I remember how it was -- JR
Academia’s increasingly entrenched elitism
People earning doctorates in economics are roughly 500% more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree than average Americans, and 78% of graduates from the United States’ top 15 economics programs have a parent with a graduate degree—the latest sign of academia’s increasingly entrenched elitism. While it was always rare to find first-generation college students earning advanced degrees, it is now exceedingly so, with only 6% of economics graduate students being the first in their family to graduate college. The study’s authors noted:
Individuals’ socioeconomic background can affect their knowledge of economic issues, their choice of questions to investigate, and their values. While this may be an issue in any discipline, it seems particularly problematic in the social science of economics—a field concerned with income distribution, inequality, unemployment, access to education, the welfare system, poverty, and myriad other issues that disproportionately affect people who are not at the higher end of the income or education distribution.
https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/july-11-2022
Journal abstract:It is well documented that women and racial and ethnic minorities are underrepresented in the economics profession, relative to both the general population and many other academic disciplines. Less is known about the socioeconomic diversity of the profession. In this paper, we use data from the National Science Foundation’s Survey of Earned Doctorates to examine the socioeconomic background of US economics PhD recipients as compared with US PhD recipients in other disciplines, proxying for socioeconomic background using PhD recipients’ parents’ educational attainment. We find that economics PhD recipients are substantially more likely to have highly educated parents, and less likely to have parents without a college degree, than PhD recipients in other disciplines. This is true both for US-born and non-US-born PhD recipients, but the gap between economics and other disciplines is starker for those born in the United States. The gap in socioeconomic diversity between economics and other PhD disciplines has increased over the last two decades.
https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp22-4.pdf
*************************************************COVID-19 Lockdowns Damaged Speech and Mental Development of Children, Say Teachers
COVID-19 restrictions have damaged children developmentally in ways that might be irreparable, teachers say.
From early childhood to high school, children rely on facial expressions, social interaction, conversation with new people, and friendships to develop mentally.
Children denied social interaction don’t grow mentally in the same way. When governments closed in-person schooling for months, cracked down on activities like play dates, and ordered families to stay home it plunged children into painful isolation.
Now, teachers across America say the lockdown generation lags behind those raised in normal years. Older children have fewer friends and slower minds, while some of the youngest don’t feel the urge to make friends at all.
“One of the biggest differences is the number of kids who have no language,” said Rachel Garcia, a bilingual speech linguist pathologist clinical fellow at Ensemble Therapy Services. She works with children aged 1 to 3 in Palm Desert, California.
Growing Up Alone
As COVID-19 lockdowns continued, Garcia noticed that children aged three and under weren’t learning to talk.
Most babies start talking at about a year old. But many in the lockdown generation aren’t talking even as toddlers, she said.
This problem had devastating implications, Garcia said. Children need to speak for nearly everything.
In a normal year, a few children always struggle with learning to speak. But the pandemic saw these numbers explode.
“I’ve been seeing a lot more of those kids who are two and three years old and have no words,” she said. “That is, in my experience, more than in previous non-COVID years.”
The culprit seemed to be devastating isolation from other children, Garcia said.
Spending time with other young children helps kids learn to talk, she said.
But some lockdown children have gone years without seeing another child—or another adult, Garcia said. Meeting another human being for the first time sometimes terrifies them.
One child cried for a half-hour upon meeting Garcia, she said.
“He got put in a room with me and spent the next 30 minutes crying his eyes out because he was terrified,” she said. “‘There is another person here who is not Mom!’”
“I’ve found throughout evaluating and asking these parents and then treating these kids that, literally, the only people they see are Mom and Dad,” she said. “For two or three years, those are the only people they’ve ever interacted with consistently.”
With only parents as role models, children find themselves in a trap, Garcia said. Parents get good at taking care of their children without language, so they don’t bother learning it.
“Mom and Dad are so in tune with what the kid needs that they just go and do it,” she said.
Moreover, parents have extremely strong language abilities. Young children feel like they can’t reach that level, so they don’t bother starting.
“You don’t see Mom and Dad as people who used to be kids. You see them as Mom and Dad,” said Garcia.
When lockdown children only have their parents to be with, they sometimes become profoundly uninterested in what other people do, she said.
“They don’t look at Mom and Dad, they don’t look at me, because they don’t have to,” Garcia said. “They can go get their own toys, they can go do what they want, they don’t have to respond to you.”
This sort of independence doesn’t make lockdown children stronger, she said. When these children need help, they give up rather than ask others for it.
“It is better and easier for them to walk away from something that they want than to ask for it,” she said.
Lockdown children are so lonely they don’t know the meaning of loneliness, Garcia said. “They’re perfectly content to play by themselves. They always have. Why should they do anything differently?” she asked.
No Conversation, No Education
Development delays like these have long-term impacts, according to researchers. A child’s vocabulary at two years old predicts their success as they start school, which in turn predicts later success in life.
Even children who weren’t isolated faced big obstacles to learning. Children must learn to differentiate similar sounds and recognize different facial expressions. Masks made both these tasks difficult.
When masks hide adults’ expressions, children understand the meaning of their words less.
A recent survey by the Education Endowment Foundation found that 55 out of 57 schools said they were “very concerned” or “quite concerned” about the communication and language development of children. Schools also said they were concerned over personal, social, emotional, and literacy skills.
It’s still too early to know how the damage done by the lockdowns will impact America’s youngest children throughout their lifetime. But the lockdowns have affected older children across America in the same way, according to several teachers.
From second grade to high school, children seem two years behind developmentally, several teachers told The Epoch Times.
This measure includes both academic learning and social development. And even veteran teachers struggle to help children jump forward two years.
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Mom-of-8 Who Homeschools Her Children Says Seeing Them Grow Is a ‘Miracle to Watch’
A woman who home-birthed six biological children and adopted two has embraced life as a busy stay-at-home mom, homeschooling her tight-knit brood on the family’s small farm in upstate South Carolina. She says seeing each one of her children grow and learn is “truly a miracle to watch.”
Kelli, 39, and her husband, Trey Ingram, 38, are parents to seven daughters and one son: Lael, 12; Ruthie, 10; Salem, 9; Faith, 7; Eden, 5; Shepherd, 4; Ever, 2; and Olive, 9 months.
For Kelli, the motivation for homeschooling all of her kids was that she wanted to connect with them and didn’t feel like she’d be able to if they had gone away all day.
“I love being in charge of what they’re learning, I love being able to talk with them about God and our faith, and weaving that into everything we do,” Kelli told The Epoch Times. “I want to set them up well while they’re young with a firm foundation, so that one day, when they’re much more mature, they’ll be able to navigate the world wisely.”
Kelli’s three younger kids attend preschool in the mornings, while she minds baby Olive and oversees school work for her oldest four. All children finish school before lunch.
The Ingrams are part of a homeschool cooperative that meets once a week. “It’s such a blessing for me to have a day off from teaching, and it provides help in a few of our subjects,” said Kelli.
The mom of eight shared that keeping a clean, tidy house, and stocking the fridge and pantry, are two of her greatest challenges. However, she uses grocery delivery services to ease the burden of shopping, and cooks supper at home almost every night.
The children have their roles, too.
“We have a little farm on our property, and all of the kids help with feeding animals and the garden,” Kelli explained. “We don’t really have set chores in the house, but we expect all of our kids to pitch in and help with dishes and general tidying up after themselves.”
Kelli hires cleaners, who visit twice a month to do a deep clean of the house. She also has an aide for handling the family’s massive laundry demand every week. Meanwhile, a babysitter comes in when she needs to run errands; this support, she said, helps beyond measure in her bustling family home.
“There are constantly needs that must be met, but even in the difficult moments, I feel very fulfilled in my job as a mother,” Kelli said.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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