Elsewhere (320)

These results should certainly not be interpreted as showing that one can easily boost learning by merely adding more schooling. In fact, there is no easy way to boost learning. Everything has been tried. There are more resources on the internet to learn from than ever before in human history, yet general knowledge hasn’t increased, and children and adults aren’t any better at arithmetic. Clearly, opportunity to learn isn’t an important variable in explaining differences between people. And dare I say, it never was?

From a cost-benefit perspective, more forced school for children means more teacher salaries to be paid. Since the effects of this on children’s actual learning seem to be somewhere between non-existent and minor, I suggest that this isn’t worth the price. 

Students At University of Augsburg Call For “Gloryholes” To Be Installed In Lecture Halls, Cite Benefit To Queer Community.

A group of students at the University of Augsburg in Germany have called for “gloryholes” to be installed in lecture halls in order to contribute to the “diversification” of the campus. Gloryholes are holes in walls or partitions created with the intention of allowing people to engage in anonymous sex acts in public. 

We are tearing down the fundamental standards and values of western civilisation based on a lie. And that lie is that any racial disparity today is by definition and necessarily the product of racism and discrimination.

So any standard that has what’s known as a “disparate impact” on blacks, whether it is a teacher licensing exam, a medical doctor licensing exam, enforcing the law – if any of those standards have a disparate impact, resulting in either the underrepresentation of blacks in meritocratic institutions, or overrepresentation in the criminal justice system, the only public explanation that is allowable is that the standards resulting in that disparate impact are racist, and the next step is that they must come down.

I argue that that assumption of racism as the explanation for disparity is wrong, that the far more plausible explanations for any disparities in representation are the vast academic skills gaps, on the one hand, when it comes to meritocratic institutions, and vast gaps in rates of criminal offending, when it comes to the criminal justice system.

But as long as racism remains the only allowable explanation, we are going to continue tearing down ideas of excellence, of merit, and moving towards, at best, a state of mediocrity, and at worst, one of risk to people’s lives, stunted scientific and medical progress, a mediocre judicial system, and the inability to push young people to reach their highest achievements.

We see gifted and talented programmes being torn down across the country – not because they’ve been shown to be unsuccessful in cultivating our best young math talent, but simply because they don’t have 13 per cent black students in them. 

For me, the revelation has been that when an institution enshrines a lie at its heart, that destroys its integrity and subverts its mission… Organisations that should have child safeguarding at their heart, such as the NSPCC and Girlguiding, now allow men who identify as women to oversee girls’ private spaces and intimate care. Gay rights campaigners press for children confused about their gender to be put on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that turn them into sterile facsimiles of the opposite sex. Since these children are statistically more likely than others to grow up gay, this is a form of gay conversion therapy.