third world county

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Meanwhile, beating a dying horse… (Why? Because it’s not worth the bullet it’d take to put it down, that’s why.)

Yes, an expansion of a post quickly slapped up yesterday…

I’ll get back to this in a minute, but for now, just hold this thought in mind, would you?

Commonly reported side effects include difficulty sleeping, loss of appetite, irritability, stomachaches, headaches, blurry vision, nausea, dizziness, drowsiness and tics and tremors. There have been concerns that ADHD medication temporarily delays growth, and one study found that up to 5 percent of children experience tactile hallucinations, often involving a sensation that bugs or snakes are crawling on their bodies. The FDA recently announced that certain ADHD drugs should caution users about the risks of serious heart problems and psychotic behavior.¹

I’m tempted to think it’s a conspiracy corrupt young minds and deliberately manufacture easily manipulated sheeple, but then I’m reminded of the quote attributed to Napoleon:

“Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity.”

I’m speaking, of course (and again), of the public “education” system in these micromanaged-from-the-swamps-of-D.C. United States.

But it’s not just micromanagement of local schools by remote bureaucraps and educraps or even bad (or lazy–and there are plenty of those) teachers or even pubschool adminstrators *spit* that are at work creating mind-numbed children (future citizens). Nope. Parents are the ones most responsible for the failures of American schools that have created a populace that is largely subliterate (while feeling good about itself, falsely calling itself literate). Parents could require discipline in school, could require their children to learn useful information, turn off the video games and TV and, well, read… Parents could vote in such a way as to lessen or even eliminate remote micromanagement of their public schools, even to voting in school board members who would turn down fedgov funds in order to maintain some semblance of local control.

But no.

Remember that list of side effects for ADHD drugs? Well, apparently more and more parents would rather drug their children out of their minds than address real concerns in public education. From the same source as linked above,

Academic doping — using these stimulant prescriptions in an effort to enhance focus, concentration and mental stamina — first started on college campuses, especially Ivy League and exclusive, competitive schools. Now, the problem is filtering down to secondary schools, Yates says, and more parents are playing a role in obtaining prescription ADHD medication for their teenagers.

So, in order to give their kids an edge in producing grades, grades based on regurgitating crap curriculum that arguably produces subliterate and illiterate high school and college graduates, parents would subject their children to unnecessary risk of side effects like those listed above.

Stupid.

A better way is suggested by the following exchange between Harry Erwin, an university instructor and researcher in England, and Jerry Pournelle (as quoted yesterday):

There is a recent Scientific American article (August 2006) on expertise that suggests what we should do for our students is motivate them to continuously push themselves beyond their current levels of ability and then provide accurate feedback on their performance. I did that this summer with some of my programming students, and their performance was *much* improved. So perhaps the problem in education is not with the students, but rather with the approach to teaching–an interesting implication for the current high- stakes testing regime in the schools–it might be wrong-headed. The SA article also suggests that the differences in talent and intelligence between students are much less important than the differences in motivation. So when your goal is to educate experts, don’t worry about their raw talent and IQ, but instead keep them pushing their limits…

Pournelle rersponded, in part, with:

[T]hat experience exactly matches not only my own experience, but that of most of my generation. Being pushed to just beyond one’s limit is apparently the best way to learn almost anything; and the experience that motivation can be as important as intelligence is very much in line with the work of Marva Collins and some of the other inner city teachers…

But do you think this has a snowball’s chance in hell of impacting prisons for kids in these United States? Nope. Too effort for parents, teachers and students. And it’d put a raft of educrats and professors of education out of work. (Or reveal them for the fools they are–which would be just as bad in their eyes.)

And it would stand a chance of producing an electorate that could see the emperor’s new clothes for what they truly are. And so, 23 years after “A Nation At Risk”—the Congressionally-mandated report from the National Commission on Excellence in Education—sounded the alarm,

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

…we are even more “at risk” than before, largely because of an increasingly “mis-undereducated” population.

But hey! That works just fine for a country with borders like a chicken wire swimming pool, the TSA, generational welfare and all the other abortions of public good wrought by *spit* politicians elected by dumb, fat and sappy Americans, doesn’t it?

But not to despair! Bill Gates, the progenitor of wonderful things like the world’s most bloated, overpriced (even the “free” software, like Internet Exploder) and insecure software (“Where do you want your computer to crash today?”) is coming to the rescue!

OK, granted the author of the article linked above has a dof in the fight, she still makes a few points I had occur to me when I first read about the Gates school project. I can tell ya one thing” I’m glad the twc.us kids didn’t have to go to a school quite that shallow and stupid.

Ah, but the Gates school is all in the tradition of Dewey, et al, preparing good (dull) drones for American business to turn into wage slaves.