When Ideologies Tackle

From Detroit:



That seems like a fair reading of Genesis 3:21.  Does PETA have a response to the gentleman?

From Massachusetts:
[R]oughly two dozen boys competing on girls teams in Massachusetts because their schools do not have boys swimming programs. They are able to do so because of the open access amendment to the state constitution, which was voted into law in the 1970s and mandates that boys and girls must be afforded equal access to athletics.... 
With every stroke they take, the boys are displacing more than water. They could knock girls off the awards podium and make it harder for girls to qualify for All-Star honors and the postseason.
There's a fairly easy solution to this, which is to honor Title IX by simply including women in all sports.  Of course, almost none of them will be able to compete in "soccer" or "swimming," as opposed to "women's soccer" or "girl's swimming."

A few will, and good for them.  It turns out that top part-of-one-percent are the ones who really get things done anyway:

The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage.
If that's where all human progress is, we need to rethink our approach to education, and how we train our children for life.  If you're not in the top half-percent, you might as well take up Zen gardening:  it's a surer way to achieve internal peace.  Accept your limits:  let go.

5 comments:

Eric said...

How Confucian.

Grim said...

That it might just be. Our overlords seem entranced with China, these days.

But say it's right; even then, there are only very few of us who will ever write poetry, or take to war for love instead of accident, or know a vision of God. Maimonides said that prophecy was so certain, for those who did the work of purification, that the absence of prophecy was miraculous in itself: it could come about, that is, only because God got involved and stopped it for His own purposes.

Consciousness is emergent, we've agreed; but what, exactly, does that mean? What precisely is emerging, and where was it hiding?

Eric said...

You're making my head hurt.

Grim said...

Now you're talking like a Buddhist instead of a Confucian.

douglas said...

I tend toward the position that we would be better off telling some kids the truth as we see it- that they might not be cut out for college and might be better off studying a trade or clerical skill for instance. Those are perfectly reasonable and honorable paths to travel, why should we be averse to it? I'm rather against telling every kid to 'chase your dreams, whatever they are- anything is possible'. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are a lot more likely that others. Why swim against the current? If you choose that, you'd better be as driven as a sockeye salmon.