Red (or anyone really),

Does this decline (or maladaptation) of the education system extend to the university level as well?

I ask because when I was getting my degree, it amazed me how many people were there that just seemed completely ill-equipped - and I'm not claiming to be any intellectual masterpiece myself. I'm talking about things like inability to write a sentence so as to pass English Comp 101.

Later in and after graduating, I still encountered people, some with MS and even PhD degrees under their belt, that made me wonder just how the hell they were able to complete the program.

It's all but a given in high school; I can recall taking our exit exam in 11th grade, which at the time was at an 8th grade level, and a majority of the class actually couldn't pass it. When they bumped it up to be in-line with expected 11th grade requirements several years after I graduated, an even larger number of them just couldn't do it.

I can imagine that this would be very dependent on the school and on the program when talking post-secondary education, but it was surprising to me to see that many people that just didn't seem right to be there. Is it really that easy to just show up and get your piece of paper, even at the university level?

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All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...

In my experience, depending on your university and major, you can show up to many universities and just get a diploma.

I graduated from a name university, very famous around the world but, in certain majors it was at the level of a community college. There were people in my major, Japanese and Asian Studies, who after four years of Japanese, and in many cases one year abroad in Japan, could not even read a Japanese children's book. Not all of these people graduated in the Japanese major, but all of them graduated.

In my opinion, unless you have a degree from a high ranking university in a field that university is well known for, a college diploma means next to nothing.

Language is actually one that I wouldn't be surprised if someone failed at even after getting a degree in it. Simply put, it's hard to easily teach because 90% of people have an absolutely wrong approach to learning a language that will cripple them at any level beyond 1st year of study levels of babytalk produced after long pensive meditation, and in many languages it exacerbates the problem even more than that (Spanish-English for instance the bad approach I'm referring to isn't as much a problem as say English-Japanese or Russian-Swahili).

Even that small minority (probably more than 10%, which is hyperbolic, but still a tiny bit) who do have the right approach probably have it by accident anyhow and don't realise the importance of what's letting them actually not be complete failures at foreign language.

Or I might be completely off, but I won't diverge into my thoughts on adult language acquisition here as it'd divert the thread.

Without going too far off-track, is the "right way" immersion?

The only other thing I can think of is that way that they teach you the language "grammatically" in university, i.e. by teaching you a bunch of verbs, how to conjugate them, etc in Spanish. I had a classmate in one of my Spanish classes who was married to a spanish-native speaker from Venezuela, and he told me that his wife found our lessons kind of weird - she said that when she was learning the language growing up, they taught you basically a bunch of complete sentences and the like, wherein you picked up the verb structures as part of learning them.

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"You can't hammer tin into iron, no matter how hard you beat it, but that doesn't mean that tin is worthless."
-Jon Snow, A Game of Thrones

"I prefer my history dead. The dead sort is written in ink, the living in blood."
-Rodrik Greyjoy, A Song of Ice and Fire

Immersion helps, as does having a use for a language- someone to talk to, books to read, TV to watch, songs to listen to. Learning a language with a vaccuum of use is a good way to not give a shit and not gain competancy, even if you memorize a lot of words and structures. However, immersion is a less basic than what I'm talking about, as basic a strategy as it is. Immersion is about forcing yourself to learn, and having a use for a language is about giving yourself a reason to learn. The thing I'm going to talk about is making it possible to learn.

The thing people do wrong is that they try to project foreign words as a list of vocabulary items and translate from english to X. When you try to say, for instance, "Today I had a sandwich" and you say... , okay, "Today", 'jucho', [I had], 'ougak', "a sandwich", 'kwebhalo', sandwich is object so change it to kwebhalwo... word order, "jucho kwebhalwo ougak".

When you do that, you're doing it wrong and will probably have trouble ever becoming fluent. Language X isn't English, and you can't project words 1-to-1. For one, that's a great way to be overliteral and calque from english, like "Had" for "Consumed", and it's a way to ignore grammatical structures like case or vowel harmony if you forget they exist in that language.

It also however is a great way to make your brain take virtual years to think of a proper sentence, because it has to think of the english thing it wants to say, think of the translation for each piece, then combine them, check for errors, rearrange if necessary, and then go to your mouth. Imagine your mind like a computer program, and you'll see how inefficient that is.

You have to learn grammar. Not like memorizing endings and things, although that's useful in some languages. You have to learn to think in the language you're using, and not consider things like "gau = warrior as a noun, but 'deadly' as an adjective, unless you want to say deadly warrior in which case you say 'jogau' because nobody would say gau gau", "khora = to hear, but also to percieve mentally" or other things. It's too much mental space, and the exceptions pile up. Your brain needs to just think in Language X, as hard as that sounds. You can't try to apply english grammar to Language X grammar, because they aren't 1:1. Gau is Gau, and you can make an english definition for it but when it comes down to it, when someone says Gau you should know what they mean and not have to think 'Gau means warrior or deadly'. Granted, once you're at a certain comprehension level, that is. For the beginning you can think in english definitions since it's difficult to begin immersing your brain in Language X, but to get beyond beginner's level you have to discard mental crutches like that. Whether you do it by mental pictures, just mental association, or some other way, you can't get stuck on the path of making your mind into a literal dictionary of Y = English Definition.

Why do you say "Takenwere" for "They had been taken" in Latin, for instance? You can just mentally substitute the two, but some things are not one to one maps and become more difficult like "Use imperfect tense for 'Used To', 'Often Did', 'Habitually Do', and 'Was Doing'. " Memorizing stuff like that is a good way to never learn when to use it, you'll have to mentally translate the imperfect from Latin into "Used to do/often did/habitually does/was doing" which is awkward and requires you to then figure out which one.

Basically the problem is that people try to translate rather than speak. Other languages aren't ciphers, and people treat them as such. Especially people who think you can just word-substitute a sentence in english on an online translator to produce a foreign language, but even people who understand language. Knowing grammar isn't enough- memorizing charts is just even more stuff your brain has to come with. You have to think in the foreign grammar if you want fluency. Most of the people who get stuck at the pidgin language level, the 'have to think for 10 minutes of mental lookup charts and consulting mental dictionary level before producing a sentence' level (where skill hardly matters if you can't use it in real time), and the 'says things that are the right words (or just literal calques) but in an improper english-influenced grammar' level I believe are stuck on this because of the way they're filing information in their brain.

This is at least how I understand language learning, and I might be wrong- I have only me and what I've been told and read about other people, but I believe parsimony is on my side after watching all those people in foreign language classes struggle and say things like "yo jugar" for "I play" in spanish and "zu spielen" for "To play" in german. Literal translation, mentally or otherwise, and even attempts to 1:1 define things as just synonyms of english always end badly.

I'm watching this happen in the district I work in. I just had the head of the Industrial Arts department rant at me about this a few days ago. The administration took every single teacher in his department and cut them down to half-time this year, at a time when enrollment in those classes is higher than it's been for several years, and then loaded those classes so high that they're practically asking for an accident in one of the shop classes. (If I were more cynical, I'd suspect that were the case - then they could say "whoops, liability's too high, better just close the shops altogether"; but I think it's just basic incompetence.) Hell, that high school hasn't had a single vocational computer class for five years now. They had programming and electronics courses in the 80's, but they can't find room or money for any such class in the 21st century?!

The terrible thing, as I'm told, is that those vocational classes are still worth a great deal - students who take those classes could, I'm told, go on to vocational schools or even straight to jobs with on-the-job training, jobs which are currently being filled by people moving in from out-of-state because we're no longer producing enough of those people in our own state!

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"There is no "taboo" on using nuclear weapons." -Julhelm
What is Project Zohar?
"On a serious note (well not really) I did sometimes jump in and rate nBSG episodes a '5' before the episode even aired or I saw it." - RogueIce explaining that episode ratings on SDN tv show threads are bunk

Ghetto Edit- Now, the problem is twofold-
one, I've never heard a language teacher in the years of classes I've taken ever even try to explain this key fact besides saying occasionally "don't translate literally", which kids seem to regard more as a 'do this because I say so' than a fundamental fact about language they need to learn and rearrange their entire mental processes around. This is something that basically to me seems to be the scientific method for learning languages, and it's only poked at as if science teachers set kids loose in a lab to gather data and occasionally told them something like "Remember to test your predictions" without explaining the entire thing.

But on the other hand, this may not be useful of a thing to talk about anyhow, as I am unsure if someone can, even knowing what to do, manage to divorce a language from their native tongue if they just don't know how to do it, or especially how you would teach someone to do it if they can't do it fromt he start. I'ven't a clue how, at least. But I'm convinced those with a 'knack' for language have good memories and talent at learning, like most people notice, but also the ability to just instinctively understand how not to horribly mess up what you already know, install a glass ceiling due to space and mental speed limitations, and sound foreign/alien to native speakers by mentally mixing two languages that are fundamentally supposed to be immiscible, and I believe the failure of most people to go learn anything of a language is due to lack of immersion or incentive, but the failure of most people to go beyond pidgin/babytalk/2nd semester levels is due to this.

Don't forget the affective filter, if you're a fan of Stephen Krashen. Most people perform well below their theoretical ability with languages because of various psychological issues which can block them from even beginning to speak. It's not just a matter of "do you know how to say X?" It's also a matter of "are you willing to take the risk that you'll sound like a complete doofus and screw up this sentence where everyone can hear?" The first can be taught, but the second one is something the student has to figure out on their own.

I was probably quite lucky because I was a natural at learning grammar (it was kind of like learning maths, except you had to learn the vocab and there were sometimes exceptions), but then after some personal things shot my self confidence to hell, my language learning suffered and it quite literally took me years to recover.

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"I would say that the above post is off-topic, except that I'm not sure what the topic of this thread is, and I don't think anybody else is sure either."
- Darth Wong
Free Durian - Last updated 27 Dec
"Why does it look like you are in China or something?" - havokeff

Speaking as someone with 20+ years in "secretarial" work AND a bachelor's degree on top of it.... even if you're qualified there's no guarantee you'll get a job. The few interviews I've been to over the past two years were like cattle drives.

Fuck this is depressing. I'm glad I got into the civil service when I did. Right now I'm living with both my father and mother (divorced, they're friends though) because they both lost their jobs in the great financial cluster fuck.

My sister is looking for a job but can't find one and can't really afford to go back to school at the moment, and is trying to find financial assistance to at least take a few courses.

Needless to say this is not what I envisioned when I thought of myself going on 25 years old a few years ago.

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The Zen of Not Fucking Up.

For us, 'x years experience' is just a 'we can refuse to hire you without appearing discrimatory' thing. I've got plenty of jobs that said they wanted xyz more experience than I actually had, and I work in HR where this is a very common thing. Look at the competencies or requirements, not the experience.

Shit, I'm 42 and without my union job and the healthcare (I only make 12.80/hr but with really good health insurance) benefits I get from it, I'd be fucked.

Sure, I'm OSHA certified to operate powered industrial trucks, but the qualifications to get that certification are so paper thin that any idiot on this board could learn the basics and be 'certified' within a month*.

At the end of the day, if my employer were to move to Mexico and I had no alternative insurance coverage to assist me with my artificial heart valve care costs and was stuck in a minimum wage job, what would I have to lose other than my life (which I'd lose anyway) if I started to shoot some plutocrats in the chest at 400 yards from a hilltop overlooking their gated community as they left for 'work'?

*Three months minimum is what I consider necessary on a single piece of equipment to be both safe and economical in learning how to operate it.
Any moron can simply move a forklift from point A to point B, but it takes skill to do so safely and economically in a warehouse full of people.

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"You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."- General Sir Charles Napier

Oderint dum metuant

Meanwhile on the otherside of the pond:



guardian.co.uk (video included in the link)

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'Alright guard, begin the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism...' - Dr. Evil

'Secondly, I don't see why "income inequality" is a bad thing. Poverty is not an injustice. There is no such thing as causes for poverty, only causes for wealth. Poverty is not a wrong, but taking money from those who have it to equalize incomes is basically theft, which is wrong.' - Typical Randroid

'I think it's gone a little bit wrong.' - The Doctor

What about childbearing? You do realize that female fertility rates drop after age 25, and plummet past 35. Are you expecting your daughters to delay birth that long as well? Or are you expecting them to have children while you support them?

A lot of what Red Imperator said in his well-composed piece in this thread has actually been happening for a lot longer than the timeframe we're talking about: I saw it starting to happen in the 80s with schools shedding votech and shop classes and taking on larger student populations than could be rationally handled. I'd say we're talking about at least two lost generations to varying degrees, but it's definitely gotten worse since NCLB and the wholesale budget reductions to school arts, shop, and recreational programmes over the last decade. It's creating a situation which looks to be nightmarish when my own son is approaching high school graduation.

Rather insane way to run a society in my view.

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When ballots have fairly and constitutionally decided, there can be no successful appeal back to bullets.
—Abraham Lincoln

People pray so that God won't crush them like bugs.
—Dr. Gregory House

Oil an emergency?! It's about time, Brigadier, that the leaders of this planet of yours realised that to remain dependent upon a mineral slime simply doesn't make sense.
—The Doctor "Terror Of The Zygons" (1975)

What I've tried to integrate into my own thoughts about parenting largely comes from the wisdom of Amy (Mayabird's) mother and what she told Amy, and Amy was.. Extremely severely discouraged from having children before the age of 30. I think that is quite sensible advice. Probabilistically, I would tend to assume that a daughter still working on her Ph.D. in her early thirties has her childrearing decisions well in hand and competency, and is probably planning to adopt or not have kids or will shortly be making enough money to pay for expensive fertility treatments as required. Thirty is much less of an issue.

And the level of support is also, for instance, variable. One could for example just pay for your child's car insurance and health insurance, but they're getting by fine otherwise without any other help. Or you might buy a house as an investment property and let them live in it at sharply reduced rates from what you'd charge renting to someone else, or things like that short of fully supporting them--though certainly I think it's the hallmark of a responsible adult to, if you have the financial werewithal to do so, save enough money to pay your child's full ride through college including doctoral studies without their having to do more than a few hours of on-campus work a week, and later on in grad school TAing and so on, so that they graduate with no debt.

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The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.

In 1966 the Soviets find something on the dark side of the Moon. In 2104 they come back. -- Red Banner / White Star, a nBSG continuation story. Updated to Chapter 4.0 -- 14 January 2013.

Yes, it IS an issue. Children to be adopted must come from somewhere. A woman waiting until after 30 to give birth is seriously risking having no biological children at all. Fertility treatments have an average success of 15-20%. That's not per attempt, that's 15-20% chance of a baby at all.

Sure, she can opt to not reproduce. That's fine. But if a woman wants kids biologically the best time is between, say 18 and 25. There's some leeway into the 30's, but not as much as people think there is.

Yeah, that's been pissing myself and my friends off, too. As recent graduates, it makes us feel screwed and that we just wasted the last 5 years in college.

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"A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification; he can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, you become something else entirely... a legend, Mr. Wayne."

-- Ducard, Batman Begins --

What the fuck were you expecting with a BA in film studies?

I didn't realize that the window for childbirth is surprisingly narrow for many (though not all) women, even though my mum had me at the late(ish) age of 33 and she herself was conceived by her mum at the almost staggering age of 41. I guess some women are more lucky than others after 30 in naturally giving birth.

I've long been aware about what Red and the various articles have said, and the BS "must have xxxx years experience" has been a familiar spectre in my annoying job hunting. I've dropped out of college some time back, although I don't see my education as really over and I'm tying up a math course this month alone. With the amount of students leaving UK schools, colleges, and universities, with increasingly fewer jobs available and the buying of a house a virtual impossibility for most, I wouldn't be surprised to see the UK have mass emigration in the next decade. No surprise we've got a fuckstastic brain drain of talented people already.

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'Alright guard, begin the unnecessarily slow moving dipping mechanism...' - Dr. Evil

'Secondly, I don't see why "income inequality" is a bad thing. Poverty is not an injustice. There is no such thing as causes for poverty, only causes for wealth. Poverty is not a wrong, but taking money from those who have it to equalize incomes is basically theft, which is wrong.' - Typical Randroid

'I think it's gone a little bit wrong.' - The Doctor

I think that's the part you've been missing, idiot. The world has a very screwed up structure whereby you HAVE to go to college but not everyone is suited to math and science courses. I couldn't pass high-level mathematics if I spent every waking moment of the next five years studying it. College is being rammed down our throats while at the same time offering only a fraction of students the benefits of education.

On that note my first day of Pre-Animation and Illustration begins today! Hooray for college!

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1980s Rock is to music what Giant Robot shows are to anime
Think about it.

Cruising low in my N-1 blasting phat beats,
showin' off my chrome on them Coruscant streets
Got my 'saber on my belt and my gat by side,
this here yellow plane makes for a sick ride

Late fertility is probably controlled at least in part genetically. Families where, for generations, most children were born after the mother was 30 might be predisposed to longer window of fertility, but fertility still declines. In theory, after many many many generations a type of human may evolve with fertility extended later in life, but do you want to be part of such an evolutionary experiment? Especially if you're one of the ones whose genes are eliminated early via infertility?

Delay of full adulthood by lack of wages that allow a young couple to be truly independent has the pernicious effect of delaying reproduction until after a woman's most fertile years. This will not only decrease the number of children, it also raises the risks of chromosomal birth defects. I wouldn't forbid women from having children in their 30's and even their 40's, but society pushing women in general to delay having children to those ages is going to drastically decrease the birth rate and increase some problems. While the world is overpopulated, it's not the highly educated women of the industrialized world who are the problem. I don't think it benefits society to set up a situation where our brightest women are discouraged from reproducing. Unfortunately, that's where we're headed.

If having children is a very important life goal for people (and for some it is) then women should at least start having them in their 20's and men in their 30's. That's just biology. While modern nutrition, sanitation, and medicine makes it more likely a woman will have a healthy pregnancy past 30, or past 40, that doesn't change the basic biology of fertility.

Shut the fuck up, troll. Last warning. You never seem to post anything that is not an attempt to troll or stir up shit. Next time you do that in any thread anywhere on the board where I see it or hear about it, you go Ban Land permanently, motherfucker.

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Warwolf Urban Combat Specialist

Why is it so goddamned hard to get little assholes like you to admit it when you fuck up? Is it pride? What gives you the right to have any pride?
–Darth Wong to vivftp

GOP message? Why don't they just come out of the closet: FASCISTS R' US –Patrick Degan

The GOP has a problem with anyone coming out of the closet. –18-till-I-die

I only know that many of the people who got straight As in German when I went to school couldn't speak the language to save their lives. Meanwhile I, a C student at best, was quite capable of communicating with Germans when the situation came up. Generally the approach that works best from my point of view is to just say something without worrying too much about the grammar and what have you, if you need to repeat yourself a few times, varying your phrasing, to be understood that's fine.

When it came to learning English though it was part from getting an English word book when I was eight. Part from simply submerging myself in english literature and movies. To my mind the best way to learn is not so much to immerse yourself as it is to submerge yourself in the language you want to learn. However the Norwegian educational system didn't contribute all that much to my success, I don't think any formal educational system can truly teach a foreign language. You need to be obsessive about it, to read it to study it to think about it every chance you get. Not just technical books, but read their fiction and watch their movies too...

The problem with thinking in a foreign language though is that it's hard to do untill you've gained a certain degree of mastery. I can think, sort of, in German but generally when I do I just go through variations of the phrases I already know. English on the other hand is much easier in that respect.

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Norseman's Fics the SD archive of my fics.

So JOIN THE MILITARY and parlay that x years experience into a position. That's what I did.

I'm hearing a lot of "I could take the all possible steps to make me marketable, but I don't want to" in this thread.

EDIT: Yes yes, I understand that some people "can't join the military" for whatever reason, but the majority of the people on this board in the age group mentioned in the OP certainly could pull it off. I did.