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Archives -
December, 2008
Santa Claus? – December 31, 2008
I’ve just been catching up on some reading and enjoyed
this column about whether or not parents should foster a belief in Santa. It was
published last week in the Washington Post and written by Carl
Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow and Under Pressure: Rescuing Our Children
From the Culture of Hyper-Parenting. Relax and enjoy. And have a very happy New
Year. (The big news around here is that I am planning to stay up for the
midnight kiss and champagne for the first time in – oh, about 40 years.)
Cheers.
Posted: 2008/12/31 5:56 PM
Devaluing the Currency of Education – December 29, 2008
I recently read in our local paper about degree scams. In one instance, a
variety of people – including a manager in the registrar’s office at a
community college, a U.S. State Department official, a police tactical trainer
and a law student who had been offered a job articling with a prestigious law
firm – had paid thousands of dollars for fake university degrees. Some of
these people admitted they knew their degrees were bogus and others claimed they
had submitted course work or said they thought they were awarded real degrees
for life experiences. The law student suggested to the reporter that she had
been a victim of identity fraud before admitting to both the lie and the phony
degree. Some of those who admitted knowing about the fake credentials said it
was “an ego thing;” others had based careers on their degrees.
Putting aside the law student’s alarming level of
dishonesty, I have to ask if she able to do her course work because of some
prior experience and knowledge that would have earned her credit for life
experience if such had been legitimately available. And what about the standards
of the law firm that had offered her a position? Did they put such value in the
currency of her credentials that they overlooked due diligence?
Or perhaps they didn’t care much about the credentials
and had another way to judge her potential success with their company. Maybe
they were looking for something other than framed pieces of paper hanging on the
wall or a march of letters after a name – the symbols of having been turned
into an “expert” on the educational production line. Not likely, you say.
But if not, then why do we legitimately bestow these symbols on certain people
who were never processed? Honorary degrees are regularly awarded by universities
to politicians, writers and other public figures who ironically have often made
their mark without attending a post-secondary institution (or at least not the
one giving them the degree). And while few would suggest that honorary degrees
are bought like those from diploma mills, many honorary degrees are awarded to
those who can donate large sums of money to the granting institution, or at
least provide it with a profile that can attract funds from others.
At any rate, as Harvard’s
Howard Gardner wrote in his 1991 book The Unschooled Mind, schools at all levels
have increasingly substituted test results and various credentials for genuine
knowledge and demonstrated understanding. And as I wrote in my book
Challenging Assumptions in Education, “Since studies show there is little correlation
between education levels and job performance (notwithstanding the specialized
technical training that can be essential), there is no reason to judge
people’s employability (or anything else for that matter, except their ability
to write tests and essays) by their degrees. So those of us who are in hiring
positions can, in some cases, reconsider policies that require university or
college degrees. We can look at a wide range of other qualifications, such as
job and practical life experience, related skills and level of maturity. To
really change the cult-of-experts mentality, many of us will have to examine our
own past university experiences, separate our identities as people from our
university degrees...and try letting our names appear naked on our business
cards.” Maybe that would eliminate the problem of diploma mills.
Posted: 2008/12/29 3:25 PM
We Need a New Way of Tracking the Costs – December 1, 2008
The global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than
through the current banking crisis, according to a recently released EU-funded
study. The report puts the annual cost of forest loss at between $2 trillion and
$5 trillion (or about seven percent of global GDP), as opposed to the estimated
$1 trillion to $1.5 trillion lost on Wall Street during the current economic
“crisis.”
Speaking to
BBC News at the recent World Conservation Congress, study leader and Deutsche
Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev emphasized that the cost of natural declining
natural capital dwarfs losses on the financial markets and has been happening
every year. (Watch Sukhdev on YouTube talk about the WWF’s
Living Planet Report.)
This calculation of the financial cost of environmental
degradation is a new way of looking at things, at least among the guys at the
top. And it might be too new to be on the radar of most of the 8,000 delegates
from 180 countries who attending the international climate talks beginning today
in Poznan, Poland. If it’s not front-of-mind, the current economic worries will make it hard
for them to keep fighting global warming. Lower oil prices mean less of an
incentive to invest in renewables. Already, wind and solar power companies are
slashing spending and the value of their stocks is plummeting. That’s crazy,
given the urgent need for renewable energy!
However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has
said that it would cost less than 0.12 per cent of global gross domestic (GDP)
product every year until 2030 to avert the worst of climate change. So what are
we waiting for? I think we need a paradigm shift, a whole new way of looking at
quality of life that goes far beyond the GDP and the stock market, and that
questions the value of growth at any cost. We’re fixated on the GDP’s rise
or fall as an indicator of how well things are progressing or not. But the
problem is that the GDP just measures spending and makes no distinctions between
transactions that add to well-being and those that diminish it; as long as money
changes hands, the GDP increases. For instance, under the GDP, environmental
pollution ends up being a positive because it creates economic activity – and
is even counted positively twice: once when it’s created and again when it’s
cleaned up. And the result of that pollution, which is often illness such as
cancer, also ends up on the plus side of the ledger because it, too, creates
economic activity. This mindset also affects families because, for instance, it
doesn’t account for things like the value of household and volunteer work,
which are invisible in the GDP because no money changes hands. And it values
schooling – no matter how awful the quality – because, once again, it
creates economic activity.
There is a rising awareness of this problem and there are
some solutions being proposed. I’ve been writing about them for decades. Here
is a
simple article explaining the
issues, that will appear in Natural Life in March/April 2009 but is now on the
website because it’s too important to wait.
Posted:
2008/12/01 9:30 PM
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