The Contradictions of US Education, by Paddington

What are we doing wrong in the US education system?

The short answer is: nothing.

The appropriate way to evaluate a system is based on what it is designed to do, and the education system is not designed to do anything. Rather, throughout 200 years of public education, it has been given a sequence of demands, and has responded by adapting organically.

Among other things, the system has been required to:

• prepare young men for factories and the military, and young women for marriage and domestic service;
• serve as a mechanism for upward social mobility (Dewey);
• produce an educated electorate (Jefferson);
• generate 'well-rounded' individuals;
• serve as a minor league for professional sports;
• fix major social problems (Head Start);
• provide enough science and engineering majors to keep the economy working;
• graduate most students, each immediately ready to be successful in higher education, or prepared for a job;

with no recognition that some of these goals are in direct conflict.

For example, demanding increased performance necessarily means that more students will fail to clear the bar. Alternatively, demanding increased graduation rates necessarily leads to grade inflation and lowering the bar. There is no way around this, as it is precisely the problem of Type I and Type II errors in statistical testing.

The over-emphasis on sports in some districts, and the effect on grade inflation, has been well-recorded. What is rarely noted is the effect on the other students. If unprepared student athletes, or others who seem to put no effort into their studies, still progress to the higher grades, what is the immediate incentive to work hard?

If teachers are trying to fix every social problem in their classrooms, where is the time for learning? In my experience, the more talented students tend to get less attention, because 'they will learn anyway'. This is a recipe for mediocrity.

In short, before we try yet another major overhaul of the system, we should perhaps first decide the goals to be met, and also check that those goals are actually achievable.

Music for Burns Night, by JD

The songs of Robert Burns:

FRIDAY MUSIC: More French Hens, by JD

On the third day of Christmas Mr S posted a video by 'three French hens' and I thought the three young ladies, known collectively as LEJ, were rather good (that video was, as it turns out, played at the wrong speed and the image was reversed but no matter, they deserved further investigation!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.E.J

We deserve an encore (but not in France, when they wish for an 'encore' they will shout bis! as they do also in Belgium. On the other hand I might have been misinformed! However the OED confirms it.)

Zero hours

"Two hours at normal power, or six to eight hours at economical cruising speed." I'll settle for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero

FRIDAY MUSIC: Ray Thomas 1941 - 2018, by JD

"He is not dead, he doth not sleep -- he hath awakened from the dream of life --"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Thomas

"Music is a moral law. It gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, a charm to sadness, and life to everything. It is the essence of order, and leads to all that is good, just and beautiful, of which it is the invisible, but nevertheless dazzling, passionate, and eternal form" -

(Plato). (Wordsworth Dictionary of Musical Quotations, 1991, p. 45).
https://voices.no/community/?q=colgrocke061106

The death culture advances another step

It was inevitable. Once you concede the right to kill unborn children, with time limits shifting back and forth in no-man's-land, someone would eventually suggest that infanticide could also become legally permissible, perhaps even a moral duty. That someone - and he started in on this 40 years ago - is Peter "animal rights" Singer who

"began to argue that it is ethical to give parents the option (in consultation with doctors) to euthanise infants with disabilities."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-i-learned-about-disability-and-infanticide-from-peter-singer

In consultation with doctors, of course. The white coat makes all the difference - remember the Milgram experiment?

At the other end of life, we have "mercy killings" - again, something to be legalised and left to doctors.

I suppose that at some point these tendencies will meet in the middle. For if allowing the deformed or crippled to live is cruelty, why should there be any upper age limit to "termination" or whatever mealy-mouthed term is in fashion at the time?

Once we accept that human life is not sacred and that it can be assessed in terms of money and convenience, we're off down the slippery slope.

Already, the British Government is encroaching on our (or our family's) right to our own bodies, proposing a presumed right to "harvest" (another sweetened obscenity) organs in the absence of an "opt-out"; the Chinese are a little further ahead at the moment, killing political prisoners on demand for their spare bodily parts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China

There certainly are issues to be discussed, but one thing I won't have is an assumption that ethical matters are to be delegated to (or grabbed by) paid philosophers, politicians and doctors - authority, in short. The way things are going, maybe one day we could see posthumous pardons for a Continental government that did all the above in the 1930s and 1940s.

We Want Plates! - by Wiggia

This was prompted by a piece on the David Thompson blog and my personal antipathy to much that calls itself trendy in the strange world of modern celebrity chef led restaurants.

I wrote some while back about the modern practice of decorating plates rather than putting food on them, but that has been pushed aside as the current trend for serving on anything but plates gathers momentum. So much so that a website and Twitter account seeks out the ridiculous levels this diversion from food itself has reached; it has been spoken of as "performance art" by those up-their-own-backsides "hipster" chefs  !

The desire to get bums on seats runs perilously close to insanity in some cases but the modern world takes it all in its stride as little seems to shock or surprise any more: restaurants with toilets for seats, another with urinal pots holding flowers on the table seemingly gather a clientele that thinks these gimmicks are worth paying for; so be it, it's their money.

But the replacement of eminently proved and practical ceramic plates is a step too far. It could be said that this trend is nothing new - chicken in a basket was around long before the advent of the plate substitutes, as was the Chianti bottle wrapped in raffia and adorning Italian restaurant tables as a lamp throughout the land even in the fifties (this latter, believe it or not, is making a comeback.)

The wood, the slate, the half brick, the paper towel all run parallel with strange new ceramics that are designed to frustrate the diner. A nine-inch surround to a plate leaves a deliberately small area for food and nowhere to put your cutlery unless you want it to slide into whatever is in the middle; the bowl with a top rim at different levels is very near to the aforementioned urinal in shape, so could they be trying to tell us something about the food therein? Or the extreme oblong plates that make eating akin to playing the piano.

The platters, as they are known, have recently come in for a food standards agency fine in one Birmingham restaurant, having not been cleaned properly and looking repulsive - this after a previous warning. This event has kick-started the fight back against the "anything but plates" outfits (and there are many of them.)

I first encountered the slate plate some years back in a Michelin starred restaurant that served a fish dish on the slate. The peas were served in a small bowl that sat on the edge as for obvious reasons they could not be served on the slate - what was the bloody point? I laughed when it was served and the chef/proprietor was not amused when I asked for a plate: he explained it was part of the presentation - back to performance art !

Anyway here is a selection of the extremes that today's restaurants go to to divert your eyes  and thoughts away from the actual food, starting with the wonderful example of a full English on a grease-proof paper mat on a board with the beans in a coffee cup and the coffee in a jar ?