The Wall Street Journal recently opined that For Most People, College is a Waste of Time. Actually, Charles Murray did the pontificating, under the Journal’s masthead. I digress.

Here’s a nutshell:

Outside a handful of majors — engineering and some of the sciences — a bachelor’s degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses.

The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.

In information technology, certifications are important. Five years ago, you were nothing without an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer). Now it seems those are a dime a dozen. Which leads me to an opinion from fellow transhumanist Aschwin de Wolf at Depressed Metabolism.

Charles Murray is on the right track when he draws attention to the  poor value of most college degrees for predicting performance in the work place. His solution is questionable, however. Certification can become just as meaningless as BA degrees if the prevailing egalitarian mindset in society persists. Furthermore, as a libertarian, Murray must be aware of the artificial barriers certification can raise to competition. One only needs to look at the  requirements to obtain Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification to realize how certification can create formidable obstacles for entering a field of business.

Although there is a place for certification for certain professions, more important than substituting certification for college degrees is to create better mechanisms to recognize and differentiate between the ability to acquire, process, and apply skills and knowledge versus sterile and unimaginative testing of textbook knowledge.

I don’t really give a rat’s ass whether I have a degree or certification. Given the chance, I can sell myself to anyone. If you don’t want to give me the chance, someone else will.

I am working on a master’s in computer information management from Bellevue University. I suppose I could get analytical and worry about whether or not I’ve made a good decision. I prefer to focus on the learning process itself and see where that takes me. When MCSEs were the new hotness I didn’t have one. Now that they are passe, I still don’t have one. I survived.

It isn’t the degree or certification that matters in life (although they do help). The learning is important. Knowing which lessons matter and remembering those is critical. You will always benefit more from political knowledge and skills than you will from a degree or a certification.

I’m not giving up on education but the degree is secondary. Learning is what matters. Like the universe, if you are not growing, you are shrinking. Stasis is not an option.

We Americans have very unhealthy attitudes about the nude human body. Teenagers have been interested in seeing each other naked since the first cavegirl developed budding breasts. When I was in school, I remember one episode in particular, in the sixth grade, when the teacher left the class and half the girls decided to show us their breasts. I don’t remember why, but I do remember taking a good hard look. The only consequence was that I had a good day that day. Things have changed. Now teens are snapping nudie pics of themselves and sending them via cell phone.

“It used to be that kids would make mistakes, and it was local and singular and everyone knew it was part of growing up,” said Catherine Davis, a PTA co-president in Westport, Connecticut, who had a frank talk with her two sons after several students’ nude self-portraits recently spread through the wealthy New York City bedroom community.

“Now a stupid adolescent mistake can take on major implications and go on their record for the rest of their lives,” she added.

School administrators in Santa Fe, Texas, confiscated dozens of cell phones from students in May after nude photos of two junior high girls began circulating. The girls had sent the photos to their boyfriends, who forwarded them to others, officials said.

This is typical teenage behavior. The only difference is that the technology has changed. Unfortunately, as a society, we are overreacting in typical self-righteous fashion.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, a 17-year-old boy recently was charged with child pornography, sexual exploitation of a child and defamation for allegedly posting nude photos of his 16-year-old ex-girlfriend on his MySpace page. The girl had taken the pictures with her cell phone at her mother’s home and e-mailed them to the boyfriend, authorities said.

Are you kidding me? The kid might need counseling. Don’t we already have enough people in jail? A 17-year-old with a naked picture of a 16-year-old is NOT a child pornographer. I propose that the district attorney who filed these charges be put in jail as a public nuisance.

At best the kid should be counseled. Instead, we’re going to destroy his life. This country is in trouble. The number of prurient busybodies is at an all time high. The number of bureaucrats who need to continue arresting citizens to justify continued employment is at an all time high. The number of self-righteous punishment brigade crusaders is at an all time high. Common sense and appropriate consequences for typical teenage behavior is at an all time low as zero tolerance zeal sweeps the land. I weep for those trying to grow up in America in 2008.

I highly encourage you to carefully read this editorial entitled Clueless in America. Here is a sample:

The nation’s future may depend on how well we educate the current and future generations, but (like the renovation of the nation’s infrastructure, or a serious search for better sources of energy) that can wait. At the moment, no one seems to have the will to engage any of the most serious challenges facing the U.S.

An American kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s more than a million every year, a sign of big trouble for these largely clueless youngsters in an era in which a college education is crucial to maintaining a middle-class quality of life — and for the country as a whole in a world that is becoming more hotly competitive every day.

Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it’s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler, a third did not know that the Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of speech and religion, and fewer than half knew that the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900.

Author Bob Herbert mentions that the United States has “one of the highest dropout rates in the industrialized world.” Gee, I wonder if that somehow correlates with the fact that we have the highest per capita number of prisoners in the industrialized world. Whether you’re planning on electing John McCain, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton is irrelevant to solving the education crisis. None of those individuals are serious about changing our educational landscape. No major politician in the two parties is - educated Americans do not grow government so politicians do not have a real interest in educating Americans.

In all likelihood, what we’ll get from our next President is more empty promises that federal oversight can solve our national overabundance of American dumbasses. I envision proposals to rename No Child Left Behind to something a little more catchy while increasing funding for the program. In 30 years, those few Americans who can still read will look back fondly on the time when this nation had an 80% basic literacy rate. By then, we’ll be a third world nation looking for handouts from India or China.

Learning English should not be mandatory to live in the U.S., but it certainly opens up a broad range of choices for those who take the time to maste the world’s primary language for discussing science and industry. If I was planning on relocating permanently to Costa Rica, I would bone up on my Spanish first. If I was planning on moving to Britain, I’d learn English. When in Rome, and all that.

In our system of publicly funded education, there is a raging debate over whether children should be educated in English or in their native language. The Christian Science Monitor discusses this in an article entitled Bilingualism issue rises again.

Arizona followed suit, and in 2002, Massachusetts became the third state to vote out bilingual education. Students who were once taught primarily in their native languages are now put in SEI classrooms where Spanish or Portuguese or other languages are used solely for clarification purposes.

But as educators analyze the results of the Massachusetts English Proficiency Assessment tests, which will be released to the public later this month, some doubt how well the new program is working.

The goal is to keep English learners separated from their peers for no more than a year. But in Lynn, where about 18 percent of students have limited English proficiency, the head of the district’s language program says most elementary students stay in SEI classrooms for about two years. It can take longer for older students.

I’m not sure what the best way to deal with the problem is. If I were supreme leader, I’d be tempted to require public school students to speak English first and learn everything else second. Then again, if I were supreme leader, there wouldn’t be public schools (not a good return on investment). The benefits of learning English should be obvious to anyone who reads this excerpt from Wikipedia:

English is currently one of the most widely spoken and written languages worldwide, with some 380 million native speakers. Only Chinese and Hindi have more native speakers while Spanish is similar in number. English is also the most widely spoken of the Germanic languages. It has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the British Empire in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that of the United States from the Second World War to the present.

Through the global influence of native English speakers in cinema, music, broadcasting, science, and the Internet in recent decades, English is now the most widely learned second language in the world. It is often used as an international language of communication, and is now a common intermediary language.

Another important point (to me, since I produce more than I consume) is that the money that is used to pay for the teaching, whether bilingual or not, comes out of the pockets of English speaking American taxpayers, whether or not they have children. I want that money spent efficiently.

I don’t think we need to make English the “official” language of the nation though - common sense should tell you that if you have an opportunity to learn English, you should do so. In America’s public schools, you should learn English first, and progress to other subjects when you are judged ready. But that’s just my opinion. What’s yours?

Boortz has posted an update on the saga of the Marine and the Prinicipal.

The bad news - Ulrica Corbett is still influencing Georgia children. The good news - Marine Sgt. Zach Richardson will be speaking to the children anyway, but outside the school environment. The ugly news - Matthew Lund no longer teaches at Anita White Carson Middle School. I wonder why.

Perhaps you remember this particular brouhaha … it happened several weeks ago at the Carson Middle School in Greensboro, Georgia. U.S. Marine Sgt. Zach Richardson wanted to visit the students at Carson Middle School who had been writing to him while he was serving in Iraq. The children’s teacher, Matthew Lund, arranged for the visit only to be thwarted by the school’s principal, Ulrica Corbett. Ms. Corbett ordered Sgt. Richardson off the school grounds citing concern for the safety and welfare of the students. This was the lead item in the June 2nd. Nealz Nuze, which I urge you to read again by clicking here.

Well .. now the good news. Next Monday, July 18th, the students from the Carson Middle School who wrote those letters to Sgt. Richardson, along with their teacher, Matthew Lund, their parents and other community leaders, will get their chance to meet and talk with Sgt. Richardson and several of his fellow Marines. The meeting will take place at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge at Reynolds Plantation and will be followed by a lakeside barbecue at the Ritz to show support for Sgt. Richardson, his fellow Marines and the students from Carson Middle School who’s letters meant so much. The Ritz-Carlton Lodge will be providing rooms to the Marines … and having stayed at this particular Ritz-Carlton, let me tell you … these Marines are in for a treat.

I don’t know what eventually happened to the principal. I do know that she caused her school and the Green County School quite a bit of embarrassment. Her disdain for this Marine in particular and for what our armed forces were doing in Iraq in general was obvious. Matthew Lund is no longer teaching at the Carson Middle School. We hope he has found a job at a school that appreciates him and our men and women in uniform. “

Ulrica Corbett never did answer my requests for an interview. I’m assuming she still has her job working as a modern day feudal lord in the fiefdom of Anita White Carson Middle School, Green County, Georgia. The quest for educational excellence free of the evil influences of the U.S. military continues.

If anyone knows how I can get in touch with Matthew Lund or Sgt. Zach Richardson, please e-mail me using the link provided on this site. Much appreciated.

And if you live in or near Green County, go show your support for a United States Marine.