Moronicans are Complete Idiots

Just how stupid are Americans?

Real stupid.

Consider exactly how idiotic your average Moronican is. Now consider that they may well have graduated from a public high school. What precisely did they learn in those 12 years of school anyway? Anything at all? Nothing? If people graduating from 12 grades of education without knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, why did we even bother spending the money to educate them in the first place?

It’s kind of nice to meet a college graduate, but some of them are stupid too. A friend of mine had a BA from Cal State Long Beach. A BA in what, I have no idea. In 1988, I asked him who he was voting for, and he said, “Reagan?” I told him Reagan wasn’t running (it was Dukakis versus Bush), and he was surprised. The Presidential election had been going for a long time, Ray Gun had been out of office for months, and this fool didn’t have the foggiest idea. I met a Mexican-American college graduate (criminology degree) who got mad at me when I told him that Hispanics were a mixture of White and Indian. He said that wasn’t true. In fact, they were pure Indian. Or something. Or whatever.

I had a Black girlfriend once. She had a BA, but it was in Homemaking. You can get a BA in that? She was taking some courses at a junior college, and she was so dumb that I had to write her papers for her. She wouldn’t understand my papers, and she would get mad at me and rip up the papers.

Half the time I start a conversation with someone and it quickly ends. They don’t have the foggiest idea what I am talking about. That does not compute! I start to explain, and they get annoyed or their eyes glaze over. “Moron alert!” Screams my brain.

“India a Self Deluded Nation,” By Raghu Dayal

Great article about what a shithole India is which goes into the various reasons we have discussed in the past for India’s shitholeness.

One wonders, though, why.

Apparently India’s education fails completely. Even higher education does not function at all. The graduates are crap. The Indian state spends almost nothing on education, which means that society thinks it is a low priority. But why is it that one goes to a 4 year college and comes out with a defective education? What’s that all about? Why does so little learning take place even at the tertiary level?

Cheating is apparently endemic. India appears to be basically a society of cheaters. Not to mention liars and thieves.

When Indian immigrants come to the US, they bring the culture of cheating, lying and thieving into the workplace as employees or as business owners.

The reputation of Indian businessmen among US businessmen is very low. They are regarded with the same contempt Jews used to be. No one wants to negotiate with them or do business with them. “The Indian will take you for everything you’ve got.” I hear this a lot from people who do business with Indians, but then I hear similar things about Chinese “businessmen.”

We already know why India spends so little on healthcare. In a society without any conception of the common good, almost no money will be spent on health care.

This is also why so many are starving while the middle and upper classes get obese and diabetic. The starving are “those people,” and according to Hinduism, they deserve their fate. The Indian middle and upper classes seem like a nation of Mitt Romneys. “Let them eat cake,” the Indian bourgeois cries.

That the Indian political class is utterly corrupt goes without saying. But we wonder why once again. Does it go back to no conception of the common good once again. In a society with no conception of the common good, how does this lead to an ultra-criminal political class?

The justice system apparently does not even function at all, but why is this? Society doesn’t feel like spending any money to have a functional justice system? And why is this? Because society itself has no sense of justice whatsoever?

The blatant misogyny of course is culturally embedded, but it shows no signs of change, apparently because misogyny is so embedded in Indian culture that no one wants to change it.

All of the mess below is the product of a shit culture. Society flows from culture. If your society sucks, then quite probably it’s because your culture sucks. In conversations with Indians, they rarely want to change Indian culture. This is particularly true with Indian Hindus. Everything is fine, and nothing needs to change. It’s all good. Shining India and all that.

Change flows from self-reflection. In order to change your society, you have to face the fact that it’s crap and needs changing in the first place. It’s Stage One that Indians never get to.

India a Self Deluded Nation

By Raghu Dayal

A land of myths, India takes mythology rather seriously till some myth-buster jolts it down to reality. We have often deluded ourselves that we are intellectually up there with the best in the world till the OECD-conducted PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) of 15 year school children had Indian students scoring second from the bottom, only ahead of Kyrgyzstan, among half a million students from 73 countries.

While the PISA ranking laid bare India’s poor school education, the 2012 QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University rankings include none of Indian universities or institutes among world’s top 200. China has seven in the top 200 list. India has over 26,000 higher education institutes with 15 million students on rolls; a survey has found 92% of their graduates are deficient in programming or algorithms and 78% of them falter in English.

Although there are more children in school, they are now learning less. As per Annual Survey of Education 2011, only 48% of class V children are able to read a class II text, and less than 30% of those in class III can do a 2-digit sum. Some 1.25 crore students come to the job market every year who have no skills. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is at pains to lament, “education in India is in peril”.

Mere enunciation of rights to education can be no solution. Andre Beteille termed the UPA move as “the Marie Antoinette Solution” – “they don’t have schools, so give them rights…” India’s high growth potential is largely predicated by its assumed demographic dividend.

This very demography appears likely to end up as the Achilles’ heel and worse, with country’s youth remaining inadequately educated and trained. There is serious dearth of employable technicians – plumbers, carpenters, electricians. India’s 1.4 million schools are in need of 4 million new teachers and 8 million more to be retrained.

Like education, health too has been a sad story. As many as 130 million of Indians have no access to basic health care; as Census 2011 shows, half of country’s population defecate in the open; 20% of households have to travel more than half a km for drinking water; more than two-thirds of houses (87% rural, 26% urban) use firewood, crop residue, cow dung, coal.

The number of physicians per 1,000 population for the world is 1.5, for India it is 0.6; the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population in India is 0.9, much lower than the world average of 3.3. Almost 2 million children die in India before reaching their first birth day.

The country boasts of more than 30 million tonne of grains stacked, some of which in open for want of warehouses; yet 40% of its children are underweight and 70% anemic. According to a WHO 2000 estimate, of the annual 529,000 maternal deaths globally, 136,000 or about 26% of them occur in India.

Although some pockets of the country have experienced material gains, and people now live longer, no fewer than 37.5% of countrymen are reported to remain malnourished, 41.6% of them subsisting on less than $ 1.25/day (The World Development Report, 2012).

While, on one hand, the Global Hunger Index 2007 by International Food Policy Research Institute ranked India 96th among 119 countries, well below all its neighbors except Bangladesh, on the other hand, it imported 1,100 tonne of gold last year, valued at Rs 3.5 lakh crore.

When the wide world around said India had all the basic wherewithal of an emerging global economic powerhouse, we started behaving as if we were already there. The Pew Research Centre survey of 21 major economies just conducted has revealed how Indians have had their optimism faded, how they have lost faith in the Indian economy and its future. Along with a dysfunctional Parliament, country’s polity is mired in sleaze; a bumper crop of robber barons mulct the national wealth.

Albeit a vibrant democracy it claims to be, India remains torn by language, region, caste, religion, no less than by pockets of wealth. We took pride in the steel frame of governance we had; today, it is left to be a creaking bamboo frame.

Symptomatic of a major myth, some erudite commentators have found in Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson a facile belief that India would ultimately outpace China by dint of its inclusive political institutions, China being pulled back, as they perceive, because of its extractive political institutions.

This pervasive myth of the delusion of democracy, as in effect it is practiced in India, engenders only derision. More and more of us keep striving to become more equal than others. Money and muscle rule the roost. An Election Commission analysis revealed that no less than 40 among Hon’ble MP’s and 700 MLAs among the legislators had suffered criminal indictment.

India lays great stores by the world’s largest democracy it is with constitutional freedom of expression, yet it has no qualms in slapping a young cartoonist with a incredible charge of sedition.

India’s parliamentarians, notwithstanding their hysterical avowals of its sovereignty, meddle in the minutiae of deciding which textbooks will have what text or which cartoons, exposing the hollowness of our democracy. With more than 30 million cases pending in courts, up to 26 years old, it takes an average of 17 years to get a judicial decision.

What better embodiment of our enduring myths than Delhi being touted as world’s “most beautiful city”, or Mumbai outshining Shanghai, or, better still, Kolkata soon transforming, Mamata di-style, into “better than London”!

We generally like to believe nice things about ourselves – a kind of collective mythomania. We fancy ourselves as a tolerant society and yet we have cases like Rushdie, Taslima, M F Hussain, et al. We hold the teaching profession in reverence, yet we kill a teacher who says no to cheating.

We similarly give our parents a pedestal just short of godhead but countless cases occur of old parents being dispossessed, cheated, even murdered in property disputes.

We respect womanhood as nothing short of devi or Mother (yatra naryastu pujyante, ramante tatra devata) but cases of rape and other crimes against women, shameful treatment of girl child (in embryo and after birth) and the fact that no woman considers herself safe after dark in the capital of India show that this is the biggest myth of all.

We believe in welcoming tourists and visitors to our country (atithi devo bhava) but few such guests would ever revisit after the harrowing time we give them.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Tasher Desh has a message wherein citizens, who had lost their vitality and elan, and their capacity to respond to the rhythm of life, were played a magic flute whereupon their vitality flowed back. Some similar transformation India needs, a leader to play that magic flute, to turn some myths into reality.

“Values and Education,” by Dota

Nice piece by guest poster Dota. Enjoy!

Values and Education

By Dota

I had recently gotten into an argument with my roommate’s Pakistani friend about the merits of education, but first some background details are in order.

My roommate had a friend over for a visit and the conversation inevitably steered towards the oft-treaded topic of Pakistan’s sorry state of affairs. After a series of banal observations were exchanged, my roommate’s friend (let’s call him S) made an argument that caught my attention. He claimed that education was sorely what Pakistan needed and that the country was comprised of uneducated peasants being led by uneducated peasants.

I’ve always found the South Asian obsession with education to be quite intriguing; a region of illiterates that revere education much more than would your average literate westerner. The Indian fears and reveres forces which he perceives as wondrous and mysterious; and what could be more mysterious and wondrous to the illiterate than a book?

A myriad of rituals revolving around book etiquette persist even today. My mother always taught me that an unread book must be closed and never left open as a mark of respect. If one drops a book to the floor, one must pick it up and kiss it before putting it away. One must never touch a book with ones feet, and so on.

The astute reader would have undoubtedly observed that the book has been deified and book etiquette may actually be a form of idolatry. This is unsurprising for just as the Chinese will eat anything, the Indian will worship anything. It is noteworthy to point out that both Hindus and Muslims participate in this ‘idolatry’ (including myself).

Having said all of this it is now perhaps not as surprising that S was an avid subscriber to the miracles of education. I said nothing as they spoke and continued to play my game of Dota in silence.

My roommate eventually turned to me and asked me for my opinion.

I told them that while education was extremely important, what was even more significant were the underlying values of a society. Values spelled the difference between an average education system and a superior one. I told S that merely building more schools would not transform Pakistani society into a modern and just society (although it would be a good start). What mattered most was the quality of education imparted and this would ultimately be shaped by the values of said society.

To illustrate my point I narrated what my roommate had observed about Norway several years ago on a trip there. He told me that schools would take children out on a field trip where the little children would then embark on the solemn mission of picking up litter from the streets. The key difference lies in values.

S disagreed and countered my argument by stating that these values were acquired in school, therefore Pakistan needed more schools. Like many South Asians, S was a passive receiver of his culture and practiced it religiously but with little understanding of it.

Like so many other Indians and Pakistanis I have known, S could sense the rot in his society but figured that these problems were external to him. Most South Asians do not see themselves as being part of the larger problems that plague them collectively. They are prone to bewailing the corruption of their leaders without observing everyday acts of corruption, such as bribing traffic cops. The problems are external and therefore so are the solutions.

Education is thus seen as being something that is external to society, and not a part of it. Therefore to S’s mind, if society is going off the rails, the only antidote is the magical elixir of education. While this may sound silly to Westerners, this silliness comes rather naturally to South Asians, and perhaps to South Asian Muslims in particular.

Muslims believe that the Quran literally descended from the heavens like a deus ex machina that promised to address the malaise that afflicted Arabian society (and the human condition in general). In similar fashion Pakistanis believe that this thing called education will descend from somewhere and save their society.

So how does education shape the average Indian/Pakistani?

On every visit back to Mumbai I’ve observed educated Indians driving the wrong way down a one way street and bribing traffic cops when pulled over. These college-educated Indians will run a red light on an intersection that isn’t policed. They will litter casually. They will seldom pay their taxes.

They have no notion of civic sense because Indian culture is traditionally rural and emphasizes segregation (via caste) over camaraderie and fraternity. They can read and they are reasonably good at math, and this is all that their education has imparted.

On his visits to Pakistan, Indian journalist Aakar Patel observes the same amoral behavior displayed by Pakistanis as well. A school in India made headlines because one of its teachers sprayed cow urine on Dalit students to ‘purify’ them. The story can be read here. Pakistani schools actually teach their students that Hindus are inferior mole people who relish darkness and confined spaces. This can be read here.

What sort of adults would such schools produce? Would they produce lucid minds capable of questioning the status quo? I doubt it. They will produce uncivilized individuals who are capable of doing algebra. South Asians are not equipped to see the failings in their shared culture. They seem to think that churning out additional schools will somehow increase their society’s level of civilization.

They do not comprehend that the average Westerner’s civic sense and general morality are the products of centuries of civilization. The radical and selfish egoism of Hobbes would eventually be tempered by the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, which would eventually give rise to the notion of public good that govern modern Western societies.

This is ultimately what I tried (in vain) to explain to S. That while South Asian institutions are capable of producing outstanding doctors and civil engineers, Western institutions are capable of making those doctors ethical and inculcating in those civil engineers a work ethic that is second to none.

In conclusion I’d like to say that the effects of education are immediately felt upon society through a general boost to the economy. But in the long run, it is the values of a society, those shared interpretations of reality reached through consensus that will ultimately play a vital role in its moral development.

Education is not the source of these values (as South Asians erroneously believe), but rather a vehicle through which these values are transmitted from one generation to the next. The source of these values is society itself, which is comprised of individuals that need to be worked on. John Stuart Mill stated in his essay on Liberty that “Among the works of man…the first in importance surely is man himself…” But this is difficult in a culture which eschews individualism in favor of collectivism.

“Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger,” by Novusipsum

This is a great piece by an Indian blogger that he left on my blog as a comment. The original is here. It’s very good, and it’s actually quite well written. And he takes on his country in a way that is not often seen in Indian writers.

I particularly enjoyed the bit about Kashmir because it rings so true. Almost every Indian I know goes nuts when I mention Kashmir. They raise their voice and start pounding on the table as their face gets red. They tell me that the problem is 100% the fault of Pakistan, who imports terrorists into Kashmir to fight India. They also tell me that all of the Kashmiris love India, and none of them are fighting against India.

However, when I tell them that most Kashmiris hate India and that many Kashmiris have taken up arms against India, they insist that I am wrong. Most every Indian I met was exactly like this. They are like drones, utterly brainwashed by some Borg. They are brainwashed on this subject as bad as a North Korean.

Most of these folks are what you might call middle class or upper middle class educated people. A number of them had university degrees and were quite intelligent. One man used to be a university professor.

Why Growing Up in India Makes You a Nasty, Cruel, Desensitized Faux-nationalistic Gold-digger

1. School

While people remark on shortage of functional schools in India, I say the kids who don’t go to school have it good. The national curriculum is odious and objectionable, seeing as it is designed for kids who bow down before all authority and the various empty suits, regardless of whether they make any sense at all. You cannot contest your teacher. At all. Never. Such behavior is simply unacceptable. Put another way, the system is a hundred percent authoritarian.

School kills all your creativity. Creativity, especially of the extrovert kind, is not encouraged. There are tried and tested methods to break the will of those who are too free. The system is based on rote-memorization. You must bend your mind a certain way to do that: it means all the rules are already laid out and decided for you. You do not need to think. Your brain must function in a certain way. Any challenge to the established order will make you a pariah.

Kids learn how to secretly and openly hate each other over the grades they are given for breaking their own will and doing pointless mind-numbing work that will be of no use to them at any point in their later life. The focus is on merit. On who is better at following rules. No wonder India has not produced a single India-based world-class scientist/technician/engineer. Science, technology and engineering, after all, are fields where your ability to think is highly valuable.

Barack Obama does not need to worry about Indian kids out-smarting American kids. If they do, it will be by doing hours of grinding and roting, and when they do, the rest of the world need to start worrying. This system is evil!

2. Parents, Teachers, Peers

All these people are the product of evil Indian schools and other cramming establishments and will force you to succeed in a way that they deem appropriate. You must resist this, but you can’t. They are everywhere.

Your peers will pressure you to bow down, to submit and ‘teach you the value of money’…. In other words, how to be a vicious gold-digger. Money is nice, but being a nasty, evil little scummy gold-digger is a downgradation of your soul that even scat-munchers do not attain.

Indian people are therefore nasty and selfish to the extreme. It is of no surprise, seeing their upbringing and their environment.

3. The environment

Your average Indian city/town/village is a primitive clusterfuck without running water or proper sewage disposal. Casteism is rampant; stupid people need little motivation to be proud of what is after all a genetic accident. They think their bloodline is ‘pure’ and grind down in the dirt the ‘lower’ caste people. Respect for human life and dignity in India has to be the lowest in human civilization.

The streets are narrow and dirty, usually overflowing with broken sewage  and water lines (which frequently mix), and the garbage the average Indian household does not feel ashamed of in throwing out on the streets. Any kind of social grace is completely absent, people shove and push each other, vehicles honk incessantly and without reason, and the local temple’s loudspeakers blare out shitty religious hymns.

Living and growing up here, you will learn, little by little, to let go of your humanity. You will get desensitized to the beggars and lepers in the street, emancipated, poor and trodden down. You will see old men and women driven out of their homes by their sons, their eyes pleading for mercy and trying to make sense of the plethora of people around them, who ignore their plight and pass right by.

Your average Indian will not even notice the squalor on the street, or the helpless human beings on the street. He will simply accept these things as a part of life, which is why things never improve. This man is the selfish product of a callous, heartless and evil system. He will never change, and western democracies should not allow such people into their homelands. Not even for a ‘visit’.

4. The Media

Catering to a large middle class that pretends to be educated, some people have taken the initiative to bring them latest news of the world. These people are funded by rich business interests with their own agenda as well as Hindu nationalists. They make the salutary noises about bad governance and bloated bureaucracy, things that are so odious it even permeates the thick bourgeois skull. This is why the middle class types buy newspapers and watch news—they can relate to it.

But the most vicious thing the media does is to fill the average Indian with a sense of pride and nationalism, something that certainly goes against all basic logic and sanity. What people would be proud of a country like this? Only brain-washed, selfish jerks that the education system produces and the media maintains.

The average Indian is full to the brim with national pride that he has no logical reason to feel. His ideas on casteism and the workings of the society are reinforced by editors of the national dailies and the news channels.

His stance on Kashmir, a truly beautiful place inhabited by beautiful people, has been drilled into him incessantly. The parable of Pakistan exporting its terrorists (not that it doesn’t – turns out the Americans knew about it all along) to India and that the Kashmiris love India (Duh) has been in print for thirty years now. Of course, India is a poor, helpless victim.

5. College

Most people in India never even graduate from their high schools, let alone college. And I say good for em. Because the system feels the need to grind out all kind of potential competition it may get from any future thinkers.

If school doesn’t manage to turn you into a humanoid selfish fuck, your college certainly will. India’s unemployment problem is so vast, and the colleges that ‘guarantee’ any jobs (professional degree mills like IIT’s/NIT’s/AIIM’s etc…. it is interesting to note that only Indians think these places are good, an independent peer review ranked the ‘best’ IIT at around 350 at world level) are too few and middle-class scramble for securing a seat there so intense, it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Millions (you heard that right, millions) of middle-class Indians right now are roting and grinding and chewing equations, formulas and facts for entrance exams that maybe a hundred of them really understand. These people aspire to be ‘engineers’ and ‘doctors’.

The workload is so immense that you can’t find time at age 16 and 17 to ogle girls (or boys), to party, to learn how to drink beer without making a face and to hang out with your friends. Hell, what am I saying? Most Indian people don’t find time to do that all their lives.

College itself is a turdfest with professors harboring massive egos, an anal-retentive and callous administration and awkward social interaction between the sexes. Girls hanging out with boys are labeled ‘hookers’ and ‘sluts’. Massive sexual repression is the hallmark of this point in your life, and given the pressure to rote more equations and to secure a job, you’d be lucky escaping the place without a drug habit or a drinking problem.

Is there anything good about India at all? With fertile plains to the north, large iron ore deposits to the south, biggest aluminum stores in the world and 30% of the world’s thorium, I think the white man would have made the country really work.

The only thing wrong with India is Indians.

Why For-Profit Education Doesn’t Work and Never Will

Gay Area Girl writes:

There is a silver lining. I hope that the budget crisis and rising tuition, can help reform Academia once and for all.

Allow students to graduate in 2-3 years (or six years for professional programs), do away with general education requirements, place more value on independent study and certification tests, and limit funding for campus aesthetics and university promotions that take up lots of dough (state of the art recreation centers or celebrity speakers) and focus on basics.

This is a terrible idea. People learn little enough even with a 4-year degree. Reducing a 4-year degree down to 2-3 years will mean they will learn and know even less. Truly pitiful. And a Master’s program should be 2 extra years and a doctoral program an extra 4 years+, no two ways about it. There is no way to cheapen these advanced degrees. They are already extremely rigorous, and cheapening them will just make them more worthless.

We are socialists here, and we believe in education, as all socialists do. I believe that education is valuable if only for its own sake. That’s a very anti-market position, but socialists dislike the market anyway, and capitalism and education don’t mix.

There has never been a decent for-profit school ever run in the history of mankind and there never will be. Education must be run by the state and only by the state. If you wish to waste your money on capitalist education, be my guest. It’s always been crap, and it always will be.

Few people understand that all of the best private universities on Earth are actually nonprofit institutions. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, all nonprofits. Oxford and Cambridge are run by the state! I am not aware of a single decent for-profit college anywhere on the planet.

The Libertarians are wrong. Medicine and education can only be run by the state and only work when the state runs them. Private education is a complete failure, and private medicine doesn’t work at all, as we are discovering here in the US.

WMarkW writes:

The suggestions you make are similar to ones made by other pro-education conservatives, like Charles Murray, who says we don’t have to send half our HS grads to college, from which only 15% will event.

First of all, a pro-education conservative is an oxymoron. There’s no such thing! All conservatives everywhere, all down through time, have always hated public education. They’ve never wanted to impose it and they always tried and still try to destroy it once it gets in.

Some conservatives don’t mind education as an indulgence for their own elite, but in a market-based society, conservatives believe in the market and only the market, so they will only value education that readily translates into big salaries. All else is indulgence – underwater basket weaving if you will.

Actually, it is quite hard to get a 4-year degree in the US. I know very few idiots who got one. Some average intelligence folks I know got degrees in Housekeeping or Physical Education, but even they were not idiots.

A four year degree shows you have a basic level of intelligence and a degree of critical thinking skills and solid work habits to make it through a rigorous 4 year study program. This is why many corporations ask for a degree, any degree, in anything – any BA will do. It shows you have a certain something, as something that is generally far above what your average person without a BA has, and you can trust me on that one.

I have met many people with 4 year degrees and many people without them. The differences are dramatic and striking in most cases.

Conservatives hate education. They don’t believe that the masses should be educated. Only the elite should be educated. This goes all the way back to the Catholic Church elite not translating Bibles into local languages. The Bible was to be written in Latin that could be understood by no one. It would then be interpreted by priests as they saw fit. In this way, the people would be kept stupid.

In the 3rd World, conservatives, reactionaries and the rich all oppose education of the masses. Education, especially higher education, is an indulgence only for the rich. Also they don’t want the poor getting educated enough to figure out they are getting a rotten deal in life. Then they might overthrow the rich.

Charles Murray is absolutely not a pro-education conservative in any way, shape or form. He’s a typical conservative, an elitist, as 100% of true conservatives are. He doesn’t believe in educating the masses. He’s also a Libertarian, so he probably doesn’t agree with the idea of public education at all.

“Where Is the California University System Headed?” by Sonia Rasmussen

A new post by guest author Sonia Rasmussen. I’m pleased to have her on board here and I hope she will write more articles for us.

The state of California has recently experienced a number of financial woes, and the poor economy has been detrimental to the state’s university system. Crowded classrooms, tuition hikes and reduced curricula plagued these schools as the recession peaked last year. Unfortunately, more state funding cuts are expected in the coming years—and experts warn the California university system may worsen before it improves.

In August 2011, Los Angeles Times reported that community college students in California would start pay higher fees for tuition, despite a dramatically thinned class list. The state reduced annual funding for two-year universities by roughly $400 million—and as a result, student fees were raised by $10 per unit.

At the time, Chancellor Jack Scott noted that 5 percent fewer classes would be offered at community colleges in California, which would leave more than 600,000 students out of the classrooms. Thousands of students are expected to turn to online universities and even accredited online doctorate programs, but hundreds of thousands are expected to remain without a university over the coming years.

Many four-year colleges in California faced similar deficits last summer, as all 23 Cal State University campuses recorded uncomfortably high enrollments, limited faculty members and increased expenses for books and classroom materials.

CSU Chancellor Charles Reed claimed he would try to avoid a mid-year tuition hike, though state funding for the university network was reduced by roughly $650 million and, as a result, student tuition rose by 22 percent from the previous year. This equated an increased annual expenditure of nearly $1,000 for all full-time undergraduates. Due to reduced classes, Cal State campuses turned down approximately 10,000 prospective applicants in 2011.

In March 2012, MSNBC reported that CSU would freeze enrollment beginning in Spring 2013 in response to further budget cuts—a shortfall of roughly $750 million. An additional reduction of $200 million could result if a tax initiative proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown fails on the November ballot. If the cuts reach their highest potential, spring enrollment could be cut from 70,000 to 25,000 accepted applicants.

Despite the cuts, KTLA Los Angeles reported last week that two CSU presidents (Fullerton and East Bay) will receive a 10 percent salary boost—the maximum increase allowed for a single fiscal year. The news sparked outrage among many students, despite claims from CSU’s Board of Trustees that the salary hikes were necessary to retain consistent leadership.

The trustees also pointed out that even after the increase, the two presidents still earned 20 percent less than their nationwide counterparts.

Though the University of California system has fared slightly better, it was also the subject of a controversial salary increase in March 2012 when President Mark Yudof defended an overall employee pension increase of more than $60 million. As California colleges continue a downward slide, their leaders are preparing for the first by padding their own bank accounts.

The future of state funding for California universities will rest on Governor Brown’s proposed tax initiative. If it passes, the state sales tax would increase by a quarter cent for four years. In addition, personal income taxes would be increased for individuals who make $250,000 or more annually.

Financial experts estimate the initial gain would surpass $9 billion, with gains of roughly $7 billion every successive year. Though the initiative would certainly help the plight of California schools, it has not yet been officially approved for the November ballot.

As the California government scrambles to save its faltering school system, students are paying higher prices for insufficiently funded campuses. The inherent unfairness of this dichotomy is underscored by the state’s uncertain future.

Even if the tax initiative is accepted and ultimately passes, the new monies will merely provide a temporary solution. In order to salvage its university program—one of the country’s largest—California must develop a sustainable, long-term plan for funding its schools and keeping students in their classrooms.

Indian Education: An Overview

Steve is a British man who is unfallibly optimistic about promoting India and its future for unfathomable reasons.

In the documentary I linked to, the kids in the slum went to school. The little girl spoke the best English in the family. Aren’t a lot of the population getting primary education and if so, I assume most of them learn to read, no?

Good Lord. Indian slums are wonderful! The kids even go to school!

Well, in rural India, in many places, there simply are no schools. I mean no schools. The teachers collect a salary, but they never show up for work, often because there is no school or maybe just because they don’t want to work. Typical Indian corruption.

In other places, there are schools but few or no teachers, so there’s no one to teach the kids. Many schools are virtually open air, and it’s quite common for schools to have no drinking water and especially no bathrooms. On top of all that, in rural India, it is very common to pull your kids out of school so they can go work. This is often done about age 9-10.

In Maoist areas, the schools never worked anyway because the teachers collected salary but then never went to work as is typical. After a while, the state starting using schools as bases for their state militias. They also stored explosives in there.

Pretty soon, the Maoists said fuck it and started blowing up the schools as they were nothing but bases anyway. The Indian press paraded this all over their front pages with headlines about “Maoists blowing up schools!” The Maoists then set up their own schools, and it was often the only schooling the kids ever got.

On top of everything else, school is often not in the native tongue of the students.

Higher education is a total disaster. All degrees, grades, everything, is for sale to the highest bidder. Want an A or a degree? Just pay off your professor or an administrator. For this reason, degrees from Indian universities are nearly worthless outside of India.

In many schools now, Dalits have formed gangs that threaten professors if they do not give good grades to Dalit students. If professors don’t give the student a good grade, the Dalit gangs threaten the professor or go beat him up.

I’m not sure how true this is, but a Brahmin friend of mine insists that this is the case in Karnataka.

India is truly Hell on Earth.

The Shining Path in the Universities

An absolutely stunning documentary, unfortunately all in Spanish, with never before seen footage of the chaos that reigned in Peru’s universities in the late 1980′s and early 1990′s. We see footage of violent riots on campus, fights with the riot police, heavily armed police and soldiers arresting students, students setting fires, university dormitory walls that are covered nearly every single inch with radical graffiti, radical graffiti covering the walls inside the universities and even inside classrooms, many huge marches of radical students with fists raised.

Any revolutionary movement that hopes to get anywhere is going to have to penetrate the cities, and then the universities. This is how the NPA is failing in Philippines. Previously, there were so many students volunteering that they nearly had to turn people away. As of 10 years ago, that flow had dried to a trickle. The Maoist movement in India has barely penetrated the cities, much less the universities. The Colombian guerrillas have little urban presence, and they have a lot of problems at the universities, though you can often seen guerrilla graffiti.

But the insurgency in El Salvador also took over the universities.

As of now, Peruvian universities are calm. Students are frightened of the years of turmoil and many are apolitical.

Peru’s such a pile of crap. Everyone is overjoyed that Fujimori defeated Sendero. Ok, that’s great. But is Peruvian society even 1% better 20 years later? I don’t think so. So what was so great about beating Sendero then? What exactly was accomplished. I never liked Sendero (way too vicious), but part of me almost wishes they would have won just to see how things would have shaken out.

A shocking documentary of what happens when a kickass insurgency turns society upside down and turns universities into bases and battlegrounds.

Ron Paul’s Education Plan

I don’t have a link handy, but I just read about Ron Paul’s education plan. In brief, he would immediately close down all US public schools. I am not sure if he would close down the US military academies or police academies, though it is an interesting question. Ron Paul would immediately shut down:

All US public:

1. Primary schools
2. Junior highs
3. High schools
4. Community colleges
5. Universities
6. Grad schools, such as:
7. Law schools
8. Medical schools
9. Nursing schools
10. Dental schools
11. Business schools

I suppose that they could stay open if they somehow got private funding to pay for their expenses. In other words, he would completely privatize education in the US.

He would also eliminate all public:

1. Scholarships
2. Student grants
3. Student loans

Obviously, only private schools would be available. See here for what US private school education is like.

Private school education in the US is extremely expensive. Most Americans would not be able to afford it. Not only would many Americans not be able to afford to go to college, millions to tens of millions of Americans would not be able to afford to send their kids to primary, junior high and high school.

An Overview of US Private Education

At the K-12 level, my experience is that private schools provide a vastly inferior education to public schools. I know this because my father worked for some of these capitalist private school rats for a while. It was a sickening experience.

Teachers were horribly underpaid and overworked, and the school scrimped on everything. Textbooks were very out of date. The school bought almost nothing. My Dad had to pay for many of his classroom expenses out of his pocket. He was constantly pressured to pass on failing students and to award A’s and B’s to C and D students. This is because these well-off Whites were paying big bucks for their private school education, and they were going to get good grades for their kids out of it come Hell or high water.

The owners of the school exploited the labor of the poorly paid teachers to the extent that they flew around in Lear Jets. The whole thing was just sick.

I worked for a bit for some private education capitalist worms in Venice. I drove down there, got my textbooks, and they gave me the names of the Hispanics who I was going to teach English to. They did pay me quite well, but they didn’t care one bit about whether or not their students learned anything.

That’s what was clear: they cared nothing about their students whatsoever. The slimeballs running it were young Yuppies who were parodies of disgusting little capitalist punks. They sat around in meetings all day talking about money, wore fancy clothes and drove nice cars. It was a revolting situation.

One of my students was a Colombian man who was obviously a drug dealer. He fired me because he didn’t like the way I was teaching him, so I called up the DEA and turned him in as a probable drug dealer, possibly cocaine (this was 1985 in Los Angeles). Haha.

I was so mad at my empolyers that I stole their set of textbooks at the end and quit. Then I gave the textbooks away to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

I received a teaching credential at USC. I must say that the education I received there was very, very good.

My perception is that private school education in the US is basically shit. It’s a ripoff. The only reason it exists is so Whites can fork over tons of money so their kids won’t have to go to school with Blacks and Hispanics. As far as the unregulated tutoring like I was doing, that’s along the same level. It’s a ripoff. Private schools frankly don’t care whether their students learn one damned thing. It’s all about the money, always the money, and only the money. It’s bullshit.

However, my experience at USC taught me that many private universities may indeed offer high quality education. This may be because they are competing with public schools and possibly other private schools. If they give you a shit education, after a while, word is going to get out, and people will just stop going. Besides, White people actually go to private colleges to get an actual education, not just to get away from the beaners and niggers.