One Must Imagine Sisyphus
Happy
- Albert Camus -
(Comments on the political, social and economic issues of the day, from a liberal perspective)
One Full Semester In Five Minutes
Man with Nature. Man over Nature.
The men do the most harm anyway.
Some paid attention. Some blundered through.
It is there in the great books
If you squint just right: the Odyssey,
The Persian Wars (which the Persians lost),
The Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tzu,
Even Walden by Thoreau.
Ignore the foolish old Gods.
Ignore the glorious epithets
Look to the sun, the winds, and the tides,
Nature decides the winners.
Manhattan was thick forest.
Passenger Pigeons darkened the sun.
Salmon so thick you could stroll across.
The buffalo filled the Plains.
The era of extinctions.
One-third of North America’s birds.
Nearly half the insects but who cares?
The still end of untold lives.
We have followed the Bible
We have been fruitful and multiplied.
Ignored the Bible and our stewardship.
We can’t spoil everything, right?
We are too many. We want
Much more than the world can bear or give.
Microbes resist us. Pests torment us.
We make ourselves deaf and blind.
Natives took what they needed,
Sustainable subsistence, thankful.
The Germans worshipped the trees before
Germany, walked in the woods.
It rained last night. Sun speckles.
The last leaves of Autumn twist around.
It’s time to remember what it was.
Let's take a walk. Look around.
Sunday, 6 Oct 24
The Lost Men
A statistic recently caught my eye: college enrollment is about 60% women and 40% men. WOW! Quite a gap. So, it was time to check the statistics on enrollment and drop-out rates for high schools and colleges. The first point is that there is no clear source of data, and the numbers vary a lot.
Let’s look at high schools:
In 2021, graduation rates were 89% for women vs 83% for men. Six percent fewer men were graduating than women. (1)
With a total of about 17.3 million students, this means at least 250,000 fewer male graduates each year. (2)
Men drop out at higher rates than women, too. In 2022, the high school drop-out rates were about 6%, distributed as follows: (3) Over one million students dropped out in one year.
Male Female
White 4.4% 3.8%
Black 5.5% 5.2%
Hispanic 8.7% 6.2%
The next question is, what are the reasons for dropping out?
Financial: Low income families (twice as likely to dropout); COVID financial impacts; and single income families
Other factors:
Parents who didn’t complete high school
ESL/immigrant family
High numbers of absences
Poor grades
Suspensions and expulsions, with boys more likely to be pushed out
Inadequate infrastructure (lack of space, textbooks, equipment, air conditioning, and so on...)
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Let’s look at colleges:
In 2021, the college population was about 15.4 million. (4)
In 2022, about 2.1 million students age 16-24 dropped out of college. Enrollment dropped about 1.5 million, attributed mostly to falling birth rates, rising tuition, and the impact of COVID. (5)
In 2023, male college enrollment was down about 1.2 million (18-24 year olds), with male enrollment at 44% vs female enrollment at 56%. (6)
Overall, then, fewer men than women graduate from high school or college. More men than women drop-out. Fewer men than women enroll in college. The gender gap is clear and large. Over time, we could be moving to another kind of two-class society, with better educated women out-performing men. With our current bias’ against women, male resentment is bound to grow.
We need to treat this as a crisis in education, and look for better ways to support our students. College, in particular, can train students in critical thinking, which is vital to our democracy. Which brings me to Elizabeth Warren’s proposals as a start.
We need to provide everyone with free school breakfast and lunch, which have been demonstrated to improve academic performance.
We must end zero-tolerance discipline (suspensions and expulsions).
We need to provide free tuition for public 2 year and 4 year colleges and technical schools.
And, we need to ensure equitable funding per student, with less reliance on local property taxes.
This would be a beginning, working toward reducing the enrollment and drop-out gaps. How to pay for this? Warren’s proposed 2% tax on the total wealth of the rich would provide more than enough. Time to get to work!
Thursday, 19 Sep 2024
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2 https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2023/acs/acs-55.pdf
3 www.smartick.com/data/charted-high-school-dropout-rates-in-the-united-states
5 https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts
6 www.bestcolleges.com/research/college-enrollment-decline/
Watching the Euros
I never thought I'd say that football (soccer) is boring, but today is the day. European football has changed. Not many goal kicks down the field. Just short kicks to the back line and a long series of horizontal and back passes before someone risks going past midfield. Fewer long balls toward the goal. Mechanical movement from side to side. Occasional attempts from the wings. Rare movement down the middle. It's as if the statisticians have found the optimal lowest risk strategies, and taken over the game. Lower scoring. Long sequences when the fans can sleep. Fewer moments of true action.
Boring!
Not boring! Hands all over the place. Tugging, hugging, pushing, hitting all the time. Football once was defined as feet, not hands. Now it looks like pro wrestling, complete with fake falls and injuries. Why is this allowed? We need more yellow cards to control the game.
I dream of the beautiful game, when passes moved the ball down the field, risks were taken, the fans stood up, sat down, stood up again and enjoyed the uncertainties on the field. Give me real football, or just give me the highlights. I'd rather watch the sun set anyway.
But wait! As in other aspects of life, the women know better. They haven’t listened to the statisticians. They still do it all, taking risks and being creative. If you like football, just watch the women. It’s much more entertaining.
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Sunday, 25 Aug 24