Uncritical Thinking
One of the downsides of being unemployed is that any time it looks like someone is interested in hiring you they want you to take tests to check if you're really the business genius you portray in your resume, or if you are, in fact, an intellectual midget with excellent bullshitting skills.
I've taken plenty of tests over the years and I'm fully aware that I'm smart. But everyone has their own preferred tests, and it's not like they give a shit what I scored years ago on the GMAT, or anything else. You're only as smart as the last test you took. The toughest tests are the critical thinking ones, where you have to look at data or information and draw conclusions. These tests involve the application of logic, the ability to manipulate data, numerical reasoning and thinking under time pressure.
There's a reason businesses want to know if you can think and reason logically. It's not like anyone presents the "real" problems of business in a nice clean question form. In reality you have a jumble of information, opinions and data. You have to make decisions, but if you make them too soon you might miss something important, and if you wait too long you risk missing the boat completely. Plus, no-one tells you afterwards if you got it right; you only find that out five years and a hundred million dollars later. Oops.
Wouldn't it be great if people in government were required to pass the same kind of tests. or at least expected to perform with a level of ability something above what might be expected from a garden snail? In fact I'd settle for having them all tattooed with one message: Correlation Does Not Imply Causality. In other words, just because one thing is often found at a higher level when another thing is at a higher level does not mean that the one thing caused the other.
I happened to be reading a news article about school test scores. (It's amazing the lengths to which it is necessary to go in order to fill the non-working day.) The point was being made that test scores were lower in areas that were "poorer", and some genius was making the point that this relative poverty explained why test scores were lower in those areas. This person even asserted that "the economy has a significant impact on students' learning". Really? Do kids get thicker when GDP falls?
The really objectionable thing, coming as it does from someone allegedly involved in education, was the logical leap that because lower incomes are correlated with lower test scores they must be the cause. Not only does this not necessarily follow, but it might actually be more sensible to postulate the opposite - that lower test scores are the cause of poverty.
There was a separate news item a few weeks ago which was bemoaning the lack of employment opportunities for young people in the benighted city of Detroit. It profiled a couple of teenagers who had left school at around 15, having been involved in various illegal or antisocial acts while at school, and now found themselves without any qualifications in a job market where employers have no need to take on unqualified people with a history of crime. They appeared destined for a life of crime and/or poverty, but it's safe to assume that their future economic situation would be a result of their lack of application and success at school.
So did the poverty of their parents cause their poor results, or did their parents' poor results cause their poverty? It's an important distinction because treating the symptom rather than the cause won't result in recovery. Trying to find ways to funnel more of other people's money into the hands of the urban poor in the blind assumption that this will result in higher test scores for their kids and a consequent improvement in their life prospects is a pointless waste of effort. Their kids will still be undisciplined and thick to exactly the same extent that they were beforehand, and having a 50" plasma TV at home won't change that.
This use of poverty to excuse poor educational achievement is dangerous, self-deluding bullshit that lets hundreds of thousands of low-income parents off the hook for their failure to instill standards of behavior in their feckless offspring. People don't do badly at school because they're poor, they're poor because they did badly at school. Over in China there are millions of little kids who exist on a fraction of what is regarded as a "poverty line" income here, and they leave school well-educated and ready to kick Western ass in the economic marketplace.
There is another possibility, of course. It's sometimes said that if we moved the kids from the bad schools to good schools then everything would be OK, but how do schools become "bad" in the first place? Violence, disruption, truancy, drugs and indiscipline are not baked into the walls of the building. The blame can't be laid with teachers, either, although there are for sure some crap ones out there. Schools are bad because the kids are bad. And kids are bad largely because their parents are shit. If a whole bunch of people are lazy, skip school, make crappy choices and refuse to work hard then it stands to reason that they will underachieve financially and eventually become concentrated in "lower income" areas.
So instead of making excuses for them, how about holding the parents accountable, and pointing out that crap schools are the result of crap kids, and not the other way round?
Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison
I've taken plenty of tests over the years and I'm fully aware that I'm smart. But everyone has their own preferred tests, and it's not like they give a shit what I scored years ago on the GMAT, or anything else. You're only as smart as the last test you took. The toughest tests are the critical thinking ones, where you have to look at data or information and draw conclusions. These tests involve the application of logic, the ability to manipulate data, numerical reasoning and thinking under time pressure.
There's a reason businesses want to know if you can think and reason logically. It's not like anyone presents the "real" problems of business in a nice clean question form. In reality you have a jumble of information, opinions and data. You have to make decisions, but if you make them too soon you might miss something important, and if you wait too long you risk missing the boat completely. Plus, no-one tells you afterwards if you got it right; you only find that out five years and a hundred million dollars later. Oops.
Wouldn't it be great if people in government were required to pass the same kind of tests. or at least expected to perform with a level of ability something above what might be expected from a garden snail? In fact I'd settle for having them all tattooed with one message: Correlation Does Not Imply Causality. In other words, just because one thing is often found at a higher level when another thing is at a higher level does not mean that the one thing caused the other.
I happened to be reading a news article about school test scores. (It's amazing the lengths to which it is necessary to go in order to fill the non-working day.) The point was being made that test scores were lower in areas that were "poorer", and some genius was making the point that this relative poverty explained why test scores were lower in those areas. This person even asserted that "the economy has a significant impact on students' learning". Really? Do kids get thicker when GDP falls?
The really objectionable thing, coming as it does from someone allegedly involved in education, was the logical leap that because lower incomes are correlated with lower test scores they must be the cause. Not only does this not necessarily follow, but it might actually be more sensible to postulate the opposite - that lower test scores are the cause of poverty.
There was a separate news item a few weeks ago which was bemoaning the lack of employment opportunities for young people in the benighted city of Detroit. It profiled a couple of teenagers who had left school at around 15, having been involved in various illegal or antisocial acts while at school, and now found themselves without any qualifications in a job market where employers have no need to take on unqualified people with a history of crime. They appeared destined for a life of crime and/or poverty, but it's safe to assume that their future economic situation would be a result of their lack of application and success at school.
So did the poverty of their parents cause their poor results, or did their parents' poor results cause their poverty? It's an important distinction because treating the symptom rather than the cause won't result in recovery. Trying to find ways to funnel more of other people's money into the hands of the urban poor in the blind assumption that this will result in higher test scores for their kids and a consequent improvement in their life prospects is a pointless waste of effort. Their kids will still be undisciplined and thick to exactly the same extent that they were beforehand, and having a 50" plasma TV at home won't change that.
This use of poverty to excuse poor educational achievement is dangerous, self-deluding bullshit that lets hundreds of thousands of low-income parents off the hook for their failure to instill standards of behavior in their feckless offspring. People don't do badly at school because they're poor, they're poor because they did badly at school. Over in China there are millions of little kids who exist on a fraction of what is regarded as a "poverty line" income here, and they leave school well-educated and ready to kick Western ass in the economic marketplace.
There is another possibility, of course. It's sometimes said that if we moved the kids from the bad schools to good schools then everything would be OK, but how do schools become "bad" in the first place? Violence, disruption, truancy, drugs and indiscipline are not baked into the walls of the building. The blame can't be laid with teachers, either, although there are for sure some crap ones out there. Schools are bad because the kids are bad. And kids are bad largely because their parents are shit. If a whole bunch of people are lazy, skip school, make crappy choices and refuse to work hard then it stands to reason that they will underachieve financially and eventually become concentrated in "lower income" areas.
So instead of making excuses for them, how about holding the parents accountable, and pointing out that crap schools are the result of crap kids, and not the other way round?
Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison
posted by Mr Bison at
10:56 AM
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