Education

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments threads about wages, education, employment, and so forth. Several people are pointing out (correctly) that our society demeans the trades, wrongly, and discourages people who would do well in them from taking them up. A typical comment:

But beyond this, our education system demeans manual labor and respectable professions. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, etc. are all well-paid and respectable professions, but we are churning out people that lump those in with working in fast food.

Parents across the U.S. are rejecting Common Core, as more and more students and parents are opting-out of their ridiculous program en masse. Over half a million school-aged children opted out of Common Core standardized testing last year, and that number is rapidly increasing.

Parents in Canada who refuse to allow their kids to be vaccinated will be forced to attend a mandatory ‘vaccine class’ on ‘immunization facts’, according to new legislation being proposed by Ontario lawmakers.  Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins tabled a bill that would force parents to complete an “educational session” before the parents made their final decision on whether or not to vaccinate their children. If they do not attend the class, they will be forced to have their kids vaccinated.

Everybody’s talking about the new Nathan Heller piece in The New Yorker, profiling the new left-wing student activist generation at Oberlin College.  And boy, is it quite a read. You can read it and guffaw at the crazy Social Justice Warriors, but there’s something deeper going on there (and on many other campuses). Here’s the nut graf:

Hoax bomb threats lead to lockdowns and evacuations in dozens of elementary and high schools across both the US and UK on Monday. In the UK thousands of children in at least 21 schools were evacuated after bomb threats were phoned in to police. One anonymous caller said that the resulting shrapnel would “take children’s heads off.” Classes resumed only after police failed to find any explosives or other dangerous items. Today, nine more UK schools in Devon, North Wales, Northern Ireland, South Lanarkshire and across central Scotland were evacuated following malicious phone threats.