The ineffectiveness of credentials and the un-electability of the minority factions [quotage}

Posted on By pukeko

The practitioners of the politics of identity can move a party to the point where it is simply unelectable. The most recent example of this is local to me: the oldest party in NZ — the NZ Labour party. The last PM of Labour was Helen Clark, who tolerated the right wing (she was of the “rainbow” — women, Maori and gays — and left factions). For she needed to know how her policies were affecting the working tradesmen and factory workers, who generally, though unionized (and Labour was founded as a political wing of the unions) were more socially conservative

Helen Clark’s strategy for winning elections had Labour building relationships of mutual benefit with sections of society who were in the minority – such as the gay community – or felt they were in the minority – such as the elderly.

A fair chunk of these minorities have formal representation within Labour’s organisation. But in seeking to secure their pound of flesh in terms of policy gains in return for votes, their agendas have become increasingly out of sync with the far more apolitical or conservative-leaning wider New Zealand public.

With the left of the party running its own agenda which puts purity ahead of pragmatism, Labour’s appeal is shrinking. Those voters whom Labour needs to capture will see Jones’ exit as a further narrowing of Labour’s appeal. The “broad church” is turning into The Temple of the Tyranny of the Minority.

It is not merely politics. It includes education. I have advocated for years that men treat university as a trade school — and I work for a university. One of the good things within the commonwealth is that each faculty stands and falls by itself — and the gender studies group and my place of employment had to merge with sociology recently because both are unpopular, with men and women alike, and within the commonwealth there is no such thing as a prerequisite.

We merely have vicious first year courses, where 80% will not be offered a place in professional courses. The morality of this can be questioned. But this is very, very profitable for the university.

If you filter all the literature and wisdom in the world through a socialist or identity politics lens, you will never learn wisdom. For some of the wisest or most challenging things are written by dead white males, or men with whom the politically correct disagree, or indeed most people find horrid.

Machiavelli, Ustinov, Diaghilev and de Sade are useful. Because they are reliably wrong, and if they advocate something doing the exact opposite is wise. But you have to read them to understand this.

I, on the other hand, don’t think it’s a problem at all. I will even go so far as to say that there are already too many men in four-year colleges, and it would be better if there were even fewer than there are today.

Let’s start with an obvious fact: a lot of young men who are in college on athletic scholarships do not stand to benefit from a college education, and in fact are being cheated. Why is it that young football and basketball players, who earn an enormous amount of revenue for colleges, are unpaid, despite the fact that the work they put in will probably never result in a paycheck? Is the semi-literate kid from the country or inner city who is a superior athlete but not professional caliber really going to benefit from college? I don’t think so. He’d be better off playing a few years in some minor league team and getting paid for it than taking classes he’ll never care about or fully understand. Best would be for him to learn a trade while playing semi-pro. If his athletic career doesn’t pan out, and it doesn’t for most college athletes, he’ll be a lot better off as a cop, firefighter, construction worker or even trucker than he would be as a burnt out athlete with no job skills whatsoever.

Next, there are the young men who are of average to high-average ability. Do they need a four-year degree for their future career? Far from it. What they need is experience on the job combined with some refinement of business and personal skills. A two-year degree will do the job just fine. Most mid level technical jobs do not require a full bachelor’s degree. Why incur debt and waste time taking useless classes from leftist ideologues when they could be earning money?

A full Baccalaureate should be reserved for men in the upper quartile of intellectual ability who can go on to be administrators, professionals and teachers. And even in that upper quartile it isn’t always necessary, because a lot of intelligent young men are better suited to getting things done than listening to lectures. Therefore, I think only about 15%, or one in six young men, really ought to go the distance in college.

As for young women, higher education is an enormous waste in most cases. … The old idea that it will help them find a suitable mate is so outdated as to be laughable, but it’s what keeps parents paying for college tuition for their daughters: they hope that daddy’s little girl will get hitched to some conscientious beta male instead of knocked up by a hoodlum. This is the single biggest reason parents send their daughters to college, and it’s a gamble that will only pay off about half the time these days as the female to male ratio approaches three to two at universities (not all college-educated men marry college-educated women, or marry at all). Not a good bet for roughly $100k, but it supports legions of hard-left ideologues, which explains the enthusiasm for the failing system in mainstream media outlets.

The best-case scenario would be a total collapse of the education bubble, and thousands of useless academics bagging groceries at Whole Foods while electricians, plumbers and network administrators who went to trade school drive well-built vehicles and live in single family homes, and their wives eat healthy food and have plenty of time to raise the kids.

Unless you are in the very bright group (that is two to four standard deviations above the mean) college is not going to help you. If you are, college will help you once you have got through the first couple of years of sheer memorization and regurgitation and you can start questioning what is going on. The University should act as a sheltered workshop for the very bright — but most young people would do better getting a job and working hard. That, at least where I live, will lead to developing a portfolio of jobs, with some resilience. Credentials are now risky. A law degree is now a credential for working as a barista. I know many young women and men who have nursing and teaching degrees and cannot get that first job they need to complete to get registered within those professions. medicine is not that far behind.

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Update

More leftist idiocy.