jasonyyun

this feels like the opposite of safe-space talk, actually - people who are considering this are actively finding their own spaces (vs. asking existing spaces to consider their needs).

They don't detect _copyright_, as far as I know. Videos are sometimes blocked or muted because a copyright-holder claims a violation, but this is a mass action based on the video or song itself, NOT on the copyright of the song. Because of this, you occasionally see videos that are posted by a legitimate user (for example, the band itself) that are deleted as part of a sweep, then restored later once it becomes clear that it's not supposed to have been deleted.

Here's the problem though: if you're interested in meritocracy, it has to be a true meritocracy all the way through. You can't ignore other parts of the process and then, only at the very end, say that the quality of work is the only thing that matters. Sure, if boys and girls at home and in our education system were treated equally, encouraged to pursue the same things, given the same opportunities...then yes, you could make this argument.

The problem, though, is that this isn't the case. Women in the United States aren't shying away from STEM disciplines because they're generally intellectually incapable of it; it's because they encounter strong societal pressures against doing so. Other countries--I'm thinking of Romania in particular, which sent a large number of IMO medalists to my university during my years there--have many more women in math and science. (And no, they're not bad at what they do.) Unless you're going to try to claim that Romanian women are somehow different or more talented than American women, it seems clear that the ways that our society and educators are affecting them are responsible for this disparity.

And once you take that into consideration, the argument for improving this problem starts to become a lot more reasonable. It bears a lot of similarity to that line from Lyndon Johnson: " You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." It's pretty similar here. Jean (and others dedicated to this cause) aren't interested in "skewing" the game unfairly. Instead, they contend that because of issues earlier in the process, whatever they may be, the gender gap isn't and shouldn't be the natural order of things.

Expanding on grandalf's thought, I suspect that the alternative--that is, opting out of school to pursue a career or other business opportunity--can come off as overly selfish or capitalistic. Education is still often considered to have some sort of intrinsic value (though, of course, this is changing as students are increasingly viewing college for its instrumental value toward finding jobs); jumping straight into a career, on the other hand, is often associated (perhaps unfairly) with generating money, which has only instrumental value.

This might be an unfair representation; there is, of course, intrinsic value to many people in pursuing a career that they're passionate about, and it's becoming increasingly the case that college is seen as having instrumental value. In the minds of many, though, college is still seen as more inherently valuable, and the arguments against going to college are just making us more and more capitalistic, at the expense of culture, education, and whatnot.

All discussions about his article aside (whether it's a valid viewpoint at all; whether it makes any real arguments), it's a little unclear to me exactly what he's doing. Can anyone clarify?

I've looked at uncollege.org, and the "What" page tells me that it's "a social movement support self-directed higher education." This means very little sense to me, and I'm sure I'm not unique in that.

Then he elaborates:

(1) "Writing a book about learning from life." Wait, what? This says absolutely nothing! In order to help you learn on your own, I will write a book about helping you learn on your own. But this is terrifically unhelpful; "learning on your own" is a massive area that needs to be specific in order to be of any use at all. As it stands, it's really no different from "PowerPoint for Dummies"--which, while useful for some people, is hardly revolutionary in sparking people to consider not going to college.

(2) "Developing experiential learning programs at existing colleges that are truly student directed." Again, this says absolutely nothing to me. Of course we all want students to have valuable, interactive college experiences. The problem is in determining how to do that, not determining that it should be done!

(3) "Building a platform to validate self-directed learning, allowing people to demonstrate their talents in an online portfolio and bypass the college degree." This gets somewhere, I think--he's finally coming up with some sort of idea. But it's unclear how this is superior to existing solutions (people already provide portfolios and examples of past work, and standardized tests exist to address this to some degree), and--as with the other cases--the execution is critical.

I don't mean to condemn everything about Stephens here. It does sound like he's motivated toward a worthy cause, and while I think college still has value for a lot of people, I think success in this realm would be fantastic. But it seems clear to me that his ideas are very undeveloped, and I'm very skeptical of the likelihood of his success based on what I've seen so far. Thiel might think differently--that the fact that he dropped out indicates some drive and initiative that'll lead him to success--but I disagree, and think that this is just a prime example of why it's good for many people to study for a few years.

I don't want to start another topic, so I'll leave this - an excellent response from a user on Quora on the topic: http://www.quora.com/Parenting/Is-Amy-Chua-right-when-she-ex...

Thanks for the concern... I saw this a minute after the post went up on Facebook and talked to a friend + colleague of BZ. He called Princeton Public Safety about 10 minutes after it was posted, and they informed him that they were on the way and that someone else had already called in. He also called a friend of his (J) who's in the area, and I think J is going over to check on him now.