Nope, my info was out of date. We've slid to 15th and the downward trend continues.
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Dr. Leonard Evans, after many years as GM's top safety researcher, is one of North America's foremost traffic-safety researchers (
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). He mentioned the US'slide from far-and-away-safest country in the 1970s to 13th (15th today)in his keynote speech to the National Academy of Sciences TransportationResearch Board in 2003. As I type this post, I am on the phone with Dr.Evans.
Well, that's an interesting question with a complex answer. Seatbelt use rates are still shitty in the US, around 67 to 70 percent compared to nearly 100 percent in virtually every other industrialized country. Also, the US (putatively) controls fuel consumption via CAFE rather than via fuel taxation; CAFE has created a mix of small/light cars and large/heavy SUVs on US roads; there is much less average disparity among passenger vehicle sizes and weights in other countries. Also, improperly underposted speed limits on limited-access highways, together with punitive and random enforcement, has bred widespread disrespect for all traffic laws.
And, it's interesting to note that only *one* country higher up the list than the US -- namely Canada -- permits vehicles with US-spec safety compliance. All the others require ECE safety compliance (everything from headlights and taillamps to mirrors, glass, seatbelts, airbags, then there are suspension and brake tests that don't even exist in the US, etc.). Driver training, road engineering and maintenance and law enforcement tactics probably factor into it as well.
Dr. Evans' book is very expensive -- $100 -- but my copy is en route.
This I disagree with. CAFE hasn't created that mix, it is people's choices of what they are buying.
The vast majority of people who purchase SUV's do not need them. Rather they think they need them. And they think they need them because they have been brainwashed into thinking this due to the constant barrage of advertising they get from the automakers who make more money on the sale of large SUV's. And the fact the automakers can brainwash them at all is because most of the people in the US blew off science in school in favor of underwater basketweaving courses that were easy A's, and blew off math in school and blew off critical thinking, debate, and anything else that smacked of requiring a little mental exercise.
There is a reason that Dr. Evan's book sells at $100 per copy. It is because since the book is aimed at the educated people, it is aimed at a very small market and the publisher cannot afford to sell it otherwise. Most of the people in the US are not very educated. And this is by their own choice. This is why books like Harry Potter that actually require you to not know anything about science and math and how the world works - so that you can actually believe in kids flying around on broomsticks - sell so spectacularly well in the US, and as a result are much, much cheaper. It is why technobabble shows like Star Dreck with impossible plots are popular. It is why the current presidential campaign is being run on 5 second slogans and sound bites rather than real discussion of the issues. The majority of voters wouldn't know real discussion from demagogery if they saw it, and wouldn't have the attention span to follow a 2 hour discussion of an issue even if they did.
You can argue all you want that fuel taxes or some other governmental twiddling is a better way than CAFE. But this is just ignoring the real issue. Everyone in the US that is of auto buying age has been exposed to so much information on the oil problems and such that they should know damn well to make better choices on what vehicles they buy. But the fact is that the US auto purchasers are deliberately choosing to purchase like a moron purchases. No amount of twiddling is going to make people start wanting to be educated when they have clearly chosen not to be.
When the average new car buyer believes he's saving money with a lease, you simply cannot make any argument about higher fuel costs amortized over time being higher. He is going to believe what he wants to believe, damn the facts.
There are some cross-cultural differences too: the school district where we lived until near the end of last year was approx. 50% Jewish and Asian, the remainder predominantly Anglo (Roman Catholic/Protestant). The School Superintendent said the Anglo parents often complained that their kids were getting too much homework, while the Jewish and Asian parents kept complaining that their kids weren't getting enough homework, weren't learning enough.
This was one of the best-performing school districts on Long Island, and we (Gentile Anglos) didn't think that our son was getting much homework. Last year, in a highly rated private school in the Midwest, he had even less homework. This year he is at a charter school, so we'll see how that works out.
MB
On 09/04/04 08:57 am Ted Mittelstaedt put fingers to keyboard and launched the following message into cyberspace:
There is no coorelation between the amount of homework and how much a kid learns. If the school lets the teachers get away with blow-off activities during the classroom instructional time, they are going to have to assign a lot of homework to make up the difference.
The Jewish and Asian parents that were complaining were making two complaints. The first was not enough homework. The second was not learning enough. These are two different issues.
But the telling thing is that the Anglo parents wern't complaining that their kids were learning too much, but only that they were getting too much homework.
All this is really beside the point though, because what matters to the society is the content and retention of what is learned, not the quantity. Society needs high retention of subjects like critial thinking and analysis, and the ability to retrieve, comprehend and manipulate information. It does not need a lot of retention of rote memory - ie: we don't need a lot of people walking around who have memorized the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and can answer all the questions on Jeopardy, yet are unable to understand that a lease on a car costs more money over the long haul than just buying it.
The sad problem with the schools is that since everyone's brain works differently everyone has to learn to think critically differently. In short, educating people on how to analyse and use the information in the world requires instruction that is customized to the student. By contrast, rote memory such as memorizing the US Constitution verbatim, is easily done with an instructional program that is not customized, and is standardized.
Customized tutoring is much more expensive than standardized instruction in a classroom with a one-to-many instruction to student ratio. Since the U.S. society has a majority of uneducated people in it, the majority in society aren't willing to pay for the increased cost of a proper education program, and will only pay for the rote-learning programs. Nor are the majority of people equipped to properly instruct their own children, being uneducated and non-critical thinkers themselves, they can hardly be expected to raise children who are critical thinkers.
Ideally, parents would use the rote-memory learning school programs for subjects like mathematics, music, language and a few other subjects that are basically all rote memory. Subjects like science, history, government, the ones that require critical thinking and analysis, these would be handled by the private tutors. But, we are far from this ideal, and instead what happens is students, left to their own devices, choose subjects like history and government which are the worst suited for rote-learning, because they are regarded as easy A's, and ignore subjects like math and language, which are the best suited for rote-learning, because they are regarded as hard. It's no wonder we have an education problem in the country.
Well, thank you. Googling the term "tangential thinking," I see that many educational programs have as one of their goals teaching people to think tangentially, I guess I was taught to do it without ever having heard the term (and maybe my tachers hadn't either).
MB
On 09/06/04 02:15 pm Arif Khokar put fingers to keyboard and launched the following message into cyberspace:
Well, thank you. Googling the term "tangential thinking," I see that many educational programs have as one of their goals teaching people to think tangentially, I guess I was taught to do it without ever having heard the term (and maybe my teachers hadn't either).
MB
On 09/06/04 02:15 pm Arif Khokar put fingers to keyboard and launched the following message into cyberspace:
An otherwise interesting post marred by the fact that the poster seems to have never studied music but feels qualified to comment on how it can be taught... Having had excellent high school music teachers and gone on to get an undergraduate degree in the subject, I feel qualified to say that rote memorization won't help you compose a piece of music.
Apologies if you meant "music history" as opposed to performance or composition, in which case this is fairly accurate at anything less than a university level.
You're wrong. Daniel's point is that CAFE legislated the relative size of those choices apart from the normal forces of the market. The number of big, heavy cars was artificially restricted, and many people bought trucks instead. Trucks weren't intially impacted by CAFE. Maybe trucks would have become more popular anyway, without the CAFE effects on cars, we'll never know. But there's certainly no reason to argue that now. The relative size of cars and trucks now is still a safety concern, regardless of which is more popular. Now that gas is going up, cars may be poised to make a comeback in the states. There ought to be fewer women driving Suburbans, but it's still going to hurt to hit one.
Actually, music the way it's generally taught to children is much less in the theory and composition and much more in the rote memory - ie: practicing a piece. As the kids get older and if they want to continue in it, of course you need more theory and composition in the education of it. But unfortunately there's this idea (which seems to have primariarly taken root in the minds of the anglo/white children) nowadays that you can learn all about music without being able to play decently. Kind of like the foreign language classes where 3rd year Spanish students still couldn't carry on a conversation with anyone in Mexico City. This idea seems much less prevalent among the children of Asian descent which is why they are out there winning all the music competitions.
You probably will scream this but until you can play at least 1 instrument your just pretending to learn about music. Getting the kid good at playing an instrument should be the primary goal of grammer school music, with theory secondary and composition third. Most people don't have true musical talent anyway and many of the ones that do are too lazy to do what is necessary to make it worth having. There's only a small fraction who have both the talent and the drive to beat it into something admirable. But then again, only a small fraction of people will ever become doctors, so I don't see anything really different here. We don't run everyone through medical school, why run everyone through music composition classes?
How can you think that performance isn't rote memory learning? Sure, a good performer isn't a rote player. But before a good performer can play listenable variations on a piece they better know it like the back of their hand first. To many people are lazy and figure they don't have to know a piece well and can just play something that sounds kind of like it and pass it off as performance variations. It's like fingernails on a blackboard to anyone who knows better.
From what I have read over the years (not a huge amount, admittedly) I have obtained the impression that car suppliers in the US meet average fuel consumption at least to some extent by manipulating the range of cars/engine sizes sold, rather than by working on fuel economy in general.
Yep, Ted, I think there was a lot of well-meaning generalisations...
For what it's worth I once spent a couple of months in a state girls' school in a corner of central London that well reflected the huge social mix in the vicinity.
There were largely 4 ethnic groups: white British, black British with parents mostly from the Caribbean, Indian (Subcontinent, East Africa) and Chinese. Though I could not say if the majority of Chinese and 'Indian' girls were born in Britain (possibly, given that they were teenagers, though it was in the late 70s, only about 10 years after tens of thousands of ethnic Indians were thrown out of East Africa) there were clear trends in attitude to work and willingness to learn.
To me there was little difference between the white and black British; they were far less motivated than the Asian and Chinese-origin girls. I have no idea about the religious affiliation of these girls but I am prepared to stick my neck out and say that, as a group, the Chinese and the Indians were quite different from each other. Nevertheless they were similar in discipline and willingness to learn.
CAFE made station wagons extremely scarce and expensive. To blame the results of that deliberate action on "people's choices of what they are buying" is just plain dimwitted.
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