Alex's Journal

I have studied abroad twice in my life. Once in high school and again at the university. In high school, I spent a year at a Japanese high school in a very rural part of the country and at the university, I spent a year in Germany. After having spent time in two different education systems, it has dawned on my just how completely flawed our education system really is.

While I don’t want to delve into the specifics as to why the other education systems are better (in some cases, they aren’t any better), I do want to point out some of the things that I find truly ridiculous about our own education system. I will start with elementary and middle schools.

My mother teaches the fourth grade at a public elementary school. I have heard all sorts of horror stories from her about school bureaucracy and politics. When she first began teaching several years ago at the fifth grade level, concerns about things such as state-backed standardized testing were negligible. As time has progressed, however, these state-backed tests are all the children are taught to. In fact, the teachers themselves are practically told to teach directly to the tests so that the school can get maximum funding. If the kids do not do well on the tests, then the schools do not well, and since state-funding is directly connected with the results of these tests, the schools that need the money the most are unable to get it. The government’s idea behind this is the encourage both schools and children to do better, but in reality, they are severely hurting the children. Some children will not do well because they can’t, others will not do well because they simply do not test well, and yet others will not do well because they don’t see a reason to and just don’t care. Standardized testing doesn’t take this into account.

Another problem with these standardized tests is when they are to be given. In Colorado, we were always tested in March. The problem about giving the test in March is that students are expected to know the entire year’s worth of content by March. That means teachers have to cram ten months’ worth of content into eight. The time after the tests is then practically useless as the teachers have already taught everything they needed to teach for the year before the tests.

It seems that every year after these tests are finished, there are mass protests against them among teachers and parents alike. They don’t necessarily get out their pickets and demonstrate in front of the capitol, but there are always petitions to dispose of the tests and some of them gain quite a respectable amount of signatures. You would think that these arrogant politicians who owe their positions in the government to us in the first place would take that as a huge sign that the standardized tested is most unwelcome.

Part 2 is coming soon and will address some of the major problems with high schools in the US.

A great comic:

Atheist Bashing

Yesterday in one of my classes, we were discussing the Wyoming state constitution. We talked about how it was formed, the unique way in which it was formed, some of the bits that were stolen from other constitutions and some of the unique pieces included in the constitution.

One of the articles states that public education shall be entirely regulated and controlled by the local level of government. What the framers of the Wyoming constitution were afraid of when they included this article was unneeded state control of the public education system in Wyoming. What they could never have imagined in 1889, however, was federal control of the education system.

This brings me to my point. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind program is entirely unconstitutional in the state of Wyoming, thus making it illegal and entirely illegitimate. Now my big question in this matter is why Wyoming’s governor and and the state legislature allow it. Whether they agree with it or not doesn’t matter whatsoever. The fact is that any control of the public education system in Wyoming above the local level is unconstitutional.

I would assume it must have something to do with federal funding — just like the drinking age and many other federal laws. The federal government blackmails states by threatening to take away funding for such things as the highway system (again, with the drinking age) to impose its will upon them. I don’t think that’s what the country’s founding father meant when they declared that each state would have its own sovereignty.

You know, I don’t understand why politicians feel like they have to meddle in every situation that occurs. There are some places they really should just keep clear of and the economy is one of them. Yes, I know they are trying to prevent an economic meltdown and ultimately a recession (or let’s face it, that should be depression). Yes, I know they are trying to prevent the unemployment rate from plummeting. But I also know that whatever they do is going to result in one or both of 2 things: it’s simply not going to work and the government will have wasted tax payer money frivolously, or they will have succeeded in spreading government power and influence drawing us ever closer to a socialist state.

No matter the result though, the government is going to use money it does not have. The national debt will continue to grow as they borrow more money from abroad or by issuing bonds, or they will print more money causing the value of the dollar to rapidly decline. Those are their only options.

I really must say that it would be very much appreciated if they would just let the free market work. We will have our ups and downs and they can be potentially bad, but we will have those whether the government intervenes or not. Not to mention government involvement will only exacerbate and prolong the problem. Instead of solving it now, we are just going to pass the problem down to our kids and their kids and their kids and so on.

According to the BBC:

Senior Democrats in the US Congress are considering backing a huge economic stimulus package to try and steer the country clear of recession.

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House of Representatives, said economists were suggesting a package worth “several hundred billion” dollars was needed.

During the US election campaign President-elect Barack Obama pledged to pass a $175bn (£118bn) stimulus plan.

No, we don’t need another stimulus package that isn’t going to work. The first $700 billion stimulus package didn’t do any good whatsoever. Nothing has improved and nothing has changed. In fact, things have only gotten worse! Why, then, do we need another one? Why does Obama feel the need to waste tax payer money on useless stimulus packages as one of the first things he does in office? That isn’t the change I want.

Today I did a presentation in one of my classes about why over-funded athletics programs should be removed from universities or at the very least, significantly scaled down. They have simply gotten too carried away with their spending and are guzzling university funding at an enormous rate. It’s really sad in my opinion because they are detracting from the academics at universities. No wonder the American education system is pumping out so many stupid people.

In my presentation, I included a comic graph that really shows the skewed priorities that football coaches have when it comes to salaries. Some of the specific examples of coaches I listed were hired with contracts worth $6-$12 million which is absolutely outrageous. After all, the whole purpose of the university is educate and not to pay coaches absurd amounts of money.

One of my favorite quotes that I found is from an article I read in The New York Times Magazine online and goes as such:

Dollars are directed from general funds and wrestled from donors, and what does not go into cherry-wood lockers, plush carpets and million-dollar weight rooms ends up in the pockets of coaches, the most exalted of whom now make upward of $2 million a year.

It’s true too! Not only are coaches making insane amounts of money, but athletic departments are spending huge amounts of money on other projects, most of the pointless and stupid. An example of that would be the University of Michigan. They spent $18 million in upgrading their stadium. One of the “highlights” of the renovations were 10-foot high lyrics to their football team’s fight song. That’s an appalling waste of money! It could go to something like classroom renovation and modernization. That funding could be used to upgrade computers around the campus or add more computers or do a huge number of other things like research grants.

The scary part is that, for most universities, most of this funding comes from student tuition rather than the revenues generated by ticket sales or merchandise sales. Universities also use their football team as a reason to raise tuition if the football team performs well, which is really ridiculous when you consider that the football team’s performance has absolutely nothing to do with how well the university is ranked academically and has no effect on the kind of education most students will get. The only effect it has is negative — it diverts funding that could go for academic purposes.

Another great quote I found that I intend to leave off on, is one from James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan. The quote comes from his book, Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective and goes as such:

The damage done to students participating in [sports] programs, not to mention the university itself, has become simply too great. It is time that we decoupled football and basketball from the world of big-time show business, and reconnected these programs, their coaches, and their student-athletes to the educational mission of the university….[otherwise] they are not worth continuing….it might be far better for our institutions, our students, and our nation if we were to phase them out in favor of flag football and intramural basketball. (214)

I found a very humorous blog entry about the Mormons continuing to posthumously baptize Jewish Holocaust victims into the Church of the Latter Day Saints. The author’s idea for revenge is quite cruel when looked upon from a Mormon’s point of view, but quite hilarious when looked upon from another point of view. The author proposes to convert dead Mormons into homosexuals. A quote from the blog entry:

Dear God of the Homos,

With your great and everlasting love that blessed the covenants of Achilles and Petroclus, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and of Jonathon and David, bless then the soul of Joseph Smith of Sharon, Vermont with your divine penis. Let it pierce the anus of his soul, and let you be forever joined to him, since on this oppressive earth, he was denied the pleasure of the male sex.

Forever and ever, our brother Joseph Smith has now joined our family (We Sing the Hymn to Praise God of the Homos!).

Blessed be God of the Homos,

Amen

You can read more about it here.

I consistently follow the blog Pharyngula by PZ Myers. He is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota and he writes quite a bit about Atheism and religion. Today he was interviewed by a German website called the hpd about his blog, Atheism and its cultural acceptance in the USA. Here’s a section of it:

4. The United States were founded as a secular nation, yet it turned out to be the most religious of all western democracies. What, do you think, are the main causes of that development?

Europe tossed out its craziest and most extreme and most religious elements, and sent them abroad. From our founding, we’ve been built of disparate colonies that were often initially established to shelter religious oddballs.

We also have a constitution that guarantees protection of religious belief, broadly defined. It meant that this was an environment in which the wildest ideas could be expressed and sheltered by the government, so we’ve actually had the opportunity for a little natural selection of religious ideas, and the most extreme have done relatively well.

5. How worried are you about the future of secularism in the United States?

Very. I think we’re at a tipping point here; we could correct the slide into irrationality and become an Enlightenment state once again, or if the crazies succeed in demolishing our educational system, we could be on a one-way slide to third-world status in the next few generations.

You can find the full interview in English here.

Well, in my ongoing quest to learn German, I have decided to start keeping a blog in German. Since I have still have 2 unused domain names — both conveniently enough in German — I’ve decided to use one to keep a blog in German.

If you speak German and would like to follow it, please visit http://www.eswirdkalt.com.