White People Time: Grades, Showing Up On Time Are A Form Of White Supremacy
(h/t Colonialista)
53 Replies to “The “W” Word”
So not going to school, never showing up on time and thus being dirt stupid is a non white thing? I like the white stuff better.
Somewhere, Yasuhiro Nakasone is Smiling.
God, I wish I still had my business so I would be able to employ some of these students. LOL
It is easier to destroy than to build. Relatedly, it is easier to allow young people collectively to become uniformly stupid, lazy, hateful thugs than it is to educate them in order that they may achieve at levels in keeping with their ambitions and natural gifts. Such thinking only exacerbates the race gap that progressives mewl about, the fools.
This is all a form of educational/cultural mainstreaming where everyone must be dragged down to the lowest common denominator, which for much of America is black ghetto cultural sloth. White progressive elites who don’t have to live with such degraded humanity instead encourage it while transferring their guilt to all “other” whites to feel good about themselves. It’s also their motivation for their voting preferences.
Do you know what else is “too white”? Reading assignments. University students are struggling to read entire books
Lizzy Kelly, a history student at Sheffield added: “Students might be more inclined to read what academics want them to if our curricula weren’t overwhelmingly white, male and indicative of a society and structures we fundamentally disagree with because they don’t work for us.”
While I was teaching at a certain post-secondary institution, I shared an office with a former head of a different department. (He retired and came back part-time under contract.)
He told me one day that while he was an administrator, he didn’t want any hassles whatsoever. I guess that meant that if the students complained about something, he would give them whatever they wanted. That explains why all those “safe space” protests on various campuses were so successful.
So much for Harry Truman’s saying: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
While I’m at it, can anyone tell me just what the dickens “feminist physics” is? Does that mean that Newtonian mechanics should be abandoned or abolished entirely because of the white patriarchy? Albert Einstein was well-known for flirting with the ladies, are relativity and space-time to be regarded misogynistic?
Methinks that there are too many people with waaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands…..
The professor says:
“The racial narrative of White tends to be like this: Rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful”.
She is correct in this assessment. At the same time, she has unwittingly described non-whites, i.e. blacks, as not honest, not hard working, not disciplined, and not successful. I don’t know if she actually knows this or if her unwitting assessment is just a lucky guess.
She goes on to say: “I care more about your grades than how you’re doing”.
I’ve got news for the professor: Your grades ARE how you are doing.
I try not to judge people based on race. Admittedly, sometimes I have to try very hard. But, if forced, to pick a superior race, then yes, I will pick white. If that makes me a white supremacist, so be it.
However, there is a caveat: I am an advocate for certain values. The vessel that contains them is unimportant to me. If you embrace the characteristics listed by the professor, regardless of your race, then chances are we are going to get along just fine.
When I was a freshman undergrad, I was required to take an English course. I was required to read certain books that I found both ponderous and boring, such as Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”.
To this day, I loathe both authors.
I would much rather that those books had been by someone such as Jules Verne, who I read a lot of while I was in high school. Those were novels that appealed to my imagination and were both interesting and thrilling. I mean, who could resist “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, “From The Earth to The Moon”, and “Journey to The Centre of The Earth”? Those were visionary and based on the best scientific knowledge of the time.
The fact that I hate Jane Austen’s works doesn’t make me misogynistic or that I detest D. H. Lawrence makes me, well, whatever. Those were books that I simply disliked. On the other hand, those by Verne may have contributed to my eventually studying engineering.
Verne’s books worked for me. Austen and Lawrence didn’t.
We must have gone to different schools together…my sentiment, exactly!
And similar outcomes.
After reading this, I suspect that my parents were closet white supremacists.:)
Bingo.
Leftists back themselves into corners all the time. By stating the “faults” of showing and working, this so-called genius is calling non-white students lazy and stupid in comparison.
Hardly praise.
I find these kinds of stories disheartening yet encouraging at the same time. It is sad that these might be the standards by which future generations will measure achievement and success. On the other hand, I won’t have to look very hard if and when I need a job, with individuals and companies that strive for actual, you know, achievement and success. Is value considered a white supremacist thing now too?
I think American blacks should set up their own universities,colleges etc and hire only black profs and raise money to support their institutions through donations. Then they can have whatever standards and curriculum they want and let’s see how they do.
I worked with aboriginal communities providing educational services to them. During exam time they were supposed to take a closed book psychology exam, but the invigilator ( a white hippy type) thought it best that it be an “open book” exam. This was reported to my institution and challenged. The psychology prof was livid, that the standard had been compromised. However, the head of the educational area of the band threatened to go to the media and complain “racism”, so my department head gave in and granted them their way. That was over 10 years ago and my bet it’s gotten worse. Why bother having standards, when they are compromised just to appease particular groups. Let them set up their own institutions. My experience found that they had difficulty setting up a filing system.
One of the problems is that academic scholars treat the works of authors such as Jules Verne as “children’s” books. They tend to look down on them as being of lesser quality and not worth bothering with.
Jane Austen, on the other hand, is an author that generates graduate theses (“Jane Austen’s Secret Lesbian Life” or some such nonsense). I never grasped why people are so enthralled by her works.
Verne, on the other hand, speculated about the future. His stories were science fiction before the term was even invented. He took the concept of the submarine as it was known then and extrapolated it. He foresaw not just nuclear subs but that crews would live in them for extended periods of time, which they do nowadays in the hunter-killers and the boomers.
“From The Earth to The Moon” and, later, “Return From The Moon” were remarkably prescient and that point was frequently mentioned during the flight of Apollo 11. If I’m not mistaken, the idea of using cannons to launch payloads into space may have inspired Project HARP, which the late Dr. Gerald Bull worked on.
I could say more about it, but I think you get the picture.
Considering how much what was predicted in such books is commonplace today, it’s appalling that authors like Verne are treated with such disdain by academics.
I have said it before, but the general public has GOT to understand that, Common Core is a transparent attempt to “level the playing field” by forcing teachers to grade on “intent” not “competence”. It is clearly aimed at “the black community” and at the “ESL community” (read: illegal alien community) who continue to underperform in (the white man’s) school. My elementary school teacher wife, who teaches in an inner city (black) school works her butt off trying to advance these kids knowledge and success. And along comes Common Core, and she has to throw out all those good efforts … and SHE has to reLEARN how to disable these kids success via a convoluted testing and grading methodology. Simple facts and truths (think 2+2=4) are no longer important. Now she has to give partial credit for every kid warming a seat. Mediocrity and failure are now given status so as NOT to embarrass the slackers. Not only is this NOT serving the children’s greatest needs and interests, it is dooming them to lifelong failure. It is such a condescending, colonial, patriarchal, attitude by the leftist educators … thinking so little of these kids as to enable their failure. So, sorry to say it, but “white privilege” in education is rapidly on its way out. The system has already been redesigned to accommodate failure. My advice ? If you LOVE your kids … pay for private school … or better yet … homeschool your kids. Yeah, I am speaking against my own wife’s bread and butter. But we are rapidly deconstructing our society … in which I refuse to participate.
I used to think that the stupid people went to Klu Klux Klan meetings.
One-third of the suicides in indigenous communities are committed by people who are two-spirited/LBGT, says Albert McLeod, co-director of Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc.
Isn’t that a problem solving itself?
Better to know how to grow a garden, pick up litter, raise funds for leftist causes and get used to being serfs for your global overlords than to learn how to think and take care of yourself. :/
Indeed Jules Verne was an important writer. Isaac Asimov used to tell the charming story of how he had discovered science fiction as a boy and his father had encouraged him. His dad kept telling him to check out an author called Zhoolvairn, but he could never find any of his books. In the meantime he was reading everything he could find by Jools Voyn…
“Verne’s books worked for me. Austen and Lawrence didn’t.”
But you got on with the job of reading them just the same because that’s what your education programme required.
“One-third of the suicides in indigenous communities are committed by people who are two-spirited/LBGT, says Albert McLeod, co-director of Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc.”
Not surprising.
“Progressives” might think “white patriarchy” is “homophobic” but it has nothing on the attitudes of traditional native cultures towards homosexuality.
With a little effort, perhaps we could learn something about Heather Hackman’s family doctor, dentist, accountant, lawyer, real estate agent, banker, insurance agent, auto mechanic, and other assorted professionals and tradespeople she hires. We could then learn which traits they share. Betcha that none of them, not one, exhibits the traits that make Heather Hackman scream. And, in that case, she’d be a lying piece of crap.
I had to read them because I was required to. When I was done, I set them aside and never looked at them again. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten just about everything about them.
I read Verne’s works because they gave me pleasure and I still remember them with great fondness.
Which authors were more useful and effective to me?
I started as a post-secondary educator in the late 1980s. A few years later, we changed everything to adopt the “student as customer” doctrine. That meant that we offered an outcomes-based education and an emphasis on retention and, ultimately, passing.
Never mind that a certain student would have been better off dropping the course or even withdrawing and re-enrolling in a program of study that was more to their satisfaction. Nope. Once they started, I had to make sure they finished and the onus was on *me* to “get them through”.
As for grading on intent, I sort of did that. I didn’t just grade whether my students got the correct answer. I looked for how they got it. Often, I gave them low marks–or even zero–if they used woolly, or even incorrect, logic but still got the right number in the end. Close counts only in horseshoes and nuclear warfare.
I started by seeing if they understood the problem and laid it out properly. Did they use the right expressions and values for their variables? Did they proceed in a clear and logical manner? Was everything copied or transcribed correctly?
If I saw where they made their error, but everything else leading up to that point was correct, I gave them full credit for what they did. The rest got zero.
At the same time, though, I pointed out to the students where their mistakes were and they often appreciated that.
“I had to read them because I was required to.”
Well, that was really my point: since the curriculum required reading them, you had the discipline to hunker down and get on with it. Sometimes getting a well-rounded education means you have to study stuff you’d prefer not to.
As an aside, I’m fond of both Jane Austen and Jules Verne.
D.H. Lawrence not so much.
“Jane Austen, on the other hand, is an author that generates graduate theses (‘Jane Austen’s Secret Lesbian Life’ or some such nonsense).”
An author cannot be held responsible for the eccentricities of his or her fan base.
Jules Verne and other science fiction writers have certainly spawned more than their fair share of acolytes with decidedly unhinged notions.
The “Progs” conveniently ignore the overt racism and ‘redneck’ bigotry in many of the minority cultures they love to champion.
When we did English Lit back in the dark ages when everything was on paper, there were always CliffsNotes available for the ‘chick books’ on the required reading list. Those books were also a good opportunity for ‘study dates’ since most girls loved to ‘explain’ Jane Austen, and it seemed to make them a lot ‘friendlier’.
Our required reading was balanced with an equal number of personal choice books and most of us tech-geeks read Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, Sturgeon, Verne, etc. and Analog magazine.
please follow this advise and show up very late for your job interview. it saves all of us who work a lot of time and hassle.
White supremacists? Well, whites build, blacks destroy.
Who needs a surgeon that actually went to class and passed a “whitey” style exam. Who needs one that shows up at the operating room clean, sober and on time. Just who needs that rascist shite?
Even Hollywood has a snooty attitude when it comes to authors. Just about every movie based on a Jane Austen book is beautifully filmed with, usually, top actors. (Yes, I admit I’ve watched some of them. Unfortunately, none of them convinced me to like Austen.)
Jules Verne’s books, sadly, have largely been mistreated in film and have usually ended up looking like second-rate children’s movies. Maybe the best one I’ve seen was Walt Disney’s version of “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, which actually convinced me to read the book and I’ll always picture Captain Nemo as looking like James Mason. Unfortunately, other adaptations didn’t fare as well, though I did like Ray Harryhausen’s work in the 1961 version of “Mysterious Island” (Harryhausen was a genius at whatever he did!).
Aha! Another reader of “Analog”!
I started reading that magazine late in high school and subscribed to it for several years until Conde Nast decided it didn’t want to publish it any more. After that, the quality suffered and I gave up on it.
I glanced at several SF magazines during those times and “Analog” was one of the best. There was another one that was similar in quality (“Galaxy”, I think it was), but the fact that “Analog” published actual articles about science persuaded me to continue reading that one.
Your betters, those older and wiser than you, dictated that you should read a book by Jane Austen. You did the correct thing and read it. So far so good. That you made nothing of it is your deficiency, not a lack either in Austen or in your betters. Stop whining.
Yawn, get feel free to get such wisdom fisked by one and only International Lord of Hate: http://monsterhunternation.com/2011/01/12/correia-on-the-classics/ here is a small sample: “Worst book for me was the Scarlet Letter. I almost became illiterate after being forced to read that piece of crap. Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. More suffering. Oooh, look, suffering. Tedium. Bored. Suffer. Oh, now let’s make her horrible child a bad analogy. Didn’t see that coming. Oh, please is it almost over? I can barely read through the tears of boredom. Please let it be over soon. Suffer. Whine. Suffer. Everybody dies. The End.” Enjoy the rest.
My “betters” happened to be whoever selected the books for that particular course. Reading them was a necessary evil that I had to withstand in order to obtain credit in that course and, eventually, my degree.
There was no “correct” or “incorrect” about it. It was either “do” or “fail”. Simple as that.
My loathing of Jane Austen is not a deficiency. It is my taste, my choice, my inclination. Many people hate Shakespeare. I did at first, when I was in high school, but I quite enjoy watching a good production or video adaptation of it. (I credit my listening to classical music and opera for that. I began doing so because I sang with a university choir during my senior undergraduate year.) That certainly shows that good writing and good ideas appeal to me.
So, do I feel that my education is lacking? Hardly. I find Jane Austen and her ilk to be intellectually stultifying and their works have nothing to say to me. They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry on a Saturday night.
On the other hand, give me an equation or algorithm to work on and I’m in hog heaven.
Betters…. *really*!
Yup. I think he had much of it right. I had to read my share of eye-glazing books, particularly in high school.
But, it wasn’t a total loss. We had to read “Treasure Island” in Grade 7 and I believe that inspired me to read “Robinson Crusoe” and “Mysterious Island”, all 3 classics in their own right.
In Grade 8, we read stories out of Greek mythology and that was fun. We also read a number of other shorter works, among which was Arthur C. Clarke’s “Encounter at Dawn”. That led me to explore other of his works and I read just about every one of his books that I could get my hands on at the time.
This was around the time that “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released and not only did I read the novel, I read a translation of both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. (Regrettably, I never got around to reading “The Aeneid”, though one of my favourite operas is Hector Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”.)
We read “Animal Farm” in Grade 10 and that led me to read “1984” on my own.
But, then, some people figure I have no taste in literature because I don’t like Jane Austen or D. H. Lawrence.
I agree it wasn’t all bad, but I would argue Larry is correct in stating that people don’t read these days because the school turned them off books. There were so many books about “losers wallowing in self pity” that people just could not stomach an idea of reading for fun after that. I always loved reading but I wanted cool books (growing up behind the Iron Curtain options were often limited) Verne, Dumas, Karl May and later when possible getting pulp by authors like Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth (I think I have read The Dogs of War maybe five times), Ken Follett etc. I enjoyed them and often devoured several while trying to get through the assigned crap like Great Gatsby (I just vomited in my mouth a little). And after reading all the pulp I have reached for Orwell or Kafka but that was because I wanted to and not because I was required. And I always come back to pulp, I much rather read Larry Correia, Taylor Anderson (reading volume 10 of destroyermen series now), or the brilliant dire Earth Trilogy by Jason M. Hough than 95% of the classics that literati believe a learned person should read. I guarantee you that if kids today were given those books in school (as an option) many would love them and would get addicted to reading.
Ah, another Alistair MacLean fan, though my enthusiasm for him has long faded.
I liked his books until “Bear Island”, which I thought was hopeless rubbish. I never read anything he wrote after that as he kept repeating himself and using the same tired cliche-filled plots in his stories just before that. I mean, no matter how many ex-Nazis his fictional characters killed off, there were always more waiting in subsequent novels.
I eventually tired of science fiction myself as eventually, most stories of that genre that I read were bordering on fantasy and mysticism. By then, I already had a master’s degree and I turned my attention from science *fiction* to science *fact*. The real universe turned out to be far more fascinating for me than the fictional one.
One problem with introducing students to works of literature is how those books are taught. I think it would help enormously if, instead of just teaching the actual writing itself, the context could be explained. Why, for example, was “Robinson Crusoe” such a fascinating tale? It’s been suggested that it was inspired by an actual case of a shipwrecked sailor, so a few words about that, as well as why he happened to be in the area when he was marooned, would make it much more interesting.
It would, however, require some extra knowledge on the part of whoever’s teaching the book, as well as some imagination.
Currently, the CBC Radio One program “Ideas” is running a documentary series about Eric Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell. Knowing something about his life adds some depth to what he wrote in “Animal Farm” and “1984”, as well as why.
Doing something like that can only add to a student’s education as one learns that there is more to a book or a story than simply the words that were written.
speaking of narratives, back in pre-winter days I showed up for an academic’s spin on how whitey exploited black recording artists by cheating on the royalty cheques.
the thesis was accepted without challenge until moi pointed out that barry gordy of motown fame was notorious for EXPLOITING his corral of BLACK artists.
the pause in the Q&A was notable; kinda like they were wary of me again pointing out contradiction, so they shied away from their sycophantry. is that a word?
“Even Hollywood has a snooty attitude when it comes to authors. Just about every movie based on a Jane Austen book is beautifully filmed with, usually, top actors.”
I don’t think it’s a snooty attitude and it has very little to do with Hollywood at all. The contemporary films based on Austen books are all British productions. They are generally of very high quality (the British are truly in their element when it comes to period pieces), filmed at convincing locations in the English countryside rather than on cod Georgian-era Hollywood backlot sets – and with quintessentially British RADA actors.
“Jules Verne’s books, sadly, have largely been mistreated in film and have usually ended up looking like second-rate children’s movies. Maybe the best one I’ve seen was Walt Disney’s version of ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’…”
Unfortunately, it would appear interest in Verne’s works peaked at a time when the “Hollywood treatment” was in full vigour. I do agree about the Disney film though: a surprisingly thoughtful and well-composed rendition, given that it was produced in 1954 at the height of all that Hollywood costume-epic cheesiness. These days, mention the word “Nemo” and almost everyone will immediately conjure up an entirely different Disney film featuring a computer-animated fish.
The reality is that Jane Austen is just more perennially popular than Jules Verne. That’s probably in no small part because Verne’s constituency is almost entirely male and is also much diminished. Austen continues to attract not only a vast following among women but a good-sized fan base of men as well.
I’m going to quibble a bit.
The 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility” was directed by Ang Lee, who’s from Taiwan, and produced by Columbia (based in the U. S. but owned by Sony, at least the last time I checked). Yes, it was filmed in England. It’s rather hard to duplicate English weather in a Hollywood back lot. Its cast was British, partly because of the accents.
Yes, the movie was well-filmed because Lee is a good director (I liked his “Eat Drink Man Woman”). Most of the performances were good, considering that the cast included Emma Thomson and Kate Winslet, as well as the late Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant (who, in most of the movies I’ve seen him in, seems to be playing the same character over and over again).
But the plot was *boring*! I mean, it seemed that the main female characters did nothing but sit around and worry about why the “right” man hasn’t come along (by “right”, it usually was concerned about–wait for it–money). That’s the whole story right there.
Academic scholars claim that Jane Austen was an observer of social mores. Maybe she was, but one could easily get that from all sorts of historical accounts. I often wonder whether she wasn’t like many hack writers are today. (They establish their reputation with one or two good books and then make a career, and their money, by writing the same thing over and over again. It works, the books sell, but it’s artistically lazy.) Maybe she wasn’t, but it seems to me that the plots that I’ve seen as adapted movies or TV shows could be shuffled around and characters swapped between stories, and one couldn’t tell the difference.
A lot of Jane Austen’s popularity is–ahem–marketing. Make a movie based on one of her books and it’ll be almost guaranteed to make money. People like costume dramas, such as “Downton Abbey” (which I thought was a poor imitation of the original “Upstairs Downstairs”). Throw in some well-known, and competent, actors, set them in some exotic locales, such as a manor house or castle, and the flick makes itself. What could be simpler?
Monty Python lampooned that literary genre in one of its sketches. It had a version of “Wuthering Heights” with the dialog in semaphore.
“Which authors were more useful and effective to me?”
I would suggest Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence. You were made to fight your way through them, and do the work. That requires adult qualities of commitment and self-discipline. If any complaints about how boring they were fell upon indifferent, unfeeling ears, you learned a bit about the unfairness of life. Being exposed to canon is all about forming a common starting point for how we shape the culture we inherit when we’re young. Throwing canon on the trash heap leads to the sort of disgraceful farce the schools have become today.
Anybody can do an adequate job if it’s something they’re enthusiastic about, that doesn’t truly require any effort at all.
What the views of this imbecilic racist tell me is that it’s time to totally scrap the public education system. Where I live, the portion of my property taxes that goes to fund “education” has increased every year yet, even in the last 10 years, I’ve seem a scary diminution of the ability of newly graduated nurses (and student physicians) to perform even simple math. Part of the mini-mental status exam requires one to serially subtract 7 starting at 100 and the new version of the printed exam has the required answers printed on the sheet which indicates that the people administering the exam are unable to perform such a simple task. I’ve seen young nurses search frantically for a calculator when they were required to divide a number by 10. I can only hope that the “teacher” who wants to eliminate “white privilege” ends up in hospital being taken care of by individuals who were “successful” products of her pedagogic methodology.
When I was in school, I generally read a book every day as I read very fast and my primary problem at this time was getting enough reading material to feed my reading habit. Science fiction was the only genre that I liked from an early age and I read every Tom Swift book I could get my hands on from the age of 8 onwards. I had read all of Jules Verne by the time I was 12 and then started in on Isaac Asimov (who was a much better popular science writer than SF writer), but it was Robert Heinlein whose works I really liked. In 1966 I discovered Analog and had a subscription for decades. Unfortunately, I had to give this up in 2010 as the new editor of Analog was an adherent of CAGW and also a closet statist. JW Campbell was a far better editor in the 1960’s and the science fact column of Analog was something I eagerly awaited every month. Larry Niven is another one of my long term favorite authors and my taste tends to be towards “hard” SF rather than fantasy.
Being able to read fast meant I could quickly get through the excruciatingly boring and meaningless crap that we were asked to read for our English classes. I never could figure out why anyone would waste the time to write about the trivialities of peoples interactions with one another when there was a whole universe to explore. For the most part I’d get away with writing an essay on some scientific aspect of the boring book we were asked to read. Poetry is something that still mystifies me. Attempting to read a book by Jane Austin is a sure cure for insomnia.
What I’ve noticed about young people today is that they would rather watch a video than read a book. This, IMHO, is a retrogressive step as information transfer rates are far faster when one reads than watching an inane youtube video and I’m mystified by the triteness of the majority of the material on youtube. OTOH, I’ve never liked lectures either and would much rather cover the same material by reading it rather than going to low bandwidth lectures in school.
The only way that the dumbing down of schooling makes sense is if the purpose is not to educate but to create a mass of serfs who are deliberately prevented from developing critical thinking skills and are unable to fend for themselves and thus require a nanny state to take care of them. They will take their place as members of the FSA and obediently vote for whatever politician promises them the most free stuff.
Loki’s comments pretty much echo my youthful memories.
I’ve always been somewhat of a contrarian – found a way around the education system by teaching myself speed reading starting around age 12 – and then challenging teachers with my personal ideas.
Only issue I ever had was math – until I figured out it was deliberately over complicated by the system.
I read those wretched books because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have passed the course and, ultimately, I wouldn’t get my degree. In other words, it was little more than taking care of business for me.
As for commitment and self-discipline, I’ve written and defended a Ph. D. thesis. Doing that requires both characteristics.
My “throwing canon on the trash heap” (where, frankly, those books belonged) hardly made me an uneducated barbarian. I read quite a number of the classics, as I outlined in an earlier entry.
Maybe the “disgraceful farce the schools have become today” are a result of doing a poor job of teaching those books and related works. For example, I studied “Julius Caesar” in Grade 10 and “Macbeth” in Grade 11. I wasn’t impressed about how the former was presented, but I liked the play because I enjoyed reading about Roman history. “Macbeth” was ruined for me at the time because the English teacher at the time was a radical commie Marxist of the sort that Bernie Sanders would love and he had to add his own twist to things. Fortunately, I recovered from that and “Macbeth” is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays.
I started having my misgivings about the public educational system when I was in grad studies around 35 years ago. By then, calculators were permitted and many of my students couldn’t do simple arithmetic without one.
How bad it was became obvious when I was a teaching assistant for a freshman course and I had a student who couldn’t do basic trigonometry. How he managed to graduate high school was a mystery to me.
The decline was clearly apparent a few years later when I began my post-secondary teaching position. Simple algebra was beyond most of them and I often ended up taking up a significant portion of my lecture time explaining the basic concepts that they should have mastered by the time they started my course.
As for “Analog”, I started reading it when Ben Bova was editor and quit part-way through Stanley Schmidt’s tenure, soon after Conde Nast sold it to a different publisher. My favourite SF author was Clarke and I remember spending my last free summer reading just about every one of his books in the local public library.
One of the problems with teaching the classics is that people get stuck on the language. Some of it is dated or the original context has changed considerably. (For example, the word “punk” originally meant prostitute.) The beauty of the words often, sadly, goes missing. Translating Shakespeare into colloquial English doesn’t help as the meaning of what he wrote is frequently lost.
My recollections are similar to Loki’s.
The comment I never could figure out why anyone would waste the time to write about the trivialities of peoples interactions with one another when there was a whole universe to explore. seemed especially true. That’s what made science fiction so absorbing.
This quote explained it best.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Stories about people were usually like vapid sitcoms, but sci-fi made one think; Heinlein in particular was good for that. I remember reading this quote when I was about 12 and it’s stuck with me for life.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” – Robert Heinlein, writing specialist , Time Enough for Love
So not going to school, never showing up on time and thus being dirt stupid is a non white thing? I like the white stuff better.
Somewhere, Yasuhiro Nakasone is Smiling.
God, I wish I still had my business so I would be able to employ some of these students. LOL
It is easier to destroy than to build. Relatedly, it is easier to allow young people collectively to become uniformly stupid, lazy, hateful thugs than it is to educate them in order that they may achieve at levels in keeping with their ambitions and natural gifts. Such thinking only exacerbates the race gap that progressives mewl about, the fools.
This is all a form of educational/cultural mainstreaming where everyone must be dragged down to the lowest common denominator, which for much of America is black ghetto cultural sloth. White progressive elites who don’t have to live with such degraded humanity instead encourage it while transferring their guilt to all “other” whites to feel good about themselves. It’s also their motivation for their voting preferences.
Do you know what else is “too white”? Reading assignments.
University students are struggling to read entire books
Lizzy Kelly, a history student at Sheffield added: “Students might be more inclined to read what academics want them to if our curricula weren’t overwhelmingly white, male and indicative of a society and structures we fundamentally disagree with because they don’t work for us.”
While I was teaching at a certain post-secondary institution, I shared an office with a former head of a different department. (He retired and came back part-time under contract.)
He told me one day that while he was an administrator, he didn’t want any hassles whatsoever. I guess that meant that if the students complained about something, he would give them whatever they wanted. That explains why all those “safe space” protests on various campuses were so successful.
So much for Harry Truman’s saying: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”
While I’m at it, can anyone tell me just what the dickens “feminist physics” is? Does that mean that Newtonian mechanics should be abandoned or abolished entirely because of the white patriarchy? Albert Einstein was well-known for flirting with the ladies, are relativity and space-time to be regarded misogynistic?
Methinks that there are too many people with waaaaaaaaay too much time on their hands…..
The professor says:
“The racial narrative of White tends to be like this: Rugged individual, honest, hard-working, disciplined, rigorous, successful”.
She is correct in this assessment. At the same time, she has unwittingly described non-whites, i.e. blacks, as not honest, not hard working, not disciplined, and not successful. I don’t know if she actually knows this or if her unwitting assessment is just a lucky guess.
She goes on to say: “I care more about your grades than how you’re doing”.
I’ve got news for the professor: Your grades ARE how you are doing.
I try not to judge people based on race. Admittedly, sometimes I have to try very hard. But, if forced, to pick a superior race, then yes, I will pick white. If that makes me a white supremacist, so be it.
However, there is a caveat: I am an advocate for certain values. The vessel that contains them is unimportant to me. If you embrace the characteristics listed by the professor, regardless of your race, then chances are we are going to get along just fine.
When I was a freshman undergrad, I was required to take an English course. I was required to read certain books that I found both ponderous and boring, such as Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” and D. H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”.
To this day, I loathe both authors.
I would much rather that those books had been by someone such as Jules Verne, who I read a lot of while I was in high school. Those were novels that appealed to my imagination and were both interesting and thrilling. I mean, who could resist “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, “From The Earth to The Moon”, and “Journey to The Centre of The Earth”? Those were visionary and based on the best scientific knowledge of the time.
The fact that I hate Jane Austen’s works doesn’t make me misogynistic or that I detest D. H. Lawrence makes me, well, whatever. Those were books that I simply disliked. On the other hand, those by Verne may have contributed to my eventually studying engineering.
Verne’s books worked for me. Austen and Lawrence didn’t.
We must have gone to different schools together…my sentiment, exactly!
And similar outcomes.
After reading this, I suspect that my parents were closet white supremacists.:)
Bingo.
Leftists back themselves into corners all the time. By stating the “faults” of showing and working, this so-called genius is calling non-white students lazy and stupid in comparison.
Hardly praise.
I find these kinds of stories disheartening yet encouraging at the same time. It is sad that these might be the standards by which future generations will measure achievement and success. On the other hand, I won’t have to look very hard if and when I need a job, with individuals and companies that strive for actual, you know, achievement and success. Is value considered a white supremacist thing now too?
I think American blacks should set up their own universities,colleges etc and hire only black profs and raise money to support their institutions through donations. Then they can have whatever standards and curriculum they want and let’s see how they do.
I worked with aboriginal communities providing educational services to them. During exam time they were supposed to take a closed book psychology exam, but the invigilator ( a white hippy type) thought it best that it be an “open book” exam. This was reported to my institution and challenged. The psychology prof was livid, that the standard had been compromised. However, the head of the educational area of the band threatened to go to the media and complain “racism”, so my department head gave in and granted them their way. That was over 10 years ago and my bet it’s gotten worse. Why bother having standards, when they are compromised just to appease particular groups. Let them set up their own institutions. My experience found that they had difficulty setting up a filing system.
One of the problems is that academic scholars treat the works of authors such as Jules Verne as “children’s” books. They tend to look down on them as being of lesser quality and not worth bothering with.
Jane Austen, on the other hand, is an author that generates graduate theses (“Jane Austen’s Secret Lesbian Life” or some such nonsense). I never grasped why people are so enthralled by her works.
Verne, on the other hand, speculated about the future. His stories were science fiction before the term was even invented. He took the concept of the submarine as it was known then and extrapolated it. He foresaw not just nuclear subs but that crews would live in them for extended periods of time, which they do nowadays in the hunter-killers and the boomers.
“From The Earth to The Moon” and, later, “Return From The Moon” were remarkably prescient and that point was frequently mentioned during the flight of Apollo 11. If I’m not mistaken, the idea of using cannons to launch payloads into space may have inspired Project HARP, which the late Dr. Gerald Bull worked on.
I could say more about it, but I think you get the picture.
Considering how much what was predicted in such books is commonplace today, it’s appalling that authors like Verne are treated with such disdain by academics.
I have said it before, but the general public has GOT to understand that, Common Core is a transparent attempt to “level the playing field” by forcing teachers to grade on “intent” not “competence”. It is clearly aimed at “the black community” and at the “ESL community” (read: illegal alien community) who continue to underperform in (the white man’s) school. My elementary school teacher wife, who teaches in an inner city (black) school works her butt off trying to advance these kids knowledge and success. And along comes Common Core, and she has to throw out all those good efforts … and SHE has to reLEARN how to disable these kids success via a convoluted testing and grading methodology. Simple facts and truths (think 2+2=4) are no longer important. Now she has to give partial credit for every kid warming a seat. Mediocrity and failure are now given status so as NOT to embarrass the slackers. Not only is this NOT serving the children’s greatest needs and interests, it is dooming them to lifelong failure. It is such a condescending, colonial, patriarchal, attitude by the leftist educators … thinking so little of these kids as to enable their failure. So, sorry to say it, but “white privilege” in education is rapidly on its way out. The system has already been redesigned to accommodate failure. My advice ? If you LOVE your kids … pay for private school … or better yet … homeschool your kids. Yeah, I am speaking against my own wife’s bread and butter. But we are rapidly deconstructing our society … in which I refuse to participate.
I used to think that the stupid people went to Klu Klux Klan meetings.
One-third of the suicides in indigenous communities are committed by people who are two-spirited/LBGT, says Albert McLeod, co-director of Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc.
Isn’t that a problem solving itself?
Better to know how to grow a garden, pick up litter, raise funds for leftist causes and get used to being serfs for your global overlords than to learn how to think and take care of yourself. :/
Indeed Jules Verne was an important writer. Isaac Asimov used to tell the charming story of how he had discovered science fiction as a boy and his father had encouraged him. His dad kept telling him to check out an author called Zhoolvairn, but he could never find any of his books. In the meantime he was reading everything he could find by Jools Voyn…
“Verne’s books worked for me. Austen and Lawrence didn’t.”
But you got on with the job of reading them just the same because that’s what your education programme required.
“One-third of the suicides in indigenous communities are committed by people who are two-spirited/LBGT, says Albert McLeod, co-director of Two-Spirited People of Manitoba Inc.”
Not surprising.
“Progressives” might think “white patriarchy” is “homophobic” but it has nothing on the attitudes of traditional native cultures towards homosexuality.
With a little effort, perhaps we could learn something about Heather Hackman’s family doctor, dentist, accountant, lawyer, real estate agent, banker, insurance agent, auto mechanic, and other assorted professionals and tradespeople she hires. We could then learn which traits they share. Betcha that none of them, not one, exhibits the traits that make Heather Hackman scream. And, in that case, she’d be a lying piece of crap.
I had to read them because I was required to. When I was done, I set them aside and never looked at them again. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten just about everything about them.
I read Verne’s works because they gave me pleasure and I still remember them with great fondness.
Which authors were more useful and effective to me?
I started as a post-secondary educator in the late 1980s. A few years later, we changed everything to adopt the “student as customer” doctrine. That meant that we offered an outcomes-based education and an emphasis on retention and, ultimately, passing.
Never mind that a certain student would have been better off dropping the course or even withdrawing and re-enrolling in a program of study that was more to their satisfaction. Nope. Once they started, I had to make sure they finished and the onus was on *me* to “get them through”.
As for grading on intent, I sort of did that. I didn’t just grade whether my students got the correct answer. I looked for how they got it. Often, I gave them low marks–or even zero–if they used woolly, or even incorrect, logic but still got the right number in the end. Close counts only in horseshoes and nuclear warfare.
I started by seeing if they understood the problem and laid it out properly. Did they use the right expressions and values for their variables? Did they proceed in a clear and logical manner? Was everything copied or transcribed correctly?
If I saw where they made their error, but everything else leading up to that point was correct, I gave them full credit for what they did. The rest got zero.
At the same time, though, I pointed out to the students where their mistakes were and they often appreciated that.
“I had to read them because I was required to.”
Well, that was really my point: since the curriculum required reading them, you had the discipline to hunker down and get on with it. Sometimes getting a well-rounded education means you have to study stuff you’d prefer not to.
As an aside, I’m fond of both Jane Austen and Jules Verne.
D.H. Lawrence not so much.
“Jane Austen, on the other hand, is an author that generates graduate theses (‘Jane Austen’s Secret Lesbian Life’ or some such nonsense).”
An author cannot be held responsible for the eccentricities of his or her fan base.
Jules Verne and other science fiction writers have certainly spawned more than their fair share of acolytes with decidedly unhinged notions.
The “Progs” conveniently ignore the overt racism and ‘redneck’ bigotry in many of the minority cultures they love to champion.
When we did English Lit back in the dark ages when everything was on paper, there were always CliffsNotes available for the ‘chick books’ on the required reading list. Those books were also a good opportunity for ‘study dates’ since most girls loved to ‘explain’ Jane Austen, and it seemed to make them a lot ‘friendlier’.
Our required reading was balanced with an equal number of personal choice books and most of us tech-geeks read Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, Sturgeon, Verne, etc. and Analog magazine.
please follow this advise and show up very late for your job interview. it saves all of us who work a lot of time and hassle.
White supremacists? Well, whites build, blacks destroy.
Who needs a surgeon that actually went to class and passed a “whitey” style exam. Who needs one that shows up at the operating room clean, sober and on time. Just who needs that rascist shite?
Even Hollywood has a snooty attitude when it comes to authors. Just about every movie based on a Jane Austen book is beautifully filmed with, usually, top actors. (Yes, I admit I’ve watched some of them. Unfortunately, none of them convinced me to like Austen.)
Jules Verne’s books, sadly, have largely been mistreated in film and have usually ended up looking like second-rate children’s movies. Maybe the best one I’ve seen was Walt Disney’s version of “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”, which actually convinced me to read the book and I’ll always picture Captain Nemo as looking like James Mason. Unfortunately, other adaptations didn’t fare as well, though I did like Ray Harryhausen’s work in the 1961 version of “Mysterious Island” (Harryhausen was a genius at whatever he did!).
Aha! Another reader of “Analog”!
I started reading that magazine late in high school and subscribed to it for several years until Conde Nast decided it didn’t want to publish it any more. After that, the quality suffered and I gave up on it.
I glanced at several SF magazines during those times and “Analog” was one of the best. There was another one that was similar in quality (“Galaxy”, I think it was), but the fact that “Analog” published actual articles about science persuaded me to continue reading that one.
Your betters, those older and wiser than you, dictated that you should read a book by Jane Austen. You did the correct thing and read it. So far so good. That you made nothing of it is your deficiency, not a lack either in Austen or in your betters. Stop whining.
Yawn, get feel free to get such wisdom fisked by one and only International Lord of Hate: http://monsterhunternation.com/2011/01/12/correia-on-the-classics/ here is a small sample: “Worst book for me was the Scarlet Letter. I almost became illiterate after being forced to read that piece of crap. Suffer. Suffer. Suffer. More suffering. Oooh, look, suffering. Tedium. Bored. Suffer. Oh, now let’s make her horrible child a bad analogy. Didn’t see that coming. Oh, please is it almost over? I can barely read through the tears of boredom. Please let it be over soon. Suffer. Whine. Suffer. Everybody dies. The End.” Enjoy the rest.
My “betters” happened to be whoever selected the books for that particular course. Reading them was a necessary evil that I had to withstand in order to obtain credit in that course and, eventually, my degree.
There was no “correct” or “incorrect” about it. It was either “do” or “fail”. Simple as that.
My loathing of Jane Austen is not a deficiency. It is my taste, my choice, my inclination. Many people hate Shakespeare. I did at first, when I was in high school, but I quite enjoy watching a good production or video adaptation of it. (I credit my listening to classical music and opera for that. I began doing so because I sang with a university choir during my senior undergraduate year.) That certainly shows that good writing and good ideas appeal to me.
So, do I feel that my education is lacking? Hardly. I find Jane Austen and her ilk to be intellectually stultifying and their works have nothing to say to me. They’re about as exciting as watching paint dry on a Saturday night.
On the other hand, give me an equation or algorithm to work on and I’m in hog heaven.
Betters…. *really*!
Yup. I think he had much of it right. I had to read my share of eye-glazing books, particularly in high school.
But, it wasn’t a total loss. We had to read “Treasure Island” in Grade 7 and I believe that inspired me to read “Robinson Crusoe” and “Mysterious Island”, all 3 classics in their own right.
In Grade 8, we read stories out of Greek mythology and that was fun. We also read a number of other shorter works, among which was Arthur C. Clarke’s “Encounter at Dawn”. That led me to explore other of his works and I read just about every one of his books that I could get my hands on at the time.
This was around the time that “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released and not only did I read the novel, I read a translation of both “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. (Regrettably, I never got around to reading “The Aeneid”, though one of my favourite operas is Hector Berlioz’s “Les Troyens”.)
We read “Animal Farm” in Grade 10 and that led me to read “1984” on my own.
But, then, some people figure I have no taste in literature because I don’t like Jane Austen or D. H. Lawrence.
I agree it wasn’t all bad, but I would argue Larry is correct in stating that people don’t read these days because the school turned them off books. There were so many books about “losers wallowing in self pity” that people just could not stomach an idea of reading for fun after that. I always loved reading but I wanted cool books (growing up behind the Iron Curtain options were often limited) Verne, Dumas, Karl May and later when possible getting pulp by authors like Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth (I think I have read The Dogs of War maybe five times), Ken Follett etc. I enjoyed them and often devoured several while trying to get through the assigned crap like Great Gatsby (I just vomited in my mouth a little). And after reading all the pulp I have reached for Orwell or Kafka but that was because I wanted to and not because I was required. And I always come back to pulp, I much rather read Larry Correia, Taylor Anderson (reading volume 10 of destroyermen series now), or the brilliant dire Earth Trilogy by Jason M. Hough than 95% of the classics that literati believe a learned person should read. I guarantee you that if kids today were given those books in school (as an option) many would love them and would get addicted to reading.
Ah, another Alistair MacLean fan, though my enthusiasm for him has long faded.
I liked his books until “Bear Island”, which I thought was hopeless rubbish. I never read anything he wrote after that as he kept repeating himself and using the same tired cliche-filled plots in his stories just before that. I mean, no matter how many ex-Nazis his fictional characters killed off, there were always more waiting in subsequent novels.
I eventually tired of science fiction myself as eventually, most stories of that genre that I read were bordering on fantasy and mysticism. By then, I already had a master’s degree and I turned my attention from science *fiction* to science *fact*. The real universe turned out to be far more fascinating for me than the fictional one.
One problem with introducing students to works of literature is how those books are taught. I think it would help enormously if, instead of just teaching the actual writing itself, the context could be explained. Why, for example, was “Robinson Crusoe” such a fascinating tale? It’s been suggested that it was inspired by an actual case of a shipwrecked sailor, so a few words about that, as well as why he happened to be in the area when he was marooned, would make it much more interesting.
It would, however, require some extra knowledge on the part of whoever’s teaching the book, as well as some imagination.
Currently, the CBC Radio One program “Ideas” is running a documentary series about Eric Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell. Knowing something about his life adds some depth to what he wrote in “Animal Farm” and “1984”, as well as why.
Doing something like that can only add to a student’s education as one learns that there is more to a book or a story than simply the words that were written.
speaking of narratives, back in pre-winter days I showed up for an academic’s spin on how whitey exploited black recording artists by cheating on the royalty cheques.
the thesis was accepted without challenge until moi pointed out that barry gordy of motown fame was notorious for EXPLOITING his corral of BLACK artists.
the pause in the Q&A was notable; kinda like they were wary of me again pointing out contradiction, so they shied away from their sycophantry. is that a word?
“Even Hollywood has a snooty attitude when it comes to authors. Just about every movie based on a Jane Austen book is beautifully filmed with, usually, top actors.”
I don’t think it’s a snooty attitude and it has very little to do with Hollywood at all. The contemporary films based on Austen books are all British productions. They are generally of very high quality (the British are truly in their element when it comes to period pieces), filmed at convincing locations in the English countryside rather than on cod Georgian-era Hollywood backlot sets – and with quintessentially British RADA actors.
“Jules Verne’s books, sadly, have largely been mistreated in film and have usually ended up looking like second-rate children’s movies. Maybe the best one I’ve seen was Walt Disney’s version of ‘20,000 Leagues Under The Sea’…”
Unfortunately, it would appear interest in Verne’s works peaked at a time when the “Hollywood treatment” was in full vigour. I do agree about the Disney film though: a surprisingly thoughtful and well-composed rendition, given that it was produced in 1954 at the height of all that Hollywood costume-epic cheesiness. These days, mention the word “Nemo” and almost everyone will immediately conjure up an entirely different Disney film featuring a computer-animated fish.
The reality is that Jane Austen is just more perennially popular than Jules Verne. That’s probably in no small part because Verne’s constituency is almost entirely male and is also much diminished. Austen continues to attract not only a vast following among women but a good-sized fan base of men as well.
I’m going to quibble a bit.
The 1995 film “Sense and Sensibility” was directed by Ang Lee, who’s from Taiwan, and produced by Columbia (based in the U. S. but owned by Sony, at least the last time I checked). Yes, it was filmed in England. It’s rather hard to duplicate English weather in a Hollywood back lot. Its cast was British, partly because of the accents.
Yes, the movie was well-filmed because Lee is a good director (I liked his “Eat Drink Man Woman”). Most of the performances were good, considering that the cast included Emma Thomson and Kate Winslet, as well as the late Alan Rickman and Hugh Grant (who, in most of the movies I’ve seen him in, seems to be playing the same character over and over again).
But the plot was *boring*! I mean, it seemed that the main female characters did nothing but sit around and worry about why the “right” man hasn’t come along (by “right”, it usually was concerned about–wait for it–money). That’s the whole story right there.
Academic scholars claim that Jane Austen was an observer of social mores. Maybe she was, but one could easily get that from all sorts of historical accounts. I often wonder whether she wasn’t like many hack writers are today. (They establish their reputation with one or two good books and then make a career, and their money, by writing the same thing over and over again. It works, the books sell, but it’s artistically lazy.) Maybe she wasn’t, but it seems to me that the plots that I’ve seen as adapted movies or TV shows could be shuffled around and characters swapped between stories, and one couldn’t tell the difference.
A lot of Jane Austen’s popularity is–ahem–marketing. Make a movie based on one of her books and it’ll be almost guaranteed to make money. People like costume dramas, such as “Downton Abbey” (which I thought was a poor imitation of the original “Upstairs Downstairs”). Throw in some well-known, and competent, actors, set them in some exotic locales, such as a manor house or castle, and the flick makes itself. What could be simpler?
Monty Python lampooned that literary genre in one of its sketches. It had a version of “Wuthering Heights” with the dialog in semaphore.
“Which authors were more useful and effective to me?”
I would suggest Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence. You were made to fight your way through them, and do the work. That requires adult qualities of commitment and self-discipline. If any complaints about how boring they were fell upon indifferent, unfeeling ears, you learned a bit about the unfairness of life. Being exposed to canon is all about forming a common starting point for how we shape the culture we inherit when we’re young. Throwing canon on the trash heap leads to the sort of disgraceful farce the schools have become today.
Anybody can do an adequate job if it’s something they’re enthusiastic about, that doesn’t truly require any effort at all.
What the views of this imbecilic racist tell me is that it’s time to totally scrap the public education system. Where I live, the portion of my property taxes that goes to fund “education” has increased every year yet, even in the last 10 years, I’ve seem a scary diminution of the ability of newly graduated nurses (and student physicians) to perform even simple math. Part of the mini-mental status exam requires one to serially subtract 7 starting at 100 and the new version of the printed exam has the required answers printed on the sheet which indicates that the people administering the exam are unable to perform such a simple task. I’ve seen young nurses search frantically for a calculator when they were required to divide a number by 10. I can only hope that the “teacher” who wants to eliminate “white privilege” ends up in hospital being taken care of by individuals who were “successful” products of her pedagogic methodology.
When I was in school, I generally read a book every day as I read very fast and my primary problem at this time was getting enough reading material to feed my reading habit. Science fiction was the only genre that I liked from an early age and I read every Tom Swift book I could get my hands on from the age of 8 onwards. I had read all of Jules Verne by the time I was 12 and then started in on Isaac Asimov (who was a much better popular science writer than SF writer), but it was Robert Heinlein whose works I really liked. In 1966 I discovered Analog and had a subscription for decades. Unfortunately, I had to give this up in 2010 as the new editor of Analog was an adherent of CAGW and also a closet statist. JW Campbell was a far better editor in the 1960’s and the science fact column of Analog was something I eagerly awaited every month. Larry Niven is another one of my long term favorite authors and my taste tends to be towards “hard” SF rather than fantasy.
Being able to read fast meant I could quickly get through the excruciatingly boring and meaningless crap that we were asked to read for our English classes. I never could figure out why anyone would waste the time to write about the trivialities of peoples interactions with one another when there was a whole universe to explore. For the most part I’d get away with writing an essay on some scientific aspect of the boring book we were asked to read. Poetry is something that still mystifies me. Attempting to read a book by Jane Austin is a sure cure for insomnia.
What I’ve noticed about young people today is that they would rather watch a video than read a book. This, IMHO, is a retrogressive step as information transfer rates are far faster when one reads than watching an inane youtube video and I’m mystified by the triteness of the majority of the material on youtube. OTOH, I’ve never liked lectures either and would much rather cover the same material by reading it rather than going to low bandwidth lectures in school.
The only way that the dumbing down of schooling makes sense is if the purpose is not to educate but to create a mass of serfs who are deliberately prevented from developing critical thinking skills and are unable to fend for themselves and thus require a nanny state to take care of them. They will take their place as members of the FSA and obediently vote for whatever politician promises them the most free stuff.
Loki’s comments pretty much echo my youthful memories.
I’ve always been somewhat of a contrarian – found a way around the education system by teaching myself speed reading starting around age 12 – and then challenging teachers with my personal ideas.
Only issue I ever had was math – until I figured out it was deliberately over complicated by the system.
I read those wretched books because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have passed the course and, ultimately, I wouldn’t get my degree. In other words, it was little more than taking care of business for me.
As for commitment and self-discipline, I’ve written and defended a Ph. D. thesis. Doing that requires both characteristics.
My “throwing canon on the trash heap” (where, frankly, those books belonged) hardly made me an uneducated barbarian. I read quite a number of the classics, as I outlined in an earlier entry.
Maybe the “disgraceful farce the schools have become today” are a result of doing a poor job of teaching those books and related works. For example, I studied “Julius Caesar” in Grade 10 and “Macbeth” in Grade 11. I wasn’t impressed about how the former was presented, but I liked the play because I enjoyed reading about Roman history. “Macbeth” was ruined for me at the time because the English teacher at the time was a radical commie Marxist of the sort that Bernie Sanders would love and he had to add his own twist to things. Fortunately, I recovered from that and “Macbeth” is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays.
I started having my misgivings about the public educational system when I was in grad studies around 35 years ago. By then, calculators were permitted and many of my students couldn’t do simple arithmetic without one.
How bad it was became obvious when I was a teaching assistant for a freshman course and I had a student who couldn’t do basic trigonometry. How he managed to graduate high school was a mystery to me.
The decline was clearly apparent a few years later when I began my post-secondary teaching position. Simple algebra was beyond most of them and I often ended up taking up a significant portion of my lecture time explaining the basic concepts that they should have mastered by the time they started my course.
As for “Analog”, I started reading it when Ben Bova was editor and quit part-way through Stanley Schmidt’s tenure, soon after Conde Nast sold it to a different publisher. My favourite SF author was Clarke and I remember spending my last free summer reading just about every one of his books in the local public library.
One of the problems with teaching the classics is that people get stuck on the language. Some of it is dated or the original context has changed considerably. (For example, the word “punk” originally meant prostitute.) The beauty of the words often, sadly, goes missing. Translating Shakespeare into colloquial English doesn’t help as the meaning of what he wrote is frequently lost.
My recollections are similar to Loki’s.
The comment I never could figure out why anyone would waste the time to write about the trivialities of peoples interactions with one another when there was a whole universe to explore. seemed especially true. That’s what made science fiction so absorbing.
This quote explained it best.
“Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
Stories about people were usually like vapid sitcoms, but sci-fi made one think; Heinlein in particular was good for that. I remember reading this quote when I was about 12 and it’s stuck with me for life.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” – Robert Heinlein, writing specialist , Time Enough for Love