Posts by Rich of Observationz
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To give Kevin the benefit of the doubt, some people deliberately choose to ignore the finer points of English usage when typing posts, or are unable to spell due to dyslexia.
I think it's a good idea to state that in advance, otherwise people will naturally assume that a traditional education at a top NZ school has left them unable to spell and punctuate.
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Oh please, no names on papers and the marker didn't teach the course, of course.
In my limited understanding of how the academic world works, this would be increasingly hard above second year university level. I believe that in most cases the lecturer giving the course would be the only one with enough understanding to set and mark a paper in it. No?
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NZ companies can't afford to pay more
(apostrophe added, "can't" is a contraction of cannot and thus takes an apostrophe)
Often they can. In my field, a high-end resource can be several times as productive as an average person. But most companies won't pay their staff because it disrupts the salary structure and/or sticks in the craw of an owner/manager who sees the money coming out of their own pocket.
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...small matters like understanding the fundamental workings of the universe to dreamers and eggheads overseas...
I blame Rutherford. We're overquota on fundamental universal physics for about the next 500 years.
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I don't work for the government, I'm an IT consultant.
Typically the reason companies I have dealt with have failed to recruit staff is that they weren't prepared to offer the kind of salary and career package needed to hire and retain good people.
People typically migrate for a range of reasons, but most of those I know were either looking for social excitements, or wanting to pursue a specialism in some form of rocket science that doesn't exist in NZ (option pricing software, racecar engine management, etc).
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Finland was the only country that performed significantly better than New Zealand in reading
As in reading the instructions for the gun:
Load, Aim, Fire(sorry but I couldn't resist)
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I don't believe NZ has a serious lack of smart people.
As a country of 4 million, we are never going to have a particularly good match between available specialists and jobs.
There is a healthy interchange process with New Zealanders working overseas and people from abroad coming here to work. It helps that NZ is (at the moment) an attractive working destination for many people - especially, I've noticed, Americans wanting to escape the Bush regime.
If individual businesses can't hire the people they want, then in my experience it's usually because their opportunity or salary package isn't competitive.
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KevinHicks - do you want to reveal how long ago you went to school and where?
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You want the utopian anarchist analysis or the realistic public policy suggestion? How about I do both:
< Utopian Anarchist >
Education under capitalism is intrinsically about weeding kids into sheep and goats in order to populate the various strata of society.
In an anarchist society, this would be replaced by system that alows all kids to realise their potential as individuals and contributors for society. That society would not be mediated by money (certainly not by accumulated wealth).Thus, "Enterpreneurialism", which is about using ones talents to accumulate wealth, would have no place in an anarchist education system. (Nor indeed, would a national curriculum).
</Utopian Anarchist>
<Realistic Policy>
Our education system is pretty succesful in enabling smart, motivated kids to achieve their goals. We have an adequate supply of high-end graduates and a reasonable *average* level of literacy.
Where it falls down is in failing a substantial proportion of the population. This includes those who never learn to read and those who spend years learning skills that have few corresponding jobs (mostly in the art/media area, I'm afraid). These people often wind up in the underclass.
The education system needs to concentrate on those who are failing, not (as it seems to at present) on those who go from a top decile school to a law degree at Auckland Uni. It needs to move away from accepting that those with poor parental involvement will intrinsically fail. It needs to stop juding schools on their ability to super-serve a tiny minority of elite students.
We need to look at a curriculum that will enthuse the section of the population that presently fails. We need to switch funding to lower decile schools and remove hidden selection, school fees and subsidies for private schools. The "Hogwarts model" of basing education on the 19th century English public school needs to go.
The NZ education system needs to turn out kids who, whatever their abilitiy level or background, are able to lead fulfilled lives.
If we did that, incidentally, we'd reduce a lot of the problems of substance abuse, gambling, crime and other social dysfunction. Without the authoritarian approach of banning everything to protect the disadvantaged.
</Realistic Policy>
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I think the ban on P is an example of the failure of prohibition. In countries where there is a supply of better, safer drugs (like MDMA) methamphetamine is almost unheard of.
But we've gone there before.