Tag Archives: education

This is Why

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…we can’t have nice schools.

Students at the University of New Hampshire [boycotted] final exams after a student uploaded a picture of another white student in what appears to be a bedtime facial mask, implying it’s “blackface.”

The university caved in to the students’ demands, and postponed the exams.

The right answer would have been to hold the finals as scheduled, let the pupils who skipped them—for whatever reason—receive failing grades on the exams, with attendant consequences for their course grade for the semester and for their graduation.

This should have been a teaching opportunity.  It isn’t civil disobedience unless the disobeyers suffer the consequences of the disobedience; that’s the only way civil disobedience can point up the absurdity of the thing being protested.  Absent those consequences, all that occurs is a toddler’s temper tantrum.  Or a riot.

But University of New Hampshire management (they don’t deserve to be called leadership) was too timid to do the right thing.  Instead, they’ve surrendered the university to the rabble.  In consequence, all this moment taught was that cry-baby temper tantrums get rewarded.

On top of this, the “outrage” was carefully manufactured.

Twenty-one-year-old Eric Buchwald, whose picture was posted without his permission, claims he didn’t depict blackface and it was just a picture of a clay facial mask he’s been using for the last few weeks.
…
A woman who owns the Instagram account that caused the scandal confirmed to NH1 News that Buchwald wasn’t aware his picture was being used; she said it was taken months ago.

A wasted major teaching opportunity combined with the overt racism of manufacturing a racist beef where it’s obvious none exists—a school doesn’t get much more useless than this.

Another Reason

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…to stop sending Federal funds to any institution in the California University system.

The University of California hid a stash of $175 million in secret funds while its leaders requested more money from the state, an audit released on Tuesday said.

The University of California system is run by Janet Napolitano, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.  And the same Napolitano who decided returning American veterans could be terrorist material: her history of dishonesty is a long one.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the audit found that the secret fund ballooned due to UC Office of the President overestimating how much is needed to run the school system that includes 10 campuses in the state.

And

The audit found that over the course of four years, the UC’s central bureaucracy amassed more than $175 million in reserve funds by spending significantly less than it budgeted for and asking for increases in future funding based on its previous years’ over-estimated budgets rather than its actual expenditures.

There’s more.

[A] top staff member in Napolitano’s office improperly screened confidential surveys that were sent to each campus. [California State Auditor Elaine] Howle said answers that were critical of Napolitano’s office were deleted or changed before being sent to auditors.

Of course, Napolitano denies everything.

Never mind her denials.  Just stop sending Federal funds—the taxes paid by the good citizens of New York, of Illinois, of Texas, of…—to the California university system.  Let California deal with its own schools in its own way without the largesse of the rest of the nation.

Internet of Things

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…and default passwords.  Default passwords are foolish in any device, but here’s a particularly failing example.  A laundromat in Colorado had a security camera connected to the Internet (as is typical of security cameras), and it began hosting a particularly malicious bit of malware.

Bill Knapp, owner of Security Solutions LLC, whose firm installed the laundromat’s surveillance system, which included the security camera:

One of the hardest parts of this business is that everyone loses their passwords[.]

And when the camera manufacturer was called upon to reset the password, it could only reset it to the default password, which is well-known, as that’s how the consumer gets in to set up his system—which should include resetting the default password to an individual, hard-to-break one.

Steve McGregory, a researcher at security firm Ixia, about poorly secured devices:

Within nine seconds of turning on these things, they get hit[.]

There’s a hint there.

A Key Point

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…from George Friedman’s piece in RealClear World, Nationalism and Liberal Democracy.  Friedman was writing about a different, if related matter, the relationship between liberalism (in the classic sense) and nationalism.  The point I’m calling out bears on our own immigration debate.

A nation is a group of people who share history, culture, language, and other attributes. It is the existence of a common identity, a coherent sense of self and nationhood that make self-government possible, because it is that sense of self that permits self-government.

Notice that: shared history.  This is not the same thing as possessing the same history.  Assimilation is what bridges the gap; assimilation is what brings people with widely differing histories—as widely different as English from Germans from Russians from Chinese from Japanese from…—into the jurisdictional boundary of a polity to become part of the nation that exists there.  Assimilation is what lets those folks with and from those differing histories obtain a shared history, the common history of the nation to which they’ve come and of which so many of them wish to become a part.

Assimilation is critical to nationhood because

a random collection of people without a core set of shared values cannot form a coherent regime, because nothing would hold the regime together or prevent internal chaos.

Is the Department of Education Living on Borrowed Time?

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Probably not but Congressman Thomas Massie (R, KY) has introduced a bill in the House of Representatives to eliminate it.  It’s unlikely to pass, more’s the pity, but we can hope.  Massie’s bill is short and sweet, too, consisting of this in its entirety:

The Department of Education shall terminate on December 31, 2018.

I’d add a second sentence, though: “All employees and associates of the Department of Education shall be returned to the private sector and not reassigned elsewhere in the Federal government.”  I’d also add a third sentence: “All rules and letters promulgated by the Department of Education shall be null and void.”  The third one may be unnecessary from a strictly legal standpoint, but I think it’s necessary for absolute clarity.

The Wall Street Journal, in the op-ed at the link, had a slightly different view:

Our view would be to put Representative Massie’s close-down bill on hold for at least four years, while the rest of us give Mrs DeVos a chance at making good on reforms that put the students at the front of the line.

I disagree. As long as it exists, the DoEd will be a Progressive-Democrat threat to our children.  More, the Federal government has no place in our education system; eliminate its presence in altogether—no matter the good intentions of an incumbent Secretary.

There’s not even a need for a rump Department to issu[e] block grants to states based on population and performance of education systems at state level, as one commenter at the op-ed suggested.  There should be no Department, rump or full-up, and there should be no Federal money transfers at all. Aside from those block “grants” never appearing without Federal strings, there’s no reason a New York tax payer should be paying into Texas’ education system, or a Californian paying into Illinois’, or….