Posted on 04/29/2002 4:25:39 PM PDT by tarawa
Edited on 05/07/2004 6:26:30 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Regarding "Memorial to Columbine held to highlight dangers of guns" (The Star, April 21), I am perplexed by the popular usage of the term "gun violence." Violence is violence regardless of the tool or method employed by the perpetrator. Why do we never hear "knife violence" or "baseball bat violence?"
(Excerpt) Read more at indystar.com ...
Democrat factories.
Great insight! Not only do public schools make kids feel incompetent, they make them feel that incompetence and dependency is a virtue, and that excellence is highly suspect and probably un-American.
Great letter!
Following on the heels of family disintegration is the school as friend and protector, not teacher and enforcer of discipline.
Moral relativism has caused families to fail, schools to fail, and now kids to fail--next, our civilized society.
Great letter.
WOWEE WHAT A GREAT LINE!!!
http://www.lingsoft.fi/~reriksso/competence.html
BY ERICA GOODE
New York Times
There are many incompetent people in the world. But a Cornell University study has shown that most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
People who do things badly, according to David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, the researchers -- Dunning and Justin Kruger, then a graduate student -- suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dunning.
This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
Some college students, Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: After doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.
In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored in only the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically correct standard English'' and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile...."
(for the rest of the article hit the link above)
That would be too rich to see our newest citizens leading the charge toward our original values, while those who have 'made it big' in America sit in their mansions and scratch their heads, wondering what went so wrong that their kids are taking guns to school.
Excellent Letter. Thanks for the ping.
Toward FREEDOM
The NEA/UN is succeeding in educating the children into proper socialists.
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