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Washington Post's Fareed Zakaria writes:
If Americans are united in any conviction these days, it is that we urgently need to shift the country’s education toward the teaching of specific, technical skills. Every month, it seems, we hear about our children’s bad test scores in math and science — and about new initiatives from companies, universities or foundations to expand STEM courses (science, technology, engineering and math) and deemphasize the humanities. From President Obama on down, public officials have cautioned against pursuing degrees like art history, which are seen as expensive luxuries in today’s world. Republicans want to go several steps further and defund these kinds of majors. “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists?” asked Florida’s Gov. Rick Scott. “I don’t think so.” America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher.
This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts — and puts America on a dangerously narrow path for the future. The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy. When unveiling a new edition of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained that “it’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough — that it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.”
It's another installment in a running debate, but with reports that 1/3 of student loans in the United States are delinquent, perhaps it's worth revisiting now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:10AM
I'd love to agree with you. It would 'feel' right. But I can't. Health- and life insurances always have to put a price-tag to human life, because resources are limited and have to be split up somehow. There is *always* an option to spend more money to prolong life a bit more. Additional medical checks, more treatments, etc. But we have other needs, too. So we need to spend some of our resources on e.g. education, but also a bit on entertainment, street repairs and so on.
Monetary value is just one way to make the resources comparable to better decide how much to invest on which topic.
You can reject the idea of putting a price tag to human life, to education and so on. But someone has to, and someone will. And the more people stick to the idea that human life is invaluable, the less people will make this decision, and the more they will hide their way of reasoning. I think it's better to openly say "yes, saving human lives costs money and we can't save everyone. Lets discuss, how much we invest and for which cases." The same goes for education, at least as far as teaching and schools are concerned.
But maybe we can find a common denominator in open access policies: Everybody should have free access to knowledge. Everybody should be given the opportunity to learn at home or in self-organized courses with others. Scientific papers and entry-level science books should available at reproduction cost (which is free for ebooks) for everybody. (For entertainment media I also advocate open access, but it's a slightly different topic for me. Access to knowledge should be a human right. Access to entertainment is a luxury.)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Interesting) by c0lo on Tuesday March 31 2015, @09:34AM
And because someone does put a price-tag to human life (maybe legitimately from their narrow point of view) does it mean that all the society must adopt the same reductionist PoV?
Oh, gosh. It took only 50-something years from:
to "we can't save everyone.".
America is dying quickly; the rest of the world can only wish there won't be convulsions in the process.
Ah, yes... metrics and the illusion of control by quantification. Have you noticed that choosing the wrong metric is usually worse than not having any metric at all?
E.g. how do you quantify the drop of biodiversity in money?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday March 31 2015, @09:53AM
I didn't make this transition, and I'm not even American at all :-) And if you asked me, I'm not sure I'd have been in favor of the mission. Probably, but not for some propagandist heroism, but for scientific reasons. And I wouldn't have agreed at any cost, just at reasonable cost.
Your post sounds very humanitarian, which is a good thing, but doesn't answer the basic question: How would you allocate different resources for different purposes? If life is invaluable, do you want to prohibit alcohol, fast food, cars etc.? Each of them reduces life expectancy, I'd prefer to balance a bit, enjoy my life within a reasonable life-expectancy.
Reg. education: Do you teach? How many classes? I you have a free evening left, why is that, when teaching is entirely invaluable? How about a teacher having stress-related health problems, should he prioritize teaching or his live? And how about pharma industry paying salary? Should they pay their workers or enforce slave-labor in order to be able to give their medicine away cheaper? There is always a kind of prioritization and therefore a need to compare the values of results of different resource-usages.
I do agree that humanity should strive for education and wisdom but also freedom. There are ways to pursue this goal without sacrificing too many others. But for that we need to think analytically about current situation and limitations. Open access is one way to go. Reducing military expenses in favor of space exploration and other sciences would be another one. But this only works if we think of our values in relative terms, not in absolutes. We need to think about efficiency, about achieving more with the resources we have.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 31 2015, @10:41AM
How do I do it now, in regards with my resource allocation and prioritization of my purposes: (feeling of guts, guestimations) maximize the number of possible outcomes of my current choices in the future: sometimes it doesn't even matter that the number of "bad" outcomes increase as well. Rationale: if I'm not running into dead-ends**, I'll choose the continuation later, when I get to that bridge.
Thanks God I don't need to allocate resources and prioritize for others.
** success may be a dead-end in itself: end of journey, how's this fun?
What did make you think my refusal to put a monetary value to life means I consider life as invaluable? (I only said valuing a life in money seems like a silly thing to me).
Achieving more in what sense (what's you metric of assessing if we achieved more)? In the monetary sense of it?
You sure you haven't already fallen into the trap of "tell me how you measure me and I'll tell you how I'll behave" (aka "operand conditioning")?
You speak about "balance between the life-expectancy and enjoying life": how do you measure "enjoying life" in monetary terms?
No. I tried, got a sense of inadequacy of my efforts, decided to better not do it than ruin the potential of the students.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:19AM
That sounds more down-to-earth to me.
Maximum joy for maximum amount of life forms, as an integral over time until end of times ;-) And no, I couldn't directly and in a general way convert joy to money or even measure the joy of other life forms. I could maybe name some resources (e.g. sufficient food) that I suspect might increase my happiness. I'm in the lucky position to enjoy my job to a certain extent because it's a permanent challenge, permanently forcing me to improve my capabilities and to learn. But I'd probably work less if I didn't have some other wishes too.
Partially, maybe. I'm convinced that everyone likes to be appreciated. But I wouldn't go out of my ways to please someone. I don't care about fashion, mas long as I'm reasonably warm and clean. I don't care much about political correctness (although I don't find pleasure in offending people, just think staying straight to my points is more important.) But then again I know that honesty is appreciated by many, so maybe I'm just honest to be accepted? And I know that smelliness drives others away, maybe that's driving me to stay clean? Who knows?
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 31 2015, @05:53PM
To both of you: it is quite fun to see technical people slowly rediscovering value theory. In all seriousness, look it up and this conversation would be much more enlightened and thus interesting.