You Have to Read This Letter

  New York father pulls his daughter out of Brearley with a message to the whole school. Is the dam starting to break?

Bari Weiss Apr 16 1,478 534

I was planning to publish a roundup today of the many thoughtful responses to Paul Rossi’s essay. I’m going to save that post for Sunday, because I was just sent this letter that has my jaw on the floor. It was written by a Brearley parent named Andrew Gutmann.

If you don’t know about Brearley, it’s a private all-girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It costs $54,000 a year and prospective families apparently have to take an “anti-racism pledge” to be considered for admission. (In the course of my reporting for this piece I spoke to a few Brearley parents.)

Gutmann chose to pull his daughter, who has been in the school since kindergarten, and sent this missive to all 600 or so families in the school earlier this week. Among the lines:

If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity,” it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was genuinely serious about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students, and their families, to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

I’m pasting the whole thing below.

Read More: If you hate bullshit, you'll surely enjoy it

(with thanks to the Maverick Philosopher)

Related:

DM: 'This is not a rich person issue, this is not a NYC issue, this is an American issue': Parent and teacher who spoke out against 'woke' antiracist doctrine in their expensive NY private schools warn it is infecting all US schools

America: A Nation Living With Lies

 Yusef, commenting on an earlier post, pointed out that if reported US Covid-19 deaths relative to population were similar to the numbers reported for the rest of the world: 

"we would have 4% of the covid-related deaths. Instead we have 20%, or 5X what we "should" have"

But I see no reason to believe the US stats. 

The US has clearly superseded the Soviet Union as the world's biggest liar. 

The US doesn't merely lie about important things such as the reasons for "bombing the shit out of" this or that country (to use President Trump's idiom), but about almost everything. 

Like the dying Soviet Union, the US teaches lies in its schools and universities.

Indeed, lies are the only essential part of the US educational curriculum, hence America's continuing decline in the ratio of educational attainment per dollar expended, which must be about the lowest in the world. 

Americans, like the citizens of Russia in the days of the Soviet Union are living with lies. 

Lies about almost everything. From Black lives matter, meaning all white people are racists who deny that black lives matter, to a seemingly endless list of mind-numbing bullshit from micro-aggressions to triggering, pussy hats, cultural appropriation, and the demand for less whiteness, aka European cultural and racial genocide. 

Which means that Americans get more lies and sheer nonsense for their educational dollar than anyone else. As the inevitable result, Americans have the lowest rate of academic achievement per dollar invested than any other country in the world, although the Brits are right up there along with the people of Canada where, to quote a national newspaper headline, Universities have become cesspools of political correctness.

What to do?

Well obviously when you are in the throws of a Communist takeover your chances of doing anything to counter the menace other than hurt yourself are slight. But here's how to make a start in transforming "education" from a process of Communist indoctrination to a process of productive learning.

Enact legislation that:

Embodies in education the old English principle that "Sticks and stone may break my bones but words can never hurt me;"

Makes academic achievement the driving principle of education at all levels;

 Pays teachers according to student achievement, and pays the best teachers more than the top educational bureaucrats. 

 But nothing of the kind, obviously, will be done. 

We are all doomed.  Doomed to live under the increasingly tyrannical rule of fools and scoundrels.  

Related: 

Martin Sieff: California Collapsing

Philip Giraldi: The Decline of the West: American Education Surrenders to ‘Equity’

Reuters: White House working with Facebook and Twitter to tackle anti-vaxxers

New York Times: Don't go thinking things out for yourself: just believe what we tell ya

Top Scientists Urge End to Covid Lockdowns, Call for Greater Protection of the Vulnerable, Freedom for the Rest

What these people are urging is that the Covid19 virus be allowed to spread freely among those who are least are risk of serious illness or death, thereby achieving herd immunity.

Herd immunity acquired naturally through the spread of a novel infectious agent depends on the acqusition of immunity by survivors of the infection, which thus limits viral spread, since the proportion of the population to which the virus can be spread is reduced. This effect is measured by changes in the so-called Reproduction number or R₀, which is the number of persons to whom each infected person passes the virus. As the virus spreads and the proportion of the population with immunity rises, R₀ falls and, with it, the number of new infections. Ultimately, R₀ reachs a value of one at which point the number of new infections stabilizes at a low level relative to the number at the height of the epidemic. At this stage the virus is said to be in a state of endemic equilibrium, meaning it won't go away but the number of new infections will not flare up as during the epidemic, but remain at a more or less constant low level. In due course, it is hoped that an effective anti-Covid19 vaccine will be available. Then R₀ can be driven well below 1.0 and the disease will become quite rare.

One question this strategy raises is how close is the world or any particular country to achieving herd immunity. According to the Johns Hopkins University Corona Virus Resource Center, the total number of Covid19 cases worldwide is 35 million. or about zero point four percent of the world's population. That implies we are very far from worldwide herd immunity, which would require perhaps four and a half billion infections, or 60% of the world's population. Or so it is believed. However, some research suggests that due to differences among individuals and groups in their social interactions, herd immunity requires infection of only about 40% of the population of concern, or three billion infections worldwide, but that is still vastly greater than the number of infections reported by the Johns Hopkins University Corona Virus Resource Center.

But the number of infections worldwide may be much greater than the data from Johns Hopkins suggest. According to an announcement today from the World Health Organization, global infections now total 750 million, or more than 20 times the Johns Hopkins University estimate. That number, combined with the lower estimate of the numbers for herd immunity, implies that worldwide, the population could already be one quarter of the way to herd immunity. If that is correct, and if as proposed by the scientists calling for an end to lockdowns we protect the vulnerable part of the population, which is to say those over 60 years of age, then we could be shot of Covid19 as a major problem quite soon.

Related:
The Great Barrington Declaration
As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection.
Read more

Over 7,000 Scientists, Doctors Call For COVID Herd Immunity, End To Lockdowns

The Bogus RT_PCR Test for Covid19

Death of the West: Autism and Atheism

Vox Popoli postulates a correlation between autism and atheism.

I first postulated my hypothesis concerning a link between the autism spectrum and atheism back in 2007 in response to a post by PZ Myers at Pharyngula in which he and other atheists were bragging about their relatively high Asperger's Quotient scores. I wrote: "Obviously, more comprehensive and scientific tests would be advised before any definite conclusion can be reached, but these initial observations do appear to indicate a possibility that atheism could be nothing more than a minor mental disorder."

 In that connection it may be noted that alleles for autism are reported to overlap broadly with alleles for high intelligence.

This correlation supports the notion that atheism is a consequence of rational thought. Certainly, there's little rational basis for theism, other than the fact that a society without a religion is doomed to self-destruction as is evident in the West today.

Unfortunately, it requires more than a couple of extra IQ points to recognize the necessity of irrational faith. It takes a civilization and an proper education system, both of which the Western nations have now jettisoned. 

Jordan Peterson Has One Thing Right: Identity Politics Is Bullshit Harmful to Children

Idiots, lunatics and revolutionary sons-of-bitches in Justin Trudeau's morally perfect Canadian universe are now waging war on Western civilization while threatening the mental health of small children by telling them that they are neither boys nor girls.

Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychologist who we have ridiculed for his absurd IQ-ist claims, is thus to be applauded for his courageous public stand on the reality of human sexual differentiation between male and female, despite the enraged antagonism of University of Toronto crackpots and activists, backed by the Ontario Human Rights Commission and the Trudeau government.

Yes, some individuals do not fit neatly into either the male or female category, whether that be for physical or psychological reasons. Yes, those people deserve consideration. But Hell no, those people, or rather the malign SJW's who seek to exploit them, have no business indoctrinating children with the the totally false and indeed insane idea that there are no "real" boys or girls. Such perverse propaganda can do harm and its proponents should be shut up. Jordan Peterson is among the few people with the balls to tell them to shut up.

Writing in the National Post yesterday,  Peterson states:

National Post, June 21, 2019: The continually expanded plethora of “identities” recently constructed and provided with legal status ...  consist of empty terms which (1) do not provide those who claim them with any real social role or direction; (2) confuse all who must deal with the narcissism of the claimant, as the only rule that can exist in the absence of painstakingly, voluntarily and mutually negotiated social role is “it’s morally wrong to say or do anything that hurts my feelings”; (3) risks generating psychological chaos among the vast majority of individuals exposed to the doctrines that insist that identity is essentially fluid and self-generating (and here I’m primarily concerned about children and adolescents whose standard or normative identity has now merely become one personal choice among a near-infinite array of ideologically and legally defined modes of being), and (4) poses a further and unacceptably dangerous threat to the stability of the nuclear family, which consists, at minimum, of a dyad, male and female, coming together primarily for the purposes of raising children in what appears to be the minimal viable social unit (given the vast and incontrovertible body of evidence that fatherlessness, in particular, is associated with heightened risk for criminality, substance abuse, and poorly regulated sexual behaviour among children, adolescents and the adults that they eventually become).

Prompting this return to the subject that first brought Peterson to wide public attention, was a report by journalist, Barbara Kay,

 

National Post, June 21, 2019: about an application filed before the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario by the parents of a six year girl, “N,” who was made subject to the new tenets of gender identity theory by her hypothetically well-meaning elementary school teacher at Devonshire Community Public School (Ottawa-Carleton District School Board). According to Kay’s account, the teacher insisted to the children that “there is no such thing as girls and boys,” and “girls are not real and boys are not real.” In consequence, “N” began to manifest substantial confusion about her identity. She asked her parents why her existence as a girl was not real. She asked to see a doctor for an opinion. She became unsettled about the reality of her biological existence. Her concern persisted over a three-month period — a long time in the life of a young person.

Peterson continues:

National Post, June 21, 2019: I can barely envision a pedagogical strategy less conducive to stable early childhood development, particularly for a thoughtful child, which is exactly what “N” seems to be — much to her detriment, in this situation. Trusting her teacher, as she apparently did, “N” listened to her lessons and tried to think through what the complicated and internally contradictory mess of information she was presented with might actually signify — and failing, as was inevitable, because there is nothing that it signifies that is reasonable, logical, practical, or true. No matter: “gender fluidity” is school board policy, even for six-year-olds, and the distress of a perfectly normal child at the lessons is a price well worth paying to ensure that ideological purity, no matter how counterproductive and absurd, is stringently maintained. Better the child suffers than the teacher thinks. Better the entire educational system reformulates itself around the new dogma (and to hell with the possibility that the experiment might go wrong) than the ideologues governing its structure question their absurd and fundamentally resentful presumptions.

And much more. An article contributing importantly to the preservation of Canadian national sanity. 

Related:
Student who told teacher there are only 'two genders' now facing harsh punishment from school

America, A Failed State?

Is America a failed, or at least an about to fail, state?

Judge for yourself.

Here's Charles Hugh Smith's evaluation of America's largest institutions:

1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation. 2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS (you know, those weird ships with hulls that slope in, not out, toward the top). 3. Higher Education: a bloated, failed system that is bankrupting an entire generation while mis-educating them for productive roles in the emerging economy. (I cover this in depth in The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy and Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.) 4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on? 5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters*, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.

*Cf. Boeing corporation and the 737MAX, a botched aircraft design and an accident that did not wait to happen — twice.

Frans de Waal: An Ethologist's Confusion About Ethics — Part I

Ethology is the study of animal behavior. Franz de Waal is a distinguished ethologist and author of several best-selling accounts of primate behavior. As de Waal reports at length in the Atheist and the Bonobo, and other works, a key feature of the behavior of apes and to a greater or lesser degree other social animals, is sharing, helping, commiserating, comforting and demanding fairness. 

From this reality of animal social existence, de Waal concludes that morality is neither unique to humans nor dependent on religion, but is inherent in mammalian biology. Furthermore, he contends, that religion is, though difficult and perhaps impossible to eradicate, superfluous to the good society.

Thus, de Waal writes:

This brings me back to my bottom-up view of morality. The moral law is not imposed from above or derived from well-reasoned principles; rather it arises from ingrained values that have been there from the beginning of time.

In this, however, de Waal is sadly confused. The constructive, cooperative, fairness-demanding and mutually beneficial behavior of social animals is not evidence of morality, natural or otherwise. It is merely the rational, self-serving behavior of the small business owner who refrains from swindling his customers in the hope that they will return for more. It is the principle of you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. By helping one another, social animals achieve a level of well-being beyond that attainable were they to live independent, uncooperative lives.

The Illogic of Libertarianism

Following Monday's announcement that the US Libertarian Party has nominated former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson as its 2016 presidential candidate (he ran in 2012 and got 1% of the votes), we reproduce here our piece on the logical absurdity of libertarianism that first appeared on Wordpress, December 11, 2013.

Libertarians consider freedom the highest value and government the greatest restraint on freedom, from which they conclude that government is an evil to be eliminated.

But given human nature, the variability of human desires and the scarcity of resources to satisfy those desires, human existence in the absence of government, or in what Hobbes called a state of nature, will degenerate into a war of all against all:

… there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, no culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

This fact, libertarians can never grasp, for if they did, they would not be libertarians.

To deny the miserable lack of freedom under a condition of anarchy, libertarians make claims about rights as though such pious talk would tame the will of those intent on a course that infringes the liberty of others. That their rights, God-given or otherwise, can nowhere be exercised freely except where they are enshrined in law and enforced by government seems beyond libertarian comprehension.

Travellers ambushed during the chaos of the 30 years war.
Sebastian Vrancx (1573-1647). Image source.

Bizarrely, libertarians may invoke authority in support of their ideology, Adam Smith being often cited. Indeed, in Edinburgh, the Adam Smith Institute claims to be “Britain’s leading libertarian think tank” (is there really more than one?). But Adam Smith was no anarchist. He was a social scientist whose great work The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was concerned with the factors underlying not liberty but the creation of wealth, and to Smith it was clear that general prosperity could be achieved only under a government.

Smith devoted an entire section of the Wealth of Nations (Book V) to the nature of good government, identifying four necessary functions:

National Defense:The first duty, and necessary expense, of the state is defence: protecting the society from the violence or invasion of others.

Justice:Just as the state must protect people from foreign enemies, so must it protect them against domestic ones. …

Among nations of hunters, there is hardly any property. People usually have nothing to gain from injuring others, and there is little need for any formal administration of justice. But where property exists, things are otherwise. There are potential gains from theft. The avarice and ambition of the rich, or the desire for ease and enjoyment among the poor, can lead to private property being invaded. The acquisition of valuable property – which may take years to build up – necessarily requires the establishment of a civil government and a magistracy to preserve order and justice. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security.

Thus, according to Smith, the accumulation of wealth, which so many libertarians believe should occur on a tax-free basis, is in fact possible only under publicly funded government protection:

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

Public Works:
The third role for the state is to build and maintain public works that could never yield a profit to individuals: institutions to facilitate commerce, the education of the young and the instruction of people of all ages.

Education:
In the matter of public education, Smith, himself the beneficiary of publicly supported schooling, was ambivalent. There was a strict limit, he believed, to the value of education for the masses:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur.

But Smith would likely have taken a different view had he lived in a technological age where the returns to investment in education are great but its cost exceeds the means of many students.

Monopoly:

Smith made numerous references to the harm inflicted on the public by monopolies, which he described as conspiracies against the public:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

Smith may have advocated no laws against monopoly, but he recognized them as an evil inherent in the system of trade regulation that he wished to see replaced by a competitive free market:

Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system.

Recognizing the necessity of government, Smith recognized also the necessity of taxation and proposed principles of taxation that any small-government conservatives would approve. Certainly, he would have considered absurd, the notion that taxation is necessarily theft.

Is a College Education Worth Less Than Nothing?

Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Richard Vedder and Christopher Denhard discuss the value of a university degree.

A key measure of the benefits of a degree is the college graduate’s earning potential—and on this score, their advantage over high-school graduates is deteriorating. Since 2006, the gap between what the median college graduate earned compared with the median high-school graduate has narrowed by $1,387 for men over 25 working full time, a 5% fall. Women in the same category have fared worse, losing 7% of their income advantage ($1,496).

A college degree’s declining value is even more pronounced for younger Americans. According to data collected by the College Board, for those in the 25-34 age range the differential between college graduate and high school graduate earnings fell 11% for men, to $18,303 from $20,623. The decline for women was an extraordinary 19.7%, to $14,868 from $18,525.

But a moment’s reflection will confirm that the method these authors use to value a college degree is absurd. For a start, a college degree requires a certain, if rather low, scholastic aptitude. By definition, all college graduates meet this requirement, but many of those without a college degree do not. Which means that, intellectually, the college graduates are not directly comparable with non-graduates.

Specifically, notwithstanding a leavening by people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, the class of non-graduates will likely be less smart in ways both academic and otherwise than the class of graduates.

To put some crude if fairly meaningless numbers on that difference, graduates will mostly have an average or above average IQ, whereas the class of non-graduates will be intellectually more heterogeneous, but will include the majority of those of a less than average IQ.

And the effect of a college degree on earnings is confounded by factors other than the intellectual. University education is marker of social class, which is sought more keenly by those of middle and elite class than those of lower socio-economic rank. Moreover, socio-economic background is likely itself a powerful determinant of income, affecting aspiration, socialization, connections, and the quality of K to 12 education.

It seems, therefore, that we really have no useful information on the economic value of a college degree, although it seems that in the case of those well paid professions, medicine, the law, rocket science, etc., which require specific higher educational qualifications, college education pay dividends. But even this is not certain for at least a few of those individuals of high ability who are channeled through higher education into the professions might otherwise have ended up as billionaire real estate  developers or Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

But in any case those with degrees leading to professional careers account for only a small proportion of all college graduates. Thus, exclusion of those with professional qualifications would greatly diminish the apparent effect of a college degree on earnings.

And, if anything, for the majority of students, the impact on life-time earnings of a college degree may be negative. Not only does it cost four to six or more years potential earnings, but it imposes a substantial cost for tuition. Net of these factors, many of America’s 18-year-olds of average ability will earn more in their lifetime by launching their career at Starbucks or MacDonalds immediately, rather than incurring the cost of a degree in linguistics or womens’ studies.

But economics are not everything. To the true lovers of knowledge, the rewards of learning are great.

First posted at Canspeccy.wordpress.com January 10, 2014.

How America's system of education is being destroyed

By CanSpeccy

(During a Presidential election year in America, this piece, first published: 4/14/2011, seems worth re-airing)

The United States, according to Chris Hedges, is destroying its system of education. A nation that destroys its systems of education, he writes, degrades its public information, guts its public libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. ..."

Hedges is surely right. But it seems equally certain that the process of destroying the American system of education is being undertaken without malice, intent or even awareness. System failure, whether in education, public transportation, healthcare or any other complex social arrangement is the inevitable result of evolutionary societal change.

In the beginning, education is rare and hard to come by. Those who get it are mostly people of exceptional talent and capacity for hard work. They are selected for their peculiar aptitude and schooled by a tiny group of committed scholars. They achieve brilliantly in a world of near universal ignorance.

Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre at best. Many of the students are not bright, some have no interest in learning. So this generation is mainly fit only for jobs in the public sector. Public demand (demand for public sector jobs, that is, not public sector services) results in a huge expansion of the bureaucracy, including the educational establishment.

Then comes the era of mass education. Everyone must have a university degree and a white collar job. Most school teachers are now incompetent. Most of them never teach: they become part of the management team. Someone invents the "bubble test", which can be marked by machine without the intervention of human intelligence at any point. Many university professors are ignorant and lazy. The students are mostly at uni only to socialize. The brightest are disgusted by their experience of "education" and shun an academic career.

Eventually everyone has a university degree and no one knows anything at all. Even the President of the United States.

In time, the economy collapses under the weight of an ever expanding burden of useless bureaucratic activity. Educational institutions decay for lack of funding. Furniture is removed for fuel wood, books for toilet paper. Buildings fall into decay and gradually disappear. Learning is despised and eventually forgotten. A new dark age ensues.

After a thousand years or so, some clever monk or hermit stumbles on a copy of Newton's "Principia," or a book of Napierian logs. They figure it out and tell other people. Some of the brightest students of this ancient wisdom form colleges where they train a few especially clever pupils. One of the newly educated elite unifies quantum theory and relativity. Practical men apply the new knowledge, making possible, among many wonders, faster than light travel, the generation of electricity from thunderstorms, and the renutrification of shit.

Then every ambitious person wants their child to get an education. Taxes are raised, schools are built, thousands of teachers are hired. Some of the teachers are mediocre ...

The Rot at the Head of the University

In The Intellectual Costs of Diversity, Robert Weissberg explains the devastating harm to academic excellence done by the promotion of diversity  in the American University — a cost that guarantees America`s demise as the world's leading intellectual, scientific and technological power.

In discussing this transformation of academia, the author considers the motivation of the Interim Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Champaigne-Urbana, Barbara Wilson, who has announced diversity, i.e., rigged hiring to insure blacks and women are favored over better qualified white or Asian males, to be central to the university’s mission. His conclusion is this:

... abandoning intellectual excellence is best explained by physical intimidation and what is most remarkable is the inconsequentiality of this threat. What interim Chancellor Barbara Wilson and others face is at most some fleeting verbal abuse …

This, sadly, is complete rubbish, for if it were not, it would be a simple matter to find university leaders with the balls to insist that the university is about scholarship, not the replacement of Christian morality with that of Political Correctness.

IQism, Racism and the Decay of the Great American University

To many psychologists, genius is simply a number that falls a certain number of standard deviations to the right of the mean on a bell curve. One of the longest running experiments on intelligence, however, suggests that true giftedness may depend as much on other factors like creativity and motivation. Since 1921, psychologists have studied a group of approximately 1500 children with an average IQ score of about 150 that were originally selected by Lewis Terman. The members of this group, known as the Termites, all grew up to be highly successful and productive, but not one of them achieved genius-level contributions. Genius seems to elude the best efforts of psychologists to capture its essence in a standardized test.
A Case Study of Genius, Ryan McPherson

The joy of racism is the sense it provides of innate superiority and, like being born into the aristocracy or inheriting a fortune, it provides an elevated status requiring no effort to maintain.

But being white no longer provides that advantage. If you're black or Jewish, OK, enjoy the psychic benefits of racism if you wish, but today white is rubbish and targeted for elimination as the dominant group within a generation, not only in America as proclaimed to applause by US President Bill Clinton during his 1998 commencement address at Portland State University, but across Europe.

So what is the alternative for those of idle disposition in need of a prop to their self-esteem? The answer, today, is IQism. By definition, half of us can beat an average score, and with a bit of test sophistication almost anyone can be above average. And if test preparation is not enough, a spoonful of glutamate before the test may give you an extra five to 25 points.

The American school system has done much to promote IQism. If SAT scores are all that really matters, a teacher's life is greatly simplified: preparing a class of restive adolescents for an IQ test is easier than inspiring them to high attainment in Greek or analytical algebra. What's more, the tests are scored by machine, which sure beats reading a stack of hand-written essays.

With the rise of IQism in America, top universities now select applicants for admission chiefly not on what they know, or on how effectively they apply what they know, but on a machine-scored test of facility in certain mental operations that measures neither judgment, nor passion, nor imagination.

But who cares if students, all of them fully adult, entering America's elite institutions of higher learning know virtually nothing: they're all really, really bright. No wonder so many students at Harvard cheat. Why bother with the books? If you're too poor to follow Ted Kennedy's example and pay someone else to sit the exam, by all means cheat in any other way you can. As a person of high IQ, your superiority is assured: the sweat of hard work, intellectual or otherwise, is for the lower grades of mankind.

Bizarrely, the SAT test was promoted by James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, to reduce the number of rich kids privileged by attendance at expensive private prep schools from being privileged by attendance at Harvard, an expensive private school. But as Charles Murray relates here the SAT test fails to predict academic performance of university entrants from poor schools any better than traditional subject-based entrance tests and thus is an expensive waste of time.

The Kahn Academy: The Future of Education?

Thinking of Universities and how toxic their mix of alleged education and politically correct indoctrination can be, prompts mention of the Kahn Academy. If you learn nothing else useful from this lousy blog, you may well find Salman Kahn's educational resource of real value.

Kahn is a hugely well educated and hugely gifted instructor who has developed an approach to online learning that offers promise of eliminating much of the ruinously expensive and politically corrupting bureaucratic educational establishment that is one of the most destructive state elements sucking the life-blood from Western nations.

Here, on 60 Minutes, Kahn explains his approach to on-line learning. What Kahn has developed is the mechanism for the kind of flexible, personalized, non-politicized and cost-effective education system we argued for here.

In essence, the process is this. Instead of teachers lecturing students and giving them homework assignments to test their learning, Kahn's approach has online instructors lecturing students at home in short, manageable segments, while teachers monitor and assist students in exercises to test how well they have assimilated the lessons viewed.

According to this paradigm of learning, the teacher serves as a tutor, checking to see that assigned lessons have been learnt, trouble-shooting when students run into difficulties in understanding, and directing students to appropriate material to take them to the next stage.

This scheme of education eliminates the lock-step advance of an entire age-group, for the lecturing is one-on-one, over the internet. Each student can thus take whatever lessons that logically follow from what he has successfully mastered so far. The teacher, as tutor, assists each student with whatever part of the program he happens to be working on now. By the time of high school graduation, some kids will have mastered advanced university or even post-graduate material, while others will have attained only a much lower standard. But that lower standard will have been fully mastered, because the student has been tutored at every step of the way and not advanced from any stage until that stage has been mastered.

University administrators like Lendley Black, President of U Minnesota, Duluth, who think it the role of the university to brainwash students instead of teach them to be self-confident and accomplished young adults, will soon be redundant. New media are making the traditional university, with its astronomical costs, its rampant political corruption and its remarkable educational inefficiency increasingly insupportable.