bigWOWO » Education

The Purpose of Asian American Studies

bigWOWO — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 06:31:35 +0000

In another internet group, someone posted the following article: Has Asian American Studies Failed? Take a look at it. It’s an article by a professor of Asian American Studies who argues that maybe Asian American studies has failed, since Asian Americans don’t seem to be shaping the public dialogue. This was the very first topic I ever blogged about. Back to my roots, baby.

While I agree that we haven’t been shaping the public dialogue, I don’t think that AAS has failed. The purpose of Asian American Studies is to study, not to change. I don’t know if everyone would agree with this since AAS came about by people who fought for change on the streets. But I would submit that while AAS was conceived on the streets amid protests and sit-ins, the purpose of the departments themselves were always to transmit knowledge of literature and history, rather than to teach people how to create change.

Think about it. In a typical AAS class, you learn about literature and history. You learn facts. You learn interpretations. You don’t take any classes to learn to make change. If that were the purpose, the curriculum might be different. Instead of just learning literature and history, you might be required to also study:

a) Management: so you could learn to motivate and lead groups of people and to fire deadbeats and Orientalists

b) Accounting: so you could learn to stay in the black with any organization you run

c) Government: so you could learn to lobby for effective change

d) Marketing: so you could spread the message

f) Fundraising: so you could generate a dangerous warchest

g) Law: so you could push the envelope and not end up in prison

If change creators were the end lesson, they’ve totally been going about it wrong. But come to think of it, this sounds like fun. Maybe Asian American Studies ought to have a more activist bent.

(Pic from here)

Our Grade School and Higher Education Disparity

bigWOWO — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:00:05 +0000

Saw the above video on how Americans drop out of engineering. One young man talks about how he took lots of math and science in high school, including calculus, but he was somehow unprepared for science and engineering at the college level. He had interest in the subject but was not adequately prepared.

What is crazy and makes little sense is that America has one of the best systems of higher education in the world, and yet we have one of the worst systems of grade school education.

I had a debate with a public school social worker friend just a month or so ago. He argued that public schools are much better at education than private schools because they were versed in dealing with a wider variety of students. While he’s right that they deal with a wider variety of students–you’ll find more crack heads and gang bangers in public school than in private school, and public school teachers have to deal with that–he’s completely wrong on the education thing. Private schools are MUCH better at actual teaching–partly because teachers don’t have to deal with crack heads and gang bangers. Plus, they have more parental involvement and parental control. This is why politicians and rich people, including those who appoint and fire public school administrators, usually send their kids to private schools. If you’re a crappy and lazy teacher in public school, they keep you around and give you a comfortable pension that could potentially pay millions. If you’re a crappy and lazy teacher in a private school, they have a board of trustees to deal with people like you. Private schools have job security, but only for good teachers. As conservative talk show host Michael Berry correctly points out, private schools usually pay their teachers much less than public schools, and yet teachers clamor for these jobs.

In Oregon, we have one of the worst teacher-student ratios in the country, along with one of the shortest school years. What makes it particularly difficult is that there are so many different views on this subject. Lots of the problems probably start at home–parents who don’t encourage education–but we need to get serious about education in this country. It’s a travesty that our public grade schools and high schools are not preparing our young people to meet the standards of our colleges. A good public education ought to be a right.

Don’t Check Asian

bigWOWO — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 23:28:52 +0000

Thank you, Dali, for sending this article: Some Asians’ College Strategy: Don’t Check Asian. The article interviews some hapa Asian women with White last names (because their fathers are White) who decided to better their chances of getting into good colleges by checking the White box or not checking a race at all on the application. We’ve seen people who are full Asian actually change their last names to get around admission policy racism, but it’s probably a LOT easier to just be born with a White last name. What this also means is that if you’re an Asian American female who wants to do what’s best for your kids, it might make sense to just join the Club.

Overall, I think this is a good strategy for them. You gotta do what you gotta do. It’s just sad that this kind of racism is still legal in America.

Asian Racism and the “Asian of Reason”

China to Cancel College Majors Where Grads Can’t Find Work

bigWOWO — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:15:59 +0000

China is having a similar problem to the U.S.–people are graduating college and are not able to find work. But instead of a laissez-faire attitude, they’re taking the reins and chopping those majors that don’t pay: China To Cancel College Majors That Don’t Pay. The article says:

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.

Get your humanities majors while you still can! If this were the U.S., psychology, U.S. history, and military technologies would be among the first to go. (They haven’t released any info on which Chinese majors would get cut.)

I’m not sure what I feel about this. I suppose education has to become more efficient in this day and age of high unemployment, so maybe ya gotta do what ya gotta do. Y’all know my views on the humanities, but maybe this could provide opportunities for the U.S. to maintain its standing in higher education as more talented arts people from China come to the U.S. to study. Then we can all be unemployed together. (On a serious note, people always say that humanities majors will wind up serving fries at Mickey D’s. But I’ve never met a fry handler with an arts degree.)

Lawyers, Law School, and Law Salaries

bigWOWO — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 17:00:22 +0000

Lawyer training takes place at the firm, not the university

Two interesting articles about law and lawyering in the NY Times.

The first was an article about how law schools focus on theory rather than how to be a lawyer. Lots of law schools hire professors who have never practiced law, and often law clients wind up paying for a new lawyer’s on-the-job training. It has always been like this, but it’s more of an issue in recent days because: a) clients don’t want to spend the money anymore, and b) many law students are having trouble finding work these days and paying off those big student loans.

It could depend on timing. Law is much harder financially than it used to be. The second article (which I found because I tagged the words “Asian American” and this link was in the article) was about a young (is mid-30′s still considered young? am I still young?) law degreed couple who recently bought an apartment in New York.

Jennifer Betit Yen and Peyton Worley

Ms. Jennifer Betit Yen (who is hapa) and Mr. Peyton Worley were both high level lawyers, then Betit Yen got hit with the acting bug and moved to LA. They then relocated to New York City, and now it looks like he’s still a lawyer while she’s still doing the thespian/writing thing in New York. For a while they were paying $5,000 a month in rent. Rent! That’s $60k a year in after-tax income on (probably) one salary, which means they probably have to make $90k a year just to pay rent…for a two bedroom apartment! They finally bought their own apartment for $1.025 million dollars.

Man, not only are these numbers obscene to my Portland ears–$1.025 million will buy you a Miami Vice-style house in the nice area of Lake Oswego in my area–but they are obscene on one lawyer’s salary, who graduated law school in 2001. Ten years apparently makes a HUGE difference in the graduates of now and then.

(Disclaimer: I realize that there are superstars in all fields, and Mr. Worley is clearly in that group, so if I knew someone who really loved law and was thinking of doing it, I would probably encourage them to still go to law school today. Someone with superior talent can always make it in any field. But these days, one probably has to be closer to a superstar to make it work. It’s much more of sink-or-swim type of environment.)

Screen Time and Education

bigWOWO — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:09:25 +0000

I saw these two seemingly contradictory articles in the NY Times recently.

The first article was about a rich, private school in Silicon Valley which discourages the use of technology as a learning tool: At Waldorf School in Silicon Valley, Technology Can Wait. Parents, many of whom work at Apple, Google, EBay, and Yahoo, pay thousands of dollars to send their kids to this school, and yet there isn’t a single computer on campus. Instead they learn with pens, paper, and bright colored chalk. One father who is a Google employee says:

“It’s supereasy. It’s like learning to use toothpaste,” Mr. Eagle said. “At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There’s no reason why kids can’t figure it out when they get older.”

The second article talks about how children of privilege and children of less privilege both have more screen time these days: Screen Time Higher Than Ever for Children. Privileged kids have access to their parents’ iPads, while poorer kids are more likely to have televisions in their rooms.

I agree with the Waldorf tradition. Technology can keep children busy, but there’s more room for learning when screens are off. If your child wants to be a programmer and learn computer programming early on, that can always be a hobby that he or she can teach himself or herself.

More Free Market Woes

bigWOWO — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 20:08:29 +0000

This in the NY Times:

A new report suggests that American students would do well to major in science, technology, engineering or math.

The report, based on government data analyzed by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, shows that professions that depend heavily on skills learned in these fields are the second-fastest growing occupational group in the United States, after health care.

While traditional fields like computer engineering and laboratory research make up about 5 percent of the work force, demand for science, technology, engineering and math skills is spreading far beyond, to occupations in manufacturing, utilities, transportation and mining, as well as to sales and management. Facing a shortage of trained people, many companies in the United States are having to recruit from abroad, the study’s authors say. –MOTOKO RICH

Everything is correct about this article until the very last sentence. What the authors failed to note was that there are LOTS of unemployed engineers in America today. Walk down where the Occupy Wall Street people are gathered, and I can guarantee you’ll find lots of good programmers, scientists, and other trained professionals.

The truth is that companies in America don’t have to recruit from abroad. They choose to. It’s much cheaper to hire an Indian or a Korean engineer for half the price of an American engineer, even after paying the fees to make the H1B Visa go through. They have to make it sound like they need a programmer from overseas in order to meet H1B guidelines, but they’re all here. Nothing against these foreign engineers–they’re skilled and talented workers–but it’s also hard for Americans who can’t afford to make just $45 k a year. When these foreign engineers retire, they’ll take their money back to their home country, while Americans are stuck without pensions and jobs. The big winners are the corporations.

That’s the conundrum facing Americans today. Sure, you can get a STEM degree and graduate with $100k in debt. But then you’ll be competing in a job market where big tech companies can just as easily hire STEM workers who will work for $45k a year.

This is yet another way that rich are taking from the middle class. It’s a boondoggle. To be honest, I think that even if you’re a STEM type, and you love math and science, I think you should do math and science. But you’re best off mixing your studies with some humanities. At least you can then differentiate yourself from your competition abroad.

(pic from here)

Education IS Oversold, But We Also Need More Education

bigWOWO — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 06:31:42 +0000

Ha-Joon Chang’s book helped me to reconcile some differing but not mutually exclusive viewpoints that I’ve held in the past, namely that:

a) Education is oversold (also see here)

and

b) We need more education in the humanities (also see here)

In “Thing 17,” Chang compares the literacy of different countries and shows how increased literacy doesn’t necessarily mean that a country will do better. In 1960′s, for example, the literacy rate of the Philippines was 72% compared with a rate of 54% in Taiwan, and the per capita income of the Philippines was almost twice that of Taiwan, but Taiwan’s per capita income today is nearly ten times that of the Philippines (180). The main reason a nation’s economy grows, as Chang shows, is because of its government and institutions, not because of it’s education.

Indeed, Chang mentions, we often don’t use a lot of what we learn in school during our economically productive lives. How many of us use calculus or chemistry in our daily day jobs? Even in our college studies, very few of us outside of STEM, medicine, or law use skills that we picked up in college–or if we use such skills, we don’t use most of them. Most of us learn our jobs by doing our jobs. Education is good, Chang says, to enlighten us and to make us better citizens, but it doesn’t do all that much for productivity.

On the other hand, there does come a point when a proportion of a population gets educated and passes a critical breaking point so that people now need a university degree. Chang writes:

“When, say, 50 per cent of the population goes to university, not going to university is implicitly declaring that you are in the bottom half of the ability distribution, which is not the greatest way to start your job search.”

Most jobs don’t require a college education to perform, but the companies often won’t hire for these positions unless the applicant has a college degree. Economically speaking, it’s a waste of resources–an economy based on meaningless prestige.

This chapter reconciled my views. Education is oversold as it relates to economic productivity. We shouldn’t be wasting resources by sending putting more money towards education during an economic crisis. Certainly we could devote money to research for better technologies that could put people to work, but a more educated populace isn’t going to do much to lift us out of this crisis–already we have so many PhDs and educated college grads who are out of work, even those who are trained in STEM fields. At the same time, education creates a more informed citizenship, which is important. Down the line–especially when the economy rebounds–more educated citizens can help us thrive as a culture.

My opinion right now is that perhaps the government should not put more money towards higher education; the government should use its resources to encourage work. It should do this by encouraging demand, by using a carrot and stick approach to economic stimulus. College is overkill for most jobs. That’s not to say that education is bad–those who have aspirations AND the grades that indicate future college success and academic interest should move forward, even in these bad times. We should encourage education because education is good. At the same time, we should separate it from economic productivity. We already have lots of educated people who are collecting unemployment. Right now we don’t need to boost supply; we need to boost demand.

(Pic from here.)

Snowlipsism

bigWOWO — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 16:17:23 +0000

Thanks to TZ and King for our internal discussion.

Here is a Fighting 44s koan that Xian wrote a while back: If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no White Man to hear it, did it really fall?

I’ve noticed that there happens to be a trend among some commenters on this blog. I won’t name names, but I’ve seen it so many times that I have to put a name on it. Every so often–well, more than every so often–we’ll get an Asian American commenter who can’t seem to think a single thought without using White people as a compass. You’ll say something like, “wow, Bruce Lee was a great martial artist,” and they’ll say, “Well, look at Georges St. Pierre and Brock Lesnar.” Or you’ll say, “Wow, Zhang Ziyi looks great,” and they’ll say, “Well did you see Jennifer Love Hewitt?” Or you’ll talk about Asian American literature, and they’ll talk about how White literature is much more reflective of reality (whose reality?). Or they’ll go on to one of the HBD threads and trash people of color while talking about what great work HBD pseudo-scientists are doing these days.

What’s strange about this phenomenon is that it’s Asian dudes who hold these beliefs. Black people and Hispanic people and all other people seem to see the contradictions in the hype. There are Asian women who have these beliefs in a more subtle way–see certain members of the AFCC–but some Asian dudes will just get in there and battle it out about how White men are oppressed by people of color, how people of color are holding back dialogue by not believing in HBD, and how the way things are are the way things will always be. They’ll talk about how illogical we’re being by assuming equality until there is proof that people are unequal.

I posed the question to King and TZ, and the term that we (King in the end) came up with for this phenomenon is “snowlipsism.” It’s kind of like “solipsism,” which is the belief that only the self exists, but it’s “snow,” referring to the Whiteness that snowlipsists need, believe, and defend. These people believe that only White people exist. For these Asian people, life outside the White race simply doesn’t exist. If a tree falls in a forest, there’d better be a White man to take note of it, otherwise it didn’t fall. That tree could fall on an Asian dude or Black dude and kill him, and a snowlipsist won’t take note unless a White person is there to observe. Or unless the tree falls on the White dude’s house and creates property damage.

My theory is that we’ve been tricked into believing that we’re more logical than we really are. That’s the stereotype–the nerdy, logical Asian dude. Racists will continue smiling and hoodwinking whoever falls for it in order to maintain the hierarchy. Unfortunately, snowlipsism isn’t a form of logic. It’s just another snow-job.

(pic from here)

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The Jews and the Chinese and the Humanities (Podcast)

bigWOWO — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 05:16:22 +0000

A Chinese guy who isn't me; a Jewish guy who isn't Hertsel

This is a podcast that I’d been hoping to do for a while. On this podcast, my good friend Hertsel and I discuss the Jews, the Chinese, and the humanities. It’s about fifty minutes, and it’s 46.2 MBs. Download it here, or listen to it here:

I’ve been thinking a lot about the humanities over the years. As most of you know (and as I mention in the podcast), I had two big posts on the humanities: David Brooks’s The Big Shaggy and Michael Roth’s Why Liberal Arts Matter. ChineseMom and I had a podcast that addressed much of the same issue. In this highly informative podcast, Hertsel and I discuss the Jewish view of the humanities vs. the modern Chinese American view. We talk about how (some) Jewish parents raise their kids with respect to the arts, and how the arts are important.

This topic/podcast is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I remember in college how lots of Chinese American students used to downplay the humanities, saying that humanities majors would someday get jobs serving fries, and how arts majors, if they didn’t go into fast food, would all someday find themselves working for engineers. Years later, we realized this was all untrue; I was talking to a friend just a couple of weeks ago about how wrong we all were. Humanities majors, in fact, often rise to the top. I can’t even recall a U.S. President who majored in anything other than humanities (usually economics or history). I believe this outward dismissal of the humanities hurts Asian Americans more than any other issue afflicting us. The Jews, as we discuss on the podcast, shaped their own narratives. We’ve done good work in getting our stories out there, but we can do better.

My favorite part was when Hertsel exhorts us to tell our stories. I was talking to him after the podcast and said that we should do this again, maybe on the same topic, maybe on a different topic that could use some dissection by a Jewish guy and a Chinese guy. Enjoy the podcast, and sound off below with any opinions. If there are any topics you’d like us to discuss, please feel free to share ideas as well.

(pic from here)