Maggie's Farm

BILL GATES’ $215 MILLION EDUCATION INVESTMENT WAS A MASSIVE FLOP

We could have told him that.  Just like Zuckerberg's 100 million in Newark schools. No measurable effect.

Colleges Can Hire Adjunct Faculty Cheap — but Does that Harm Education?

Unless you have another job, it's difficult to survive on adjunct gigs. 

The sad story of progressive education in Australia

At This New College, Yes to Latin and Hiking but No to Cellphones and Federal Aid. Like Hillsdale, in some ways: Wyoming Catholic College.

Article by George Leef.

Peterson is right. The Liberal Arts have been degraded by neo-Marxist jibber-jabber, and few students find inspiration in that. It's deadening.

Curating is the new pretentious term for picking and choosing things you like or want. I was recently at a restaurant which offered a "Curated selection of organic teas." 

Well, highly-selective colleges now "curate" their admissions. Of course, they always have done so. 80 years ago they wanted to be preppy, WASPy clubs.  Not now.

The top-rated comment on a column titled "Harvard can’t have it all" (about the lawsuit charging discrimination against Asian-American applicants).

I very much doubt that Harvard, for example, is biased against Asians. Selective schools are not purely meritocratic, if grades and SATs are the only measures of merit. They are not, of course. They do want a mix of interesting and talented people who they think can contribute to, and thrive in, their environment, and who will be future successful ornaments to their alma mater They make a bet that you will be special. Plus necessary legacies and donors. And quarterbacks. And bassoonists.

In my view, as long as past performance and IQ (eg SAT) meet some standard, let them "curate" their Freshman classes at will.  Elite schools could fill their classes many times over with kids with perfect grades and perfect SATs, but that would make no sense at all.

Story here. We now understand that the SAT turned out to be basically a proxy for IQ.  It makes sense to me for schools to be interested in IQ.  Of course, there is far more to what a person might have to offer than IQ, but I think they ought to know that when making distinctions between applicants. Especially at a school like Chicago, which, unlike most of higher ed, requires that a graduate actually ends up knowing a lot of basic things which are not easy to learn.

I am just talking about Liberal Arts higher ed, of course. 

From A GREAT HIGH SCHOOL AND THE MAYOR WHO WOULD DIMINISH IT, an ethnic/racial breakdown of one of NYC's three elite high schools:

Asian — 613
White — 151
Hispanic — 27
Black — 10

Why do they even measure these statistics? Can't we just view people as people? I am confident that nobody in the board of ed is discriminating against whites, hispanics, and blacks.

Interview transcript here. A slice of her comments: 

I think one major impetus for my change was the fact that, despite being in default liberal environments all of my life, I nevertheless always adored the works of the Western literary tradition. And when I saw the 1980s’ multiculturalism taking over university campuses, and ignorant students who had never read the works of the Western canon feeling empowered to reject those works on the basis of the gonads and melanin of their authors, that to me was appalling.

Ironically, people I don’t think understand this distinction, in the 1970s, which was the height of this very abstruse literary theory known as deconstruction, that you mentioned, and that I was an uncritical acolyte of. However odd the theories of language were, holding that meaning is impossible, that the human self is just a fiction, a trope of language, we read the canon without ever once thinking to say, if I’m a female, “Oh, gee, I can’t read Milton because he’s a dead white male.” It never came up. So, I fortunately had a strong grounding in greatness, in beauty, in eloquence, in sublimity. And when that came under attack, that started to turn me away from the broader trends that were going on in academia.

The USA is the worst country in the world. Europe is a terrible ex-colonial place in its death throes, a quaint museum with food. European civilization is the worst the world has produced. The Western World is obsolete and evil, etc.

These radical chic attitudes are getting old-fashioned, but they are still around in academia: It’s Time to Fight for Western Civilization

A short book and a warning about life from Carl Hiassen:  Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear

Silence Around Test Scores Serves the Privileged

Every college has its price. 

To what extent are degrees little more than credentialing?

In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone (h/t Woodpile) 

Why is this happening? Too much money to throw around? It seems to me that all a school needs is teachers and a few clerks.

"Unprepared" is a euphemism with the hidden assumption that everybody, if "prepared," would be higher ed material. Of course, there are countless reasons why the assumption is wrong, but let's start with some of the obvious ones: half of the population has below-average IQ; many people lack the interest or the character traits needed for rigorous high ed (or for high school for that matter, but may want the diploma); many kids float through secondary school while benefiting minimally.

So  Why Do Colleges Admit Students Who Can’t Do the Work?

Is This the Hardest Course in the Humanities?

It's about W.H. Auden's humanities class at Michigan in 1941.  This is not mass-market, fast-food education.

  Its syllabus resurfaced a few years ago and provoked much commentary on its mass of 6,000 pages of the most powerful and challenging literature in the canon: The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them.

From a Scottish student in the US:  Presumption and self-censorship

It's like the Red Guard out there. George Orwell said "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

She's the young assistant teacher in Canada who got in trouble for showing a 30-second TV clip of Jordan Peterson in a class.  A lefty who was mugged by greater lefties.  She is smart and charming too.

The words which got Penn Law Prof Amy Wax in trouble (my bolds):

 All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-"acting white" rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.

Bryan Caplan says 80 percent of American education is just "signaling."

Articles like that are so misguided and cynical that it makes me sad.  Clearly there are hundreds of sorts of education, some formal and some informal, some practical and some impractical. 

I learned the Bible in Sunday school, in college, in church, and in a men's study group. Enriched my life greatly. Never helped me get a job.

Nobody writes a beach-reading book with the wit and dark craziness as Carl Hiassen, but he has a new book coming: Assume the Worst: The Graduation Speech You'll Never Hear

 "This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. That's not what you need. You need a warning."