Natural Degeneration
One of my colleagues sent me the link to a New Yawk Times article [Link] detailing some research done a U Fribourg dealing with how animals learn. What struck me about this were the implications of the findings for humans, and in particular humans in the Yankee republic.
The dismal prospect is that our current educational system, where individual competition is abolished in favor of the “everyone who enters the race gets a prize” philosophy of Political Correctness, and replacing it by a standardized shul level pseudo-competition – the Every Child Left Behind oppression of the Yankee government – is making our children less intelligent, less able to learn and compete successfully. In terms that would be used by traditional media were it not also constrained by political correctness, genocide by education.
Reinforcing this is an article on research from London Metropolitan and Cardiff U that young people today are anti-nerd. [Link] In effect they are opting out of maths, science, and engineering because they see maths as useless number crunching and the practitioners of those disciplines as “old, white, middle-class men”, people who are not normal, lack social skills, and are obsessive.
Guilty as charged! But it is somehow difficult to a generation who treasures individuality to see how becoming a member of a herd or hive and surrendering self determination and creativity is a life worth living? Normality is banal, social skills are for peasants and dweebs, and one person’s obsessiveness is another’s concentration, which is a capacity I see all too seldom in contemporary youth – unless they are playing a video game.
The sad thing here is that the social barriers in the maths and sciences are generally lower than in most disciplines and activities. The amount of yammering I hear in maths and science professional meetings about diversity is vastly greater than I hear in management and business professional meetings.
This herd mentality does not bode well for the species; after all, it was herd depredations that desertified the Sahara.
