2015-09-16

The Sun Begins to Rise in Japan

Social sciences and humanities faculties to close in Japan after ministerial decree
Many social sciences and humanities faculties in Japan are to close after universities were ordered to “serve areas that better meet society’s needs”.

Of the 60 national universities that offer courses in these disciplines, 26 have confirmed that they will either close or scale back their relevant faculties at the behest of Japan’s government.

It follows a letter from education minister Hakuban Shimomura sent to all of Japan’s 86 national universities, which called on them to take “active steps to abolish [social science and humanities] organisations or to convert them to serve areas that better meet society’s needs”.
This could be a brilliant move to revitalize the intellectual climate and economy, one that the West should emulate. Many Americans waste 4 years and more than $100,000 getting a worthless degree in a fake major. Even formerly serious degrees in English or History, have become next to worthless due to political indoctrination. Students going to college become dumber because they are taught to not think critically. They shut off their brains when hit with unpleasant information. (Professors now complain about this attitude among students, but do not attack the source, which is the university itself.) Finally, these majors are a source of harassment for the rest of the university and the wider economy. Although the real damage comes from regulatory and legal restrictions on business, this problem is crystallized by the fury at the NASA scientist who landed a fly on bullet 300 million miles from Earth, but wore a shirt with chicks on it while talking about it.

We landed on a comet, and feminists are angry about a shirt
He is the British project scientist for the Rosetta mission that succeeded last week in landing a module on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, some 300 million miles from Earth.

The mission took a journey of 4 billion miles and is a feat that has been compared to landing a fly on a speeding bullet. It is, in short, a thrilling triumph for human ingenuity.

But let’s not get carried away and lose sight of trivialities.

In discussing the mission on camera after the landing, Taylor wore a Hawaiian-style shirt depicting cartoonish, scantily clad, buxom women brandishing firearms. And just like that, Taylor stood for the subjugation of women and their exclusion from the world of science.

Taylor was mercilessly condemned on Twitter and the Internet until the next day he apologized in tears, for having committed the sartorial equivalent of a thought crime.
This is the ruling ideology behind many workplace rules in the West and in some cases, it completely destroys companies.
It doesn't sound that bad, until you look at the numbers and realize that the Women's Outreach Program, which didn't exist in 2010, rapidly grew to soak up 45.8 percent of the foundation's entire budget by 2013.

Karen Sandler was, for three years, the foundation's executive director. She made Women's Outreach the open source software's top priority, and quickly turned what had been a financially healthy tech foundation into one that was $80,000 in the hole. In 2013, the most recently reported year, Gnome spent $275,000 of its $600,00 budget (and $512,000 revenue) on Women's Outreach.

In her outgoing statement as Gnome's Executive Director, Ms Sandler described the Outreach Program for Women as an "ongoing success". She was also elected to Gnome's Board of Directors.
Back to Japan:
The call to close the liberal arts and social science faculties are believed to be part of wider efforts by president Shinzo Abe to promote what he has called “more practical vocational education that better anticipates the needs of society”.

However, it is likely to be connected with ongoing financial pressures on Japanese universities, linked to a low birth rate and falling numbers of students, which have led to many institutions running at less than 50 per cent of capacity.
If it is an intentional policy, that's good news for Japan because it signals other reforms will follow. If it isn't, that's fine too. Wasting billions of dollars to turn people into agents of economic destruction is decadence defined. The U.S. will eventually come around to Japan's position too, by choice or by force (of nature).

No comments:

Post a Comment