Teaching the Spiritual dimension

 

TEACHING THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSIONS IN ORIGINS

            Geologists, Physicists and Biologists have investigated and found the earth came about as a planet 4.5 billion years ago after a Big Bang 14 billion years ago.  Why so? Well the Big Bang is supported by the continual expansion of the universe and categories of elementary particles found.  Geology examines depositon of rocks and deformation in earth forces. All point to very long times like the physicists say.  Biologists are supporters of Darwin’s Natural Selection as the origin of species and Miller experiments that brought forth amino acids, the building blocks of life.  Yet it’s just theory with problems.  Big Bang requires movement well in excess of the speed of light, whose absolute value is a physical principle. And the expansion indicates the need for 5 times more matter than what we see, hence the postulation of Dark Matter. Darwin’s theory has been shown to not generate enough mutation by a long shot. So everybody believes in evolution, but isn’t sure of its cause.  Yet this is all common in theorizing.  More to come. Science isn’t the “chiseled in stone” stuff many people believeTeachers often leave students with the notion that “It’s all figured out,” when in fact it’s a big room full of arguers.

             When I ask Christians what they think of creation, quite a few say they believe in a 6-day creation as Genesis describes. Well, except that there are 2 stories of the creation—something most folks don’t realize.  This first in Gen. 1 through Gen 2:3 is what everyone has in mind, but Gen. 2:4 says “These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heavens and the earth.”-- quoted from the KJV so in good faith to traditionalists. Literally, one day.  Well, they say, the second passage is figurative, just a shorthand way of writing the creation story, not literally one day. Okay, but what of the firmaments?  You can’t just accept the 6-day thing without accepting the firmaments in the story of Gen. 1. 

            Ah, we are dumb moderns don’t know what a firmament is, do we? The KJV translators have translated it quite correctly from the Hebrew.  It comes from metalworking. And the technique has existed since at least 2500 BC.  A firmer is a hard surface on which metal is shaped.  Start with a once-melted blob of metal (think copper) and pound it with a hammer over the firmer.  The result is a metal firmament, which through the pounding process is further hardened.  But what if you want a curve to make the shoulder piece of a coat of armor or a cup or bowl?  Then the firmer is a hardened stump carved into a dome, with the curve you want.  The toughest, strongest piece ancients knew was a metal firmament. Thus KJV Genesis vs. 7 tells about God dividing an enormous water into two waters by using a firmament that was named the heavens.  That is, the heaven firmament is like an inverted bowl to which stars and moon and sun were attached.  Below this firmament was another flat one that held the land and the seas. 

            Here’s the picture.  The universe was like a vast waters within which earth, a flat disk, sealed to a bowl-shaped sky, floated submerged.    The heavens have tiny holes, the stars, which leak and that is where rain comes from as it forms clouds first.  This was the common understanding of what the world was like throughout the Middle East 4000 years ago.  What people thought they knew is perhaps how God talked to them.  Obviously He couldn’t start with a lecture on Quantum Field Dynamics to shepherds.  Yet if you believe a literal Genesis 1, it means you accept it all. An inverted bowl sky is hardly good science today.  Yet maybe God was really interested in sin, death and faith far more than proving what the world looked like. The moral story is what God’s word is all about. Men are sinners from birth.  Even the universe’s laws have been changed by sin

            Secular scientists would hardly care,  but believing Christian scientists do. There are several possible explanations.other than accepting a flat disk earth. Was God clever enough to talk in accurate science poetic language that some ancient shepherd would understand? When He talked about the firmament of heavens was He talking about the barrier between the physical universe and the spiritual domain, but shepherds still think it meant the sky? Or is the answer locked in a prehistory absorbed into all things? Surely Adam was an enterprising fellow who might have noticed a recently split rock with a sharp edge.  He could have attached it to a stick and fashioned an axe.  Then felling a tree, he noticed that there were rings which he could reason, form each year.  Hence the tree might look like it had been alive100 years—but it was only created a week ago Tuesday.  How does Adam explain such things?  Well, he figures that God has embedded a “prehistory” in the tree.  Those narrow rings thirty years earlier indicate drought. (Fun to speculate, isn’t it.)  Indeed He had to have put a prehistory in all of nature that we can track and use it for whatever purpose we can find.

            Like finding oil.  Current oil evolution is thought to start with dead critters settling in the sea so rapidly that they don’t rot fast enough—what’s called a reducing environment. Organic matter forms in a layer.  Heat and pressure then cause a cake of cooked organic matter called a bitumen.  Then with more heat and pressure done over the right amount of time, the blob of organic material yields oil and natural gas.  The gas rises rapidly and often manages to escape ultimately into the air.  The oil most often is trapped in an impermeable rock (tiny porous spaces that don’t connect well to each other.  By process, the permeability increases and the oil migrates into a porous reservoir rock.  Oil company geologists don’t give a fig about Darwinism and the selectivity of species.  They just have a prescription that, if done with modern science, allows us to find oil in one out of 3 wildcat wells--or even better. Old timers who just followed trends found oil in an oily area about once in 12 holes.  “Russian drilling program” of blind random jabs into the earth find oil far fewer times. So the science, or whatever you want to call it, works. “Works” is all Conoco-Phillips cares about.

            Likewise, Christians who work as scientists postulate theories based on facts, not spiritual beliefs. Many have settled on this.  The Genesis story is allegorical in its science.  Ps. 90: In the Lord’s eyes a thousand years are as one day and a day as a thousand years.  Maybe each day in Gen. 1 is several million years. Whatever the case, the 4^th law of thermodynamics states that entropy (a measure of disorder) either remains unchanged or increases in each reaction.  Hence Death is a law of nature. And that is where God, who exists in the spiritual realm, steps in.  The laws governing tiny sub-atomic particles say the states they occupy come about by chance, probabilistic chance. Who watches or determines their outcomes? Quantum physics says there can be nobody.  It is just probability, an indeterminate thing. (The winner of the lottery is just a chance thing.) Faith says otherwise. God is guiding the outcomes. Then God, the author of the play, steps into the play (an unheard of thing!) to change the outcome. Hence any scientist who really considers himself an careful thinker, needs to consider that there might be a spiritual dimension, and a Being capable of making a world of stunning beauty in its laws as well as its scenery (and quite unobservable by normal methods of science). A Creator Being, far higher than all the creatures of the world could even grasp. Would such a Being, be a Cosmic Saddist, such as the God of  Islam, who just watches mankind writhe and go down to hell, or the God of Judeo-Christianity who comes bearing hope for sin and a relationship with Himself?  That’s what we need to teach.

Oklahoma public school debate and proposal

 

Surely we still need public schools.  But golly, the results are disappointing.  Latest NAEP test scores show 8 points lost in 8^th grade math and other losses about 5 points nationwide.  10 points is a year’s schooling. Everybody is blaming this on COVID but the scores had improved through 2018 and have now fallen.  The decline started prior to COVID and continues. But the Dept of Defense schools on bases has not fallen.  My sister-in-law and niece, who teach on an army base, say they love teaching the kids there because of DISCIPLINE.  Any disturbance that sends a kid to the office alerts the commanding officer to call the parents.  That seems to be enough to get the student straight.  The other place where NAEP scores haven’t fallen is at some Catholic schools which do the NAEP tests.  They stayed open mostly during COVID.  The Lutheran school I am particularly acquainted with also saw no loss of test results—though they use another testing agency than NAEP. (7^th grade closed two weeks only during COVID) This school graduates 8^th graders with 11^th grade achievement scores every year.  One year all 22 students were labeled “college ready”.  The Lutheran Alumni students go on to public high school and are leaders throughout the high school.  Is this success due to cherry-picking the best students in the community?  No at allt. The student population has more minority students that the general population and scholarships help many of the kids attend.  This year there are 10 Dept.of Human Services custody foster children, and most are doing swell.  Likewise the Army base where my niece teaches has 47% Afro-American kids and scores better than the public schools in the city next door to the base.

            So my question is, “Do we need all that money and politics inserted into public schools?” Catholic and Lutheran schools educate elementary and middle school kids for less than half that of public schools. When I look at what these schools and charter schools do, they are much like the 1950s schools I attended when USA had schools far better than the rest of the world. Today we rank 28^th in science and 20^th in reading. We had one principal, small athletic facilities, parents very supportive, teachers that pulled you aside and assigned extra work if you excelled in some area, no-nonsense discipline environments where kids could learn as much as they could, and they taught ethics, politeness and math.  That makes successful citizens later.

            Governor Stitt has a proposal that seeks to instill some competition into public schools by having $3000 of the $13,000 spent per student follow the student wherever the parents wish the child to attend. His opponent is very much in bed with the teachers unions and educrats and says this “steals money’ from the public school districts although they would retain the $10,000 remainder when a student goes elsewhere and in some cases get to still count that student as one of their own.  Looks like a good deal all around to me.  Well, if Hoffmeister wins and the deal dies, it will surely drive parents to the doors of our 3 parochial schools in town. And Oklahoma continues 46^th in ranking.   

8 things to make our education better--following Charles Murray

 

Human abilitites vary radically.  A testing psychologist named Howard Gardner found 7 (and a few more are being discovered and described) Body-kinesthetic varies from someone who trips over his own feet to Nadia Comenici, Musical from tone-deaf to Mozart, Spatial from someone who gets lost 2 blocks from home to Kit Carson, Linguistic from someone who can’t talk complete sentences to Shakespeare, Logical-mathematical from someone unable to see cause and effect to Isaac Newton, Interpersonal autism to Bill Clinton, Intrapersonal from an undisciplined narcissist to Confuscious. Next understand many people will, even with much training not be able to be a Mozart or find their way through wilderness like Kit Carson. Although we can recognize many talents, 2 and a half of the above--Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, and (partially) spatial--correlate with much success in life and constitute what are termed Academic Abilities.  Those are the 3 most taught in schools although our schools should also provide outlets for the other talents like music and athletics. The academic abilities are valuable with every aspect of human life and are the basis of IQ, NAEP, and military intelligence tests. High academic ability often correlates with strong interpersonal and intrapersonal skills.

            Trouble is, many students are not very capable of doing all skills.  Teachers can teach rote things in math like multiplication tables, but “logical progression” is a skill that must be had to do even junior high math.  Literacy teachers can teach vocabulary and grammar but “inferential leaps” are needed to understand poetry.  And each of these abilities require basic skills of the other (inferential leaps require thinking logically in circumstances, for example). Schools get blamed for student inability but try being a teacher who attempts to teach math to people with severe lack of logical progression skills. No Child Left Behind? But all schools must leave some behind others. More homework? Won’t work if the curriculum is pitiful! Small class sizes? Not much help!

            Students come to school with differing abilities and we know certain things affect it.  Malnutrition depresses Africa perhaps 25 IQ points.  Early development also makes differences. IQ trends are set-in by age 6 to 10, so pre-school experiences are important. Yet nearly all the social programs of the 60s and 70s stressed raising intelligence by pre-school experiences.  Those succeed only temporarily. Gains are lost by second grade. In 1964, James Coleman studied the effects of inequality in schools vs. student performance. EVERYBODY (including Coleman) expected to find quality of schools = academic achievement. Nothing—facilities, money spent per student, credentials of teachers, curriculum—made a difference. Except one thing did, family background. Not waiting for the Coleman conclusions, Congress passed Title I to affect all the expected but wrong conclusions.  Measures of Title I have shown negative effects. Likewise, No Child Left Behind cheated the vast body of regular students. The result of all these programs has left us with falling test scores in some areas and a scapegoat paradigm of bad schools—violent classrooms, no standards, incompetent teachers, etc. Yet well under 10% of US students have a  failing school. So rescuing those students is not overwhelming. But it points out an important step #1 School Choice.  Private and charter schools have modestly higher math and reading scores.  What separates them are #2 Discipline--safe and orderly learning environments and #3 curricula with a core cultural learning. Those are the first 3 elements that any common education school must provide.

            Next we must understand that college doesn’t fit everybody.  It doesn’t impart the necessary skills of living and making a living and never did.  Going to work on time, working hard, being pleasant to work with, honest, reliable, looking for ways to further the business are those skills. College coursework is designed for IQ of 115 or greater, about 20% of the population.  The fact that we push 35% of students through college results in dumbing down the curriculum, substituting political propaganda for learning and indulging students to go 6 or 7 years for a bachelor’s degree. However, there is such a thing as a Core Learning important to function in a society. And that actually is a function of common education.  To function in any culture requires a core cultural knowledge, the glue that holds a society together.  This starts in grade 1.  Trouble is, many topics are not taught completely and often with considerable political encumbrance.  For example: historic slavery. Few high schoolers could tell the differences in indentured slavery vs. chattel slavery.  Why were mixed-race slaves often community leaders and why are there more in the Caribbean than in USA? Where were conditions best for a slave—Brazil, Caribbean or USA?  Why were slaves so few in 1787 that the Constitution sunsets the practice, but after 1820 so numerous they outnumbered Caucasians in the South? Why did race become a modern issue in USA but not in Brazil?  As a result of this anemic curricula,public schools often teach that all slaves were like the field slaves of the US South, creating a bitterness that does little to challenge personal growth and advancement among Afro-Americans. Let’s restate #3 again.  #3 Teach a robust core culture curriculum.

            Let’s return to common ed. When you learned and loved it, was it the time when you were challenged to do something your teacher sensed you were capable of or the time when you were challenged to do something you could not accomplish no matter how hard you tried?  I’ll bet it was the prior. Too many young adults are pushed into trying college.  They struggle, acquire a lot of debt, never finish or finish with a degree in a useless subject. High School counselors try to suggest college to a majority of students when they should say to the kid who likes to operate machinery, ”Do you realize you can make a lot more as a crane operator than a pizza delivery boy?” Few parents try to guide choice of major with their kids. Students don’t want to take broad survey classes in history, art, sciences, and so they have wide gaps in their education even after college. Finally, students think that a degree guarantees them a nice job--true only narrowly.  Employers don’t care if your Statistics I class was well-taught. They just see the degree as a screening device for entry level applicants.  College proves you can think. But among mature workers, being the best at your field is the Important Thing.  Love your work enough to be the best, not mediocre in a field that is somewhat a stretch for you.#4 Make it possible for each student to find a place and the average child should be taught how to make a good living. In order for that to happen, a one-size-fits-all system must not be in place and trusted teachers must have liberty from extreme oversight.  #5 Teachers must be free to teach.

            How would you answer this, “Does America need leaders with more integrity, prudence, self-discipline, moral courage, or just smarter ones?” Most people like the common sense, not the overeducated intellectuals.  But smarts is important too. You’ll want your physician to be smart as well as your CEO. But you also want them to be good and wise. We are talking about the upper 10%, “elites”.  Most elites spend their days reading, tapping on keyboards, listening and talking—verbal skills. Yet it is the verbal section of SAT and ACT scores that has seen the most decline—a clear indication that we fail to educate the verbally skilled. Rigorous is almost never used with the phrase,verbal expression, in schools today. It starts with correct spelling and grammar in elementary education and goes on to syntax and reasoning, evaluation of data and pattern recognition.  The last two are part of the widespread statistical illiteracy among today’s gifted. We don’t teach it because rarely does a teacher in the early grades start it and rarely does a college prof demand it!  Study of history as a sort of vicarious experience, also imparts wisdom.  Rigor in thinking about virtue is also vital.  There are certain issues so fundamental to the human condition that people must think about them. Western individualism inspires the young to risk to fulfill their potential and roil the established ways of doing things. Family relationships locate happiness in the matrix of human relations. Humility grows from being a failure usually more than once. We need to make sure the gifted know how it feels for the rest of humanity. But then hope grows from finding ways to get up again. A spiritual walk is important in a leader.  So, since the elites will lead our society, we had better teach wisdom and values. Hence education should #6 Push the gifted as fast as they can achieve until they find the limits of their ability but also #7 a liberal arts education for gifted is absolutely required. #8 Teach rigor and excellence in all things.

            This in a nutshell is what Charles Murray, a leading sociologist who specializes in IQ, thinks we need for education.

#1 School choice

#2 Safe and orderly learning environments

#3 Teach a robust core curriculum

#4 Place--each student to find a place and the average child should be taught how to make a good living.

#5 Teachers must be free to teach

#6 Push the gifted as fast as they can achieve until they find the limits of their ability

#7 Liberal arts education for gifted is absolutely required

#8 Teach rigor and excellence in all things

Missing stuff from a HS history book

American History

When I first learned it was so Americentric. Reading a variety of historians, I always thought those high school books will soon overturn this and tell a more complete story. Nope.  They now vomit political correctness. Here’s what I mean--let’s just choose the Revolutionary War as an example. 

.     The preliminary things that are important to realize about our Revolt are that France was 4 times as big as Great Britain and Spain was twice as big.  Netherlands and Britain were small.  Second, Sugar was king in the new world, not cotton or tobacco or furs. When France lost the French and Indian War, they ceded unprofitable Canada but really held onto (are you ready for this?) Haiti.  Dutch, French, Swedes, Spanish all vied for the Caribbean Sugar Islands.  Add Portugal and they were the real villains in slave biz, not USA, as the PC assumes today. Third, Enlightenment.  When Jefferson wrote the Declaration, it was pure Enlightenment logic and it influenced Whigs in Parliament like Burke and Fox to sympathize.  Fourth George III, the monarch who wanted to think of himself as a great warrior like his dad George II, was a Palace Puppy who never even saw the sea until he was an old man (Yes, an Englishman!) He appointed second rate ministers who never went on a fact-finding mission to America either. And his generals had No Real Strategy to win and reoccupy.

            So the Americans won the logic appeal, the propaganda game, the spying game and the guerilla warfare game.  When they won at Saratoga, Oct. 1777, Benjamin Franklin went to work.  He should be as big a hero as Washington.  He got the French to ally in 1778 and America was no longer alone. Spain tacitly backed France in hopes of recovering Gibraltar.  Dutch wanted British Caribbean islands and also joined against Britain.  Then in 1781, Corwallis surrendered at Yorktown which really took the wind out of British war hawks. (And here our HS history books seem to pronounce the war over) But Brits were winning other victories and it wasn’t the end of the war.  Adm. Howe defeated Admiral De Grasse in the Caribbean saving their precious sugar islands.  They stopped the Spanish siege of Gibraltar and Britain was once again ruler of the seas. Franklin met a peace delegation in Paris and talked sense.  There was no winning for the Brits in USA. Washington had just threatened hanging a British officer in retaliation for a loyalist atrocity and suddenly opinion in England had turned from “colonists are feckless dummies” to “this Washington is one tough cookie”.  Franklin, knowing that the Canadians were ambiguous about the Revolt, offered to make no claims on Canada and leave it in British hands.  But USA must be outright independent.   Then he enticed the French with a first of its kind treaty for free international fishing in the Grand Banks off Newfoundland. French felt like they were back in the game in N. America with that provision.  (First international fishing treaty ever done) Then he wooed England with the idea that once America was recognized as independent, the 2 nations had far more to agree about than to dispute.  France and allies signed. England signed. Everyone thought they had gotten a good deal.  In the ensuing toasts in Paris, a Frenchman boasted of their alliance by saying to a Brit, “the thirteen United States will someday form the greatest empire in the World.” To which the Brit retorted, “Yes Monsieur, and they will all speak English, every one of them.” The British historians think this was the beginning of the Anglo-American Special Relationship.  (I think they forget War of 1812 and other disputes). Sly Franklin sailed home from Paris with an Independent United States of America.

What intelligence research tells about social problems

I’ve been reading about intelligence, education and social behavior and some interesting things have been proven.  You probably suspected a lot of this.  All these stats are for white people only, no racial component.

Remember those plots that show if you have only a high school education you’ll likely make $30,000 a year, but if you have a bachelor’s you’ll make $50K and advanced degrees = $90K?  It turns out, while this is true, the distribution for each education level is extremely broad. There are Phds on welfare. There are CEOs who have 8^th grade ed.   The correlation between education level and earnings is about .3 (1.0 or 100% correlation is perfect; zero is none whatsoever)  IQ correlates at about .6 so it is a better predictor of earnings. 

The people who study intelligence were highly persecuted in the 60s and 70s for their proofs that intelligence gives a lot of advantage and it is somewhat inherited.  That was the era when people believed that environment caused everything.  (Well, why try to breed smart sheepdogs? You could just make any old mutt a shepherd.) So the researchers went underground by the way they stopped talking about test scores and began talking about standard deviations away from the curve peaks.  Apparently it worked.  Media and many others couldn’t understand what they were talking about.  Then came the 90s demand for education accountability and testing.  Once again, intelligence measures became important.  A guy with 80 IQ doesn’t make a very good elementary particle physicist. 

The popular concept is that college education skyrocketed after WW II.  No, it actually began growing rapidly about 1920. 1920—2% of population had a bachelors; 1940—8%; 1960—16%;2016—35%.  That reflects the fact that in 1950 the traditional 55% of top quartile of SAT scorers went to college but by 1965 it was 80%.  And it was since about 1960 that the prestigious colleges began to compete for the top HS grads.  Why?  College costs quadrupled from 1950 to 1960, and a lot of middle class families could no longer afford it unless they had a smart kid who could get scholarships.

The result is that people of a certain intelligence and education often only associate with others of similar status, especially in urban areas where many technical people are employed.  The tech revolution has insulated many of the best and brightest from the rest of the people.  This explains why so many of our best politicians come, not from mega-metros but cities of 400,000 or smaller where everyone rubs elbows.  The tech skills are accountants, architects, engineers, professsors, dentists and physicians, mathematicians and scientists and the like.  These 8 jobs suck up 25% of the top 10% in IQ. And as the federal regulations have grown by a factor of six in the last 20 years, it takes a smart guy to start a successful business. Average Joe finds it hard.  Thus in 2014 for the first time in 400 years, America’s number of newly closed businesses exceeded the number of start-ups for the first time. 5-year running average) And interestingly the Supreme Court has forbidden employers from giving intelligence tests, yet these correlate better with successful job performance than anything else—reference checks, interviews, education, or age.  As kids are strongly encouraged to follow education as far as they can make it go, education is now strongly tied to intelligence.  The upper technical fields have seen a real salary increase of about 60% since 1963 while others are up only about 10% in constant dollars.  Hence the new success of Trump’s appeal to lower middle class.   And the nerds mate together just as they live close, thereby producing smart kids.  But it’s a loose correlation.  Ben Carson’s mom will surely object.

Let’s talk social difficulties.  Less intelligent women have most of the out-of-wedlock babies.  But of course there’s debate.  Some would say parent’s socioeconomic status (SES) is the cause.  It turns out that intelligence is more fundamental but SES plays a role too.  A graph of Americans below the poverty line is stunning.  Poverty decreased in a straight line from 1940 when 50% were “poor” to 1969 when the curve flat-lined in the 12-15% range it has had ever since.  The Great Society was supposed to reduce this!  Instead it halted the decline of poverty.  When a group goes from 50% to 15%, who is left behind?  Those who lack thrift, energy, determination and brains, it is likely. 

The statistics about unwed mothers are staggering.  Married women of lowest 2% of IQ are 18% likely to live in poverty.  Those in upper 2% are 1% likely.  But single moms of the lowest 2% IQ are 70% likely to live in poverty.  Upper 2% are still 15% likely. It is as if marriage makes you rich.   And the numbers cut across all reasons for single motherhood—widowed, divorced, and never-married.  This almost says, “If you want kids and means, get married and stay married.” Why are women so adversely affected?  I think it is because men are hard-pressed and measured by career while women who have children will often compromise a job if it adversely affects the children. Equal pay for equal work is the Law.

A HS education has become the norm. The dropout rate doesn’t correlate very well with SES but does correlate strongly with IQ.  It figures.  If you struggle with classes, you are more likely to drop out. The number of disabled and collecting Social Security has increased 50% during the Obama presidency, causing Bill O’Reilly to exclaim, “Has America gotten more hazardous?  That can’t be!”  No, but here’s what the stats tell us.  Low intelligence workers opportunistically claim far more disability.  There is a slightly better safety behavior among the intelligent workers, but the real story is that discouraged workers, finding it harder to keep and find a job, find it more socially acceptable to claim disability and get a sympathetic doc to approve it. And they won’t go crazy watching daytime TV and living leisurely.  Employment of teens who aren’t in school has gone from 85% in 1954 to 63% in 2009 to 51% today.  And when you study the SES of these workers, it suddenly gets interesting.  Unemployed teens drop in unemployment rate as they go to higher IQ.  But it’s the other way around for SES.  The ones who have wealthy parents are more long-term unemployed.  Living in the proverbial basement, I guess.    

Why Dems are so elite

Why are Democrats so often elites in urban areas?  In 1920, people were separated in social classes more radically than today.  John D. Rockefeller died in 1920 with a wealth of about 5% of the country’s GDP.  Today, the entire Forbes 400 doesn’t add up to 5% of GDP.  And in 1920 2% of people got college degrees. ( Today, it’s 35%.)  The result was that only a thin veneer of people, often with higher IQs, had managed to get through colleges.  But beginning in the post WWI era, significantly more began to attend higher education.  By 1940, 8% of 23-yr-olds had a degree.  Since it takes an IQ of about 115 to be able to handle college material and only about 14% of population has 115 or higher, there are many who struggle and colleges have had to water down curricula. 

            In the 1950s, college costs began to soar.  Ivy League educations, a staple on the East coast, became too costly for many families.  And the colleges began to take more students from all across the USA, often based on high SAT scores and sometimes needing scholarship help. This ‘cognitive competition’ spread.  As the number of grads soared, they became a class of workers who held better jobs. To see how this classism works, ask yourself who your ten closest friends are.  Then ask what kind of education they achieved. If you are college-educated, you probably have a lot of college-educated friends. And vice versa. 

            Now some math.  If one out of three people get a degree, what is the  probability of having 6 out of ten friends with a degree too?  Well, from the general population, it is about one chance in 600 of selecting 10 people at random and having 6 with a college degree.  And it is about one in 6000 of having all ten degreed.  Yet 6 out of 10 is the likeliest answer to this question found among college-educated people who answer this question.  In 1920 this would be rare to the point of strange, because college grads were so few.  But today, the cognitive elite hang out together, far more than random probability predicts.  In the 20s you would have a good chance of meeting someone with a third-grade education who was incredibly smart but didn’t have a chance to go to school.  (This example--my grandfather.) But beginning in the 60s secondary education began to steer higher IQ individuals to seek college.

            And where did they land?  Accountants, engineers, architects, professors, dentists, physicians, mathematicians, and scientists are eight professions that account for most of it.  In 1940 only one in twenty people of the upper 10% of intelligence was one of these.  Today, these 8 occupations employ 25% of all the people in the upper 10% of IQ (>120).  We have become a technological world.  And urban areas employ most of these people.  (Well, I know you can find a CPA in a town of 5000, but we are talking worker distributions.)

            They live in the city but don’t rub elbows with the less-educated very much.  Well-paying jobs, prime neighborhoods, good schools.  They are an elite.  Over against this are the less-educated.  Some struggle in the middle class.  Others are in the ghettos.  As middle class working-class jobs disappear, the cities have become increasingly polarized economically.  The only way to do politics in this mélange is to have something for the rich and something for the poor.  Here’s how Dems solve it. The rich get favors from government (special contracts for large companies would be an example) and the poor get benefits. 

            The Democrat playbook stole a page from Europe’s nobilesse oblige.  These were aristocrats who feared for their safety after France’s Revolution.  The idea was to play a public image of being a benefactor, an egalitarian, a guy with the common touch.  In effect, “Don’t guillotine me!  I’m a Good noble.  Do that guy over there who exploits you.”  We call this a limousine liberal nowadays.  Their exaggerated narrative about caring for the poor is almost laughable (given that they don’t touch those people), but it is popular.  Why?  Because all you have to do to become a liberal is think yourself smarter than everyone else.  YOU should be in charge! Be one of the aristocrats! Be kingmaker! And this strokes the ego of many in the cognitive elite.  Indeed, you can be from the other end of the spectrum and still imagine yourself king of the world and be a liberal too.  Or just dream of an Obamaphone.  Thus the Democrats win a majority of not only the lowest income quintile (70-30%) but also the upper quintile (55-45%). Republicans are the party of the 3 middle class quintiles from $21K to $105K taxable. 

So what does this say Republicans should do? First keep stressing liberty as conservatives always have done.  Second, use education choice as a wedge issue in urban areas.  Third, capture the lower middle class vote like Trump has done.  Liberty has to be understood as being free to live your life as you see fit, without government’s heavy hand of Obamacare mandates, enterprise-killing regulations, quenched opportunity.  Education choice is a clever gambit, because of regression to the mean.  If you and your spouse are extremely high IQ, your kids tend to be much more average.  Likewise, mediocre folks sometimes have very gifted children. Think Ben Carson’s mom.  Social stratification in schools is a major problem in large cities and a “way out” is a good solve for the R’s.  Finally, some sort of retraining or incentive to change careers is good for middle America along with better trade deals and the border wall.

Meanwhile it needs to be recognized that the D’s don’t have a lock on the cognitive elites.  Many of the best and brightest want freedom to innovate and be entrepreneurs.  Bread and circuses social policy run by Dems is a loser economically and destroys lives that not just a few low income people notice.  Those D’s who are among the elites have little experience in dealing with the problems of lesser mortals as well.  This means a party of few new ideas, rather like Hillary and Obama.   

Murray's observations of US education

Many of our prescriptions and some of our politics of education is misguided. So says conservative sociologist, Charles Murray. I’ll relate his reasoning over several posts beginning today.  You can test kids for many abilities and most are distinct—musical ability is not related to athletic ability, etc. But 3, mathematical, verbal, and spatial reasoning are somewhat correlated.  Call this “academic ability” and it is the basis for IQ theory. But half the students will be below average and they get frustrated by school. So here’s an achievement test question for 8^th grade.  If you have a company of 90 workers and the next year it has 10% more, how many workers does it have then? Only 62% of 8^th graders can answer the correct ‘99’. Many can calculate the 10%=9 but many don’t realize you have to add this to 90.  Now as teacher, you can teach the test by drilling on this type of question, but there are hundreds of others too.  So what happens are the first 3 blunders of public education.  (1) Politicians and educrats brag that they can make poor students improve markedly.  Sociology disproves this, but this romantic myth pervades education policy. (2) Teachers, expected to provide the miracles of education improvement of poor students, teach the test which they have either seen or have seen like tests many times.  (3) While it is proven that even poor students have an ability to memorize a great deal (it’s the “reasoning” that forms the basis for academic ability) memorization is greatly downplayed in modern education.  Too bad! In order to function in a culture, you have to know a lot of stuff about how things operate—core culture values—what’s a minuteman, a smoke-filled room, how do you make a cheeseburger or change a toilet flapper, and so forth.  Sans memorization, we create a body of students who cannot cope.  Teaching the test only works temporarily and does nothing to really elevate reasoning skills. Educrats who insist they can miraculously transform dullards into geniuses, ask the public to throw money at the problem. Hence more money only helps get better teachers and student scores in countries where dire underspending has been happening.

            Besides romanticizing education, not teaching core cultural knowledge and teaching tests, there are more problems with public ed.  (4) Disruption and lack of discipline hurts all the students in a class and this is the biggest indicator of schools with an F grade.  Bad teachers, no standards, few resources often go with this. In the 50’s the Coleman Report on education found, to the stunned surprise of politicians, that quality of schools did not yield achievement, but family values did.  Pols didn’t listen.  They gave $$$ to poverty area schools under Title I.  Acheivement actually fell!  No Child Left Behind penalized schools which didn’t progress.  No change in student scores. (5) Hence throwing money at the problem doesn’t fix it.  US schools are almost twice as expensive as any others in the world, and kids scores are about #30 in OECD.  Parochial (religious-based) schools spend half what public schools do and get higher test results—even when applied to low-income scholarship students.  But the parochial schools have discipline, memorization, allow teachers more often to teach freely and some other things we’ll cover tomorrow.

            (6) Too many kids are told to go to college.  90% are encouraged to attend by high school counselors but only 35% of them will get a degree.  The other 65% will struggle with college and drop out. They should be advised, “Hey, you like to operate equipment?  Do you know a crane operator makes a lot more than a pizza delivery man?” Colleges estimate IQ of 115-120% or about 9-12% of seniors will be able to handle college material. (7)To try to handle the excess, colleges have done grade inflation (easier grades) and steered students to curricula with less rigor in math or verbal skills like social sciences, humanities, and things like recreational science. But there are too many grads and few jobs in these areas. Colleges are saavy.  Employers use a BA or BS as a screen for abilities, so colleges pack ‘em in and charge more. (8)But the lesser grading standards mean the smartest students aren’t getting enough education and are slowed down.  Thus we see widespread statistical illiteracy among the gifted, little history, and almost no liberal arts. (Some things like humanity and humility are so important for a gifted leader, that we MUST think about them.) (9) Both HS and colleges promote self-esteem which promotes a risk-averse, selfish, foolhardy, autonomy. No wonder we have less entrepreneurship. For the first time in 400 years, America has fewer business start-ups than closings. Next post: How to fix it.

            So here’s Murray’s solutions. (1) re-install memorization of core cultural values that are not politically motivated in K-8.  (2) Get rid or education’s romantic myth that they can make a genius out of an average student. (3) provide a stable, disciplined environment that gives all kids a shot at maximum learning. The upshot of these 3 things is that if you aren’t a genius, you can still come out of school having enjoyed it, armed with a lot of know-how, a very good person even if you aren’t Einstein. (4) Teachers should be free to teach and evaluate one another informally with shared ideas. (5) Involve families.  16 hours a day, students aren’t in school, so what are they learning. 4 & 5 are often the two most widely observed factors in highly education-successful countries.  (6) Let the gifted go as fast as they can. (7) Teach the forgotten half how to make a good living—dependable, good attitude, hard workers, cooperative—and enhance career tech programs. (8) School choice.  Competition among schools.  Not one size fits all. (9) Use more certifications (like CPA exams, bar exams, plumbing license exams) instead of degrees.  Murray then notes that private schools have no magical monopoly on this basket of techniques, high-scoring countries are not all alike.  These are just principles found from sociological studies. Yet as I pass this around to the many teachers in my family they agree that Murray is spot-on.

Solutions for Education

What follows are some thoughts on education and why it continues to yield lesser results by Charles Murray, sociologist and expert on IQ and testing.

            If you test people for different abilities, you will find one has musical talent; another, athletic; another, interpersonal skills.  And none of these are related.  But there are 3 common abilities --verbal, mathematical and spatial reasoning skills—that correlate.  Doing well in one implies highly likely to be above average in the others. Together, we could call these the Academic Abilities.  And this is the source of IQ measurements.  Students with high IQs succeed in school.  This talent is fairly fixed among individuals. 

            Almost everyone knows what it is like to be poor at some aptitude.  You were the last kid chosen in sports.  You are tone deaf and can’t see the poetry in music.  And kids who aren’t chosen by the teacher for an answer, soon realize their lack of academic talent.  It’s demoralizing because “smarts” has a lot to do with not only status but credentials for success later in life.

            If you think schools just do a bad job when students don’t score well, talk to teachers who have struggled with lower academic ability students.  Progress is slow. Concepts won’t be remembered the next day. Now nobody would insist that we can make a klutz into a super athlete, or a shy kid an extrovert. Only in our public schools do we romantically insist that we can make low academic ability students into geniuses.  It simply isn’t true. And this is the problem with No Child Left Behind.

            We should define what is meant by verbal/math/spatial reasoning.  Here’s a problem from an 8^th grade achievement test.  “If a company had 90 workers last year and this year they have 10% more, how many workers does the company have?” If you say 99 congratulations. 2/3 of 8^th graders can’t answer this.  Note this tests reasoning ingenuity.  It has been discovered that 90% of students can identify last year’s 90 workers; a large portion can calculate 10% (= 9).  But the final step of adding the two together is what stumps so many.  Now we could “teach the test” by teaching problems of this type, but there are thousands of other reasoning questions, so the overall score is little changed. Bottom line, a large majority of students can memorize a large amount of material. But ingenuity is rarer.

What then separates schools with good scores vs. those with poor ones?  Excellent question.  It was first investigated in the Coleman Report of the 1950s, to investigate differences in academic achievements of rich kids and poor. Everybody in Congress, who sanctioned the study, had theories.  Credentials of teachers, curriculum, facilities, money spent per student or per teacher—none were found to correlat with achievement.  Family background was far and away the most important factor in school success. Subsequent studies of adoptions proved that IQ is partly due to environment.  If you live in a upper middle class neighborhood, have parents greatly interested in your education and spend time with your learning, you’ll have higher academic achievement. Subsequently attempts to increase ability in students from poor backgrounds in programs such as Head Start have been spectacularly unsuccessful.  (Spending per student in Head Start is 3 times that of an elementary common ed, yet 2 years hence, has no measureable improvement in student scores! It’s little more than day-care for the poor.) Yet we also know there are truly bad public schools with low achievement.  These have violent classrooms, nonexistent standards, incompetent teachers and competent ones who have given up. 

We could start forming conclusions here, but let’s talk college first.  Ever since the 1920s colleges have said that to comfortably do the coursework, you need an IQ of 115 (upper 16%, SAT 1180).  110 can struggle and get a degree.  Even 105 can achieve it by targeting easy courses and majors.  About 50% of high school graduates try college.  With diluted courses, this now yields 35% graduation rate. (It was 25% in the 60s) But that means that 2/3 of students join the workforce soon after high school.  Here’s the weird thing.  High School counselors promote college to 90% of students.  Meanwhile the liberal arts education of colleges—teaching a wide body of general learning--has atrophied.  Most public schools no longer teach the lesser version of this “core knowledge” of our culture.  Why teach this?  You need a core knowledge of things like Huck Finn, Wall Street, smoke-filled room politics, Minutemen, Mount Everest and Mecca, to be able to function as a knowledgeable citizen.  This is core knowledge of our culture which was taught prior to the 1980s. Public schools avoid much of this because it has controversy.

Now let’s talk education solutions based on these findings.  First, nearly all students have aptitude at memorization especially in lower grades. Public schools need to return to teaching core knowledge.  Add ethics to this and demonstrate it by providing an environment that is safe, orderly and respectful.  Everyone is entitled to a place where they can learn all they dare to learn and be respected.  If you’re not a Mensa it doesn’t mean that you can’t become a truly good person.  Teaching the forgotten half how to make a living is also in order.  “If you like to operate machinery, do you realize you can make a lot more being a crane operator than a pizza delivery man? Show up every day, work hard, get along with everyone.” Career tech has been an unvarnished success.  It should be further supported.  Sending the message to young people that they should go to college no matter what (Ahem, politicians and guidance counselors) is a bad message.   On the other hand, with gifted students we should encourage them to go as far and fast as possible, letting them find limits in ability. Helicopter parenting and self-esteem teaching (possessing a big opinion of oneself) techniques are ruining students.   Studies show that kids avoid doing anything of risk where they might crash and burn when they get constant accolades.  Even the best need to crash and burn a few times (learn limits) to instill humility.  Leaders, geniuses who aren’t humble, who don’t sympathize with ordinary folks, are tyrants in behavior.  Another area of lack in public education is verbal rigor.  USA’s verbal reasoning skills have been on a downward trend because we have come to accept just about any form of verbal expression.

Finally, expand choice. When people talk about “common sense” they mean a practical wisdom (born from cultural knowledge) that applies logic in an appropriate manner—rightly assessing the consequences of a course of action.  This is what comprises the success of private schools, largely through the template of the paragraph above.  They don’t make IQs go from 100 to 140.  They make more functional citizens and impart Christian faith.  They teach history, which is the way we develop vicarious experience. They teach core knowledge, recognizing that certain issues are so fundamental to the human condition that people must think about them. 

Personal note: I think Murray has come pretty close to the solutions.  I had the privilege of attending a parochial high school that was like the Harvard of high schools.  University physics major was fun and breezy after St. John’s Academy. They performed, on Turbo, the things Murray advises for the gifted half of students. My wife taught first grade at a local parochial school.  She had problem students she took under wing after school.  Big strong carpenters and small engine repairmen still happily holler greetings at her at Walmart to this day. I remember them when they were 3 feet tall.  This is how people should turn out.

None of this is to say we shouldn't pay teachers fairly or support school building projects.  But the real keys are letting teachers be free to teach, good class environments, and having parents who take an interest in the child's education.

Tony the microbiologist

Tony grew up a poor Dutch boy from Delft.  His dad was a basket weaver and died when Tony was 5.  His mom remarried a painter but he died when Tony was 10.  Tony barely got time for school, but became a bookkeeper’s apprentice in a drapery shop. Still, he learned English and math and was clever. He taught himself to read English.  Drapers in 1650 did menial hand work and like taylors and sail makers were poorly paid.  In 1654, the resourceful Tony opened his own shop.  The people who put drapes in their homes were big shots—barons and wealthy merchants—and their wives were very finicky about the draperies.  The best fabrics were needed and for this, drapers carried magnifying glasses to examine the threads of the cloths at 2 or 3X magnification.  That’s what Tony wanted badly.  While doing a job in London in 1668, he came across a book Micrographica by Robert Hooke.  Hooke used a compound microscope of two lenses that was terrifically expensive, to enlarge 20X.  Tony was fascinated.  Here were pictures of legs of fleas covered with hair, the chambers of cork, and wool fibers.  The book also included a diagram and plans for the compound microscope.  But the price was way out of Tony’s league.  Glass was a precious commodity.  Lenses were taxed heavily and produced by the guild, an early form of labor union which closely guarded its secrets.

Still, the persistent Tony found a way to experiment with glass.  He found that a glass rod that is heated could be drawn out into a thin whisker, broken in two and then the end of the whisker, reheated until it forms a glass bead droplet on the end.  Tony noted that these almost perfect glass spheres could magnify greatly and so he devised a holder for the sphere that had pinholes for observation and a screw-and-pin that held a sample of something near it.  It was crude but workable. To test the result, he looked at the same things that Hooke had.  Results confirmed.  Tony showed his cheapy magnifier to his friend, Dr. Reinier de Graaf. Amazingly he had achieved 200X magnification. The tiny glass spheres were far more uniform in curvature than ground lenses.  By pinholing them, he reduced aberration from the sides.   When a 1673 paper from the Royal Society of London bragged about microscopic work by another author, de Graaf wrote the Society a letter, “a most ingenious person here named Antonie Leeuwenhoek has devised microscopes which far surpass those which we have hitherto seen.” Another Dutch scientist confirmed the draper’s work.  In 1674, Tony was crossing a lake in a boat and asked the locals why the water was green in some places and almost milky in others.  They claimed it was the dew.  That made the BS buzzer in Tony’s head go off, and he took a sample of the water home and put it under his best microscope of perhaps 500X.  To his amazement he saw “little creatures” darting about with flagellated tails and cilia waves on their bodies. This was the first observation of bacteria in the world. The microbes he was seeing, he described to his friend, an artist who dutifully drew pictures. Leeuwenhoek wrote the first of 275 letters to the Royal Society.  In the next 50 years he never published a proper scientific paper. 

Better times came to Tony.  He was appointed to an accountant position in city government, then to a lucrative post as surveyer. He lived until 90, having become the Father of Microbiology.  He was visited by royalty and kings—and not for drapes. In 1686 he was knighted for his microscopic work.  But I wonder what would have happened if he’d not found a way around the regulation, guilds and taxation of glass lenses with his own glass sphere making?  What if he’d not made the most of his education to take that job in London? He was 40 years old when he made his first microscope—a typical lifespan for the era. What if government officials had put his work to a halt by noting that he competed without degree or license. 

 The Economist notes that America’s economy needs lower taxes, less regulations, and better education these days.  If even the Europeans can see this problem amid 1.4% growth and an education system that ranks 30^th out of 40 OECD countries, why don’t we?      

What went wrong with state pensions

With all the tiring drivel about Presidential politics, let’s look at something closer to home.  How is it that the public worker and teacher pensions are going so far set?  A recent economic paper by Andonov, Bauer and Cremers shows the problem is when unaccountable public pension managers meet federal rules they do dumb things, game the system.  We the taxpayers and the retirees pay.

            A pension fund is a promise to pay out an income stream in the future—debt, if you will.  That’s how it works with your annuities or a private pension.  Corporate bond yields or some other conservative measure is used to discount future liabilities.  As your annuity or a pension fund matures and more people are at or near retirement, it should be invested even more conservatively.  You don’t want your money to evaporate at age 70 when you can’t make it back. 

            But public pensions are allowed by the Government Accounting Standards Board to discount their liabilities by the expected return on their assets.  That means that the liabilities look lower/better if expected earnings are guessed high.  Guess/project 10% rather than 5% return and you only have to put in half as much.  Now with public funds there are only 2 sources of funding—ask employees to contribute more or soak the taxpayers.  The first is like going to war with the best funded unions on earth.  The second is politically unpopular.  So what to do?  The public fund managers choose to project in-your-dreams returns, thus making the liabilities look small and the fund more solvent. 

            And what happens when government bureaucrats invest aggressively to justify those projections?  They underperform private pension investing by half a percent a year.  Thus, many states have pension funds with pitiful public pension projections.  This is why Illinois and California are such basket cases in state finances.  Oklahoma had 90 years of Democrats who had the attitude of “Oh, we’ll just go raise taxes in the future.”  The state still has $10 billion unfunded liabilities for teachers and public workers.  But that’s down from $16B because COLAs have been forgone and other funding has been found.  (And new teachers must live with defined contribution plans.)  But the easy part is over.  Either taxpayers will cough up or taxpayers will tell retirees to live with less (about one-fourth less).  None of this is pleasant.  And it could have been avoided if GASB had not had special rules for public pensions.  That needs to change in the future.