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Category: Educational (Page 25 of 27)

Educational topics and useful things to know.

A College Education is Not for Everybody

March 2, 2008 / / 5 Comments

The education system in the U.S. applies a one-size-fits-all approach. Everyone is expected to to do K-12 and go on to college. This is what kids are told from first grade on and they are told “everyone can and should get a college education”. K-12 education is aimed solely at college prep and I submit that this whole approach is wrong and at the root of many social problems in this country. At some point in the early 20th century, Americans got the idea that everyone’s goal should be college. This is misguided and ends up harming a large percentage of kids, leaving many of them at age 18 with a diploma in their hands, no marketable skills, and the sense that they are a failure. Since kids are told all along that college is the way to go for everybody, the ones who don’t make it feel like failures because they didn’t make it to college “like everyone is supposed to”. These kids’ self-esteem is accordingly low.

Kids who don’t make it to college are often condemned to an unfulfilling life of relative poverty and dependence, working at a worthless job that provides no satisfaction or sense of achievement–the stereotypical hamburger flipper. If they have kids of their own they can’t survive without food stamps because the unskilled jobs they can get, assuming they can get a job at all, pay poverty level wages. For some, upward mobility consists of getting into a life of crime, selling drugs, or other activity that brings in a decent amount of income and such alternatives don’t appear so bad “because they are a failure or a dropout anyway”. None of this should happen. The concept that everyone needs to go to college is nonsense–a pipe-dream conjured up by educators with little sense of reality or human nature. The problem I describe would not happen if the educational system took into account the reality that not everyone needs a college education nor is everyone suited for a college education. What everyone needs is a good job and the self-respect that comes from having and performing a good job. For some this means college, for others it definitely does not.

My suggestion is to copy the European educational system. At 12 or 13 years of age, kids are given an aptitude test. If they pass the test, they proceed to Hochschule and Universität (high school and university). If they don’t pass they go to a trade school, and trade school in Europe is nothing like trade school in the United States. It is interesting, engaging, challenging, and fulfilling. Most of the training takes place in industry and small business, not in a school. Almost all of the kids’ schooling takes place in a real work environment so when they graduate they really do know their trade and usually get hired by the company that trained them. What’s more, they get paid in the process. This is how it worked in Germany in the 60’s and 70’s when I was there, and again in the 90’s when I was there. Germany and Austria are still running the same system today.

Out of such a system there are no “dropouts”. You don’t end up with high school graduates who still know nothing, and more importantly, have no skills at all. I have met 35 year old men (white guys) in the United States who deal drugs and constantly get into trouble, and in talking to them I learn that they have a diploma but no skills whatsoever, have never actually done anything productive in their lives, have never built or made anything. Some have never even used a screwdriver or a power tool–nothing. Their self-esteem is zero. They readily admit that they are useless and only know how to steal and deal. There’s something extremely wrong with an education system that turns out people like that. And these are men who had opportunity, not poor “ghetto kids”. Imagine how it is for a ghetto kid, raised by parents who are just as I describe above, who live on public assistance and who are surrounded by friends and family who are the same. How is a kid like that to even know of a better way unless the educational system provides it to him or her? Our “ghetto kid” is likely going to drop out of high school, and even if he or she graduates will likely not make it to college, and will be in the situation I described earlier.

Yes, I know that the German / Austrian school regime would never fly in the U.S. The political correctness people would raise holy heck about it being discriminatory. Let’s see if that’s so. The fact is that not everybody is university material. You can’t push everybody through the same mold of a high school education that is aimed at college prep. Some of us are bricklayers, stonemasons, carpenters, dental technicians, mechanics, artisans, musicians, plumbers, electricians, etc. Not everybody is cut out to be a physicist.

The way that you educate for those trades is to involve and obligate small businesses. Of course, it goes without saying that the rules and requirements on the small businesses who teach are very strict, they are closely monitored, and they have no choice. All businesses above a certain fairly small size, like ten employees, must take on apprentices for training. It’s part of the cost of doing business in Germany and Austria. From what I’ve seen of this system, up close and personal, it works great. I have seen it, talked with business owners about it, and I’ve talked with and sometimes worked alongside the kids in training. (I speak German) I know it works and it’s been working for 100 years. This is not an unproven idea that I cooked up with my academician friends, it’s a tried and proven system that could be studied and imitated in the United States.

But like I said, I’m sure U.S. educators will rail at my suggestion here, calling it discriminatory. Meanwhile, our present system that is supposedly non-discriminatory continues to turn out legions of high school “graduates” that can’t read above a fourth grade level, can’t find their own country on a map of the world, and have no marketable skills. So much for an American’s “right to an education”. I submit that our present education system does discriminate. It discriminates against those who are not college material and leaves them at age 18 with nothing useful.

Kriegskuchen (War Cake)

February 1, 2008 / / 2 Comments

Back in 1963, my Aunt Annie, who was at that time 90 years old, gave me a recipe she had gotten from her mother for an unusual cake she learned to make as a child in Germany. She called it Kriegskuchen, which translates as “War Cake”. It was called this because it’s easy to make and does not require butter, or eggs, or oil, which are in short supply during a war. For those of you on a low-calorie or low-fat diet, or for those with an egg allergy, this is just what you were looking for.

Kriegskuchen (War Cake) 1

My mother made this cake often during the year all through the 1960’s and 70’s, and especially around Christmas. The flavor of the standard recipe is Christmas-like, but the recipe is flexible. I’ve continued the tradition for many years, and experimented a lot with variations on the original recipe. Around Christmas I bake and ship these cakes in various flavors to my friends and kids. I thought I’d share it here.

Kriegskuchen (War Cake) 2

All of these cakes are baked in a standard bread pan. The recipe I got from my aunt was in grams but my mother converted it all to more convenient units.

Original Recipe:

2 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa (Hersheys)
3/4 cup sugar
2-1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup raisins, currants, or diced dried apricots soaked in water for 12 to 24 hours until they swell up.
1-1/4 cup milk (measure precisely)

Whisk together all the dry ingredients. Then add the milk and mix with a spatula until everything is wetted. The batter is thick and pasty so it takes some effort to fold and mix. The moisture content of flour varies so sometimes you need to add a tiny bit more milk. There should be no dry flour or cocoa visible. Then scoop it all into a greased breadpan and bake at 350F for one hour. Remove from oven and allow to rest for five minutes. Turn out on a cake rack to cool off.

Kriegskuchen (War Cake) 3

Next, we can get creative and have some fun with this cake. If you want a super chocolaty cake add one cup of chocolate chips to the original recipe, or add one cup of peanut butter chips, or 50/50. Adding a teaspoon of vanilla changes the taste. Omitting or reducing the cloves changes the taste.

Or, we can substitute other fruits for the currants/raisins. Elsewhere in my blog you will find a recipe for candied orange peel. Candied orange peel combined with the chocolate makes a heavenly flavor. If you really want to go crazy add candied orange peel and chocolate chips. Wow.

Or, we can omit the cocoa. For this variation, omit the cocoa, reduce the milk to one cup, and be sure to add one or one and a half teaspoons of vanilla. You can add just about any candied fruit you like. About one cup does the job. My son-in-law’s favorite is a version made with candied pineapple and no cocoa. For this, I purchase cans of small diced pineapple wedges and I candy them the same way as the orange peel recipe elsewhere in my blog.

Have fun with this low-cal, non-fat cake. Depending upon the ingredients, calorie count for the whole cake varies from 1,400 to 1,800 calories except for the super chocolaty chip version above that comes in around 2,900 calories.

Happy 60th Birthday to the Transistor !

January 13, 2008 / / 3 Comments

In honor of the 60th birthday of the transistor, here are some photos:

The First Transistor

Replica of the First Transistor

Diagram of the First Transistor

The transistor was developed in 1947 at Bell Labs by William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen. It was first demonstrated at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947. This transistor was made from germanium, not silicon like most transistors today. Germanium was used through the 50’s and into the 60’s before being completely replaced by silicon transistors. Those of you who are old like me will remember the first transistor radios in the 1950s. The transistor was the hot technology of the day. More and more products were “transistorized”. The term “solid-state” was not used in the early days.

Before long there was a competition over the number of transistors in the radio. Seven transistor radios, nine transistor radios–a big advertising deal was made over the number of transistors and the consumer was led to believe that more is better. Around the time I got into electronics, around 1959, 1960, I disassembled a 14 transistor radio and discovered that about half of the transistors were fake. (You don’t need 14 transistors to make a basic radio. Six to nine is adequate.) The extra transistors usually had their leads twisted together and soldered into a single hole. But if you open the radio and did a quick count of transistor cans, there were 14. So I learned a marketing lesson at an early age.

Throughout the 1950’s and into the 60’s, transistors were made and packaged one at a time, and then assembled into circuits that you could see without your eyeglasses. You could work on it with your hands and a soldering iron. Plenty of transistors are still used as individual devices today, especially in high-power or radio circuits, but in 1959 Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments patented the first integrated circuit, where more than one transistor was fabricated simultaneously on the same substrate, along with components like resistors and capacitors to form a complete circuit that performed a function. The photolithography techniques used to “print” these circuits soon made it just as easy to make a miniature 20 transistor circuit as it was to make a single transistor. This was the way to the future.

In 1971, Intel introduced the first microprocessor, a slow little 4-bit micro containing about 2,500 transistors. By 1975, Popular Electronics published the famous article that launched the personal computer revolution. It was an article on how to build a computer using Intel’s 8080 microprocessor. The 8080 contained about 4,000 transistors. By the 1990s, the microprocessor in your average personal computer contained about 500 million transistors. The latest multicore processors contain billions of transistors. The transistor has come a long way.

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