Education

Turning the Sow’s Ear into a Silk Purse

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Lately I’ve been struggling with the concept of “educated beyond one’s intelligence”. Testing and education is supposed to separate the meritorious from the masses. Unfortunately, education serves only to cut off the very bottom, obviously inept cohort, but seems to have less ability to separate truly good people from mediocre intellects and fakers. This has direct implications beyond Academia, as David Foster pointed out when he noted the reliance of businesses on paper trail rather than accomplishments as a means of filtering potential new hires.

I’m now starting to construct a mental model for why education seems to be failing at this central task, and a few terms spring immediately to mind.

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P.J. O’Rourke on the Daily Show

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Viacom put the entire archive of Daily Show with Jon Stewart online last October. I haven’t seen many bloggers mention this, and no conservative blogger, so at least part of our readers may not heard about this yet. The Daily Show may be a bit too liberal for the taste of most Chicago Boyz contributors and readers, but there is a lot of good stuff there.

For example, there is this clip of P.J. O’Rourke presenting his new book, On the Wealth of Nations. O’Rourke has done something many eminent economists never managed or got around to, he worked his way through Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, or ‘The Wealth of Nations’, as it is more commonly called. And O’Rourke actually managed to get such a good grasp on this difficult subject matter that he was able to write a book of his own that makes it accessible to the general public.

The book is highly recommend, an excerpt from the first chapter can be found here.

(The first link to the Daily Show leads to the index page there, but it directly leads to the clip with P.J. O’Rourke, too, at least when I click on it).

Hunting the Five-Pound Butterfly

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(This is an old Photon Courier post which I dug out in responding to a post about skill shortages in manufacturing and thought might be of interest to the Chicago Boyz readership.)

The Wall Street Journal (11/16/05) covers the growing tendency of companies to do hiring based on a long string of highly-specific requirements. The article deals specifically with engineering jobs, but the same trend can be seen–though maybe not quite to the same level–in other fields, such as marketing and sales.

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Capitalism’s Friends & Foes in the Ivy Halls

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It’s hard to believe, but education could be worse.   According to Stefan Thiel’s “Philosophy of Failure,” at Foreign Policy, it is in Europe.   Of course, what we predict about economics there may have all the validity of the predictions for the Democratic primary in New Hampshire.   Nonetheless, indoctrinating youth on the evils of capitalism can hardly seem a useful approach to increasing the EU’s economic vitality.   On the other hand, my daughter in high school has come home from her first week in economics.   So far, they have discussed the importance of job creation, the problems with Keynes, and watched a Stossel documentary.   I don’t know her teacher and know we are fly-over, rather than trendy.   But in passing, that teacher is likely to energize and make responsible youth who need that advice.   And it seems better sense than her nutrition teacher’s “Super Size Me.”