The productive vs. the unproductive: Walter E. Williams

I have to wonder if plastic, phones and computers-and in fact most of the stuff we have collect-actually make our lives that much happier. Take, for instance, TV: TV is great, and is probably the most pervasive piece of modern technology (other than cars) in modern life... but are people who own tvs necessarily that much happier than people who own books?

In general I think that the higher the production value the worse it tend to crowd out quality. Movies are worse than TV, which is worse than radio, which is worse than print.

The people who home school their children are the biggest self-loathers....NOT!

You're on to something here. A lot of people who say that Americans are ignorant because of bad education are overlooking something really important. It's that American education is better because so much education in the US is privately run. Our current president got a superior education from an American private university. To say that Harvard is a world class university would be an insult to Harvard.

At the moment my kids and in Panama with me but they're enrolled in a US run home schooling program. No other country in the world has anything that can begin to compare with American home schooling but the America bashers will never admit it.

Everyone -- you included-- knows that when we want say, a top notch Doctor to do brain surgery on a family member that we'd want one with a medical degree from John Hopkins and not one from Botswana U.

Yes. Botswana U. exists in a melieu with was not immersed in traditions of free inquiry. Harvard was formed in such a melieu. More's the pity that it seems to teach nihilism which treats the melieu which generated its own self as an object of loathing.

American education is better because so much education in the US is privately run. Our current president got a superior education from an American private university. To say that Harvard is a world class university would be an insult to Harvard.

At the moment my kids are in Panama with me but they're enrolled in a US run home schooling program. No other country in the world has anything that can begin to compare with American home schooling but the America bashers will never admit it.

But until recently, America did have homeschooling on any significant level at all compared to its present state. For that you have to credit our government education system for so signally failing to meet the expectations of parents who were themselves satisfied with their own government-school education - and found that the same educational quality was no longer on offer in the government schools available to their children.
When your children return to the U.S., will they be satisfied to return to government school regimentation or will they attempt to stay with the homeschool curriculum they have become accustomed to?

I collect old books. Reading reference books such as the Encyclopaedia Brittannica produced towards the beginning of the last century is eye-opening. I have a set of 1903 Brittannicas. I can assure you that the average college student will have difficulty comprehending most of it though it was aimed at approximately an 8th grade reading level in its day.

A solid century of public education has bought us nothing but a mostly illiterate mob in my opinion.

It's interesting that students at the highest terminal degree level of the most academically rigorous programs of top U.S. universities are disproportionately (and increasingly so) foreign.

"For years, most of the Ph.D.s awarded by American universities in mathematics and engineering have gone to foreigners. We have the finest graduate schools in the world -- so fine that our own American students have trouble getting admitted in fields that require highly trained minds." Thomas Sowell in Phony 'ethics'.

While the best U.S. graduate schools are being filled with foreigners, U.S. school kids fall behind. Fifteen-year-olds in the U.S. rank near the bottom of industrialized countries in math skills, ahead of only Portugal, Mexico and three other nations, according to a new international comparison that economists say is bad news for long-term economic growth.

Since when does pointing out massive domestic government failure constitute "bashing America?"

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