is intensely hostile to anybody who does not adhere to an Abrahamic religion.

No, you can't just mentally transpose words like "God" and "Christmas" and "him" as a universal pronoun into your own life situation. This is exclusionary language. Just because the "in-group" of white middle-class protestant males deems these terms are inclusive it doesn't make it so.

I'm not saying that it doesn't, I'm well aware that it does; however just because the head leadership holds to a twisted meaning of "morally straight" doesn't mean the organization across the board believes/follows it.

Right, it just means that people who are inclusive and unbigoted are being so /against official policy/. And head leadership does have final sway in certain cases regardless of local deviation, eg the linked one.

Ok... I am not going to say you are wrong. because as per usual you are technically correct in the strictest terms... but you don't have to ACTUALLY believe in "God" or even a higher power in order to join the scouts. Granted i only have anecdotal experience to draw from, but for most of the people i was in scouts with the whole Scout promise was literally nothing more than a formality that they needed to learn and be able to recite in order to advance in "ranks". It was almost across the board nothing more binding than having to say the pledge of allegiance in school. You did not ACTUALLY have to believe in "God" to be a student, the most you had to do was half coherently mumble some words.

...You know what, Why does this feel like i am walking into some mind **** trap??? What is it Jon'C? Is there some nuance in something that you wrote that i may have missed that you are going to get me with a "you should really try to read my post better." ??? I just have an impending feeling that im going to get smack with an "Ah-HA! *****!" moment. It is really unnerving...

So yes, never mind.

An atheist could just you know.. promise that and not mean it. SINCE THEY BELIEVE IN LIES ANYWAY.

Yes, lying is always an option. Staying in the closet is a great way for a gay person to avoid being lynched, and during America's apartheid some black people did surprisingly well if they were lucky enough to "pass".

I will stop here and let you reflect on this.

Ah yes, the post-Eisenhower Pledge of Allegiance, such a painfully obvious unconstitutional piece of tripe whose death clock is marching in lock-step with the current crop of white male republican judges. Probably not the best thing that will happen after a well-connected Christian fundamentalist suffered a methamphetamine-induced stroke but it's up there.

I'm a white middle class male protestant so my understanding of exclusionary language will always be sophomoric, but I can assure you that saying "one nation under god" is a bfd. No, it is not a generic stand-in for whatever you believe, and no, it is not "ceremonial" worship and therefore meaningless, and no, it is not whatever other moronic excuse was invented by some racist halfwit mouthbreather fundie judge. This **** is not okay.

Yeah that is one bear trap i am fine with leaving un-poked.

Look, I understand that there are people who will be offended by language like "one nation under god" and "do my duty to god and my country" or exclusionary language of any kind and honestly I think it would be good to change that language and attitude. I think the Scouts has the potential* to be a very positive influence on a lot of peoples lives and think they should strive to be inclusive of anyone who wants to join.

What i did say, and ALL that i said was that the idea you put forward of the foisting religion on you and if we find out you don't believe in god you are OUT OF HERE!!! and my actual experience with scouts were VERY different. (yes, yes. I get it. having to utter the word "god" is tantamount to religious foisting.)

*there are obviously a good number of things that the scouts as an institution need to fix.

so in all seriousness, is the issue that exclusionary language is used at all? is it simply because scouts is such a noticeable example? is the issue that there is exclusiveness of ANY kind taking place? for example is it ok for a bunch of trumpet players to want to start a hiking group of only trumpet players? or is an "exclusive" group never ok and everyone needs to be included in everything regardless of anything? Or is it more the exclusionary substance in this case, as in religion and sexuality?

Are you insinuating that non-theists more readily lie because they don't believe in a spiritual power to hold them accountable?

if so **** you