The earthquake and tsunami that walloped Japan left much of its coastline ravaged, but left one thing intact: the Japanese reputation for honesty.
In the five months since the disaster struck, people have turned in thousands of wallets found in the debris, containing $48 million in cash.
More than 5,700 safes that washed ashore along Japan’s tsunami-ravaged coast have also been hauled to police centers by volunteers and search and rescue crews. Inside those safes officials found $30 million in cash. One safe alone, contained the equivalent of $1 million.
The National Police Agency says nearly all the valuables found in the three hardest hit prefectures, have been returned to their owners.
“Heritability for the “big five” core personality traits as: Extraversion 0.86, Openness 0.92, Neuroticism 0.59, Agreeableness 0.85, Conscientiousness 0.81.”
* Steve, I just discovered the Dalhousie University Dental School Facebook “scandal.” I heard about it last night on the CBC. As far as I can tell, 13 male fourth-year dental students at Dalhousie formed a Facebook group in which they shared comments about which female students they’d like to “date” (so to speak) and that women were better off in the kitchen, etc. Somehow the CBC discovered this, and it has resulted in a MAJOR freakout such that the 13 students are being forced into separate classes to complete their last semester of dental school. Of course, the University has now commissioned an independent panel to look at the “larger issues.”
The important subtext I discovered only in the comments on a few sites is that the 13 were complaining about the preferential treatment that some of their female classmates had received.
* Being a thug pays off in romantic prospects. Showing up on time, respect for authority, doing a job you hate … that’s incompatible with the current model of romantic success. Keeping it real gets one laid in the ghetto. And barrio. So it repeats.
* Private schools can and do kick out students with bad characters. They remove the badly-behaved and the stupid from their sample. Shape up or ship out is the rule, at least where I am familiar with things.
Inevitably then, private schools score much better than public on any measure of student performance. I think someone like Steve would have a name for this, like skewing the sample or something. (I’m not a statistician or market researcher, but I can tell when two things are being unfairly compared.)
We here know that personality is heavily genetic, and we also know that some aspects of character vary by race.
What we also know is that good character is reinforced by consequences. Guidelines, expectations and consequences. These things are kept out of public schools, by law even.
* Here’s a group of people ill-suited to teach character:
– Government employees who can’t be fired, work short hours and get long vacations
– People whose bachelor’s degrees are the easiest to obtain of any bachelor’s degree
– People whose job it is to teach from approved textbooks in an approved way and who are not rewarded in any way for creativity or originality
– People who in most cases cannot compete successfully in the private sector
– People who get their jobs without having to pass an aptitude test
– Leftists, socialists.
Public school teachers are at the intersection of all six of those Venn diagram circles. If kids are going to get character education, they will have to get it from their parents. Too bad mom and dad both have to work all the time.
* This problem began when black community agitators in the 1960s fought teachers’ unions for control of the classroom. Black students couldn’t buck up to the unions’ white ideas of what good character was. So standards had to be dropped to the lowest level, where they remain today.
* I send my kid to the local corner elementary school here in Japan. I’ve been pretty impressed with this. First, they stick to the the three R’s for the most part.
Second, they teach character/personality quite unapologetically. For instance, report card includes getting graded on things like “listening to others”. Gaman/ganbaru (self-control/extreme effort) are also big topics. It is pretty pervasive in almost everything they do, things like the big kids mentoring littler kids, being truly sorry when you screw up, etc.
I’ve been extremely pleased with the school system here in Japan. The facilities are, for the most part, extremely simple/aged/rundown by U.S. standards – e.g. they don’t have central heating at my kid’s school and it is not out in the country or anything – but that just proves that the U.S. is throwing money away on that stuff.
* If you taught your children the warrior code, they would go happily and courageously into a hail of gunfire to shield the unworthy and the contemptible. That might seem like a useless death to those concerned with “getting ahead,” but those of noble spirit are not concerned with what the lesser men think of them. “To thine own self be true.”
A great book for young men and women I would recommend on this score is “Once an Eagle” by Anton Myrer. Myrer himself was no slouch: Boston Latin, Exeter, Harvard, and the Marine Corps in the Pacific.
