By Professor Doom
It’s no secret
that something’s gone horribly wrong in education. Despite over a century of
careful study of how to teach human beings, it’s clear we’re not learning as
much as we used to. A simple
glance at a college entrance exam from over 100 years ago shows that
today’s high school graduates aren’t even close to the level of knowledge that
19th century high school graduates regularly demonstrated.
With high school
graduates dropping so far in skills, it’s only natural to see either of two
things in higher ed: a massive increase in the failure/dropout rate, or a
massive decrease in the standards of higher education.
It’s the latter by
far, as I’ve detailed many a time in this blog. The question thus arises:
what’s happening to our high school (and, presumably, pre-high-school)
students? While certainly, it’s quite possible that the incompetence and
corruption I’ve detailed in higher ed has counterparts in our public school
system there are other issues that could also be a factor beyond the dumbing
down of the material.
We’re currently
running all sorts of experiments on the human race, and I suspect as long as
technology continues to rapidly improve, we’ll be running even more in the near
future. Never before has the world’s infrastructure allowed for ideas and
inventions to be exposed to humanity so quickly.
As a
quick example, online pornography is, well, ubiquitous, starting perhaps 20
years ago. A few years ago, researchers were curious if watching such things
was harmful, but could not run the experiment: they were
incapable of finding males not exposed to it. You can’t run a legitimate
experiment without a control (I do wish we could tell Education specialists
this important concept…). Let’s just hope watching porn isn’t a real problem…it
seems harmless enough, but what would have happened to society if, after 10
years of watching it, it caused severe problems in the viewer? Half the
population could have been crippled, warping society for generations.
It isn’t just technology which can affect
the entire population in short order, political systems and social programs
unlike anything the world has ever seen can be devised and implemented within a
few years…it’s reasonable to consider the effects of such systems.
r/K selection
theory is an evolutionary theory (theory!) that a species can engage in two
basic strategies for continuation of the species. The r-selection strategy is
to have lots and lots of offspring, and for the parent to not care too much
about survival of any particular offspring. The classic example of a species
following this theory is rabbits, although certainly more extreme examples exist,
such as snails which lay millions of eggs, caring nothing for them, leading to
less than 1% reaching maturity.
The K-selection
strategy is to have few offspring, but the parent invests a great deal of time
raising them.
Now, this idea
need not be the defining factor of all individuals in a species—certainly, zoos
have noticed that some individual animals make more attentive parents than the
others, even as the inferior parent animals have plenty of children.
So, while humans
tends towards the K-selection strategy of preserving the species, some parents
are more inclined to having a few children and raising them well, while others
are fine with having many children with little sense of parental responsibility
for those children.
One of the many
experiments unleashed upon humanity, or least American citizens, in recent
times is the Welfare State: no matter how many kids you have, you and they will
be taken care of. This started most glaringly with the New Deal, with a clear
doubling down with the Great Society, giving an important message to those who
would listen: breed all you want, and let government take care of educating,
feeding, or whatever else your children might need.
My
grandfather, to judge: “I gotta feed these young’uns somehow!”
--My
grandfather used to transport moonshine, back when it was illegal. He had his
reasons, as my mother had 10 siblings.
Granted, in
agrarian societies, having many children was encouraged, because having many
helpful hands on the farm was a good thing. It was nevertheless understood that
the farmer still was responsible for feeding his children, and in turn those
children were responsible for the parents once they were too old for hard work.
In these societies, it was the smarter, better, and more resourceful farmers who
would have more children, because they could afford to be responsible for them.
Today, being
irresponsible means having lots of children, the opposite of what it used to
mean. We’ve inverted our social norm in this grand experiment.
Now, government
will feed your kids and even takes responsibility for your retirement. We’ve
had around 4 generations of this huge social experiment, this huge inversion of
morality, a morality which, pre-inversion, allowed humanity to dominate the
planet. Despite the inversion, we kept freedom of choice, where individuals get
to decide if they want to go with r-selection, or K-selection, for their
offspring.
My father:
“I pay my tax dollars to send some kid to public school, and on top of that I’m
supposed to pay to send my kids to private school?”
--my father
still sent me to private school, even though he hated paying effectively double
what his responsibility should be, paying for the r-selection people. I only
have 1 sibling.
Freedom of choice
meant everyone was ok with this, but there is one obvious problem here: we make
our decisions as a democracy. The people who chose to have few children, and
care for them, are typically outvoted now, and get to watch as their tax
dollars go to pay for endless programs for the children of the people with many
children. The K-selection people who only have the children they can care for
are now a minority, and I suspect it’s by a wide margin.
The US government
has now run this selective breeding program for about a century. Often when you
selectively breed an animal for one trait, you get other traits as well. German
shepherds weren’t bred for hip problems, they were bred for
intelligence...and so now some owners have the misery of watching their
intelligent pet suffer with every step. 50 years is
more than enough time to breed wild foxes to be as tame as puppies…with many
other “bonus” traits as well.
It’s no great
stretch to think selective breeding works with humans. Our bountiful social
programs have been breeding humans to be r-selection favored. Perhaps the
r-selection followers are also bred to be less inclined to study (I’ll not
suggest the more obvious idea), as this trait is less common amongst the
K-selection followers who are more willing (again, I’ll not suggest “able”) to
consider the consequences of having children, and thus do what they can to
limit their breeding to what they can personally be responsible for.
Could it be that
the immense collapse in the caliber of our high school graduates despite all
we’ve (supposedly) learned in Education as a field is neither due to the
complete failure of Education, nor due to the immense corruption and
incompetence of our “leaders” in higher education, but simply a result of our
government’s eugenics program regarding its citizens?
If so, how do we
reverse this? Can we reverse this? Dare I even ask if we should reverse this? I believe it’s better if humans can know
things but I like to consider: before changing things, I want to make sure the
change would be a good thing. If we’d asked questions like that a century ago,
perhaps we’d have more people interested in, and capable of understanding, the answers
today.
I lean towards
reversal, however, as we’ve compensated for the decay by erected an incredibly
corrupt community “college” system where over
90% of the coursework is identical to what we teach in our (generally debased)
high school system. I would prefer "college" to mean college, after all.
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