We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Critics have tagged the Common Core with the pejorative "ObamaCore." The gibe is more instructive than many realize. The Affordable Care Act and the Common Core both involve ambitious efforts to change whole swaths of American life, though the practical impact of each was intentionally shrouded in uncertainty. Both would have benefited from more scrutiny early on but are now increasingly entrenched. In health care, critics have found it a losing strategy to talk about simply repealing the ACA without talking about what should replace it. They need to offer plausible alternatives to have a shot at policy or political success. Meanwhile, the ACA has started to change American medicine. The same is true of the Common Core. Five years on, it has started to change instruction, textbooks, and curriculum.
... the lynchpin of our civilizational patrimony, now starting to break apart, is the United States, on whose vitality, basic conservative values and prosperity the so-called “free world” depends, or has depended. Foundering in sidereal levels of debt, ravaged by a parasitical entitlement cohort and crushing numbers of real unemployment, together amounting, according to some estimates, to 47% of the census which does not pay taxes (according to Forbes, 70% of American families receive more in net government transfers, refunds and benefits than they pay into the system), crippled by a left-leaning governing party, a complicit media establishment, and an academic fifth column, the U.S. has also been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood operatives and riddled by subversive Islamic organizations that may be ultimately sufficient in themselves to turn the American dream into an American nightmare. As Thomas Sowell writes, “Why are Americans — and the Western world in general — falling all over ourselves stifling our own self-expression to appease people who chose to immigrate here, and are now demanding the suppression of anything they don’t like, such as public expressions of Christianity or displays of the American flag?”
I know a guy who got an A+ in Physical Chemistry at an elite university, and never went to class. He needed the spare time to practice with his grunge band. He told me he spent 24 hours non-stop going through the textbook with the help of some borrowed Adderal.
I suspect he missed a lot of interesting stuff, but he got the competency.
There are plenty of reasons for "seat time" in many areas of study, but certainly not in all. For example, there really are no valid criteria (in my view) for competency in Art History, or in history for that matter.
My experience in life has taught me that many or most people would accept some form of feudalism in exchange for safety and security for themselves and their families. Serfdom, if you will.
Caught as most of us are between a job and the government, it's all still basically feudal is it not? Not what the American founders had in mind.
Education, in the end, should be pursued for its own sake. We learn because we want to know, and knowledge is beautiful even if it isn’t ‘used.’ Now more than ever, a person can learn anything and acquire any knowledge without spending a dime or sitting for one minute in a college classroom. This is the miraculous reality of modern times. The potential for a person to educate him or herself is limitless — but we think knowledge must be strictly confined behind the walls of an official institution or it doesn’t count.
“Go to the most prestigious college you can” is revealed to be bad advice. Similarly, the obsession with increasing the numbers of “underrepresented” students at top schools in the belief that this somehow improves their upward mobility (and “social justice”) looks like folly. Our selective schools, in short, are not all they’re cracked up to be and graduating from one is no guarantee of success.
That is because, Arum and Roksa maintain, our entire higher education system has pretty much succumbed to a non-academic mentality: “Educators have increasingly ceded their authority to students, and administrators have shifted institutional emphasis from students’ academic and moral development to their personal growth and well-being. Empowering and catering to students as consumers has only exacerbated these broader and deeper changes.”
An academic resume may matter socially, but after your first job it doesn't matter much for career. We wish strongly to believe that an elite "education" provides a foundation for more life enrichment and a dream-fulfilling career, but as time goes by I have my doubts. If you really care about intellectual enrichment, the Great Courses is all anybody needs.
The "Gentleman's A" harms students in the end. Here's what he says:
In large, introductory courses taken by a substantial cross section of the student body the grade distribution at a typical college or university in earlier times might look something like this: A’s:15%, B’s:25%, C’s:45%, D’s:10%, and F’s:5%. In words, the meaning of the letter grades were given as: A=Excellent; B=Good or Above Average; C=Average or Fair; D=Poor; and F=Failing. Like so many other aspects of American society and culture, things changed very rapidly on the grading front in the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was then that what we now call “grade inflation” got its initial start and experienced its most rapid rise.
Those As in the liberal arts used to be expensive, but now you can get them anywhere. That's why it matters to do math and physics - to show what you really have under the hood.
By taking a promising idea and making a hash of things, advocates of the Common Core paid homage to a long tradition in American education. What could and should have happened in 2009 just might still be possible. It would offer the surest way out of what otherwise looks to be a bruising war of attrition that will complicate school improvement for years to come.
Although that original vision still offers a potential path forward, the odds of the necessary course correction actually taking place seem slight. Indeed, self-confident Common Core advocates have not been inclined to acknowledge missteps or problems and are instead more disposed to double down on clumsy political machinations, attempts to impugn skeptics, and an insistence that everything is working out just as they intended. At this point, however reasonable the rationale for the Common Core, it seems increasingly clear that American education would be better off if this unfortunate, quasi-national enterprise had never made it off the drawing board.
... it is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble.
Every Catholic university has its own story. But the basic dynamic tends to be the same. For all their good intentions, most Catholic administrators are hopelessly confused and inconsistent when it comes to the goals of education. Just talk to a Catholic dean or college president. They do not want non-Catholic students to be “uncomfortable,” and they want everyone to feel “included.” Then, not a minute or two later, the conversation shifts, and the very same proponents of inclusion will insist that we need to challenge our students with critical thought and diverse perspectives. Hello! You can’t have it both ways—making students comfortable and challenging them.
I was recently driving from New Haven to Boston and picked up the first hitchhiker I've seen in quite a while. He was hitching to Augusta, Maine, a Navy guy on leave.
I asked him why he did it. He told me had hitched since his early teens, and just liked it. I told him I used to hitch all over the Northeast, mostly going to see gals. Nobody gave me use of a car when I turned 16, or even when I graduated from college.
It seems to me that hitchhiking in the Northeast is a disappearing tradition. Too bad - it was a good thing, always interesting, but maybe that was a more innocent era.
As a 2013 analysis for the National Bureau of Economic Research showed, only the minority of higher-achieving students value academic quality over campus amenities; Ivy League schools and the like compete on that dimension, not amenities. The vast majority of would-be undergrads, however, are more likely to put a premium on the social side of college, and this is especially true of the wealthier students among them.
At least in the northern climes, it's the last chance to aerate or plug, overseed, and fertilize if you want a half-decent "grass garden" which is suitable for walking and dog abuse. As I always say, lawn grass is a garden. It's not natural, and needs care just like any garden. Lawns benefit a great deal from fall fertilizing. If lawns are walked on at all, they require aerating. It's not a rug. If you have a small lawn, you can do that by hand with a hand aerator or a spade: stick it in, wiggle it, and pull it out.
A Spring or Fall aeration or plugging, a Fall overseeding, and three fertilizations per year ought to be good enough for any grass lawn, with or without irrigation but using a mulching mower. Readers know that I top-dress in Spring, but it might not be necessary for everybody. I like doing it.
(The only purpose of irrigation is to make a lawn green when it doesn't want to be green. It's fine for ahow, but spray paint might be cheaper.)
I advise doing those chores all at once. Do it now, and if you have a crabgrass problem, you can deal with it in the Spring with crabgrass-preventer. (You can't overseed and use crabgrass-preventer at the same time because the weed-preventer will prevent germination of your grass seed.)
Best, most logical plan? Minimize your lawn and grow lots of trees and shrubs, and mulch the heck out of them. It's a shame that the "gracious lawn" became the American Way, as if our little 1-2-acre plots were English estates. Heck, all anybody needs is room for Croquet and Badminton, some walking paths and maybe a cool little putting green, but the American lawn has become the expected standard.
Well, nobody. However, it doesn't matter because the regulators are our moral and intellectual superiors like Cass Sunstein. Philosopher-Kings, you might say, or experts.
I am more from the William F. Buckley Jr school:
"I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."
The regulation-maniacs assume, of course, that we common folk have no sense, no information, and few morals, and constantly need their guidance, rules, and laws. Most of them, I suspect, have minimal contact with us regular folks.
Modern skepticism about rationality is largely motivated by years of experiments on cognitive bias. We are prone to apparently irrational phenomena such as the anchoring effect (if we are told to think of some arbitrary number, it will affect our snap response to an unrelated question) or the availability error (we judge questions according to the examples that come most easily to mind, rather than a wide sample of evidence). There has been some controversy over the correct statistical interpretations of some studies, and several experiments that ostensibly demonstrate ‘priming’ effects, in particular, have notoriously proven difficult to replicate. But more fundamentally, the extent to which such findings can show that we are acting irrationally often depends on what we agree should count as ‘rational’ in the first place.
It's an interesting article. I have always figured that humans are partly and sometimes rational and practical, often emotional, frequently uninformed or misinformed, etc. etc. I feel the same way about the regulators who seem to me to be irrationally obsessed with the idea of controlling others to try to make the world fit their fantasies. I'm sure Psychiatry has a term for that tendency. After all those who like to regulate are heir to the same human foibles and temptations as everybody else. Just more grandiose in their self-esteem and less humble and self-doubting.
Why Girls Tend to Get Better Grades Than Boys Do - New research shows that girls are ahead in every subject,
including math and science. Do today's grading methods skew in their
favor?
Does this question require research? Anybody who has ever sat in a classroom knows why.
Critics might dismiss my and others’ concerns about what trigger warnings represent as a slippery-slope fallacy. But if there is one thing that I have discovered in fighting for free speech on campus, it is that when it comes to limitations on speech and the uniquely sensitive environment of college campuses, the slope is genuinely perilously slick. In my career, I have seen harassment rationales — meant to prevent misogynists from forcing women out of jobs through constant abuse — being invoked to justify censoring everything from quoting popular television shows to faintly implying criticism of a university’s hockey coach to publicly reading a book.
Danielle Henderson spent six years and $60,000 on college and beyond. The effects of that education? 
I was recently driving from New Haven to Boston and picked up the first hitchhiker I've seen in quite a while. He was hitching to Augusta, Maine, a Navy guy on leave.