Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Are you sure this is the same reality?
Absolute wow. Andro Hsu is a "scientist." This is shocking to me because his columns display no scientific skepticism of his assumptions.
Families in agriculture-based developing nations value a large family, both for labor and retirement insurance. It seems only natural for financially well-endowed parents to want the best for—or out of—their brood, including paying $25,000 for an Ivy League woman’s eggs.
But poor parents just don't care about their kids. No love involved for anyone. Yeah, okay.
Education as commodity production is now government policy. President Bush’s No Child Left Behind program mandates increased testing in public schools. This amounts to a quality-control regime to ensure that students can at least parrot a minimum number of facts before being spit out into the world, assembly-line fashion. We can’t or won’t spend money on more teachers to cultivate students’ full potentials as human beings— instead, we stamp them out with a cookie cutter.
Teachers do not cultivate students' full potentials as human beings. Students do. Hand-holding with special teachers only puts a damper on our humanity. Telling a kid "here's what you have to do, now deal with it" lets her build her own identity.
For example, a fellow graduate student instructor told me of an attractive young student who approached him in office hours during finals. Pouting and doe-eyed, she pleaded, “I’d do anything for an A.” To which the GSI responded, “Anything? Really? Even ... study?"
Umm... dude, that joke is old. Very old. It wasn't "a fellow graduate student instructor" involved.
But I guess there's no suprise. The study of science is EngineeringLite.
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