42 Replies to “The Children Are Our Future”

  1. Serfs, slaves and cannon fodder. They won’t be mining the asteroid belt or terraforming Mars.

    1. Our masters rather look forward to the happy day when the only thing they’ll need human proles for is to act out their disgusting sexual fantasies on slaves specially bred for the purpose.

      Everything else, including the job of conquering the galaxy, they plan to leave to robots. Terraform Mars? What for? So human proles can live on it? Robots will do just fine on Mars as it is, mining it for everything of value.

      Moreover, robots never organize slave revolts or have any wants of their own, actually. Meet completely predictable fuel and maintenance needs and all is well. Why, central planning might even make sense in such a world. Robots will make far better socialists than humans ever did—and it’s easy to set priorities when the people whose wants still count for anything number only a few dozen.

      Hence the push to replace as many of us as possible with robots and convince the human proletariat to stop reproducing, never mind educating their young.

  2. In a socialist world you don’t need to think, you just need to do what the ruling party tells you.

  3. For many years, at the post-secondary institution I was at, I taught a drafting course, complete with conventional instruments and drafting machines. We also had CAD facilities, but the students learned that later.

    Then, one year, my masters decided to scrap all the conventional drafting and, along with it, the much-needed techniques (including certain geometric methods) and self-discipline that goes into making a proper drawing. If they needed to create something using pencil and paper, there was always sketching. (And, yes, I’ve seen what the kiddies produced. Much of it was absolute rubbish because they didn’t see the point in it.)

    My objections were ignored or over-ruled, naturally. It was my duty to “get with the program” (no pun intended).

    So, should the electrical grid fail, there won’t be any drawings produced by the youngsters because they don’t know how. I, on the other hand, with a T-square, a set of compasses, some triangles, and templates, can still put pencil to vellum (or ink in mylar) and create something that a tradesman can read and understand.

    But what do I know? I only learned to draft the conventional way back in the Jurassic Era and I spent much of my engineering career either creating drawings or checking someone else’s work.

    1. One day the grid will fail with none of the millennials able to get it back up and running without computers. No one will be able to do the needed calculations using pen and paper.
      Then, they’ll lament giving Grampa that black capsule as he was excess population!

      1. Here’s an interesting perspective.

        I’m still in the process of settling my father’s estate. I was told by another machinist that reading and using mechanical measuring instruments, such as vernier calipers, was no longer being taught. Everything has to be digital now. Last year, I sold a lot of my father’s calipers and micrometers to someone who works on high-performance machinery. One comment the buyer made was that he liked the older mechanical instruments because once they’re calibrated, they tend to stay calibrated.

        I can still read the old calipers and micrometers, though I’m a bit rusty. But I can do it because I learned it early on.

        Digital readouts are nice in that one has the numerical value right away but one thing they can’t do is give one a sense of overall perspective or context. If one takes a measurement, one doesn’t always get the sense of how far off one might be from a required value, whether it’s a voltmeter or a dial gauge.

    2. I still own a manual portable typewriter. I also have my Dad’s Slide Rule and drafting set. The latter is German made and very high quality.

      1. I still have the manual typewriter that helped earn me my B. Sc. and my first master’s degree. I have a drawer full of drafting equipment that I can use. I do need a new vinyl surface for my drafting board, though.

        I put my slide rule up on blocks many years ago after writing an electrical engineering mid-term exam in which one of the questions involved the use of phasors. I still use it from time to time, though, just to make sure that I don’t become rusty. I’m still amazed at how powerful it is as a calculating device.

        The kiddies nowadays don’t understand the underlying principles.

    3. That was in the Jurassic period, back in the Fifties and Sixties, when even tradesmen in some areas of the country were given drafting courses in trade school in order that they could interpret prints and drawings that were assembled by architects and engineers. Those tradesmen were the last defence against engineering mistakes. Over the last 75 years we have devalued the intrinsic value of tradesmen to our society. In the push to educate/brainwash society into getting a diploma we have eliminated one of the standards that helped create everything we hold dear today, the tradesman. Seventy five years of listening to the mantra of “get a diploma in X,Y, and Z studies and you’ll get a good job with a big salary, don’t go to trade school because you don’t want to get your hands dirty at some menial job”, well that thinking has brought us to the position we now find ourselves in. A population that cannot think and reason for themselves because they have been fed a diet of BS their entire lives. The engineer and architect may have been able to put their ideas down on paper but it was the skilled tradesman that lifted those plans from the paper and with reason, planning, skill, dexterity, experience and an inherent desire to solve problems created the product from the idea.

      1. The engineer and architect may have been able to put their ideas down on paper but it was the skilled tradesman that lifted those plans from the paper and with reason, planning, skill, dexterity, experience and an inherent desire to solve problems created the product from the idea.

        That was one of the things I emphasized to my students, partly because I am the son of two tradesmen (both of my parents being journeymen in their respective disciplines) and because, during one undergrad summer, I worked with the maintenance crews in an oil refinery. I was among those people who had to build what was shown on the prints.

        One would think that the kiddies appreciated that. Uh, no. They knew everything better, of course.

    4. I work in the electronics field, specializing in RF systems for public safety . Been at it a long time. Started tech at a gov’t sponsored courses through Employment Canada in the 80’s. Achieved Technician and then Technologist through continuing education. Took a few years.

      Techs I’m working with today that are coming out of school cannot troubleshoot circuits, and seem to have difficulty developing and keeping to a troubleshooting methodology.

      Everything is modular, so just chuck the bad one and replace it. No cause investigation, no in-depth troubleshooting.

      I think they would be lost if they had to actually troubleshoot an older irreplaceable piece.

    5. BA…I hear that.

      Tech is great as long as one understands the fundamentals. I too learnd the old way…not as in depth as a aspiring Draftsman would, but enough to make a dwg that a pipefitter or weld Fabricator can read and implement – on paper. Spool sheets and the like. I’ve always enjoyed using good quality pencils and making my own dwgs…It’s fun actually and something I’ve always enjoyed doing. both orthographic and isometrics.

      For my normal work, Welding Inspection/QC-QA, doing dwg markups, BlueBeam Revu became indispensible. So good that I bought a license – allows me to import a hand done dwg and augment it as needed.

      I Still use rulers, squares, circle/oval templates etc for dwgs….along with std mechanical measuring devices in the field. Digital is fine until ya run out of Batteries. Oh, and I learned how to type on an old Underwood. Gr 10. (1968)

  4. I keep encountering people who want to portray themselves as being technically sophisticated, simply because they use the latest bright and shiny electronic toy. They, however, are so stupid that they shouldn’t be let anywhere near a computing device.

    For example, over the past few days, I sent seasonal greetings to a number of people in either French or German. Often, I got a response like “I don’t understand what you just sent me.” Hello? There are all sorts of translation websites available, such as translate.google.com. Those translation sites are your friend. (One person thought it was a downloadable “app” and, when I explained what it was, whined that it might slow down their iPhone. Sheesh!)

    Then again, I remember using the old Babelfish service, back when it was hosted on, as I recall, Altavista.

    1. Hello? There are all sorts of translation websites available

      See, I’m looking at that sentence and thinking “weren’t you just ranting about people relying too much on technical gimcrackery in lieu of fundamental skills?”

      It’s absolutely true that technical professionals aren’t being taught the fundamentals any more, which is a problem. But this place is rapidly turning into Small Dead Luddites.

      1. My point is that with all the technical resources that are available, if one doesn’t immediately understand a foreign phrase, there’s no reason not to use them in order to figure out what was said. Think, people!

    2. It’s SHEAR LAZINESS.
      Everything has to be handed over on a goddamned platter for their consumption.

      Digital communication is like a drug to the young…they want and need instant gratification. Their Cell phone being that instrument of Addicition.

  5. When I learned stats I had to do pages and pages of calculations by hand so that I would understand exactly why and how multivariate analysis works. When I could do a relatively simple problem manually I was allowed to start using a computer program. We had to carefully document how and why we got our dataset. We then had to justify each and every parameter we set for the program in writing on paper before allowing the computer to do the calculations. Unfortunately many of today’s students do a kind of punch and play where they kept fiddling with the program and allowing it to run as many times as possible until they finally get the result they expect. I had a student tell me “I ran the stupid program 26 times before I finally got that p=0.05.” When I asked if he understood why that was problem, he gave me a totally blank look.

    1. and now here I am at the last of my life and not one dam math equation has any value. cool eh.

  6. The implication that leapt out for me was the idea the “one-on-one” teaching or “personalized learning” could be accomplished by bunging each kid an I-pad.

    The more general problem is that educational reform proceeds without monitoring its effectiveness. [Not restricted to education]
    Typically, the program to be replaced is dismissed in a phrase or two & the new program is announced in the glowing terms of its potential success. But a comparison of the one with the other AS IMPLEMENTED is never done.
    People in evaluation research who insist that you can’t evaluate without comparisons get a chilly response.
    The people hiring them would much prefer positive evaluations.

    So educational reform tends to resemble changes in fashion more than objective advances.
    And, as Oscar Wilde once said: “Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly,”

    1. So educational reform tends to resemble changes in fashion more than objective advances.

      A few years back I was chatting with an elementary school assistant principal at a party. She attributed her meteoric rise through the public school hierarchy to gaming the system – she had presented tons of papers at educational conferences, you see; and she got her material by simply looking back ten years to see what the hot pedagogical fad had been then, tarted up an existing paper, put her name on it and presented it. Fads in pedagogy cycled every ten years or so, she said, so she was always “on the cutting edge”.

      When I pointed out that plagiarism aside, this clearly meant that either none of the pedagogies made any difference, or else no one was checking to see if they made any difference, I got the cold shoulder for the rest of the evening.

      1. Unfortunately, such games aren’t just played in the school system. It’s openly encouraged in academe as the more publications one has to one’s credit, the greater one’s chances of getting funding and, best of all, a seat at the golden hog trough, courtesy of tenure.

      2. It’s impossible to exaggerate the cynicism of some people.
        Fortunately, teachers are mainly alone in the classroom with the students they teach; their loyalty is often to their areas of study & knowledge does advance.
        An incident from Alberta by way of illustration: William Aberhart, before he became premier and inflicted Social Credit on the province, was the Principal of Crescent Heights High School in Calgary. He once said to one of his teachers:
        “I hope you aren’t teaching evolution. I don’t approve of that theory”
        The teacher fixed him with a baleful glare & said “I’m teaching Biology”.
        He left her alone after that & I like to think of her as a minor educational heroine.

  7. Equality of results, which I think today means “equity”, is a fallacy. Equality of opportunity is fine, but given that half the sudents are below average intelligence guarantees inequalty of results. Sorry. That is real life.

  8. What would you expect when good intentions trump common sense?
    I have noticed a staggering drop off in the quality and capabilities of Professional Engineers in the last 2 decades.
    And that was well after I had the T Shirt;”6 munz ago I couldna even spill ingineer,now I is one.”
    Now the new ones cannot visualize spacial relationships at all.do not follow through and exhibit aversion to such things as stairs,dirt and personal discomfort in investigating the product they supposedly engineered.
    We are FUBAR as the current tradesmen retire.

    Can Ahh Duh.
    We have the Standards.
    We have the high lofty ideals.
    We have Regulation beyond reason.
    We have no one capable of meeting them.
    Those who impose these regulations,standards and legislation have never built anything,grown a thing nor assisted the operation of those who do the latter, but they have University Credentials and are deemed expert by their peers.

    The Children need no math skills,for the future we have bequeathed them.

    1. I have noticed a staggering drop off in the quality and capabilities of Professional Engineers in the last 2 decades.

      One reason is that engineering professors have been hired directly out of university for the last 40 or so years. Anyone who doesn’t study all the way from undergrad to Ph. D. or who actually worked in industry in a design office, on a shop floor, or out in the field needn’t bother applying for a faculty position. Spending grunt time “out there” is seen as a lack of dedication to research. (No, dummies, it’s learning how to put into practice what you twits spent 4 years putting into my head.)

      Another is that there’s also an increasing reliance on so-called co-op programs in engineering schools in which undergrads spend a year with a company. (Uh, that’s what summer jobs with those same firms used to be for.) The real reason, however, is that that same firm is interested only in cheap labour and all the student really learns is how to be a company lackey.

      I spent one of my undergrad summers with the maintenance crews in an oil refinery. I think I learned more during those 4 months than I would have if I’d had an office job. A co-op position would never have taught me how to cut and thread pipe, how to use a Scott air pack when going into areas where there might be hydrogen sulphide gas, or why wearing a hardhat at all times could save one’s life. (It did for me one day.)

      1. I have seen the results BA, right at one of the largest Oil Sands producers in the North. Absolute ASSININE decisions that had the possibility of one of the oldest Hydrogen Furnaces going “critical”….that would have been tantamount ot a tacical Nuke going off. This was on A Hydrogen Furnace Rebuild – Shutdown a few yrs ago

        Right beside said Furnace was a Hydrogen Compressor plant & within said bldg was a Surge Tank sitting on top of a compressor that held a pair of 24″ Reciprocating Pistons. The Surge tank had two ea 10” 300lb Flanges on the underside that were to mate with recessed locations on top of the compressor.

        The holes on the Left side flange mated up perfectly to the tapped holes side of the compressor. But the holes on the Right side were off by 50%…Ie; the Flange was turned enough so that no amount of fiddling and jiggin the whole assembly would they fit.

        I (QA/QC Inspector), suggested at the time to cut the flange off, re-fit, tack it into place and do what is known as an “In Process Weld”. 8-10 hrs max. NO Hydro test but full NDE on each Weld pass (MT and RT final).
        NOPE, that got shot down.

        What they came up with literally blew my mind..! They took all 24 of the studs (7/8″ X 4.5″ long), and machined the first 2″ of them BEYOND THE THREAD DEPTH so as to clear the thickness of the Flange and allow enough movement for the flanges to fit and the studs to go into their tapped holes. A jury rigged cowboy install if I ever saw one. (2 Days to get them machined no less). I told them they were Insane and that they had destroyed the mechanical integrity (Tensile Strength), of the studs – and HELLO, we are dealing with pure H2 here..??? it didnt seem to faze them one bit.

        Once installed, I was then asked/told to sign off on the Torque Sheet (a Legal document attesting to said Torgue procedure being done correctly – properly) – I Laughed and told that engineer He was a fkn Lunatic and to go pound Sand. He didnt like that one bit, but I was damned if I would….so He ended up signing it himself. No way was I going to sign off on that utter stupidity.

        Fortunately nothing did go wrong…but its interesting to note that this particular furnace was 1 of 6 on the planet, built back in the early ’70’s – 3 of which, in various global locations cratered for various reasons – 2 were dismantled and one remains in service. They rebuild this entire unit every 5 yrs. At a cost of ~ 1.5-2 Billion. It’s a money maker ya see….BIG TIME, Hydrogen being used in pretty much all their processes.

        So yea, first hand knowledge of so called “Mechanical” Engineers.

  9. “…the way to build reading comprehension is to adopt a curriculum that has kids spending at least a couple of weeks on a particular topic, to build knowledge and the vocabulary that goes with it. That’s especially true for children from less educated families, like Kevin and his classmates, who are unlikely to pick up much sophisticated knowledge at home—and may lack even basic vocabulary like ‘before.'”

    In other words, Kevin’s name is not Kevin. It is José or Muhammad.

    The problem is that teachers who take their jobs seriously are asked to teach something to children of Third Worlders who either are cursed with IQ’s that would signal mental retardation in white American children, arrive in school unable to understand simple commands in the English language, or both.

    Even top-of-the-line farm equipment won’t help you grow much in the Sahara desert or Antarctica. The problem isn’t the computers. It’s that most of the children of “less educated families” aren’t worth trying to educate.

    Anybody interested in actually helping them will neuter them or spay them and send them back to their cesspit of origin.

    1. The problem is that teachers who take their jobs seriously are asked to teach something to children of Third Worlders who either are cursed with IQ’s that would signal mental retardation in white American children, arrive in school unable to understand simple commands in the English language, or both.

      I know all about that. The year I started my teaching position, we had a number of people who hadn’t been in the country very long. A lot of them had poor English skills, so they likely didn’t understand what I was saying or they couldn’t express themselves properly.

      It was a wonder how many of them passed my courses or, for that matter, finally graduated. I long suspected that they did so by copying each other’s work or other means of cheating. (I even noticed some of them looking at someone else’s exam papers which, conveniently, were located where they could be easily observed.)

      My problem was that I knew that it was going on. I couldn’t do anything about it because I didn’t catch them, or I wasn’t allowed to for certain “political” reasons, or, as I figured out, I was asking for trouble by pursuing the matter, if you know what I mean.

    2. Hardcore comment, but the only one that gets to the fundamental issue.
      It’s not the tech…it’s the kids. God bless them, but nobody can pick their parents.

  10. I remember in the 1990s debating with a friend, I was saying our technologies are making us dumber, he disagreed, he thought it was making us smarter.

    30 years later I am more right than ever

  11. What idiot uses words like “combine”?
    I can combine 2 and 5 in multiple ways:

    2 + 5 5 + 2
    2 – 5 5 – 2
    2 * 5 5 * 2
    2 / 5 5 / 2
    2^5 5^2
    etc.

    Which one does the idiot want?
    Mathematics requires precision.

  12. Back in the day, I taught the use of cheap, bog-standard slide rules to grade school kids in the gifted program in Ontario. Had to start with Grade 9’s because they needed to understand exponents. As a rule, they were amazed with the functionality of the ‘plastic calculator’ but in actual use over a period of about an hour, we never got further than multiplying 4 x 2 or dividing 10 by 5. I still use a slide rule, but it is getting harder to see the scales!

  13. Pen and paper works for me for all kinds of things.
    I’m no Luddite I just think fundamentals are important.
    A kid who can draw or write or do math or all three with their hands is eventually going to lead and or control these other shiny stuff, push button kids IMHO.

    1. But it’ll be the “shiny stuff, push button” kids who’ll get the jobs because they’re seen as being “current”. The ones who can do things or figure out how to to them with their hands are seen as unskilled.

      I found that out in a number of interviews many years ago.

  14. I remember years ago reading a short science fiction story about a man who amazed people in the future because he could do basic mathematics on a piece of paper with just a pencil and that he was doing it all in his head. The audience couldn’t figure how he was doing this and he was treated like a national treasure. We are heading quickly to that dumb down level. As a former teacher I also remember a local coming up to me on the street one day and asking me if I knew a way that he could use to determine how much paint he’d need to paint a shed. I tried not to make him feel too foolish as I explained A=LxW .

  15. Thanks to these wondrous toys, students can’t spell, write a coherent sentence or look up a word in a dictionary.

    I suppose that it never dawned on anyone to teach kids these skills before thrusting toys in their hands.

  16. I once got kicked out of a apprenticeshit prep course for . . . . for . . . . . .
    doing 2 digit multiplication in my head faster than the gen z’s could tap the calculator buttons.
    the problem was 25 X 34,000
    had the answer in about 5 or 6 seconds
    heres what I did in my head:
    bump the 25 up by 4, ‘100’
    lop 2 off the 34, get 32, now DROP it by a factor of 4, get ‘8’
    whats 8 times 100?
    now add on the 2 X 25 you lopped off, voila, 850,000 !!!
    all in my head in a matter of seconds.

    it was the *next* day that dun me in when I offered to explain the trick.
    got accused of “showing off” and then booted out of the course.
    it was soon after that I pulled TWO aces ‘from out of my sleeve’ and applied for and got my disability pension.
    with a pristine clear conscience.

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