egos and change in education
The dizzying pace of change is making the proverb “pride cometh before fall” more true than it used to be. And not for reasons of slighting some god but for pragmatic ones. Ego was a luxury reserved for when change happened slowly. Take the four year college for example. Most people know we’re far past peak college and the whole thing is going to come crashing down in the next five years. But colleges are veritable ego nurseries (I know, I went to Wheaton for four years and worked for it two more). The status quo is unsustainable simply because the younger generation is realizing a four year degree (particularly at a private institution) just doesn’t offer a return on the exorbitant investment. Before I went to college in 1998 I had access to the internet but back then there wasn’t social media or an easy way to get the perspective of those after college. Now with Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter there is (see lostgeneration subreddit).
Udemy (an online course vendor) just lowered its prices on courses drastically. For many subjects such as Computer Science, the quality of instruction is better than most colleges. Anyone with a laptop and a tablet (it’s nice to watch the videos on a tablet while having the code editor open on the computer) with enough discipline can learn just about anything. The future of much of education is just computer labs with dual monitor setups running Udemy (or a similar vendor’s) courses with facilitators walking around to help (perhaps people in the industry who are either paid or volunteer depending on the funding source of the school). What this future of education leaves out is all the administrative layers that have pushed up tuition to sky high levels.
But the people at the top of schools don’t want to hear this, they’re going to keep riding the gravy train of higher education until the tracks mysteriously disappear.
Quoting The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas Yesterday:
Now let’s take a step back and look at the forces that would drive someone to do something like this yesterday. Here’s the reality that we don’t often talk about – that societies are held together less by laws and force and threats of force than we are by ethereal and fragile concepts like mutual respect and belief in the justness of the system itself.
distracted
Though I’m pretty godless I still pray once in a while (because I’ve experienced too much of the spiritual world to be an atheist). I find now that I’m more distracted with my eyes closed than open (because my mind is in overdrive). So I pray with my eyes open.
more poetry – i can’t halucinate encouragers
science is on the axis of inquiry
religion is on the axis of love
when they stay in their places
they leave enough room
for each other to breathe
church!
stop telling people God is love
(as if it were a reflexive relation)
because then when they stop seeing love
they’ll stop seeing God
and walk out your door
if God is holding his breath today
it just means he’s going to breathe on you harder
tomorrow
when there’s an alpha male in the room
you piss off
you are fucked
when there’s an alpha male in the sky
you piss off
you are fucked and damnned
hopelessnes is like tinnitus
if you can’t effectively mask it
it will destroy you
the system is no longer just
Comment I posted on Reddit thread how millennials are checked out of work:
People are just wising up. In America religion was a catalyst to getting employees to put their nose down and work hard and employers (at their best) would agree to treat their employees justly. But in the last 40 years employers have tried to milk this for all it’s worth without holding up their end of the bargain. It worked for a while but eventually employees wised up and started working like they were disposable. And more recently the younger generation is dropping out of religion like flies because for them there has never been a time where the social contract was more than a piece of paper.
People seem to forget that you only reap what you sow.
The system will bend over backwards to get us to believe it is just. This is because if we believe the system is just then we’ll feel a lot worse when we go up against it. I was brought up Christian and to believe the system was just. And it was more just when my parents were growing up, in the early 80’s a church my dad worked at even paid international airfare to get my eyes checked every six months while they were in Honduras. But my experience after 2000 is the Christian and secular system is no longer just. But because I was brought up to believe the system was just I feel worse going up against it than I probably should. I know the upcoming generation won’t and I’m happy for them.
Cognitive Dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is experienced as anguish by most Christians. That’s why they hate engaging people with disabilities. It’s like we need and orange sign in front of us that says, “prayer doesn’t work zone”. They have to compartmentalize and divide prayers between the ones that will work and the ones that won’t. Mental illness brings an additional wrinkle into it as now often the voice of God is often telling people crazy shit.
Antidepressants
Antidepressants help people regain custody of their lives. – NYTimes Article
Warrent
Police don’t need warrant for your phone location data, court finds
Is Everything Wrestling?
Can you smell what The Rock is cookin’?
Great NYTimes article on truth and stories:
This is partly because the rest of the world has caught up to wrestling’s ethos. With each passing year, more and more facets of popular culture become something like wrestling: a stage-managed “reality” in which scripted stories bleed freely into real events, with the blurry line between truth and untruth seeming to heighten, not lessen, the audience’s addiction to the melodrama. The modern media landscape is littered with “reality” shows that audiences happily accept aren’t actually real; that, in essence, is wrestling. (“WWE Raw” leads to “The Real World,” which leads to “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” and so forth.) The way Beyoncé teased at marital problems in “Lemonade” — writing lyrics people were happy to interpret as literal accusations of her famous husband’s unfaithfulness — is wrestling. The question of whether Steve Harvey meant to announce the wrong Miss Universe winner is wrestling. Did Miley Cyrus and Nicki Minaj authentically snap at each other at last year’s MTV Video Music Awards? The surrounding confusion was straight out of a wrestling playbook.
Water Rant
People can’t get their head around our depleting fresh water resources because in the U.S., besides a couple small California communities, the tap hasn’t run dry. When things fail in capitalism it’s more of a gradual thing. Supply goes down, price goes up, things get scarcer and scarcer. But running out of water isn’t like this. It’s binary. There is running water and then there isn’t. And you can bet if LA or Las Vegas suddenly ran out of water there would be mass hysteria. But nearly running out of water feels just like having all the water in the world (because of the way the taps work). So people are easily fooled.