Majoring in Hackademics: The UnCollege

College debt across the US has skyrocketed to near $1 trillion, risking a catastrophic financial bubble when it bursts. At the same time, the benefit a student derives from a four year college degree is falling off, year by year.

Minyanville

The diverging trends are taking a toll on students and recent grads. Student loan delinquency rates now exceed those of credit card, mortgage, and all other types of consumer debt. And many indebted grads are being forced to delay buying homes, having children, and saving for retirement.

The situation is causing many experts to warn of a student loan bubble that could burst much like the housing market did in 2008. Howard Dvorkin, author of Credit Hell, told The Fiscal Times last month: “It's hard to predict when the student loan meltdown could occur, but if the bubble explodes, the consequences will be devastating for the economy.” _Minyanville

NYT

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to “hacking” higher education.

...UnCollege advocates a D.I.Y. approach to higher education and spreads the message through informational “hackademic camps.” “Hacking,” in the group’s parlance, can involve any manner of self-directed learning: travel, volunteer work, organizing collaborative learning groups with friends. Students who want to avoid $200,000 in student-loan debt might consider enrolling in a technology boot camp, where you can learn to write code in 8 to 10 weeks for about $10,000, Mr. Stephens said.

THEY can also nourish their minds from a growing menu of Internet classrooms, including the massive open online courses, or MOOCs, which stream classes from elite universities like Princeton. This guerrilla approach hits home with young people who came of age seeking out valuable content free on Napster and BitTorrent.

Mr. Stephens, a dropout from Hendrix College in Arkansas (he later earned a Thiel Fellowship), started UnCollege less than two years ago, and already its Web site attracts 20,000 unique visitors a month. “I get on scale of 10 to 15 e-mails a day from people who say something along lines of, ‘I thought I was the only one out there who thought about education like this, I don’t feel crazy anymore,’ ” he said.

There are other groups, too, like Enstitute, which offers two-year apprenticeships with entrepreneurs in lieu of college, and Zero Tuition College, an online support network for students looking for alternatives.

The goal is not to foment for a mass exodus from the ivy halls, Mr. Stephens said, but to open people’s minds to a different set of opportunities. _NYT

Children need to be trained in the many arts of making money long before they reach college age. Children schooled in The Dangerous Child Method will acquire the skills to support themselves financially at least three different ways -- and they will know how to manage the money for its best utility as well.

The US government educational system isolates children from a very young age from real world responsibility and avoids teaching them vital real life skills which they will need when they are out on their own. Each stage of education kicks the can down the road a little further, expecting that the next level of education will fill in the gaps. Sadly, parents are complicit in this massive scam of the "educators," and then they wonder why their children move back in with them -- unmarried, unable to find work, without meaningful skills or competencies.

The trend toward general indebted incompetency is one that the government welcomes -- because it gives governments new excuses to expand to new areas of oversight and responsibility, while taking away or restricting more individual responsibility. Time is running out on this misguided culture of psychological neotenates and lifelong incompetents.

Harvard Dropout Bill Gates Takes Online MIT Course, Discovers a new Investment Opportunity

It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood, and it is never too late for a dropout such as Bill Gates to go back to school -- even if for only one online course.

According to Phil Giudice, the CEO of a battery startup called Liquid Metal Battery, his company found their most high profile investor, Bill Gates, through a more unusual way: the classroom.

...Gates started taking a class from Liquid Metal Battery founder and MIT Professor Don Sadoway via MIT’s online open-course program. Gates took Sadoway’s 34-lecture series on batteries and contacted Sadoway by email to meet with him and learn more, said Giudice.

“At first Don thought it was a joke,” said Giudice, “but then realized it was actually Gates and that Gates was serious,” said Giudice. Soon after, Gates invested in Sadoway’s new battery venture Liquid Metal Battery, and has also invested in at least four other battery startups. _GigaOm

GigaOm
It will be at least two years before the new battery will be ready for commercial application, but the episode does illustrate the idea that it is never too late to re-open at least some chapters of one's life.

MIT Open Courseware

This vial containing three immiscible liquids – that is, liquids that cannot be mixed – demonstrates how the chemical components of a liquid metal battery can self-assemble. When the vial is shaken, the liquids separate after a few seconds. (Photo by Lee Moshurchak, courtesy of Donald Sadoway.)

Introduction to Solid State Chemistry is a first-year single-semester college course on the principles of chemistry. This unique and popular course satisfies MIT's general chemistry degree requirement, with an emphasis on solid-state materials and their application to engineering systems. _MIT OCW
MIT Open Courseware

Udacity

Coursera

Free Video Lectures

Academic Earth

YouTube Edu

Peter Thiel Aims to Misbehave

This article is cross-posted from Al Fin, the Next Level

Peter Thiel is a successful entrepreneur, visionary, and venture capitalist. But according to many tenured ivory tower professors, Peter Thiel has become "the enemy." One of Thiel's recent "investments" involves sponsoring youth under the age of 20 years old, in the starting of their own entrepreneurial enterprises. The young people must forego a college education during the time that they are engaged in their intensive entrepreneurial training and startup experience.

Interestingly, one of Thiel's young hopefuls -- 19 year old Dale J. Stephens -- has embarked on an entrepreneurial campaign in opposition to an excessive dependency on a college education. The excerpt below is taken from Stephens' article in CNN: College is a waste of time:

I have been awarded a golden ticket to the heart of Silicon Valley: the Thiel Fellowship. The catch? For two years, I cannot be enrolled as a full-time student at an academic institution. For me, that's not an issue; I believe higher education is broken.

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

...College is expensive. The College Board Policy Center found that the cost of public university tuition is about 3.6 times higher today than it was 30 years ago, adjusted for inflation. In the book "Academically Adrift," sociology professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa say that 36% of college graduates showed no improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning or writing after four years of college. Student loan debt in the United States, unforgivable in the case of bankruptcy, outpaced credit card debt in 2010 and will top $1 trillion in 2011.

... Learning by doing -- in life, not classrooms -- is the best way to turn constant iteration into true innovation. We can be productive members of society without submitting to academic or corporate institutions.

... We who take our education outside and beyond the classroom understand how actions build a better world. We will change the world regardless of the letters after our names. _College is a waste of time

Brave words, which will need to be backed up by braver actions. Stephens will receive $100,000 and access to expert advice and assistance in reaching his entrepreneurial goals. Stephens has already been signed by Penguin Press to write his first book, "Hacking Your Education."

What is most interesting about this phenomenon is that Thiel's initial investment is spurring a downstream expansion in interest in entrepreneurial alternatives to mainstream college education. And this downstream expansion is likely to spawn further downstream expansion, and so on etc. . . .

Wise people understand that school is not the education. Life is the education. The efforts of modern society to place emphasis on the educational effect of schools at the expense of the educational effect of life, has led to a society of Peter Pans and Cinderellas, perpetual incompetent adolescents of the psychologically neotenate variety.

Peter Thiel aims to change that emphasis back, in an effort to help save at least a few youth from wasting their time and lives. Peter Thiel aims to misbehave. And he is hoping that the attitude will be catching.

Universities Exist for Themselves, Not for Students

Image Source

Surprising Facts About Some of the World's Most Successful Failures

• 1. The richest man in the world twelve years running, Bill Gates, with a net worth of $52 billion, is a dropout.
• 2. Four of the ten richest people in the world are dropouts (number 1, Bill Gates; number 6, Sheldon Adelson, worth $26 billion; number 8, Amancio Ortega, worth $24 billion, Li Ka-shing, worth 23 billion).
• 3. The world’s wealthiest high school dropout is Li Ka-shing.
• 4. Four out of five of America’s richest people are dropouts (number 1, Bill Gates; number 3, Sheldon Adelson; number 4, Lawrence Ellison, $19.5 billion; number 5, Paul Allen, 16 billion).
• 5. America’s richest elementary school dropout, the late H.L. Hunt, was worth billions.
• 6. America’s richest high school dropout, J.R. Simplot, is worth $3.2 billion.
• 7. America’s richest college dropout is Bill Gates.
• 8. Asia’s richest resident, Li Ka-shing, is a high school dropout.
• 9. Argentina's sole billionaire, Gregorio Perez, worth $1.7 billion, is a high school dropout.
• 10. Spain’s richest resident, Amancio Ortega, worth $14.8 billion, is a high school dropout.
• 11. There are 68 billionaires who are dropouts and numerous millionaires.
• 12. Many of the world’s greatest inventions were developed by dropouts, including television, radio, airplanes, cars, motion pictures, the incandescent light bulb, the car stereo tape deck, the gas mask, the traffic signal, earmuffs, the game of basketball, the sewing machine—and many more. _MillionaireDropouts

Billionaire College Dropouts

CEOs Without Degrees

The idea that a person must graduate from college before he can make something of himself is a fairly recent idea -- and a crock of excrement. University educations are taking a bigger bite of a family's budget, and offering less and less in return. The faculty and staff at too many universities have decided that it is their job to shape you and your children in their own image, while charging you an arm and a leg to do it.

Most university degrees are worth less than the paper on which the diploma is Kinko'd. It may be time to consider the alternatives to the expensive indoctrination camps they call "universities."

Is College the Biggest Waste of All?

Saying “too many people are going to college” is not the same as saying that the average student does not need to know about history, science, and great works of art, music, and literature. They do need to know—and to know more than they are currently learning. So let’s teach it to them, but let’s not wait for college to do it. _Source

Many of our most successful entrepreneurs and inventors dropped out of college--or never went in the first place. For many entrepreneurs, college can be a waste of both time and money.

A great majority of our nine million college students are not in school because they want to be or because they want to learn. They are there because it has become the thing to do or because college is a pleasant place to be; because it’s the only way they can get parents or taxpayers to support them without getting a job they don’t like; because Mother wanted them to go, or some other reason entirely irrelevant to the course of studies for which college is supposedly organized.

As I crisscross the United States lecturing on college campuses, I am dismayed to find that professors and administrators, when pressed for a candid opinion, estimate that no more than 25 percent of their students are turned on by classwork. For the rest, college is at best a social center or aging vat, and at worst a young folks’ home or even a prison that keeps them out of the mainstream economic life for a few more years. _Source(PDF)

Most parents would be dismayed to learn what their hard-earned money and credit was being devoted to. A waste of time and money? Sure, for most students. Sometimes much worse--also a waste of the students' minds--academic lobotomy. At most, 25% of college students are actually suited for a rigorous 4 year degree. Most people would be better off with an alternative educational path.

The income for the top people in a wide variety of occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that require a B.A. Furthermore, the range and number of such jobs are expanding rapidly......the demand for skilled technicians of every kind—in healthcare, information technology, transportation networks, and every other industry that relies on high-tech equipment—is expanding. The service sector includes....growing numbers of specialized jobs that pay well (for example, in healthcare and the entertainment and leisure industries). Construction offers an array of high-paying jobs for people who are good at what they do. It’s not just skilled labor in the standard construction trades that is in high demand. The increase in wealth in American society has increased the demand for all sorts of craftsmanship. Today’s high-end homes and office buildings may entail the work of specialized skills in stonework, masonry, glazing, painting, cabinetmaking, machining, landscaping, and a dozen other crafts. The increase in wealth is also driving an increased demand for the custom-made and the exquisitely wrought, meaning demand for artisans in everything from pottery to jewelry to metalworking. There has never been a time in history when people with skills not taught in college have been in so much demand at such high pay as today, nor a time when the range of such jobs has been so wide. In today’s America, finding a first-rate lawyer or physician is easy. Finding first-rate skilled labor is hard. _Source

Sometimes, the futile quest for a college degree can devastate a family's finances, and leave a student deeply in debt with nothing to show for it.

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this: "I wasn't a good student in high school, but I wanted to prove that I can get a college diploma. I'd be the first one in my family to do it. But it's been five years and $80,000, and I still have 45 credits to go."

...Such students are not aberrations. Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science. _Source

Too many students, parents, and human resources managers continue to nurse the absurd fantasy that a bachelor's degree confers a level of competence or judgment on its recipient. The myth will be a long time dying. Long ago, when college education was far more rigorous and demanding--and when it was understood that only a small per centage of high school students would go to college--a bachelors degree meant something to an employer. But in these modern days when campuses are more often places of indoctrination into political correctness and post-modern faux multiculturalism than places of meaningful education, bachelors degrees are not worth the paper they are embossed upon.

An educational world based on certification tests would be a better place in many ways, but the overarching benefit is that the line between college and noncollege competencies would be blurred. Hardly any jobs would still have the BA as a requirement for a shot at being hired. Opportunities would be wider and fairer, and the stigma of not having a BA would diminish.

.....The demonstration of competency in business administration or European history would, appropriately, take on similarities to the demonstration of competency in cooking or welding. Our obsession with the BA has created a two-tiered entry to adulthood, anointing some for admission to the club and labeling the rest as second-best.

Here's the reality: Everyone in every occupation starts as an apprentice. Those who are good enough become journeymen. The best become master craftsmen. This is as true of business executives and history professors as of chefs and welders. Getting rid of the BA and replacing it with evidence of competence -- treating post-secondary education as apprenticeships for everyone -- is one way to help us to recognize that common bond. _Source

The rot begins in the places where K-12 teachers are trained, and progresses throughout the primary and secondary educational systems. The central Departments of Education are saturated with the mindless rot of non-questioning acceptance of obsolete educational traditions. Teachers' unions and their pet politicians exist to make sure that nothing ever changes at the primary/secondary levels.

Change always comes to systems that are so innately counter-productive. The question will be whether the change will be forced by an enlightened appraisal of how the system fails to meet its purported goals, or whether the change will come after the entire edifice comes crashing down, taking much of society and the economy along with it.

I'll let James Altucher of Financial Times sum it up:

First, and foremost, it's too expensive. To send a kid to college you need from $200,000 to $400,000. That's insane. There's no way the incremental advantage they get from having a diploma will ever pay back that amount. Perhaps for the first time the opportunity cost (a phrase I remember from Economics 101) of college does not equal the extra profits generated by the degree.

Second, I don't believe in a balanced education. Most colleges require students to take a smattering of art, maths, sciences and so forth. Taking 10 courses a year on wildly different topics, with enormous homework responsibilities, not to mention droning, boring professors for at least eight of the 10, is the surest formula for creating complete non-interest and inability to remember anything in any of the topics covered. What a waste of $400,000.

And third, there are far better uses of time. One reader asked what her kid should be doing instead of college. Here are some of my responses:

1. Working.....

2. Take half the fee for one semester, give it to your kid, and tell him or her to start a business. Not every youngster has entrepreneurial sensibilities, but it's always worth trying once. The cost for starting a business is next to zero, so it's a viable alternative.....

3. Spend a year trying to become good at one thing.... _FinancialTimes

The US has long been an opportunity society--where emigrants and citizens of little means scrape together or borrow money to start businesses, and frequently build comfortable lives for their families. Business has always been the best and most frequent road to success in opportunity societies. That should always be true, as long as government is reasonably friendly toward small business, and keeps the obstacles to new business low. Remember that, when you vote.

A University Model For High Schools

This diagram comes from this PDF file from blogger Bruce Hall. Bruce has devised an impressive solution to many of the most pressing problems of the public high school system in the US.

Public high schools are a significant monetary drain upon communities, but are not providing a useful education to most students who attend. Growing numbers of students drop out before completion, and an increasing number of high school graduates are not qualified for either work or higher learning. Universities and employers are forced to devote ever larger budets to remedial education for high school graduates who cannot read, write, spell, punctuate, do basic arithmetic, formulate a valid argument, or recognise logical fallacies in everyday life.

Most proposals aimed at improving secondary education amount to throwing more money at the problem by doing more of the same. The educational establishment simply wants to intensify its efforts within areas proven previously not to work. Bruce's proposal is not only a bold departure from the hackneyed approaches of "professional educators", it may actually work!

Perhaps it is time for educators to realize that the present high school education may be archaic for today's world. After all, it is organizationally and content-wise [3Rs etc.] little changed over hundreds of years... even though schools have gotten larger.
Rather than recognizing the opportunities available with larger schools, the educational system forces larger schools to conform to the small school model and wonders why it doesn't work. Let's get a little creative in our thinking. Instead of thinking of a large high school as a bloated version of a small high school, why not organize it into the university model? Take advantage of the large number of teachers with a variety of interests and skills. Create small high school "colleges" within the large high school "university."

...In four-year high schools, the organization could be changed so that incoming freshmen receive the traditional compulsory courses. Then students can choose a "major" [that could be changed once at the end of their sophomore year] where more of their courses fall within the major curriculum... increasing each year until their senior year when all of the courses fall within that "major."

...It is designed to appeal to the varied interests of students while having sufficient academic challenges in the areas of reading and language skills, mathematics, and science within each "college". Certainly, this is meant as a concept for further work and refinement, but I have long felt that the traditional organization of high school was for the convenience of the educators as opposed to the education of the students. Don't construe the "colleges" as isolated; students would still have the opportunity to take courses within those other units that they felt [along with counselors] augmented their primary coursework.

....The world is changing... perhaps it is time for high schools to change. __PDF_BruceHall_UniversityModelforHighSchools

The modern methods of child-raising and education are failing badly. High school graduates should possess skills that would allow them to earn at least twice minimum wage. Vocational school graduates with one year completed after high school should be able to start a job at close to three times minimum wage. Two year college or vocational school graduates should be able to start at nearly four times minimum wage--and progress on from there.

In the real world, it is the ability to get the job done that counts. Western nations currently suffer from a perennial shortage of skilled craftsmen and tradesmen, along with an abundance of dropouts-without-useful-skills, due to the catastrophic failure of high schools to prepare students for the real world. Schools try to force all students into the same cookie-cutter program, regardless of interest or aptitude.

Bruce Hall could teach the educational system quite a lot about how to solve many if its largest problems. Unfortunately, the educational-industrial complex is in it for the money. The last thing it wants to hear is that it needs to make fundamental changes that might upset the apple cart.

Would You Pay $1 Million to be Lobotomised?

College education is becoming increasingly expensive. Current figures are well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and soon may pass the $1 million mark. We are continually being told that a college education is worth at least $1 million over a student's lifetime. But given the large number of school dropouts who are billionaires and mega-millionaires, many people are wondering if the price of an academic lobotomy--university education--is actually worth the cost.

But what if the college premium doesn’t exist, or is greatly exaggerated? If a college degree isn’t worth as much as the conventional wisdom assumes, is it possible that the money the country keeps pouring into the current financial aid system isn’t wise? That taxpayer acceptance of the ever-rising price of higher education, patience that already wearing thin, would evaporate? And that that combination of factors would finally force college leaders and policy makers and others to get serious about confronting the problems?

That is the roughly scenario that Miller laid out last week in a scathing letter to Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, in which he accuses the board, through its choice of financial assumptions and presentation of data, of misleading the public in its “Education Pays” report, which aims to lay out the benefits to individuals and to society of a strong higher education system and of equitable access to it for Americans from all backgrounds.

A different analysis, “using assumptions more in line with current realities, might reach the shocking conclusions that American higher education today has gotten too expensive for what it produces; that it has become too costly for the typical student ... that education (a college degree) does not pay!” Miller wrote. ___InsideHighered

The best route to riches in an opportunity society such as the US is through business. Ambitious high school dropouts with an idea and persistence can become millionaires, and often do. Currently there is a desperate shortage for craftsmen and skilled labourers who earn upwards of $100 K or more a year with overtime. Much of the sluggishness of economies in developed countries such as the US is due to a lack of skills to push forward the many backlogged projects in energy and industry. This backlog will only get worse.

There is no need to pay big money for an academic lobotomy. There are many other routes to material wealth and comfort that do not involve opening your skull for (often) feeble-minded professors of twisted ideological bent. If you must have a college education, you can obtain all the knowledge via the internet and the libraries in your area. If you must have a degree, many reputable universities offer distance learning degree programs.

It is best if you understand what you are paying for, what you can expect to get back, and what you may be sacrificing--before you step into the lobotomist's theatre.

Future Jobs: College Grads Need Not Apply

In spite of growing levels of underemployment for college graduates, almost every child has the message "you've got to go to college" drilled into her. But seventy percent of the jobs in the top ten largest growing occupations will not require a college education, according to the Carnegie Foundations Change Magazine.

...the story of the top 10 occupations with the largest (rather than fastest) growth in number of jobs is different. The BLS expects these occupations to grow by 4,600,000 jobs—23.4 percent of the total increase in jobs from 2004 to 2014—while the top 30 will increase by 8,833,000, or 47 percent of the total increase. Seventy percent of these occupations do not require college; 30 percent do....The jobs that require postsecondary education credentials total 29 percent for 2004 and will rise to 31 percent by 2014. This is consistent with the very gradual increase in educational requirements that we have seen over the last six decades....Thus, while jobs requiring advanced education might be expanding rapidly, they still accounted for too small a share of the workforce to affect the average level of education needed for all jobs.

...Fewer young college graduates have been able to obtain college labor market jobs, and their real wages and annual earnings have declined accordingly due to rising mal-employment. These young college graduates take jobs that displace their peers with lower levels of schooling."...

Change
Via Joanne Jacobs

Most workers in the foreseeable future will not need a college education. That does not mean they will be flipping burgers, or earning minimum wage. A growing population of the world's billionaires lack college degrees.

Most students appear to be focusing on jobs--working for someone else--life long employment. No surprise, since all the media can talk about is "jobs, jobs, jobs." Such jobs emphasis is 18th century thinking that belongs in the past. The focus in the 21st century should be upon assuming the mantle of personal responsibility as independent contractors. Government bureaucracies--firmly mired in the thinking of the past--are geared to "full employment" and enforce many job-related mandates for employers.

We will see a lot more "under-employed college graduates" as society's emphasis on the importance of a college education comes face to face with an economy that will mostly require "no college" or only "some college."

It is possible for many parents to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for their child's education, only to find the child is prepared only for a minimum wage level job. More and more, college graduates are qualified only to point out the many "injustices" of the society they are belatedly cast out into--as grown-up children, psychological neotenates. Many of these grown-up children will never assume responsibility, because learning to do so was never part of their education. Binge drinking? Yes. Hooking up? Yes. Blaming everyone else for problems? Yes. Self-responsibility? Sorry, no, never.

While most of the professors at universities are growing fixed and fossilized in their disconnect from the actual state and needs of the real world around them, more youth--particularly women--are pinning their hopes on the favourable job prospects bestowed by a college degree. Unfortunately, they are choosing degrees that will not give them appreciable advantage over associate degree holders, or even high school graduates. More injustice? To them, apparently so.

Hovering in the background, out of focus, is the impact that the quickly evolving internet will have on the jobs/education picture. In many fields, emphasis will be on "certification" in particular skills and specialised knowledge. Such certifications can be quickly updated to meet the actual state of technology and innovation in a particular field. On the job training combined with "certifications" will assume an ever more important role. And ever more certifications will be obtained via internet and internet based schools and programs.

Even in traditional degree paths, more education will be provided by internet based off-campus providers, or via virtual campus. A worker's education can grow as his job develops. Consider it "flex-training" or "flex-education."

More on this very important topic later.

Panic, Damn You!!! 2

What does it take to bring you to the verge of panic? Global Warming? Peak Oil? Muslim terrorism? Threats of economic recession? The thought of [you fill in the blank] in the US White House? Whatever it takes, the mainstream media is determined to push your panic button. The media has no scruples about crying "fire" in a crowded theatre.

Popular panic, or collective panic, typically happens when the fear of being trapped in a dangerous place sweeps through a large group of people. This often leads to a mass stampede with some number of persons being trampled underfoot.

In the case of Peak Oil or Global Warming, panic may take the form of a fearful "hunkering down." When an entire society "hunkers down", it fails to plan for and invest in the future. In such a situation, predictions of recession become self-fulfilling prophecies, as investment capital for economic growth is pulled out of the productive economy and placed in more fear-based "investments."

The most knowledgeable voices on oil supplies at this time are Leonardo Maugeri and Daniel Yergin. If you have not read their respective books, The Age of Oil, and The Prize, you need to do so quickly so as to be informed on this issue. "Peak Oil" is a relatively cut and dried issue compared to "Climate Change." By reading Maugeri's book in particular, you will have a much better handle on Peak Oil.

To better understand the panic and hype over "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming" (CAGW), will take more time, thought, reading, and getting your hands dirty with a calculator. But it will be worth it if you can face the future with more confidence, rather than being at the mercy of climate grifters such as Al Gore.

Start with Warren Meyer's (Skeptical) Layman's Guide to Man-Made Global Warming. Warren also produced a free online climate video. The best website for an open discussion of technical climate issue (without climate orthodoxy censorship of ideas) is Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit. Just as good--but not allowing comments--is Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science blog. Roger's blog is full of scientific articles that expand the climate discussion beyond the narrow issues considered important by Al Gore's Nobel partner, the IPCC.

For staying informed on issues of Islamic terrorism, I recommend a select group of journalists and blogs that work overtime to accumulate reliable information.
The Long War Journal
Michael Totten
Strategy Page
Robert D. Kaplan
Small Wars Journal
Belmont Club

Any readers who wish longer reading lists for any of the above topics, contact me at alfin2100@hotmail.com

A panicked populace is a populace in a state of involution or atrophy. The problem is a reluctance to invest in the future. That reluctance includes a reluctance to procreate to replacement--which is a huge problem for the western world and Japan.

Symptoms of this destructive pathology of the human spirit includes the rise of organisations calling for massive cutbacks in world population including dieoff.org, the human extinction movement, and other groups including those privately endorsed by academics like Eric Pianka. The fact that a large segment of leftist, postmodernist academia and media supports this human "die-down" and reversal of the scientific and technological progress of the western world, should cause parents to seriously consider the educational paths of their children. Unless they actually want their children to have this deep-seated pessimism instilled deeply in their children's developing minds.

The best antidote to panic is to be both informed and prepared. There will no doubt be some large bumps in the road over the next few decades, getting from our present "between-levels" state to the next level. The best "shock absorber"for those bumps is knowledgeable preparation.

Hundreds of thousands are without grid power in California currently, from Pacific storm damage. Obviously everyone needs stored clean water, food, and provisions for alternate heat, refrigeration, and power. Fire extinguishers. Emergency lighting. Medicine kit stocked for at least a month. Extra cash. (ATM's not working) Optional barter supplies.

Here are Popular Mechanics' lists for survival kits. The Al Fin sidebar has more sources for survival information and supplies in the lower 1/4th of the sidebar.

If you are not willing to panic, be prepared.

Because American Schools Are Creating Mediocrities Out of Promising Young Minds

A recent post on Slashdot accentuates an ever worsening problem:

I am a new graduate student in Computer Engineering. I would like to get my MS and possibly my Ph.D. I have learned that 90% of my department is from India and many others are from China. All the students come here to study and there are only 7 US citizens in the engineering program this year. Why is that? I have heard that many of the smarter Americans go into medicine or the law and that is why there are so few Americans in engineering. Is this true?

Slashdot

But the question is not only relevant to engineering grad schools. It could be asked of US graduate training in math, computer science, physical sciences, and the more technical areas of biological sciences.

US higher education is considered the best in the world, when looking at technical and scientific training, and business and economics. (The arts and humanities have turned into indoctrination centers, but that is another topic.) It is logical that qualified students from China, India, and other less developed nations would travel to the US and take advanced training.

But it is also true that many of the graduate spots filled by foreign students would not have been filled by North American students anyway. Why is that?

First of all, I am not saying that this phenomenon is entirely bad for the US and Canada. Attracting the best minds in the world is not a new phenomenon for North America, and has benefited the region for well over a century. The problem is the minds that might have happily entered these technical fields had they been better prepared in preparatory school and grammar school.

Feminists complain endlessly about the problem that Larry Summers clearly and correctly (though timidly) mentioned in his famous talk that caused feminist science professors to faint dead away. Women are not entering technical fields at the same rate as men, and are particularly not achieving the highest levels of these fields, comparable to men. (Feminist professors are still holding a grudge against Summers, blacklisting him and preventing him from speaking wherever he may go)

But do the feminists differentiate between the foreign male students, graduates and professors, and domestic students, graduates, and professors? Well, men are men, and they are all the enemy, so to speak, so no. But do these outspoken feminists truly believe that the top universities discriminate against women AND domestic men when admitting graduate students and assigning professorships? How very odd.


As an aside, you may wish to go to Slashdot to see how quickly the discussion veered onto unrelated topics. That's one reason I rarely bother with Slashdot. With a few notable exceptions, the comment quality has dropped significantly.

The abysmal nature of lower education in North America, especially the US, has disqualified most domestic students who might have taken higher ed degrees in technical subjects. This is only part of the downward path of education in N.A.

But in the US, and Canada, the best way of becoming very rich is through business. Some scientists and engineers can leverage their technical and scientific training to a success in business. But so can high school and college dropouts.

Foreign students who wish to immigrate to the US and Canada can better do so by achieving a Masters or PhD in a useful subject. Thus part of the motivation for foreign students. Clearly, domestic students lack a comparable motivation, which is a huge part of the problem with lower ed training for science and technology. The reason for that lack of motivation will be explored in future postings.

School for Dummies

Not that kind of dummy! Schools are in fact manufacturing dummies--functional illiterates--at a record pace.

...if you think that newspaper readership follows education, you would expect it to increase. But it has declined for every level of education.

....Magazines are likewise in trouble. Paid circulation for magazines covered by the Audit Bureau of Circulation peaked in 2000 at 379 million; dropping to 362 million by 2005, in spite of increasing population, higher incomes, and educational attainment. I suspect that the greatest decline is in the magazines that offer the most in terms of knowledge and thoughtful analysis.

....One reason adults are reading less is that an increasing number of them are unable to do so. The National Center for Education Statistics conducted surveys of adult literacy in 1992 and 2003. It tested ability to read prose, documents, and quantitative materials, such as graphs, charts, and tables. At every level of educational attainment, from elementary school through college, prose and document literacy has fallen

....The decline in reading amounts to a decline in learning and knowledge. The vocabulary acquired through normal everyday conversation is limited. The much greater vocabulary of educated adults is learned mainly through reading. As to knowledge, one can learn from fiction, but not in a coherent systematic manner.

....There are cognitive differences between readers and nonreaders, and between good and poor readers. Reading and writing are more abstract, objective, and analytical than oral communication. Readers display a greater range and complexity of expression. Cognitive gains include ability to generalize instead of thinking only in particulars, to use analogy, to classify according to common abstract properties. Such abilities are found with much lower frequency among illiterates.

The philosophy prevailing in public schools has helped undermine the quest for knowledge—to rebuild literacy, we must reverse it. Two generations have been taught that they have a right to their own opinion without regard to their mastery of the subject; that all opinions are of equal value. This assumption underlies the popularity of public opinion polls as means of settling matters of fact and logic. No one told them that such an opinion is worth somewhere between a plugged nickel and a tinker’s damn. So why do one’s homework? Why read, why think?

Source.

When you combine increased narcissism, psychological neoteny, and reduced literacy and cognitive skills, large numbers of modern graduates--and dropouts--may have somewhat less to offer society than they think.

There is a strong need for efficacious schooling for children and youth--even for adults. To stop a raging epidemic (of illiteracy and functional stupidity) one must go to the source. In this case, the source (university ed schools, the education industry, teachers' unions, the media, etc.) are virtually untouchable in the US due to their vital importance to one of the major political parties.

Dropping Out of School to Get Rich

A degree is no guarantee of competence or aptitude. Particularly these days, when political correctness and conformism are more important to teachers and professors than any valid understanding of the world. Here are some billionaires who dropped out to get rich:

Bill Gates
Larry Ellison
Steve Jobs
Michael Dell

Here are some wealthy and famous persons who dropped out of high school:

Jim Clark, Internet Billionaire
Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Galactic
Sir Michael Caine, Actor
Louis Armstrong, Musician
Ella Fitzgerald, Musician
Duke Ellington, Musician
Pierce Brosnan, Actor
Sir Sean Connery, Actor
Jack Kent Cooke, Media Billionaire
More at source.

Here is a long list of famous and wealthy dropouts at Wikipedia.

Here is a super-list of celebrity dropouts.

The fact is, if you are good at filling a perceived need of the public, government, or commercial interests, you may have a better chance of being successful by making your own way, than by staying in cookie cutter assembly line style of conformist education, oppressed by mindless politically correct guidelines.

Other Expectations: Making One's Way

Recent comments from Turtlekill have stimulated me to consider alternative ways in which a person might wish to order his/her life. Both men and women are being shortchanged by current societal expectations.

For women, some evidence suggests that having children at an early age (in her twenties) produces health benefits for both mother and child. But all health concerns aside, is it possible that there is something inherent in the process of raising a very young child that teaches something to a parent that cannot be easily learned any other way? Is it possible that child-raising itself offers benefits to the mother (primarily), that will stand her in good stead in the course of her later career?

I suggest that this is the case, that watching and aiding the physical and mental development of a very small child provides a learning experience that is very profound and very valuable. Such an experience is also frequently very rewarding emotionally, and frequently not regarded as a sacrifice.

A woman trained in human nature by very young professors-in-diapers, can be a formidable judge of character indeed. Often what seems to be missing in trial judges in courts of law, entrepreneurs, and rising executives in enterprise, is that very character judgement. Yet so often professors of feminism discourage young women from having children early, and disparage and criticise women who make such a choice for early child rearing. Perhaps they lack good judgement themselves?

Young men are also putting off marriage and child-rearing later and later in their lives. ( Why should they buy the cow when they can get the milk for free, so to speak?) It is not only the mother who learns from the young child. If the father will pay attention and attend to the child himself, he could also learn a great deal about human nature, and also gain an emotional reward.

Education

It is expected that children of college educated parents will also go to college, and beyond. In fact, it is desired, "societally", that most youth should graduate from high school and go on to graduate from college. But is that the best plan for the youth, and for "society?"

With the internet (and before that with public libraries), virtually everyone can have the knowledge base and erudition of the college educated, regardless of their formal educational attainment--as long as they can read and learn to operate a computer. With faster connection speeds and more advanced interfaces, virtually any type of knowledge or skill will be available over the net.

The lack of a college degree did not keep some of the most famous billionaires and tycoons from achieving their wealth. In a large part of the world, it is still a person's capacity to achieve that counts, rather than the degrees behind the name. Children and youth need to learn real world skills, and problem-solving skills well enough that they acquire justified confidence in their ability to make their way in the world. A college degree is no substitute for confidence based upon achievement.

Unfortunately, the educational system in the west is devised to deny children and youth the opportunity to achieve anything meaningful. This is because the people who devise and revise the educational system do not have real-world skills themselves, so fail to see any value in them. Educated idiots, is the cruel but accurate description for a large proportion of university professors and professors of education. How are these educated idiots going to help students to acquire necessary skills that the idiots do not even recognise as important?

University of Minnesota scholars Harkins and Moravec have put forward a bold plan for making universities relevant again. Their Leapfrog University proposal is a hopeful and reasonable approach to making universities a fertile bed for growing solutions to societies problems.

But not everyone, not even most, perhaps, should go to university. A university education is no guarantee of success or competence. The more society tries to force everyone to get a college degree, the less value the certificate seems to have. Then you need a masters, a doctorate, a post-doc, a post-post-doctoral fellowship, and so on, to distinguish yourself academically.

But in the real world, it is competence that counts. Competence and confidence that is based upon competence. One alternative to college for young men (and recently for young women) has always been military service. Many young people go into the military uncertain and unskilled, and come out with job competencies that in civilian life might have taken much longer to acquire.

In an opportunity society, it is entrepreneurs and independent businesspeople who have the greatest potential for economic growth. In the independent business world, you do not generally need a degree if you have the competence. This is more true in the trades, in businesses that service the large businesses, and in new pioneer industries, where rigour mortis has not set in, as it has in the professions.

An intelligent high school dropout can still apprentice in a trade, learn the business, then strike out on his/her own. If able to out-compete, the dropout can grow a new business to an impressive size, and either cash it in or move to a supervisory and planning role and live on the proceeds. Not bad for a dropout. Better to have the degree, perhaps, but there are ways to compensate if people are open to them.

How many people have internalised the attitude of "failure" or "loser" because of the limited and overly critical attitude of many in society toward educational and professional achievement? How many of these go on to become failures, losers, drunks, junkies, etc. because of this subconscious internalisation of society's attitudes? What might they have contributed if they had been given all their options when they were young?

But how could they, when there is such prejudice against alternative orderings of one's life? When their teachers themselves serve merely as conformist enforcers for the larger society?

These are very interesting things to consider. Do not for a moment believe that this blog has seen the last of speculations on this topic.
:-)

Death by School

I am referring to the "cognitive death", the murder of the mind, a ghastly crime committed against millions of north american students every year, by government schools. Here is a quotation from a conversation between cognitive scientist Seymour Papert and Brazilian radical Philosopher Paulo Freire:

Paulo Freire: Yes. Absolutely. To me this is not a statement yet. I state that school is bad, but I don't state that school is disappearing and will disappear. That's why I am appealing to all of us who have escaped cognitive death by school -- who are the survivors here -- to work on modifying it. For me, the challenge is not to end school, but to change it completely and radically and to help it to give birth from a body that doesn't correspond anymore to the technological truth of the world. . . . .
. . . . .
Seymour Papert: Will there be school? I'm not saying that school is going to go away. It depends what we mean by school, but I think that what we need to note and very clearly … and this is something else I learned from you, actually - is that we must be conscious and critical of what it's about fundamentally.

And now what's wrong with schools is not details. What's wrong with school is absolutely fundamental. It is so fundamental that to say you're going to correct that is not very far from saying we don't have school.

Freire wants to radically modify school so it will stop killing the minds of its students. Papert is suggesting something more radical.

As the slow evolution of school lags further and further behind the rapid evolution of society, increasing numbers of students all over the world see school as irrelevant to life. Many drop out. Many more drop out mentally, emerging from school with poor skills and negative visions of themselves and the society they are entering.

Throughout Papert's work on education, the theme recurs of replacing the total obsolescence of modern schools with something more effective, more stimulating, and more relevant to the future the students will be forced to face.

Here's Bill Gates: America’s high schools are obsolete.

By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded – though a case could be made for every one of those points.

By obsolete, I mean that our high schools – even when they’re working exactly as designed – cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.

Training the workforce of tomorrow with the high schools of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. It’s the wrong tool for the times.

Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year.

It is much worse than Papert and Gates might lead you to believe. Not only are today's schools poorly designed for the challenges of tomorrow (even today), they are being run so incompetently, corruptly, and even maliciously, that even if well designed they would be destroying children.

But it gets worse. Schools are not only inept, poorly designed, corrupt money sinks, and welfare programs for bad teachers, they are also actively at war against boys.

Boys have brains that on the average fit the demands of engineering, theoretical computer science, physics, and mathematics, at the higher levels of difficulty. If boys are being "warred against" by schools, no wonder there is a dificit of qualified engineers, high level computer scientists, and physical scientists. Schools are driving away the very sort of mind that can work with mathematical and spatial concepts the best. Death by school. Societal suicide.

This is a huge problem, because north america is running a severe engineering deficit. "America is experiencing an engineering deficit. Compared to twenty years ago, 20,000 fewer U.S. students now graduate college with engineering degrees. Europe and Asia now graduate 3 to 5 times as many engineers as the U.S." Excerpted fromengineeringand.com . What is true for the US is true for Canada. Canada is importing more and more of our engineers, like the US.

Government schools are incubators for all manner of delinquency. Government schools are best seen as preparation for being dropouts. Any type of social problem you can identify in north america is made worse by an order of magnitude by government schools. Crime, unemployment, bad race relations, teenage pregnancy, drug abuse, lack of civility, obesity, sloppy thinking, ignorance.

Why do taxpayers continue to support the people who are ruining their children? The people running the north american school systems are causing far more damage to our societies than any muslim terrorist or saboteur. We are being gutted and roasted on the fire by our own cooks and utensils.

5% of people do 95% of the work. That may be the magic goal for proportion of next levels in a post-singularity world. We are creating entire generations who will not be able to adapt to the rapidly changing future. We will have to take care of them. Feed them, clothe them, shelter them from the elements, entertain them, heal their wounds, injuries, and illnesses, diagnose and treat their depression, help them live long, healthy, satisfied lives. This will be our obligation, our burden, our privilege.