September 4, 2013 / Posted in  Critical Thinking, Critical Writing, Education, Ethics, Research, Third World nations

Contents

I. Abstract

II. Introduction

III. Educational Costs are Limiting Academic Learning

IV. Religion is Circumscripting Learning

V. University Ratings: Worldwide with Focus on Perú

VI. Low National Scores

VII. Wealth and Fear of Progress

VIII. No Books, Bad Books, Pirated Books

IX. Intellectual Property and Degree Mills

X. For-profit Universities: Murdering Education for Money

XI. Benchmarking: Steps to Successful Scientific and Academic Research

XII. Identifying Potential Partners

XIII. Identifying Data Sources

XIV. Establishing Process Differences

XV. Targeting Future Performance

XVI. Communicative Process

XVII. Adjusting Research Goal

XVIII. Review and Recalibrating Research

XIX. Calibration and Recalibration in Learning Areas

XX. Conclusion and Recommendations

XXI. Bibliography

XXII. End Notes

Abstract

As liberality inches towards reality, those who would suppress independence of thought and of work take control of the dissemination of knowledge at all levels, buttressed, in many cases, by an abundance of money and strength of political endorsements and religion. Vouchers are passed out to destroy public education, and those with sufficient currency buy land and build schools that parrot their ideologies and work for their specific ends, be it Donald Trump creating Trump University to give him a hedge on wealth manipulation in the USA, or landed gentry in Perú who build schools in an effort to solicit votes for public office.

This paper focuses on the dumbing-down process, with more than 7000 high school students dropping out of high schools in the USA to the decline of learning in most universities and colegios in Perú and throughout Third World nations from Ecuador to Russia where religion has a strangle-hold on the conduct of inquiry and geniuses, such as Stephen Hawking of Cambridge, University in the UK are told not to investigate in select areas for various reasons, including going where only a god is allowed to go when Pope John Paul II rebuffed the Lucian Professor of Mathematics who wanted to read the trial manuscript of Galileo. Today education in Russia is under assault by the non-declared Dictator Vladimir Putin and by the former KGB spy and current Patriarch of Moscow Kirill I. This study looks at why this happens and what can be done about the killing of knowledge.

 

Introduction

In nearly every Third World nation, it is rare, if not nearly impossible, to find any academic standards in the fields of education: from the arts and sciences through tangent areas in engineering and medicine nearly all schools fall short. This is especially true in Latin America where only four universities in Brasil, and one in Perú rank in the 300s. Third World private for-profit universities, for the most part, are pathetic pandering punctilious without substance institutions or eleemosynary educational institutions with little drive beyond the money they take in for fees, tuition, and assorted “miscellaneous” items. An increasing number of students drop out before completing any diploma or dinosauretic, anachronistic and antiquated, deplorable and disreputable degree that is redressed as contemporary and modern. Such pathetic pieces of paper annihilate the entire concept of learning, while teachers who have more than a modicum of intelligence leave academe for more financially rewarding careers as brain-dead legislators and senators, worldwide (with a decided abundance of anachronistic anglers seeking to feed off the teat of taxes rape education by insisting on the teaching of mythologies from the absurdity of creation to a supernatural hand writing on a temple wall. It is no less than the crafty, cunning and cruel Pope Urban II finding an excuse to send the second and third sons of the nobles, lords and earthly sovereigns to their untimely deaths in his ill-fated but expected slaughter of the First Crusade in 1095 CE so as to gain the lukewarm loyalty of the heads of kingdoms, duchies and other fiefdoms for himself and invention of Holy Mother Church.

While in the USA all fees are stated upfront and keep climbing for public students, private wealthy families feed off of vouchers that further polarizes society and will ultimately lead to a major bloody civil war between the rich and poor. In Perú, where fascists and NAZI hosts sit in the malodorous Lima Congress vastly outnumbering the few who have a genuine interest in advancing learning in this impoverished South American nation where public education joins Haiti, Paraguay and Mauritania with an average academic score of zero, there are countless charges for worthless studies taught by semicompentent to incompetent faculty in private and public universities (usually traveling from one to another each day in quest of a living wage as few are privileged to be full-time faculty in any single institution) that are not revealed until the unfortunate undergraduate or graduate is ready to complete studies and seek a career.

Numerous studies show, Perú and Haiti have the lowest ranking and highest number of uneducated, ignorant and thoughtless academic apprentices in the world, and it keeps getting worse. The denigration and loss of any academic stature in the world, especially as seen in the plethora of plaintive papers (worthlessly wretched, yet inscribed as being “thesis” when few are more than a rough draft of an undergraduate paper) that proliferate, while many universities do not even require a thesis of its graduate, Lima’s lethargic legislators legislated, lackadaisically, listlessly, laws requiring a thesis for a student to graduate from any university.

 

Educational Costs are Limiting Academic Learning

These bankrupting hidden, hermetic and enigmatic fees include a cash payment equal to three or more months pay garnered by the average manual labor for the diploma, and if the strained, suffering student is not already impoverished financially, physically, and psychologically will soon be with exploitative, extortionate and exorbitant fees for a diploma. Not only must the student pay for “tuition” but for numerous sundry items such as the “publication” (photocopies) of the bachelor, master, or doctoral thesis that will equal no less than one-tenth the theft of the rapacious tuition money from the pupil’s threadbare purse. Private pecuniary universities are far more the purloiners of the wages of the workers than public groups, but theft is everywhere with “universities” popping up in one year and the second year declaring operation has opened a graduate school.

The treasures taken of cash are styled gifts to thesis committee members, honor payments to masters who sit in judgment of oral recitations on the subject matter of the thesis that is seldom new having been either written at length by countless other students or is encyclopedic in nature and has little merit, or is more likely is totally unknown, unprovable, irrelevant, unlearnt and undecipherable to those who parade pontifically past cretinous colleagues while treacherously tricking the solecistic pseudo-savants to side with the bluster of the rascal. In private universities, especially Roman Catholic and Adventist institutions in Perú and other Latin American states, numerous financial requirements for religious rites, rituals and celebrations are de rigueur, so that what was once a matriculation fee has doubled, tripled or risen to a level than any savior god experienced after life on earth ceased.

 

Religion is Circumscripting Learning

Religion plays a decisive role in bastardizing edification, elucidation, and erudition especially when Jehovah’s Witnesses use Watchtower pamphlets as authorities on Greek words (especially attempting to decipher the differences between σοφία, a wisdom based on sapience, and γνώση being cognizance based on knowledge that has next to no relationship to λέξη that has little in common with the quaint λόγος that is reason or consideration). Such imprecative malediction is definitely neither divinity nor divine: god, a bastardization of biblical proportions in all works from 389 BCE through the writing of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate.

It would have been better for the plagiarists of the Bible to have translated the ancient word into είδηση (meaning into intelligence, communication, or tidings) and other aspects of “education”. Roman Catholics call upon Aquinas who not only plagiarized from the ancients but mangled the message of Augustine, Plato and Plotinus¹ to meet his bigotry and lack of basic intelligence (e.g. changing good into god, and Augustine wrote divine (divinum and ariolo) for forms (έντυπα and σχήμα) or ignorant (ignorantes and inscius) that became evil (κακό as a noun, and κακός as an adjective) and so forth), yet was style a Teacher (doctor) of the Church; there is the unique separation between Aquinas and Augustine over their views on women, leading to a further diminution of the female and redaction of biblical lore.

Aquinas was never a great doctor of the medieval Church any more than Augustine was a doctor in the ancient church: a novel invention by the Emperor Constantine I at his Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, as illustrated by Eusebius.²  There is evidence that they were based on the Codex Vaticanus³ and Codex Sinaiticus,⁴ or 01, [Soden δ 2.] although there is no historical evidence among the records of the First Council of Nicaea of any determination on the canon to the contrary of what the propagandist Jerome wrote.⁵. The most that can be said about either man was that his finesse lay in his ability to plagiarize and twist words to fit his particular partisan perspectives. The early bibles were acknowledged as propaganda material to strengthen the role of the Emperor in a dying Empire, with no oficial canon being accepted in what became known as Christendom until the sixteenth century CE.⁶

Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses are articulately active in repressing knowledge to meet and fit their tenets of faith, while Roman Catholics use mediocre Hollywood films to teach Bible and history; yet each must be hailed as being far better and far more accurate than the Slavic invention of what became over a period of hundreds of years, the torturous Russian Orthodox faith with a suppression of scholarship so rigorous and barbaric it actually exceeded the unholy Inquisition in Spain, Italy, and the New World.

Today, few nations (except in the more enlightened First World of nations such as Finland and South Korea) seek out subject matter experts (SMEs) who can chart a course careering towards scientific knowledge and the mastery of contents, in fear of being left without a job and feeling the wrath of those who control the flow of money to those who would be teachers. Only two of Russia’s universities made the list of the top 1000: Moscow State University (Моско́вский госуда́рственный университе́т и́мени М.В.Ломоно́сова established in 1755) at 79,⁷ and St. Petersburg State University (Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет) at 301 and has been declining ever since the fall of the Soviet Union.⁸ The USA held the top four and sixth through ninth places.⁹

 

University Ratings: Worldwide with Focus on Perú

There have been regular examinations of the value of most universities in all nations over the last decade (and before the last decade for most). Universities that once ranked high have fallen, and those who ranked low have gone lower, especially in Latin America. Only the university of Sao Paolo (Brasil)¹⁰ and the Autonomous National University (Mexico) made it onto the current, 2013, list’s top 100-150 universities. The Federal University of Mines, São Paolo State University, State University of Campinas and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brasil) make it in the 300s, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sol (Brasil) in the 400s.¹¹ There is only one other Third World university that is found among the top 500, with the exception: the Pontifical in Lima ranked 433.¹² Haiti and Perú are at the very bottom of university rankings for quality of education, library collections. All Perú public libraries do not permit circulation of the books but must be read in the library. Only 60% of all cities in Peru have a public library and most do not have open shelves for citizen use.

I used to be ashamed of what I considered a small personal library of over 65,000 books, manuscripts, parchments of hieroglyphic texts from ancient Egypt, cuneiform inscribed rocks and potsherds, etc, until I learned and personally observed that my private collection is bigger and better than any library in Perú.).¹³ Resident foreigners living in Perú do have lternative ways of finding books in French, German, English, and a few other languages;¹⁴ and professional professorial preparation and presentation.¹⁵

In Perú, the “acclaimed” Pontifical Catholic University (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú) in Lima (founded in 1917) is number 1 ¹⁶ and number 433 in the world;¹⁷, the National University San Marcus, also in Lima at number 2 in Peru, having previously tied with Pontifical in 2012.¹⁸

Among private for-profit universities in Perú, Universidad César Vallejo (established in 1991 by César Acuña) is number 21 (number 4707 on the international tables),¹⁹ besting the Universidad Nacional Pedro Ruiz Gallo that stands at 34 (number 6118 on the international list).²⁰  UNPRG’s rating reputation within the Peru structure of education is struggling. ²¹ The highly publicized party school Universidad Señor Sipan(across the street –it flatters itself using the word carretera²² has the reputation of having two discotheques within a short walking distance from the main campus.  That there are two discotheques within feet of the university is in open defiance of the law. Administrators at USS scoff at any problems with the law, as both of the discotheques have protection from being closed down to conform to Perú law as their protection is bought by the discotheque owners who yield to the extortion of a largely corrupt Chiclayo police force that demands soles nuevos to allow both bars that sell more than beer to stay open.

Both discotheques are heavily packed with university students who prefer beer over reading and drugs over studying. Universidad Señor Sipan is not listed on either list of world class schools at any rank, but is one of the most capacious mammoth money-making institutions the Acuña family funded for business and political aspirations.

Humberto Acuña, not to be outdone by his brother César Acuña or any of his eleven hermanos (he has five brothers and six sisters), is the current president of Lambayeque Province (a nice political and profitable plum) has had numerous problems with his brother, Congresista Virgilius Acuña. Virgilio, who has created his own university and questioned Humberto’s management of the province, causing the provincial president to lament: “It is unfortunate that the congressman did not report, does not read, does not have knowledge of my government and municipal management (that he) confuse(s) with regional government, that are two different things. (I am) sorry that being a representative, (Virgili0 does) not worry about read(ing) and (does not) have data for give good (i.e. correct) information to the community”: “Es lamentable que el congresista no se informe, no lea, no tenga conocimiento de mi gobierno y que confunda a la gestión municipal con la regional, que son dos cosas distintas. Lamento que siendo un representante no se preocupe por leer y tener datos para dar una buena información a la comunidad”²³), Virgilio Acuña Peralta siphoned money to fashion Universidad de Lambayeque in downtown Chiclayo (and was accused of money laundering, along with his eleven brothers)²⁴  Charges of money laundry are common in Perú with the former President Alejandro Toledo now being accused of profiting from his office and having several homes worth millions of dollars.²⁵

Virgilio claims to be a civil engineer who taught eight years at Universidad Nacional Pedro Ruiz Gallo, and lately as the founder of the Universidad de Lambayeque as well as Brüning College.²⁶  Brüning College, originally known as Colegio Brüning, but now, to give the school a better image to Americans, and pretentious Peruvians who want to brag that they have a child in “college”, has been restyled as Brüning College. Brüning “college” is not a college by any academic or linguistic standard. Its resources are limited, it is a for-profit private school where most of its teachers do not have a solid college education, language skills are limited, the majority of the students do not read and out of the eighty students in the “high school” not a one had read an entire book, expressed dissatisfaction and even nausea over the idea of reading, and all claimed without an exception that reading was boring and distasteful and they would graduate because their parents paid their tuition. The test scores of students at this private school are, charitably understated, in the cellar.

Virgilio Acuña is cited in Wikipedia.es as the author of: Transporte y Lucha Contra la Pobreza (2006), El Proceso Administrativo de Control Interno en la Gestión Municipal (2002), and co-author with Javier Sota Nadal of Reforma de la Universidad Peruana: Dimensión Legislativa” (2002). No library retrieval service that pulls up books from all participating libraries (including Universidad San Marcus in Lima) has a record of any of Virgilio’s books being held at any library in the world.²⁷

The teachers (from the Spanish word profesor(a) meaning teacher–not a professor and with no academic rank). For the most part, teachers in Perú are poorly trained, read from badly written textbooks and whose interest in further reading and study is negligible to nonexistent. The 203 teachers whom I interviewed in the Spring of 2013 stated they had not read one book in the last three years, and most did not read the newspaper or watch televised news casts. When they asked me about my publications, I suggested they go to www.worldcat.org., www.loc.gov., or any other retrieval site. This appears:

Other schools and universities in Perú that have my books in their libraries are: Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, Biblioteca Nacional – Peru, PUCP CEDOC Centro de Documentación y Cienicas Sociales, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Peru, Universidad de Piura, Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria, Universidad del Pacifico; Boston, MA; Niedersachsische Staats -und Universitatsbibliothek Gottingen (Germany), etc.

Of the teachers and faculties that I visited, there was not a single individual who was able to tell me who the current Vice President is in Perú. Perú has two vice presidents. The First Vice President is a woman: Marisol Espinoza Cruz (born June 30, 1967) who had represented Piura, where she had studied journalism at the Universidad de Piura. Less than forty percent knew who the President of Perú is at this time (Ollanta Humala). Humala’s second vice president was Omar Chehade who was forced to step down because of corruption charges.

Universidad Católica Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo (USAT) in Chiclayo, Perú, does not allow its faculty, library, or any other part of the institution to be ranked since it is a part of Opus Dei (formally known as The Prelature of the Holy Cross and Work of God (Opus Dei: the full Latin title is: Praelatura Sanctae Crucis et Operis Dei). USAT has an especially good computer science program with a well-trained faculty, and a better-than average engineering program. Unfortunately from my audit of it English department (that uses UK-created disks) the teachers still use spanglish (a combination of Spanish and English). The classes are lethargic and barely passable. The USAT library is better than most, but the librarians lie to the students and tell them that they have letters from authors and publishers allowing anyone who wants a copy to photocopy it without charge. The USAT library has no comprehension of what intellectual property is and several librarians have informed me that it is customary to copy-and-paste at will–having been told the plagiarism or copying (pirating) anything is neither illegal or morally wrong.

The enthusiasm of students in computer science nearly matches the zeal of those in economics. The problem with USAT is it overemphasis and careless teaching by the Jesuits and Opus Dei members who ignore realities of science, objective scientific investigation and principled research, turning their academic disciplines into strictly religious preachifications. One USAT sociologist equates all things social and therefore normal requiring that everything enhances, embellishes and elevates all “sciences” to a religious epiphany divining and defining all things as subordinate to what he termed as the Sacrament of Marriage. The profesor’s knowledge of sociology was minimal, he rejected any contemporary thinker, and worse–he had no apparent knowledge of his own church’s history. There is no record of such a sacrament as marriage before 1050 CE, when it is first found in the writing of Damian. Even Thomas Aquinas says no more than marriage is a pledge between two people that is sealed with sexual intercourse.

Marriage is not defined as a sacrament until the sixteenth century Council of Trent, when bishops agreed on sealing canon i, Session XXIV, in response to the former priest and Protestant reformer Jean Calvin (1509-1564) who wrote:²⁸ “Lastly, there is matrimony, which all admit was instituted by God, though no one before the time of Gregory regarded it as a sacrament. What man in his sober senses could so regard it? God’s ordinance is good and holy ; so also are agriculture, architecture, shoemaking, hair-cutting legitimate ordinances of God, but they are not sacraments”.

The article or canon at Trent was in keeping with the Office of the Inquisition of the Roman Catholic Church prohibiting any disagreement or debate in the mode of the medieval era. Still the prelates produced no documents to justify their decree or codify their canon.²⁹ There were no regulations or established rites or rituals in the early Christian communities before 325 CE.³⁰ The unnatural and abnormal state of chastity, virginity, and celibacy was praised by Jerome ³¹ who saw sex as a distraction from prayer ³² and never had a firm foundation in psychological development. Tertullian wrote that marriage was a form of fornicate and similar to adultery.³³

The only manuscripts that exist attesting to this work were written (one) in the ninth and fifteenth centuries that won any respectable adherents and advocates. A careful reading shows that copyists included marginalia that were conjectures and outside of actual linguistics of the time. The formalization of the requirement of a priestly performed marriage is nothing short of a theological connivance to gain land by the church through the act of mortmain.

Marriage was not recorded in any official capacity until it was included in the list of the seven sacraments at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274. ³⁴  Reality was that it was never universally adopted by all churches as Rome was still a distant city and medieval lords ruled over their churches since their sons were frequently the bishops, as with Henry II who made his prince Geoffrey archbishop of York, and the Emperor Henry IV appointed his own relatives and courtiers as bishops before removing the pathetic power-hungry pope, Gregory VII, from his station. This action fanned the flames of the Investiture Controversy that spread through Europe and into England, leading to the murder of Thomas archbishop of Canterbury.

Only a few bishops were holy men. Most commandeered their own knights into battle for gold and glory swinging heavy maces that struck young and old, piercing their heads and bodies and cutting them down like dry timber to choke on their own blood swelling in their torn throats, and like 38 of the married popes who were more barbarian than brave “soldiers of Christ”, put their own children into senior offices in churches, abbeys, and monasteries that had scant reputation as celibacy circles.  Medieval monasteries moved into the dark world of Satan worship and fear of the Devil, of debauchery and plagiarism incorporating marginalia into texts to twist the writing of ancients to support their novel religion.  The debauchery was so well known that even Chaucer commented on it in his famed Canterbury Tales. The cloven carrousels  of corrupt clerics led sovereigns closed them down not only to stop popular outcry but also to reap in the reward of the huge treasuries most ecclesiastical institutions had in the form of gold crosses and jeweled reliquaries that held more than the bones, blood, tears of martyrs but enough pieces of the True Cross to build a war ship.  These were sealed treasures merely dreamed of by the thieves who frequently attacked the holy places but became the treasury of landed barons and suzerains and czars–especially in Slavic lands where Christianity was forced on subjects to distract them from the realities of their sufferings on earth in quest of a paradise in the clouds.

The Office of the Holy Inquisition was the favored instrument of silencing dissent by popes from the pontificate of John VII (who may have been the infamous Pope Joan) through the rule of the rogue Polish Pope known as John Paul II. John Paul II used the Office of the Holy Inquisition, that was presided over by the German cardinal Josef Ratzinger, to attack those who criticized his church, including Stephen Hawking³⁵ before flagellating his body. John Paul’s self-abuse of his body was openly hinted at in his encyclical Salvifici Doloris (Apostolic Suffering) 11 February 1984.³⁶

The Bible expressly forbids self-mutilation and torture.³⁷ The word discipline is accurately translated as control and not abuse as found in the mangled modern missionary missives. This form of flesh abuse is further denounced in Ephesians 5:29.³⁸ Self-abuse was seen as self-hatred, and to deny the body its normal functions through such unnatural acts as self-denial, chastity and celibacy were seen as sinful acts.³⁹ It had no support in the early community before the Emperor Constantine created his “church” that was a law court (εκκλησία, a meeting house or room for private prayer or sanctuary is ναός) to try people for what was assumed to be heresy.

Self-abuse has been for thousands of years considered a form of mental illness, from the days of practiced medicine in ancient Egypt⁴⁰, to the caretakership of Akkadia and through the tranquil days of other more civilized than the one forced on the world by Constantine and his successors through John Paul II whose self-flagellation is psychopathological pathophysiological-schizophrenia. This mental dysfunction is the result of self-loathing and the taught attribution of the action to experiencing the suffering of a dead person or the pain of society.⁴¹ Far from being a saint, John Paul II was mentally ill as testified in his canonization of the mentally incapacitated self-mutilator Josémaria Escrivá, founder of the odiously opportunistic Opus Dei, and had no true claims to sanctity or love of others (alii caritate).

The majority of the members of Opus Dei (popularly known as God’s Storm Troopers: Dei equitibus procellárum) are, for the most part, lay people who are committed to turning world governments into a single theocracy led by the popes on Vatican Hill⁴² and their relatives who transmogrified the church into an open pornocracy when more crimes were committed and people tortured and murdered in the name of religion,⁴³ with popes taking underage girls as concubines.⁴⁴

 

Low National Scores

Low national scores for Perú are a product of numerous political intrigues, protests by students and faculty, cronyism and blackmail or extortion with students graduating with minimal knowledge in their specialization and faculty possessing scant knowledge in their fields, lacking publication, continuing education or a desire to do more than earn a paycheck, with many holding part-time (usually one course) at several education centers, especially in Lambayeque Province.  In this Perú approaches the ranks of the USA that is in last place for grades four through eight in the fields of science (less than 31% of all science teachers have even a degree in biology), mathematics, and general education, and for the same reason: worthless curriculum, teachers who do not know their own subjects, underfunding for education by patronizing politicians who want their personal ideas preached and not sound academics taught.⁴⁵

The next major problem is the vilifiably venal, vicious Congress in Lima that gives scant attention and nearly no financial support to education, but permits the seating of elected prostitutes, professional athletes and representatives who spend more on buying chicken to feed their fat bellies, as with Congresista José Anaya who was given a five year prison term for billing the nation for S/.3000 soles nuevos for chicken dinners for one month.⁴⁶ Perú’s Congress has a barely marginal interest in the education of its people. Instead of adding funding for books, schools, better pay for teachers, the Congress is more interested in over-funding a wasteful military (similar to the situation in the USA), paying pensions to Congresistas who served by one term, and enriching each other. Under what promised to be a change from the corruption of the past, the 2013 Congress in Lima cut funding to schools, and teachers had to seek additional employment to buy the necessities of life.

Congresistas refused to even consider giving the natural and intellectual nourishment that the elite could afford, drowning future generations in the wasteland of wasted minds and creative ability that had long been the hallmark of Perú under the Spanish conquerors of the past. Ignoring popular outcries for a serious and solid education has become a daily ritual throughout the would-be intellectual centers of the nation, from Universidad Nacional Pedro Ruiz Gallo in Lambayeque Province to the National University of Trujillo and everywhere else that universities and schools were operating under the weight of few soles for teachers, books, or students.⁴⁷

Much of this miserly ministrations merchandizing as education are the result of the wretched conditions in Perú that are the result of the contemptible, conniving, crassly corrupt and self-serving SUTEP: a teachers’ union that fights to retain incompetent teachers and administrators at national schools while student grades in Perú are the lowest in the world):⁴⁸

Rich families, known as fundadors, in South America “founded” universities not for the sake of raising the educational standards within their cities, provinces, or nations, not even to offer greater educational opportunities to those of modest means or in poverty, but instead to use their money (much that has been denounced as being the result of either money-laundering or of narco-trafficking) to build imposing edifices for educational institutions as stepping stones into politics. The few time that any student sees a fundador is when the benefactor visits graduating classes and takes students from their classroom to expensive restaurants to pressure the collegians into working for his or her campaign for local, provincial or national offices. It is the beginning of a dynastic quest, as with the Fujimori family that cashed in on the political careers of the former agricultural professor Alberto Fujimori, when first his daughter Keiko ran for Congress and later president (she was defeated by Ollanta Humala), and later her brother Kenji (who was repeatedly in drunken fights with the police but was still elected to the Lima Congress), whose style is now openly being applauded by other families in the northern provinces who have children sitting in Congress and hope to place one of them into the purchasable office of the Presidency of Perú.

The case was quite clear in Lambayeque Province, and in Lima (city and province) despite the lack of transparency but veiled promises to avoid all signs of corruption and cronyism.⁴⁹ I will never forget when I walked into a classroom to find no one in attendance to take the final examination. The Directora of the School of Languages informed me that the university’s fundador had taken my students, in fact had shuttled the entire eighth cycle, to Jockey Club to buy them all dinner and “encourage” them to work on his campaign to be president of Perú.

Perú is not unique in South America. The graft, greed, bad education, and incompetent graduates from For-Profit Private universities is legendary. Two of my students could barely speak English, yet both were awarded teaching jobs as profesors. One of the two young man had written a two-hour examination essay before leaving for his new post, and when I received it, the essay was one page with four words spread across the bottom of the page and there was neither a noun nor a verb among the four words. When the youth questioned me as to why he received the grade of zero for the class–a course he needed to graduate–I replied that it was impossible to record any lower grade.

It has never been explained to me how he graduated, received a diploma and was awarded the job. He was not unique, as in the previous semester I had twelve female students who did not even come to class the last four weeks nor take the final (not counting the one student who slept through five classes and missed the last four scheduled classes, but did take the final as an oral examination but could not differentiate between interpreter and translator. She complained to the Director, Academic Dean, and President of the local branch of the for-profit nationwide university that since she had paid her tuition, the university was obligated to award her a degree. When I was asked to rethink her zero, I rejected the absurdity of the request, repeated my stand and said, firmly, “No, that I will not do.” I quit.

These are not unique situations in South America, especially in Peru. The rampant graft, greed and deceit of those running for office today, from the local level to that on the national plane are seen as places of opportunities to pilfer from the national treasury in hopes that each successful candidate who wins an election will be able to match or exceed the greed of the Fujimori family.

Alberto Fujimori was among the most despicable, degrading, detestable, disreputable odious opportunists in Perú history. In 1990, the one-time agricultural professor in La Molina, ran against Perú’s only Nobel Laureate (in Literature in 2010): Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa, and neither won nor lost–it was a tie necessitating a run-off. Neither the Japanese mafia nor Vladimiro Ilich Montesinos Torres, head of Perú’s CIA, the SIN (Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional; it operated independently as if Montesinos was the Al Capone, Josef Stalin or Vladimir Putin of Perú) would tolerate their hand-picked marionette losing. Montesinos and his goon squad pressured Vargas Llosa to go into exile. Fujimori won handily, with those who spoke out against his lack of leadership quickly silenced and swept away from the chronicles of history.

Fujimori quickly become the dictator that American administration favored, knowing that it could easily handle the one-time teacher. With the support of the perpetually angry Congresista Martha Chavez, the emerging mass-murderer quickly controlled the chaotic situation that became worse when the initial good intentions of the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso), a Maoist guerrilla insurgent organization in Perú, became as bad as anything that any despot would deploy.

Having divorced his wife (who was also a Congresista) Fujimori gave Perú a veneer of security by using his iniquitous assistant Vladimiro Montesinos death squads, ran on a weathered dry plank to strengthen education in Perú. That he never did and set the stage for those who would think critically what lay in store for the nation when Fujimori sent his own children to the USA. His four off-spring had expensive educational opportunities in the USA, but Kenji was a true Peruvian who preferred beer over books, while the others could never settle down–save to spend the nearly $1 million Montesinos took from the national treasury and gave it to Fujimori to pass on to his brood.

 

Wealth and Fear of Progress

Since Fujimori fled the nation carrying with him millions of dollars worth of gold bullion belonging to the people of Perú, wealthy candidates who have built universities to further their political goals already are planning on a bid, using his opportunism and the graft of Keiko as a playbook for their own nefarious needs. Hiring the poor to paint walls with slogans proclaiming that they will stay away from corruption, which no one ever does, Peru’s affluent aristocrats (in their thoughts but not in name) at the same time vow to buy votes from the poor (the poor make up 44.5% of the entire population),⁵⁰ as did Alberto’s daughter Keiko Fujimori, by taking bags of rice to the homes of the destitute.⁵¹ asking for their votes before handing them the bags of rice. Voting irregularities and disenfranchisement of poor, women, and liberals in Latin America, as throughout the Third World, are almost as bad as it is in Indiana,⁵² Michigan,⁵³ Florida,⁵⁴ Ohio,⁵⁵ Texas⁵⁶ and elsewhere in the USA where the Tea Party struggles to end voting rights to the applause of Neanderthal legislators and the governor of Iowa a growing attack on democracy,⁵⁷

Scott Walker has challenged and denied every basic civil right to any labor organization members, teachers, members of minority races (although the Caucasian race is rapidly becoming the minority race in the USA), and students. Scott’s attack on students is not as severe as it is in South and North Carolina⁵⁸ The Carolinas are now as racist as are Arizona, Arkansas and South Dakota.⁵⁹ They are on par with the blatant racism that is feeding the sycophants of Indiana⁶⁰ that stretches the claws cannibalizing the liberties of the most vile state in the north: Iowa run by Terry Branstad, whose son Eric killed multiple people and was not charged with the crime of their execution,⁶¹ Today Iowa’s Tea Party in the House operates the state as if it is a satellite of the defunct Third Reich.⁶² Iowa’s neo-NAZI Secretary of State, Matt Schultz (in the pay of big agribusiness and meat packers, is determined to suppress the disappearing middle class and disenfranchise the poor),⁶³ has launched one of the most diabolical diktats to end voting rights in Iowa history,⁶⁴ nearly on par with those of the hate-filled North Carolina legislature that has enacted bills for special and excessive penalties for parents accused of encouraging or allowing their children who are students to vote if they change registration from Republican to Democrat.⁶⁵ These restrictive measures are as vile as those in the wasteland known as Texas (not only in backward areas, but more so in urban areas that hunger for limelight of being updated and technologically smart to the exclusion of any representation, reference or recognition of the past and what forebearers went through to make the area educated and the heritage that each are left the Lone Star State.⁶⁶

 

No Books, Bad Books, Pirated Books

The greatest problem in investigating academic quality is the paucity (if there is even an existence of quality in) or original textbooks or other books.⁶⁷ Most schools have out-dated textbooks and books that include mythologies in the sciences and technologies; most books are published using colloquialisms, jargon, and vulgar English and other street idioms, with little regard for the use of words in correct grammatic sequence and in most cases where word choice is marginal and does nothing to elevate the students’ vocabulary.

Sectarianism, racism, bigotry is found in many books on many library shelve at all levels of learning, with one religion considered and displayed as the orthodox faith–a “true” belief–and others relegated to a lesser status, are limited with a little bit of taught family and social fear, community concern, and therefore feel intimidated, but painfully, grudgingly tolerated status as with Black people, or loudly discarded. In this Perú society is mapped like the blatant racism in rural Iowa and Indiana, the hatred for minorities in Florida where minorities outnumber Caucasians, and act as if they were rogue members of the New York City Police Department racially profiling anyone who seems not to be of their liking.

The same is true with women seeking the right to control the destiny of their own bodies, but the venal veteran clergy still chortles back to the days of the Latin American Inquisition that wrongfully thought it had the right “divined by God” to tell women what to do, when to do it, how to do it, and be subordinate to an archaic and useless code that elevated males to supremacy as if man was created first (the Hebrew word of Adam means red earth, while Eve translates as lifegiver but over the centuries the churches distorted the original meaning and pistoned true philology into narrow channel that would elevate the episcopacy corpus ab intra decrescens. Well-trained, free thinking rational academics recognize no authority as being greater than another and know that all things must be tested regularly and verified as fact, affirming that no mortal is infallible on any issue or reality from morality to psychology or sexuality.

This was the fractured fiction fantasized from the time of pharaohs to kings in days gone by as Louis XVI was to learn when it was his time to meet with Madame Guillotine, invented October 10, 1789, by Joseph-Ignace Guillotine, a French physician, and remained in use until 1981 (although its last guest was Hamida Djandoubi who discovered her sharp wit on September 10, 1977) yet this is the cardinal hinge on which most of Latin America hinges its curriculum, and continues to endure in Islamic nations where the Qur’an is considered the ultimate authority, much as the Bible is raised as a god throughout evangelical communities in the USA and Europe.

 

Intellectual Property and Degree Mills

There is more theft of intellectual property in Perú than any other nation, and the students at Perú universities are among the least prepared for any job in the future given the paucity of reading interest and the low quality of teachers who have but a breath of knowledge in their alleged subject areas. Perú, like Ecuador until President Rafael Correa stepped in to close down its degree mills (14 universities and 26 foreign NGOs: Non-governmental organizations),⁶⁸ is close to resembling the USA and its disreputable bargain-basement degrees from unaccredited schools (and some accredited schools). ⁶⁹

The theft of intellectual property in Perú and throughout the Americas, Europe and much of Europe is one of greed and the belief that no one need pay for anything that is “information” that “belongs to the people”—the cry of the great thief Aaron Schwartz who illegally⁷⁰ downloaded over four million JSTOR scholarly academic articles⁷¹ from the MIT computers he was to safeguard. It is true that nearly every nation makes pirated copies, but the majority (95%) of illegal reproductions come out of Communist China that has more billionaires than any capitalist society. The cheap pirated copies mass produced in mainland China makes downloading in the USA a waste of time, yet in Perú, 25% of the Peruvian economy is based on the sale of illegal pirated materials, found everywhere. It is common in schools and universities where it is excused by the very wealthy, lawyers and judges as “everyone is doing it and has for years”, as several parents told me when I failed their children/young adults for plagiarizing their papers–that put me in trouble not with the authorities but the university administration where many directors and heads of departments have entire pirated libraries.⁷²

While the cry is for free access to all other researchable material that is deemed too costly for anyone to afford, both faculty and students admit their individual and collective reluctance to read or become comprehensively educated, demanding diplomas and degrees without bothering with competent or cogent thesis, much less demonstrating even an embryonic enthusiasm for writing any scholarly paper. While most people want free access to information and free computers (with pirated parts and programs) are provided to most people where even a marginal cost can be met by the government, the level of learning and studying continues it decline and the world has notice a correlating ratio in the increase of ignorance as the computers were used for Facebook and other social media or to look at pornography.⁷³ Yet these faculty and graduating students demand jobs that few are qualified to hold and even fewer are able to conduct—with even administrators at private schools in Lambayeque boast of buying their Master degree, with one in Pimentel, Perú openly admitted he had purchased his first and demanded that I help him by a second—on par with a teacher at SENATI in downtown Chiclayo threatening that he would physically “destroy” me if I did not pass him on an FCE examination–not so that he would be a better teacher, but, as he stated “so I can earn more money” while the Director gave me poorly photocopied texts of the FCE book for students and teachers originally published by the IB Programme.⁷⁴

The majority of degree mills fraudulently operating claim to be associated with a religion or church, with the most common ruse being the use of the word Christian in its name, followed by the use of the word Islam: West Coast Baptist College (California), Universitas Sancti Cyrilli (Malta), Texas Christian Bible University (Crowley, Texas), Sancta Sophia Seminary (Oklahoma), St. Thomas-a-Becket College & University (Canterbury, England), etc. The USA has the highest rate of degree mills, numbering over 810 fake-schools, with the UK coming in second place with numerous fraudulent schools and programs, with 271 pseudo-universities pumping out degrees and fraudulent transcripts. ⁷⁵

Some have argued that if every student had a laptop computer, education would be better, more popular, and true learning would be the result with higher grades, greater awareness of subject matter, and use of educational tools. It is a lie. In Perú free computers have shown a sizeable loss of interest in learning, and a greater dependency on corrupt governments from the local to provincial and national level. The ever-burgeoning degree mills set up as universities by would-be pathetic proto-politicians more interested in self-aggrandizement and increase in their wealth at the expense and repression of the majority of people, especially as seen in Perú and its northern provinces, education is synonymous with putting a founder of a university in name only where academic standards are not even considered.⁷⁶ This is true especially with the rise of for-profit schools and universities in the USA and the destruction of true academic inquiry—leading more than 7000 high school students dropping out of education every day in the USA.⁷⁷

 

For-profit Universities: Murdering Education for Money

The nations where education is dying, such as in Perú and throughout Latin America and growing daily in the USA, is not only in the area of climate change and science denial, but to stop progressive thought and the conduct of inquiry continues to underfund education, leaving Scandinavia to be the only area where learning is growing and society benefits from a firm educational background.⁷⁸ The benchmarks of quality and excellence that is defined as the tool used to measure performance using a specific indicator such as qualitative, quantitative and critical investigation, research, and publication of a solid piece of scientifically based and proven hypothesis in the field of specialization of the educator or student struggling to attain a level of proficiency that eludes most people. Most benchmarks of quality scientific investigation and research resulting in rigid standards and valuable education are disappearing universally—outside of Scandinavia, with Finland leading the charge up the steep slope of academic excellence. In the field of education, benchmarks are the various tests, rigor of curricula and the difficulty of examinations that in backward nations such as Haiti and Perú (both that have the lowest level of academic excellence in the world) are ignored in favor of awarding useless diplomas to students who find it impossible to compete on the world stage as the float aloof their parchments the pompously promote their holders as Bachelors, Masters, or even Doctors of disciplines—especially doctorates in education (most fraudulent doctorates in education are styled as Ph.D. Ed/Education, while legitimate ones are Ed.D.).

 

Benchmarking: Steps to Successful Scientific and Academic Research

While each nation takes glory in its various limited or profuse institutions acclaiming each as superior, when stacked up against the publication, research and degree areas and holders of significant distinctions, few can accomplish their dream, especially in Perú, Haiti and Mauritania whose universities rank at the collective bottom of the world of erudition and education. Few Third World universities have any concept or appreciation of what is academic benchmarking.

The primary twelve steps to rigorous benchmarking are ignored or shuttled as far from reality as possible, and few of the stages are known or followed. In benchmarking in academe, we find cause to reflect and enhance the stellar areas: The thirteen stage methodology consists of (1) selecting the subject, (2) defining the process, (3) identifying potential partners in subject field, specialization, investigation or research, (4) reconnoitering thoroughly data sources, (5) collecting data, (6) selecting partners, (7) determining any gap in investigation, research or composition equating the understanding, acceptance of, and use for academic enhancements and the elevation of learning, aperture or arroyo to channel testable hypotheses to reach sound conclusions, (8) establishing process differences and differentials, (9) targeting future processes and performances in line with academic excellence, (10) communicating effectively, efficiently, and expertly with all levels and strata of scholars, students, savants, and erudite Illuminati, (11) ability to adjust goals to meet current challenges and advance to future ones with as little unease as possible, (12) implementing proposals that worked in select instances during the scientific process to test the hypotheses, and (13) review and recalibrate when necessary. Selecting a solid subject for serious investigation, research and publication includes knowing what subjects are feasible, and what research materials are available. Then, too, even though a subject sounds serenely wonderful, many times it is discovered that all aspects of the topic have been written on by other individuals—especially a plethora of information that refutes the thesis direction. While preliminary inquiries as to the availability of information can be found online, the Internet is not always the safest and best way to initiate research. The Internet may have lists of bibliographies, but many titles are not available to the investigator or research, and those that are not read may contain either inaccurate information or whose authenticity and reliability is questionable.⁷⁹

 

Defining Research Process

Once a subject matter is determined it is essential that the investigator define the process that is to be used in research of the subject. In defining a subject, the investigator and researcher must be searching into a pilot study and a preliminary study. It cannot be a reiteration or restatement of previous research and refinements. The process must investigate behavior or identifiable information. When the definition includes delving into human topics, the information must be provided by individuals in the form of documentation that can range from a school record to a written thesis or statement. It must be direct research and not merely a review of another person’s research.

What is not acceptable in this area is expert consultation since it does not involve interaction with the research subject (the human being) but only relies on the work of another, nor can it be the gathering of information from outside fields that do not require interaction with other people, as in the steps taken for collecting information to improve an existing program of study or enhancing the standards of an institution. ⁸⁰ For example, when I was attempting ascertain why one female student in my Scientific and Technical Translation class would sleep through all presentations, miss numerous class and group meetings, and fail to present the required papers both on time and exact, the student’s reply was “I paid my fee to attend this class, therefore you owe me a passing grade.” She led a carge of classmates who were under her control to my office to demand a new teacher and higher grades. Unintimidated, I refused to do so and failed this individual. The administration of my university, going through the Academic Dean who suggested I visit with the Director of Languages, insisted that I ignore printed university policy that stated that when a student fails a class, the instructor must offer that student an opportunity to recover the class and achieve a better grade, and let another person teach the student and give the student a passing grade even though she had mastered nothing of the subject matter, could barely speak the required language and could not even translate from her language (Castellaño) into English, and was unable to define English words precisely and accurately. When I tested the class on a passage from Stephen Hawking’s book on big bang and black holes, using the Spanish edition, she translated the text to read that Galileo argued that the sun went around the earth. This student refused to understand the unique difference between translation and interpretation, and delighted in referring to herself as an Interpreter, despite the fact that she would need to be able to translate the foreign language first before interpreting it for an individual or corporate client.

As the pressure mounted, being reminded about how wealthy her parents were and their promised endowment to the university hinged on me allowing the student to have a different teacher who would give the desired passing grade, I resigned rather than sacrifice my standards. I realized that the university was less of a learning institution and more of a degree mill as is common in Perú. I have no regrets in leaving, and know at my age I will never teach again. It is better than sacrificing authentic education at the whim of money and people who worship it as Perú becomes less educated and crime rises.

 

Identifying Potential Partners

Identifying potential partners is difficult at best, under any circumstance. Indentifying potential partners involves detailed research into the background of those considered as possible colleagues as well as determining who might be interested in the research project and actually add to both the investigation and the research itself. The primary challenge in this undertaking is finding someone who is not an opinion former, policy maker or practitioner, but someone who will add to the subject by working coequally and with a definite focus on the process as well as an eye to answers not completely asked. The research partner must be able to tailor all aspects to the needs of the project and not to a supporter or individual who will not use the research for the good of the community. Partners are essential for enhancing and extending collaboration.⁸¹

 

Identifying Data Sources

Identifying data sources requires serious considération of where data can be discovered, and how to explore the material when discovery is made. While there are numerous data banks, not all will be conducive of discovery without a thorough review of what information is available. Unless the project is to define, limit, and determine new information, it is incumbent that the project coordinator understands what data already exists on the topic under consideration and figure out what information is not yet available. That which is not available is the best source by its absence of information to determine a true scientific investigation to learn why there is no information on the topic relevant to the hypothesis.

If (and when) there exist information on the subject being considered, then the investigator/researcher must determine how extensive the information is and what needs clarification, augmentation and elaboration. With the determination of the extensiveness of the information, the individual or group must decide how to keep tract of references found and how each reference was used. The most important caveat in this area is to remember to verify the reputability any paper or essay that is found on the Internet through any search machine, such as Google, Yahoo, Ask, and others.⁸²

Visiting databases have several positive and numerous negative results. To determine if the database is worthwhile, valuable, reliable, authentic and scientifically accurate, it is essential to describe the problem being investigated, track other forms of the information and identify any past information that was antithetical or synthetically made accurate. When approaching any data base for new information, the individual or group must define variables and what fields need initiation or augmentation, defining what is variable and what is fixed, determining how the information is to be stored and/or be analyzed, and what reports will be generated with the information found and catalogued. Collecting data and selecting partners is always difficult and requires a definite discrimination against favoritism or cronyism.

Collecting data must be dispassionate, and partners selected must be chosen based on their expertise, not on friendship or other personal emotions based on gender or other external criteria that is not appropriate in a scientific inquiry.⁸³ Determining the gap between what is know and what is assumed requires a thorough, comprehensive understanding of the thesis statement and what must be found to prove or disprove the goal of the research. The aperture or arroyo is a discontinuity in the argument, investigation, or research that can have serious consequences if not projected and dissected to discover the discrepancy. Can the crevice be filled, the caesura be closed and if so by what means, methods, and materials?⁸⁴

 

Establishing Process Differences

Establishing process differences can be completed with qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Research questions must be continually refined so that the focus becomes more refined and limited and verifiable. The research process must be common to different research approaches (behavioral science, design science, action research, and so forth) so that it can refer to and use the investigative prowess and the final results from all fields to sharpen the clarity of the current proposal.⁸⁵ By definition, research is a systematic inquiry that leads to the construction of new knowledge and not a mere reiteration and exploitation of what knowledge already exists or had existed and was either discarded or built upon. To that end, the research must be public, replicable, unprejudiced and independent, advancing the state of the art being pursued.⁸⁶

 

Targeting Future Performance

Targeting future performance in research involves revealing alternative motives for the research and what steps must be taken to insure impartiality and openness in the conduct of inquiry. What motives might affect the research or cause its dismissal or endowment? How would the research be affected if there were no sidebars or there was an absence of control by various unnamed forces? Frequently the target is the subject itself under select and/or controlled circumstances—but what happens to the target if the circumstances cannot be controlled and shift randomly? Is there flexibility within the target or approaches to the target, and if there is no flexibility, is the research a failure or an opportunity for a separate or disjointing approach?⁸⁷

 

Communicative Process

The communicative process in research is more common in biology than in other sciences (social sciences and applied sciences) in the sense that it takes communicative processes to bring together two cells—but the same technique can be applied to all disciplines. This is possible when researchers understand and diagnose or define component parts within the research. This juncture, multidisciplinary teams can be invited in and the research expanded or constricted depending on need.

There is some concern over a communication crisis in research as leading to a dearth of information from the researcher and co-investigators that transmogrifies into a dilution of knowledge and advance of information and progress in general. Today exists a conception, right or wrong, that not only do researchers avoid communicating with the public but also with each other, breeding resentment and consternation in fear of research inaccuracies and obliqueness of how written papers are created and distributed. It is argued passionately that there needs to be developed—and used—new levels of clear, concise, and concrete scientific communication to stand above the cacophony of daily e-mails and telephone/cellular calls and conversations.

With increased specialization, this need for communication becomes more acute and critical, with many scientific investigators and researchers feel abandoned by the cold wind of elitism as the quality of scientific communication, for many, has noticeably declined. Many times, when information is released, it is done so using unreadable graphs that take up hours to offset the reality that the writer/author/scientist/researcher really is unprepared and is attempting to ward off questions that cannot be answered at the time query is made. Frequently this is acerbated by an increase in quantity of research to the diminishment of quality of research. This I found to be painfully obvious when six female students in my Scientific and Technical Translation class attempted to pass heralds and reams of paper that said nothing, and whose abstract was longer than the thesis itself. While some professors will accept such nonsense, I saw no reason to reward pseudo-clever detailing with more than a bargain-basement grade.⁸⁸

 

Adjusting Research Goal

Adjusting the goal of the research project requires establishing specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-targeted (S.M.A.R.T.) goals, working on the theory that an effective tool to make progress is to make certain that all participants in a group work with a single, tenable and common goal toward a clearly stated process leading to a single result from all of them that can be easily meshed together into a final format. Goals are a form of motivation that sets the standard not only for the research project but also enables self-satisfaction attainment with performance as a team or for the single researcher. Goal achievement is the measurement of success and being able to meet the goal shows the researcher or scientist that job challenges were met and dispatched and that the individual(s) who met the goal have significant prowess over their subject and resources, and not enslaved to the project but in command of all facets.⁸⁹

Setting goals affects the scientist by narrowing attention to one process and directing efforts to goal-related activities, leads to more effort to achieve the goal, requires persistence in achieving the goal, and developing cognition that can lead the individual(s) to develop and change behavior.⁹⁰ Committing to achieving the goal leads to higher performance,⁹¹ and is more productive than being told what to do, when to do it, and how to do it—psychologically creating in the minds of those so ordered a feeling of enslavement to the goal rather than being the master of the goal and its results. The best results, therefore, are obtained by creating positive context feedback to those working on a project; in the same way that a department head or dean needs to address what is done by each person to ensure that all things are for the good of the project and not for a single person.

When I taught teachers at my former university, complaints were raised by colleagues that they hated to attend my courses as the Directors (present and past) never bothered to give them feedback on how they were doing in my classes on interpretation of literature and style or on techniques of investigation or research, even though I had given them summaries and asked them to visit with the Director who had my complete report of colleague progress. Implementing the research project comes once the purpose of the research is clearly stated and understood, describing the subject under investigation and how the objectives of the project may have to be restricted in scope by logical and resource limitations.

The dimensions of the research must be defined as being prospective (purely experimental) or retrospective (using information that is already available), or a combination of prospective and retrospective as with observational and sampling studies. All can be channeled based on operational or adaptive management trials. This leads to an information search, meta-analysis, sampling that may include descriptive sampling, new or familiar experimental research, and observational approaches.⁹²

Review and Recalibrating Research

Review and recalibrate a project is essential to ascertain if all variables have been catalogued and analyzed, if the thesis has sufficient evidence to support conclusions or whether or not the thesis should be discarded and a new thesis determined. Recalibration is used to determine, check, and (if necessary) to rectify the graduation of any point given quantitative measurements of subject matter studied, or to divide or mark any parts needing further inquiry, while determining the correct range of the research so that it remains in the original focus scheme or the focal point is modified to be of service, or discarded if not correct. Recalibration is a plan that is so carefully constructed that it has precision in use, application and appeal for all those who will read and verify the study and its conclusions. This is the skeleton on which the sinews and flesh of the study rest—avoiding any self-serving process or glorification in quest of recognition that is undue the researcher or group. It is an equalizing tendency that is common in advanced nations, but barely alive in poor Third World countries. The extension of higher education to an increasingly large proportion of the population has led to concern that this has resulted in dilution of the academic elite and so caused a lowering of academic standards. In Third World nations, especially in the lowest tier of countries like Perú and Haiti, teachers teach for the money with little interest in achieving academic excellence to presenting serious subject matter expertise and training to their wards and students.

Education for most people, especially in Third World nations, is seen as a passport to greater job potentialities, job security, and personal enrichment at the expense of the rest of the population. This is common with for-profit universities built rapidly in northern Perú with no thought as to the education or experience of the faculty, with mealy administrators who will trade academic excellence for job security by retaining and even promoting psychopathic schizophrenics in the student, teaching, and administrative population.⁹³

 

Calibration and Recalibration in Learning Areas in Education

Calibration and recalibration is especially effective in learning areas and education. Calibration in educational processes requires pre-learning assessment given to each learner to determine what the student already knows, personal learning paths that can be prescribed for each learner based on his or her pre-learning assessment, learning preparation studies to understand what motivates the student and handling the issues of recall and relevant prior knowledge invested in the correlations between new information and prior knowledge, to facilitated the learning experience.⁹⁴ This can be modified, deleted or expanded based on the materials and independence levels granted to learners to master knowledge with diverse and numerous tools, requiring specific feedback to validate the learning process. Calibrate instructional processing is informed by pedagogically (teaching process) and andragogically (adult learning)⁹⁵ tested theories of learning that take place in a self-paced environment with or without computers or other electronic devices. In each case, the results will be achieved and learning driven by subject matter experts (SME)⁹⁶ who understand phases of instruction: (1) Preparation of the student to learn, (2) presenting materials that the student must learn, (3) engaging the student with effective material to assess mastery of the subject matter, and (4) formal validation of the student’s performance by assessing performance and encouraging retention and transfer of the material through generalizations as well as critical thinking of specifics and creative analysis leading to independent thinking and processing.⁹⁷

In each case, all stages of learning must follow the scientific method and be reviewed, reanalyzed, and verified repeatedly to insure coherence and competency. Review and recalibration is essential not only for authenticating what has been discovered but where the discovery can lead. No research is final, as, like life, research is a journey that has no end and only answers questions when asked, but no one asks all questions so there is much to be discovered over eons.⁹⁸ It is because Russia has silenced questioning “established truths” (ranging from ecclesiastical propaganda pushed by Kirill I of Moscow) such as the erroneous argument and dangerously inaccurate misconception that homosexuality is a choice and can be cured by reparative therapy: long disproved and rejected by all major medical groups including the American Medical Association,⁹⁹ American Psychiatric Association,¹⁰⁰ American Psychological Association,¹⁰¹ American Pediatric Association,¹⁰² and their counterparts through Scandinavia and Europe, and the World Health Organization,¹⁰³ All major psychological and psychiatric groups have condemned reparative/conversion therapy. ¹⁰⁴

 

Conclusion and Recommendations

The problem with current education is that it is not education. There are no rules, no regulations, and no requirements for serious work. Textbooks are not required for most courses, with teachers telling students to find information on the Internet—the least reliable source of all. Libraries are ignored, forgotten, or with the true idiocy in Texas today, are done away with in quest of modernism and digitalizing works and using virtual campuses (these virtual campuses and virtual libraries are now plaguing the world). It is followed by San Antonio Bexar County Library, followed by Midland County Texas Library, that will be “book free” and only charge for books or pages the user wants—depriving the author and original publisher of royalties, ignoring copyright laws, and stealing intellectual property.¹⁰⁵ With biotech libraries there is no longer any incentive for any writer to author any book, article or other work, and with the loss of that incentive, education dies. The University of Texas at San Antonio has no physical books in either its engineering or technology schools. Other schools follow suit, and libraries beome a thing of the past with students, uncritically, turning to the Internet that is ripe with errors, misstatements, inaccuracies, and proselytization of worn myths.¹⁰⁶

The University of Texas at Austin goes even further and allows users to download without charge over 2600 books with no payment to authors or publishers and argues that The University of Texas at Austin recognizes no intellectual property rights at the school, and has over 96,000 early English (1475-1700) books on line (none certified as actual reproductions), more than 33,000 books from the Gutenberg collection, and other stolen texts under the claim that they are outside the scope of copyright laws: national and international.¹⁰⁷. The same is happening elsewhere, with Perú universities and schools mandating that all students visit the university’s Virtual Library that is, in nearly every case, tied to other virtual libraries from Madrid to Michigan and beyond. Deciding to take a survey of reading and reading comprehension, I queried all students in the universities I taught at in Lambayeque county about reading habits.

Only one student out of 213 read a single complete book in the year queried. Only one alumnus had read a book that had more than 400 pages. Five students had read a complete book of between 100 and 300 pages in three years. Four students read similar books in five years. Not a student had read more than one complete book in the original format and length in the ten years surveyed. When it came to judging reading comprehension, zero students could remember main characters, none could retell the plot, and only one had an understanding of basic words that were not common to the community.

Since I also taught teachers at several Lambayeque universities, including courses in elementary reading and writing, I used the same survey and learned that only two teachers had read a complete book—that turned out to be their textbook—in one year. Three teachers had read one non-textbook in three years, and five read two non-text books but supplemental to the subject being taught in five years. In my course in reading, I had to find a thin (limited pagination) book to gain attention. Using Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that is printed on sixty-six pages, of the twelve faculty members who had the course mandated as obligatory, only two read all sixty-six pages in three weeks. Only one understood the basic theme.  None knew what Bob Cratchit meant when he descended the stairs where his Tiny Tim lay dead on the child’s bed, and Bob announced to his mourning family that he was “a happy man.” All teachers thought that the father was insensitive, although in the mid-nineteenth century, the expression was interpreted as Bob Cratchit was content and accepting of the fact that his small son had died.¹⁰⁸

Not a student of mine who taught English at the university where I taught in Lambayeque Province could see the connection with Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge and Mr. Chokepear and his Christmas that appeared in the magazine Punch in the first issue in 1841,¹⁰⁹, and Washington Irving’s essays on old English Christmas traditions in his A Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., published in 1820,¹¹⁰ as detailed in Kelly (1995).¹¹¹, and the Christmas dinner in Restad (1995, p. 137).¹¹²

It is the lack of desire to read or think or write critically. It is the absence of any desire to investigate or research a topic that leaves the world of teaching in the nadir world of ignorance. This will not change until (1) teachers are obligated to publish at least one article every other year, (2) teachers are mandated to take additional course work in their subject field, (3) teachers do not receive any increase in pay without showing continuing education credit and successful work completed, (4) teachers are not advanced to more sophisticated and rigorous courses, and (5) schools grade teachers on excellence and tie financial imbursements and rewards to quality performance of students and teachers, with the initial step being to grade university teachers by rank: Instructor (a minimum of a Master degree in the subject area taught), Assistant Professor (a minimum of a Master degree in the subject area taught plus at least one publication every two years that is nothing less than an article in a learned journal or two public presentations before learnèd societies, (not mentioning reading critically, or doctorate in the subject area), Associate Professor (an earned doctorate and significant publications), and Full Professor (the rank is Professor: at least one earned doctorate, significant publications and a record of presentations to subject area societies and service to the community). It follows the rubric weathered by the adage of holding a carrot in front of the reluctant mule. If there is to be quality education, there must be quality teachers.¹¹³

 

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End Notes