## Thursday, October 31, 2019

### Lies about mandatory mathematics from math haters

As expected three weeks ago, yesterday, the Czech government abolished the plans to introduce a mandatory "matura" exam (at the end of the high school) from mathematics since 2021. The parties in the government clearly want to steal some of the lazy stupid brainwashed young voters from the Pirates, a party of far left green drug addicts and Antifa puppets. The status quo will continue – the teenagers may choose an additional foreign language or mathematics and almost all of them, and an increasing majority, simply choose the language.

It's very bad, some voices of sanity are heard on the Internet but they're accompanied by the brain-dead SJWs and math haters who celebrate. The tweet above is from Mr Jan Skopeček, a conservative lawmaker whom I know in person. He says that mathematics should enjoy some respect, especially in an industrial country like ours. It cultivates the thinking and the mandatory exam may increase the quality of the high school education. He will vote against the plan in the Parliament.

Some of the math haters' responses are really cute.

Like this guy, clearly an SJW, Štěpán Ryšavý, claims to have a math matura but he says it's interesting that no mandatory math exam like that was needed for us to actually become an industrial country.

The only problem with this assertion is that it is a complete lie, in fact, a perfect opposite of the truth. And a person with common sense must be able to guess that the statement is untrue. The rigorous enough education in mathematics was clearly a vital condition for countries to get industrialized. It's rather amazing that this simple statement is presented as a controversial one – or downright denied – by so many people today.

Just one or two decades ago, it was still common sense that the poverty of the poor countries starts with their schools etc. Recall Feynman's Is Electricity Fire? to know how the conferences about education looked in the early 1950s.

OK, so after 1620, the Battle of the White Mountain that is so hated by us the Czechs, the Austrian government didn't give a damn about the education of the population. It changed dramatically in 1770 when the incredibly enlightened modern empress Mr Maria Theresa published
Das Schulwesen ist und bleibt allzeit ein Politikum.
Yes, the education system is and always will be a political matter, she wrote. In 1774, her folks released
Allgemeine Schulordnung
and the universal education became mandatory in the Habsburg Empire. "We would like to see the children who attend schools" etc., the original modest formulations said.

Within 13 years, 1774-1787, the level of education in Czechia jumped dramatically. Additional reforms took place in the following years, see e.g. these slides. Joseph II, Maria Theresa's son, was still a vigorous reformer who made a difference.

But it gets really interesting and relevant in the revolutionary year 1848 and the following one, 1849. Women were incorporated into our education. Purely Czech schools started – don't forget that 1848 was a year in which nations within the empires demanded some emancipation. And in 1849, our education system underwent the Exner-Bonitz reform named after Franz Serafin Exner and Herman Bonitz.

They introduced the 8-year "classical gymnasiums" (liberal arts high schools – which included Greek and Latin but Latin was no longer the language in which the teachers conveyed the wisdom) and 6-year "real gymnasiums" (more focusing on the industry and the commercial sector). Simultaneously, these schools were ended with the matura exam. It had an oral part, a written portion, and both involved mandatory mathematics as well as the natural sciences and classical languages.

It "accidentally" happened that several years after the first alumni appeared with that exam, in 1859, Arnošt Valdštejn built a subsidiary of his foundry in Pilsen. More importantly, in 1869, that was bought by Emil Škoda who turned it into Škoda Works in Pilsen, soon to be the largest factory in Austria-Hungary. Obviously, Škoda himself has had massive education – usually from German-language schools. Aside from rather low-brow workers, however, he clearly needed lots of other engineers in his factory. Do you doubt that? Do you doubt that despite his super-poor background, the Czech Edison František Křižík had to study at the Czech Technical University?

OK, Laurin and Klement who founded the carmaker – which became Škoda Auto, now a part of VW Group – didn't study much. Laurin was trained as a locksmith while Klement bought a bike from Dresden which broke soon. He wrote a hate letter and they responded that he "should better use a language that is comprehensible to us", a codeword for German. ;-) This made Klement so angry that he and Laurin started to produce bikes and then cars! Theirs became a famous company but they clearly copied most of the hard know-how from others.

The Wright brothers (with their first aircraft in 1903) hadn't studied much but to produce great airplanes, e.g. Willy Messerschmitt had to study at the Munich Technical College. I could go on. Some people could become important in the industry without a formal technical education but they just couldn't do it without numerous people who had that education.

The SJW said that my observation that the mandatory technical education was actually started shortly before the industrialization exploded in Bohemia "didn't matter" because "they didn't have cars, airplanes, and the Internet" yet. What? How is this argument supposed to be logical? Cars, airplanes, and the Internet were consequences of the technological progress that followed and that needed that education, too.

Of course, cars were the oldest ones among the three. The first useful car was made by Karl Benz in 1886. You know, it's the guy whose name appears in Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes is a woman's name that is present in order to fulfill quotas, she didn't have to build anything. Now, it is incredible to try to imagine the type of the "thinking" of these people who seem to believe that the construction of the first cars had no relationship with the technical education. It's just so stupid not to see that the education is basically a necessary condition.

Karl Benz started to study a technically oriented lyceum – the word would soon be used as a synonym of "gymnasium for girls", however – when he was nine years old! He got there this soon because he was a prodigious student at the grammar school. Later, he studied at the Poly-Technical University.

I hope that I don't need to go through the biography of the people who built the first airplanes or the Internet (or the World Wide Web that was born, you know, at CERN, hardly a place that is superficial about the education rooted in mathematics). The idea that they went through schools that ignored the technical subjects or mathematics – or where these subjects were just a cherry on a pie – is just utterly ludicrous. Štěpán Ryšavý's idea that the people behind the first cars, airplanes, and the Internet were trained by "schools" where they repeated that the European Union was the salvation of the world and its enemies were evil homophobes shows the complete lack of common sense of people like him – which really became a majority in his generation. These are mostly absolute morons who are incapable of preserving the civilization as we've known it for quite some time.

And the likes of Babiš are supporting this degradation of the nation. PM Babiš also named a young hardcore Gr@tin whom I know in person (and who has also appeared as a commenter here) to a "committee for the climate". It's a guy who literally believes that the sky is falling. A total and completely scientifically illiterate loon. The education system is led by the people who will tell you that the expansion of the factories had nothing to do with the technical education of the people. What future may be expected when things go in this direction and they evolve this quickly? What is the expected future of the society in which the stupidest among the pompous fools acquire the bulk of the powerful positions?

Idiocracy, the movie, was extremely optimistic because it envisioned a decaying society of complete morons around 2500 AD. We will actually get there around 2050 AD unless we really start to fight against the decay and the omnipresent lying deluded scum that is causing this decay.