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Quote of the Day: Artificial Stupidity
“Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.” — Thomas Sowell
Thomas Sowell states the importance of a good education and ensuring those that provide it are competent to teach better than I can. Education is the great sleeper issue of this campaign, buried beneath the economy and crime. But nothing has done more to cause traditional Democrat constituencies to vote Republican than the misuse of the education system at the hands of the educational establishment. The purpose of the American education system, in their eyes, is to enrich the employees and use it to sell their cultural agenda. The quality of education provided is at the bottom of their priorities, to be given sufficient lip service to convince the suckers financing this country’s public schools and institutions of higher education to continue funding it.
Except the suckers are wising up and voting accordingly. The question is, what will the Republicans do with this gift handed to them by the voters? Reform the education system within their state, as DeSantis seems to be doing? Or refuse to address the problems because fixing them will be hard?
Published in Group Writing
We’ll, obviously keeping the issue alive is the important thing: you can’t fundraise off a solved problem.
The proper policy is simple: abolish compulsory education.
I suspect that would make the problem worse. It would offer the government the opportunity to maintain a public education system “for those interested” while neglecting its quality, because “if people are unhappy with it, they don’t have to attend.” That’s the story with higher education today. It is not compulsory, but its quality is almost as wretched as primary and secondary education.
I sure disagree with this one. What would you have taught? Nothing? Leave it up to the parents? What makes you think that many parents wouldn’t put kids in schools teaching the same drivel as at present?
Complex problems rarely have simple, three-word solutions.
It’s not the opposite.
-(artificial intelligence) == natural stupidity.
Sowell is right on the product, though.
Aren’t you clever. Sometimes they have one word answers “No”.
Education vouchers. Let the public schools come face to face with the free market.
Sowell delivers a good quote here, but it’s wrong in an important way. There is nothing artificial about the stupidity that our schools teach and our students learn. It is, unfortunately, the real thing.
Years ago, in my libertarian days, I had the pleasure of working with the late Marshall Fritz on his Alliance for the Separation of School and State project. Marshall was an articulate advocate for the privatization of education. (He was also an irrepressible force of nature.)
We had already been homeschooling our six. None of them attended an actual school until I put the youngest three into Catholic high school after my wife passed away. I have never regretted for a moment the cost and inconvenience of keeping them out of the public school system.
However it is done, I think it essential that education be dramatically reformed, and at all levels. We’re watching the self-immolation of higher education today and that can’t happen fast enough for me. I agree with @seawriter‘s post: there is a wonderful opportunity right now for Republicans to partner with parents in opposition to the woke cancer consuming our public schools.
That’s the ticket. It’ll take a good politician to make the case in the face of all the NEA / Union caterwauling about destroying public education, but really, it starts with asking people which word in the phrase “public education” is the most important?
Thank you. That formulation is going to end a few arguments.
I would point out that education, itself, is not really difficult. It doesn’t require exotic technologies, equipment, or resources, it’s not expensive, and we’ve been doing it for centuries, so there’s an accumulation of “best practices”.
So there’s absolutely no excuse for screwing this up. So what we’re seeing in US public schools is a pure example of a completely broken system.
Where the “system” includes the Department of Education, local governments, school boards, bureaucracy, and… a government workers union that makes political contributions. The latter should not even be legal.
If you cut a check to the parents, the aggregate value would go straight up.
Accreditation in higher education is mostly the same thing as a trade licensing scam. The whole thing should be ala carte.
It’s a tough problem partly because of the professions. In my opinion, it’s the graduate schools that are largely controlling the entire system in the sense that what they want their applicants and students and graduates to know has become the standard and content for what children are taught. The graduate schools choose the students they want, and those students are the ones who spout the party line.
This is how we ended up with a pediatric psychiatric field that is, in my opinion, completely off the rails today. The system is all self-reinforcing. I read a great book years ago by Dr. Regina Herzlinger: Who Killed Health Care? She was, and perhaps still is, a Harvard Business School professor, and the Harvard Medical School students had to take her course. She became alarmed that every single medical school student simply assumed that a single-payer health care system was inevitable and desirable. How does this happen? In my opinion, bias in admissions.
With the education process removed completely from the federal level by abolishing the Department of Education then each state can go with vouchers or not and the outcomes should tell the story. This can also be used to highlight for our overall population the meaning of the concept of federalism so they will get an understanding of what it means to live in a republic. Our current approach to public education fails to convey any knowledge of these concepts to the students.
This is one of my friends on Twitter. lol I think she was on the school board of a pretty big district here in the Minneapolis metro.
Maybe some work on the three R’s once these people figure out what that is.
Another helpful formulation: We should be funding kids, not institutions.
If you are afraid of having your theory of education made public, maybe this gig just isn’t for you. Or maybe you need a rhetoric class or two. Remedial ones.
So much this! I would get behind a Republican Donald Duck if he promised to abolish public sector unions!
And Mr. C has been screaming into the abyss for half a dozen years that Republicans should put school choice at or near the top of the agenda. Parents and students need schools to compete. How else will we improve quality?
But, it’s not called the stupid party for nuthin’.
I’m convinced the issue with higher education is on the end of those who “benefit” from it, which is the professions that hire from higher education’s degree holders.
That #1, professions hire almost exclusively from the pool of degree holders regardless of quality, and #2, that if the pool of American degree holders prove inferior in quality, the professions can hire outside the American pool.
Number 1 makes a guaranteed customer to higher education while quality is not in nearly as high demand as the diploma. Number 2 keeps professions uninterested in the quality of the education.
We need there to be some interest in investing in education.