Bunk

My mom used to say, “I don’t think you could stand on the corner and hand out twenty dollar bills without making people angry.” There are multiple ways of viewing everything, but this isn’t the way I would have seen this development: Developing countries are rapidly increasing the number and quality of college graduates, generating a sea change in the relative education advantage that advanced countries have enjoyed over literally hundreds of years… “Given recent trends in primary education, the world economy may achieve near universal literacy within a generation,â€? says Gail D. Fosler. ...

Am I biased in my perspectives? Absolutely. Is there anyone who is not? No. So, now that I’ve owned up wholly and completely to the accusation that I am biased in my reading and interpretation of the study in question… Commenting on my previous post about the Fuchs & Woessmann study, Mihaly Nyary writes: “You have an agenda, and not the authors,” and provides the abstract to the study, which is in no way whatsoever related to the point I made yesterday. Let me try once more, and make a handful of other points along the way. ...

Slashdot is running a story about a highly questionable research study: The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today…. Indeed, the more pupils used computers, the worse they performed, said Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Wossmann of Munich University. While the report itself doesn’t seem to be available, I’m going to make a wild guess here: these tests were administered using #2 pencils and sheets of paper with many bubbles on them, which students diligently filled out. ...