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Limit class sizes to five students

A Modest Proposal: Limit all class sizes to five students

This post is an experiment. The original post was a lengthy quotation from a more serious work.

The quote was:

In 1939, one scholar wrote:

Now the plain people have noticed that education is getting longer and longer. Fifty years ago people learned to read out of a spelling-book at six years old, went to high school at twelve, and taught school (for money) on a third-class certificate at sixteen. After that, two years in a saw-mill and two at a medical school made them doctors, or one year in a saw-mill and one in divinity fitted them for the church. For law they needed no college at all, just three summers on a farm and three winters in an office.

All our great men in North America got this education. Pragmatically, it worked. They began their real life still young. With the money they didn’t spend they bought a wife. By the age of thirty they had got somewhere, or nowhere. It is true that for five years of married life, they carried, instead of a higher degree, bills for groceries, coal, doctors and babies’ medicine. Then they broke out of the woods, into the sunlight, established men—at an age when their successors are still demonstrating, interning, or writing an advanced thesis on social impetus.

Now it is all changed. Children in school at six years old cut up paper dolls and make patterns. They are still in high school till eighteen, learning civics and social statistics—studies for old men. They enter college at about nineteen or twenty, take prerequisites and post-requisites in various faculties for nearly ten years, then become demonstrators, invigilators, researchers, or cling to a graduate scholarship like a man on a raft.

The serious work is at:

http://www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/leacock-toomuchcollege/leacock-toomuchcollege-00-h.html

neomemical

Skyrim was symptomatic of Bethesda’s problems

meme update

 

doomscroller

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stonetoss

People who rely on “common sense” are frequently wrong but seldom in doubt; they also frequently suppress any discussion that might reduce their social prestige.

The people who keep society dysfunctional usually defend their favorable social status.

It is not enough to just trick the smug idiot who believes in conventional foolishness. It is not enough to prove to other people that the smug idiot can be tricked. Tricks are malicious; tricking an idiot can cause neutral parties to side with the idiot.

The difficult part is finding a phenomenon outside the conventional foolishness that is important for building new future worlds. It is also a bit of effort to develop a working product based on the new phenomenon that can be shared in a useful manner. And even if you can do all of that, the smug idiots will claim that you have done nothing useful and that their knowledge is the only knowledge.

meme March of Madness

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Some Random NEON

What did Tierney think?

The Value of Convenience_ A Genealogy of Technical Culture — Thomas F. Tierney