Starvin Larry

By Nathan Barton

What or who should control training and education? Especially technical education, such as science, engineering, medicine, mathematics, and related fields?  What we have now is NOT working, and increasingly dysfunctional.

Lew Rockwell website has an interesting story telling us four reasons that college degrees are becoming useless.  In reality, the headline does not accurately state the thesis of Jonathan Newman’s article.  He provides four (of many) reasons that more and more college degrees ARE useless.

Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute, wrote in his blog  a few weeks ago: In US universities, a divorce is needed. “If the worthwhile parts of the U.S. universities are to continue to thrive, or even to survive as serious endeavors, it would seem that a parting of the ways must come. The STEM fields must separate themselves from the bulls**t parts of the universities. The latter can then go their own…

One of the subjects we discuss in this blog, a lot, is the importance of having quantifiable metrics of performance. A large part of that is what I call “soft standards,” i.e. “I did better than I did last time,” and “I performed the drill/skill correctly.” On the same hand however, there is a time and a place for “hard standards.”
“Hard standards” are simply a published set of metrics that a given group of people are expected to be able to achieve, on demand, without specific preparation or warm-up. As individual practitioners of…dare I say…the “Heroic Ideal,” soft standards really should be more important to us than soft standards, but hard standards do have a very important role to play as well.
In the first place, it allows us the confidence to accept fate stoically. “What is, is.” If I have met a hard standard, on demand, without preamble…