In a free society, being born poor should not stop an intelligent, capable, hard-working person from becoming prosperous. Social mobility refers to the capacity for people born in a lower social class to transition to a higher social class during their lives. Industries that have historically improved social mobility include professional sports and universities. These [...]
Are you thinking of pursuing graduate degree? The Internet is rife with advice on how and whether to proceed. Most of this advice is wrong. Today I am officially “Dr. Wolfe.” Here is what I wish I knew when I started. 1. Find a Reasonable Supervisor The single most important part of a PhD is [...]
The poster-child for what’s wrong with postsecondary education is the computer science program. Despite the enormous need for competent programmers, database administrators, systems administrators, IT specialists and a host of other technical professionals, computer science programs seem to explicitly ignore the professional skills of which western society has growing deficiency and proceed with materials and [...]
If you’ve gone to grad school, particularly for a PhD, this may ring true for you. The strange thing is, grad schools seem to be constructed around the assumption that grad students are desperately inept and have no idea what they want to do for their thesis or beyond. This premise has so profoundly affected [...]
Here is an interesting editorial calling for radical restructuring of universities. The basic point is that “universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no [...]
Many adults do not understand human rights – what they are, why they’re important, how their presence or absence affects the well-being of society. As far a I can tell, the reason adults don’t understand human rights is that they didn’t learn about it in school. What’s worse, even if human rights issues are covered [...]
A crisis of incompetence has infected the medical professions. I’m not talking about that bullshit the scientologists spew about treating your own diseased kids or that religious nonsense about not taking a life-saving blood transfusion because it will somehow steal your soul. I’m talking about the silo-fication of medical education. Suppose you have a sore [...]
After a week or so of computer woes, I’m back, ready to take aim at the American education model once more. A couple of weeks ago, I observed a few fundamental flaws in the way we teach our kids. Here’s a few more crucial ways we make our kids, and our adults, stupid. 4. Not everyone [...]
Ever notice how ninety percent of the people you meet on a daily basis are fucking morons? It’s kind of a no-brainer to assume most of society will be functionally retarded if your entire educational system is broken, designed to produce perfect citizens, instead of developing a love of learning and fostering intellectual growth in [...]
Have you ever watched the news, read the paper, or sat through a high school class, and wondered why the hell people in America seem to do everything completely backasswards? I suppose it’s no surprise that we do things backwards in a country whose administration thinks an unprovoked invasion is a form of defense, but [...]