This semester my wife’s university “upgraded” its computer system. The email speed and storage is improved. Pretty much everything is un-improved… or worse. As the head of the voice and opera program, my wife has to keep tabs on the schedules of a good hundred or more students. The former system allowed her to access multiple class schedules at once, allowing her to assure that students were registered in the right sections, which is always a problem, because the section numbers refer to the professors and the levels, and the registrar’s office seems to think that any professor can teach any student individual voice lessons and has a habit of assigning some students randomly – even when the students know and present the right section numbers. The new system only allows access to one section at a time, which more than doubles the time it takes her to make sure students are assigned where they belong. The old system allowed her to see whether an email had been opened, very useful in determining whether students and colleagues actually read what had been sent. The new system does not. In addition, the new system is different enough that it takes time to learn all the differences in necessary features. The verdict? A lot of lost time for everyone for little improvement overall, and significant drawbacks for people with administrative duties.

This isn’t limited to academia. At least every month, if not more often, when I’m talking with my editor and ask for information, it takes longer, because the computer system has been changed or “up-graded.” I asked other editors at the publisher… and they all rolled their eyes, not at my editor, but because they have noticed the same thing. Now… none of them can describe any aspect of the changes that makes their lives easier, but the changes go on and on.

I’ve noted, in past blogs, the continual changes in the Microsoft Word program, the vast majority of which merely add complexity for the sake of adding features… and some of which, such as the grammar checker, are so much worse than previous versions that using it will actually make bad prose awful and good prose far worse. And to top it off, you can’t turn off the grammar checker without turning off the spellchecker. Now… I understand that the latest version of Windows is going to smartphone icons, which will make using Windows easier for all the people who really don’t use it for anything particularly serious and add time and frustration to those of us who are tied, for occupational reasons, to Word and Windows. Another example of the hideous combination of American industry’s “one-size-fits-all” attitude and the need for a continuous illusion of progress.

I don’t mind true improvements in technology… but new “upgraded” features that do the same thing as older versions and new interfaces that don’t improve function, but still have to be learned, are a waste… and they’re anything but progress. In fact, they’re worse, because they present the illusion of progress. They also impose unnecessary costs on business and users because updating is required in order for “my” computer to read “your” files and documents, and the updates make lots of money for Microsoft and other vendors, but usually don’t generate commensurate income for most computer users.

Yet almost anyone who complains about these illusions of progress is considered a dinosaur or a troglodyte.

John Boehner has now passed, if that is the appropriate term, Nancy Pelosi, in public opinion as the most ineffective and least well-liked member of either Congressional or Administration political leaders. Although Speaker Boehner is far from my most favorite politician – the term “favorite politician” being an oxymoron for me – the current disfavor with his actions and behavior is not entirely of his own making. It is, in fact, the result of a Republican party that seems to have forgotten – or wishes to ignore – both the role of government and the role of the Congress in making government work.

Again, I’m not going to blame the Republican party entirely, because the same attitude exists, if to somewhat lesser degree, among the Democratic Party. The fact that the attitude is less virulent among Democrats has nothing to do with virtue, but because, at this point in history, the Democrats embrace a wider constituency and have to look at a slightly wider range of alternatives in order to maintain what power they have, while the Republican Party has essentially divested itself of all who are fiscal and structural conservatives but who oppose the more fanatic aspects of the GOP true believers and certainly all moderates.

The result is that the GOP has become the “party of NO” – no tax increases, no abortion, no immigration, no gun control, no health care for the working poor, no corporate taxes, no unions, no equal economic rights for minorities and women, no gay marriage, not to mention denial of global warming and evolution. At the same time, much of the Democratic Party believes that almost any new government program is a good idea, particularly where the disadvantaged are concerned. Neither outlook is viable.

No matter how many poor and disadvantaged there are, even if we confiscated all the wealth and income of the top two percent, as I’ve pointed out before, it wouldn’t support government for a year. Government programs can’t expand, not unless other government programs are eliminated or curtailed. Right now, we can’t even fund the ones we have, but that’s because, in the past, both parties have agreed on taxes that were too low to support the programs that Congress had already created. Likewise, the mindset of denying reality that underlies much of the GOP agenda won’t work.

But Boehner is in an impossible position. The GOP essentially won’t compromise on taxes, and no compromise is possible without that. Obama has offered some compromise, but the GOP wouldn’t even accept Boehner’s alternative tax increase just on families making over one million dollars a year, let alone Obama’s compromise of $400,000 [incidentally, that’s just about the cut-off for the top one percent]. The fact that Boehner won’t even call the House into session unless the Senate acts, despite the fact that the House could take up an already Senate-passed bill and amend it, is another indication of his inability to pass anything remotely resembling a compromise and his unwillingness to admit it.

So… unless Obama caves in to the GOP, which looks unlikely, or the GOP looks at reality, which is equally unlikely in the next few days, going over the fiscal cliff looks most probable, although I, and most Americans, I suspect, would prefer less excitement.

Last Sunday, The New York Times had a front-page story on the problems faced by students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. While the story highlighted the specific problems of three minority females, my wife the university professor sees the same problems played out by white students in a state university with a very small minority population. Despite an apparent proliferation of loan and aid programs for students of modest means or less, the graduation gap between economically poor students and those of more affluent means is now wider than it was thirty years ago. Although the graduation rates of most ethnic/economic subgroups have improved, the rates for those of means have improved far more than that of those from poorer backgrounds.

Why has this happened? There are a number of reasons, and the Times article, frankly, didn’t emphasize nearly enough some of the root causes. The principal reason, from what my wife and I see, is that the growth of tuition has outstripped the growth of available grants and scholarships. The reason for the growth of tuition at state universities is not, contrary to popular opinion, because of high salaries for full-time faculty, not at a time when most state institutions have been freezing salaries or holding raises to one or two percent, or reducing full-time professors and replacing them with part-time adjunct faculty, but because for almost a generation, state legislatures have been reducing the funding of their public institutions at the same time as enrollments have continued to increase. Higher enrollments require more buildings and larger classes, or more classes taught by less qualified instructors… and, most important, higher tuition.

At my wife’s university, and at all the public institutions in the state, funds for scholarships and grants, even federal grants, have not kept up with the cost of tuition. If colleges and universities offer full-tuition and room-and-board scholarships, then the number of available scholarships goes down as tuition rises. If they offer the same number of scholarships, then those scholarships no longer cover tuition and room-and-board. Either way, that means that economically disadvantaged students must either borrow funds or find part-time or full-time work. My wife has watched student after student become swamped with debt or spending so much time working that they cannot spend the time to study and to succeed academically. In addition, all too many have other problems created by their past, such as poor study habits and even worse judgment. More affluent students also have these problems, but they often have personal safety nets, such as parents who can support them while they waste too much time learning with bad study habits and behavior that detracts from academic success.

In addition, in many fields, merely taking classroom courses isn’t enough for future success. For example, in the hard sciences, students need to take laboratory courses, and those are invariably later in the day – and often students who work find themselves in an impossible situation. If they try to follow an educational path that would pay more in the future, they can’t work the hours they need to pay for that education, yet taking a more “standard” curricula ends up giving them a degree with a major in a field that is already glutted. The majority of students who succeed in music and the performing arts – and many do, despite the rhetoric – are those who not only take the classes, but who do all the extra activities, which include performing and rehearsing long hours, often without credit. This becomes almost impossible for students who are entirely self-supporting, except for the one or two that come along every few years who are truly brilliant and gifted, and even for them, it is close to impossible.

But each year the situation has become worse as the legislature funds less and less, and tuition climbs, and professors’ incomes are frozen, and more adjuncts are hired, and poorer students work longer and longer hours and get deeper and deeper in debt.

All of this doesn’t even take into account the fact that primary and secondary schools are failing to instill certain basic skills required for both academic and occupational success. When more than a third of all students graduating from secondary schools do not have the writing skills to compose – without electronic aids – a single coherent paragraph, and when the majority lack any semblance of analytical skills, it’s no wonder that students who are preoccupied with finding the money to even attend college are dropping out or failing in huge numbers.

But the great debate remains about how federal and state taxes are too high.

Years and years ago, back when I was actively involved in national politics, a scholar of politics made the observation that, “Where you stand on anything depends on where you sit.” The converse is also true, in that the positions one takes reveal the true nature of one’s views.

The “negotiations” surrounding the “fiscal cliff” illustrate the above point fairly clearly. The positions taken by each side do indeed reveal where each side sits, so to speak, and whom they represent, regardless of the window dressing of the rhetoric thrown out by each side. The Democrats are demanding that the “rich” pay more in taxes. Interestingly enough, their definition of “rich” includes all of what has historically called the upper middle class and even a fraction of the mid-middle class, i.e., moderately salaried two-earner families in high-cost-of-living cities. The definition of “rich” has been muddied over time by inflation, but consider that a family income of $42,000 in 1970 is equivalent to more than $250,000 today, yet in 1970, forty percent of all families made more than $42,000. Today, only 2% make more than $250,000. President Obama classifies those in the top 2% as the rich, but those in the ninety-ninth percentile have family incomes of between $250,000 and $350,000, and that one percent pays ten percent of all federal income taxes. Well-off certainly, but rich? All this does suggest that Obama and the Democrats, rhetoric aside, are out not only to soak the rich, but also to soak the upper middle class.

The Republicans, of course, aren’t exactly blameless. For all their rhetoric about controlling spending, they haven’t. In fact, they’ve more than helped it along, and then they’ve coped with the erosive power of inflation by simply pushing for lower tax rates. After all, in the end, what matters isn’t what you make, but what you keep. So, as inflation has decreased the purchasing power of the dollar, so that the real income of most families is only some 60% of what it would have been without inflation, federal income tax levels on the top ten percent, and especially on the top one percent, have been more than halved since the 1950s. The result? Although all income levels have suffered in loss of comparative purchasing power, the greatest burden has fallen on those in the middle two quintiles of income, what generally might be referred to as the working class, because their tax rates have not decreased as much as those with higher incomes, and because federal programs have tended to cover most of the impact on the very poorest. The Republicans’ “Plan B” was even more deceptive in that, while it would have protected the upper middle class from a tax increase, it not only did that, but it would have removed the few limitations that do exist on restricting tax exemptions for the very wealthy… and Boehner couldn’t even get the enough Republicans to support that.

When all the math and tax policies are considered, the politicians have been paying for federal programs through deficit spending that has reduced the purchasing power of all incomes, although, like it or not, those families in the lower 50% of income only pay 3% or so of federal income tax. The Democrats have done their best to shield the very poor, because programs such as food stamps are essentially indexed against inflation, and the Republicans have done their best to shield the very richest one percent, and continue to do so, even with the fiscal cliff looming, and everyone in between has taken a hit of some degree… and both Obama and Boehner are holding out in the fiscal cliff negotiations for the best deal they can get for the very rich and the very poor – and if they do come to an agreement, they’ll call it a benefit for the middle class.

According to not only a study cited in The World 2013 [published by The Economist], but to an array of other sources, there’s a growing gulf between what employers need in the way of skills and what the schools are producing. And contrary to popular and political opinion, or the latest pop/political fix of STEM [science, technology, and mathematics] education emphasis, the greatest problem is that students don’t have an adequate grasp of problem-solving skills or other basic skills [like an adequate command and understanding of their own language]… yet 70% of the students believe they do, and something like 70% of employers believe they don’t.

Based on what my wife the college professor has observed in recent years, and on studies in the field, over 80% of the students cannot take information presented to them and use that information to solve problems or come up with the answer requiring very basic reasoning. And according to their SAT/ACT test scores, these are bright students. Furthermore, most of them cannot retain information that they have heard, or read, even when told that retention of that information will be necessary. They have a slightly higher retention rate when the information is presented in visual/video format, but not a significantly higher retention rate. Their attention span is generally less than ten minutes for any given subject.

The percentage of undergraduate students with these difficulties varies, generally with the selectivity of the college or university, but between 25% and 40% [depending on the methodology used] of all those who receive an undergraduate degree are effectively functionally unable to communicate or receive written/text communication effectively.

Is this a totally new phenomenon? Unhappily, it’s not. Older college professors can recall students with these problems dating back at least thirty years. The problem is that, back then, there were fewer of them, because the more rigid secondary schools basically pushed a significant number of them away from higher education, and of those who did enter college, far fewer of them got degrees and graduated, simply because they couldn’t recall enough information to pass difficult courses.

There are several aspects of the problem that tend to get ignored in this era of “I can look anything up.” First is the fact that in order to be able to look up relevant information, one has to have enough of a knowledge base to know what to look up. Second, one has to have the underlying skills to know what to do with that information. Having the fastest thumbs on the planet and the greatest screen/eye-to-hand coordination equates to incredibly fast reaction times, but doesn’t equate to problem-solving skills.

As I have noted in the past, more than once, basic problem-solving and language/communication skills MUST be learned young. By the time students are 18 or so, their brain patterns are set. Second, no matter what anyone wants to believe, not every student can or can be motivated to learn these skills. Effective teaching on the primary level in particular can maximize the number who can, but not all can learn such skills. The idea behind No Child Left Behind is a politically popular delusion that is destroying effective education. People have different basic intelligence levels, and while some of that innate intelligence can be enhanced or depressed by environmental and social factors, only a small percentage of the population will ever function at the highest – or lowest – levels.

Trying to craft an educational system that “prepares” all students in the same fashion is an exercise in frustration, ineffectiveness, and wastefulness. But there is also an immense accompanying socio-political problem, and that is that, particularly in the United States, people tend to respect only a handful of skills – those of professional athletes, those of popular entertainers, and those who are rich and famous. These three groups amount to less than 1/10 of one percent of the population, and the chances of success in any of these areas are incredibly slender. There is little real respect, for all the lip service paid, for teachers, police officers, and others who hold society together, because lip service pales alongside the financial negligence. The professors at my wife’s university, for example, and for that matter at all the state universities in our state, have been frozen something like six times out of the last 18 years, and the few cost-of-living allowances have been on the nature of 1% to 2%. The salary levels for beginning teachers in our area, and likely in other areas as well, are less than $1,000 a year above the poverty level for a family of four… and most young teachers here are married. Very few doctors can afford either to be general practitioners or to practice in rural areas or many inner city areas because what they can earn won’t cover the cost of their educational loans… and their malpractice insurance.

Yet, in many areas, good-paying positions are unfilled… because young people can’t be bothered to be electricians, plumbers, air-conditioning technicians, high-tech welders… the list is significant… and all too many of the “schools” that profess to teach such trades are inadequate, and charge far too much.

Do I have a simple answer? No… I don’t, and I don’t believe that there is one… and because there isn’t, and because no one really wants to tackle complex issues any more in a culture where information, such as it is, is only one mouse-click away, I worry that it will be some time before the situation changes.