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.
That essay was linked by George Leef's comment on the Send Fewer Students to College topic. Leef concludes:
If you think about the reality of higher education rather than its lovely facade, you have to drop the belief that we need to send more students to college.
The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.
The pup who works in NYC is studying for her GMAT. It sounds like a rightly demanding and discriminating exam.
She says the grammar correction sections are extremely subtle aspects of complex sentences, and that the two-part interactive math problems only give you two minutes each if you want to finish them. If you get one right, the computer gives you a more challenging one. It ramps up fast, she says, to try to find your limits. That's a great idea, like an automated oral exam where they can push each line of questioning until you are totally stumped and crushed with humility. The two-part math questions involve something like Which of the following additional pieces of information do you need to solve this problem? A,B, Both, Neither.
Brain swirls. These sorts of logical challenges quickly separate the men from the boys.
There are two essays also. Sounds like good fun to me, but I like exams. No. I love exams, whether offered by schools, institutions or, most importantly, by real life every darn day.
The pup does too: she is busy re-memorizing her exponent and square root tables to save time on the exam. She has great fun doing it, and says "It will never hurt you in life to have 9 to the 5th on the tip of your tongue." She began with 1-12 to the third and is working her way up.
No calculators allowed for this exam. Good on them for that.
I like my kids to get out of the Northeast for at least some part of their education, and they all have done so. I am delighted to have a pup at Kenyon College. She loves it, and I am pleased and relieved about that because through secondary school she spent every free moment banging around NYC, going to theater, museums, concerts, street fairs, theater internships, pubs, etc. I had come to think of her as a city girl.
My overall impression of the Kenyon kids is clean-cut, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, cheerful, studious, not overly Maoist, and very engaged in all of the activities of the school. For one example, the pup tells me that she does not know one kid who is not involved in some musical activity, and that the intro Theater course is the most heavily subscribed, with four large sections.
Small liberal arts colleges in the countryside tend to feel like Prep Schools to me, and Kenyon does have that feeling. If a kid went to school in the relatively isolated countryside or to a place like Exeter, Andover, Hotchkiss, Choate or Deerfield, I don't think they would find Kenyon to be an exciting change of pace. (With around 1600 kids, Kenyon is half the size of the BD pup's high school.)
Kenyon was founded as an Episcopalian seminary and college by Dartmouth grad Philander Chase in 1824 when Ohio was pioneer country. It remains, technically anyway, an Episcopalian school.
Kenyon grad Paul Newman built them a wonderful new athletic center with pool, gyms and work-out rooms (which are shared with people in the town). He didn't need to build them a theater, because they already have three: a black box, a small theater, and a high tech large theater - plus a large music performance auditorium in Rosse Hall. That's enough for 1600 kids.
I took some snaps of the cozy campus, of course.
The pup's favorite classroom, in Ascension Hall:
Lots more snaps of the Kenyon campus below the fold -
"A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics."
"Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s."
When I blamed the children’s poor discipline and concentration on the layout, the teacher looked at me with horror. ‘The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,’ she said emphatically. Children are now expected, for example, to be ‘independent learners’ in charge of their own education. (‘Why do teachers keep asking me what I want to learn? How am I supposed to know?’ one boy asked me in exasperation.)
Crowder pays them a visit to find out, and it's worse than I though. An embarrassment.
What are these morans (nb - that's the cool blog spelling) doing in any competitive college? Or any college? Are these simple souls our best and brightest?
What happened to the old saying: "You can't shine sh-t"? These dopey kids should have real jobs, where they could learn something useful to do, shine themselves up, and become a credit to themselves. I think colleges are ripping these people off - or their parents.
was prompted by a survey of freshman composition courses a few years back. Fish read lesson plans for 104 sections at his university and found that "only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues --- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising." Writing courses taught by writing instructors should focus on writing, period. People should teach subjects in which they have some expertise (what do English graduate students know about globalization?), and materials brought into the course should not obscure stated aims (how does teaching about racism help students write better sentences?). This is to insist upon boundaries between disciplines---another no-no in current thinking---and to divide people into experts and dilettantes. It is also to endorse the goals of general education and examine how well a college curriculum delivers them. Hence the discussion of a new report by ACTA.
Last semester, in an unguarded moment, I did what literature teachers should never do. I told a student her interpretation of a poem was wrong. From that moment I was regarded as an enemy to freedom.
Part 1 was posted yesterday morning. This is from Dr. Bliss.
The Headmaster also had a policy that all administrators had to teach something - from the Admissions officer to the Provost and the Dean - and coach a sport too (however badly - nobody there cared if you were a lousy coach as long as we all got 2 hours of strenuous sport and fresh air). That was wise. Everybody was a teacher first. Every kid had to take 4 years of an ancient language and 4 years of a modern language, and you had to take math at least up to pre-calc. Plenty of kids flunked out. They would say to the parents "Sally does not seem to want or to be ready to take what we have to offer her here."
One of the teachers (or masters, as they were called), with or without their spouse as they wished, presided over every (assigned) table at all meals except breakfast, which was a free-for-all. You could not miss a meal. We students rotated the table service duty, and also the dish-washing duty (in what we called the Wombatorium).
We had required, monitored study hall (in old, panelled study halls) every night after dinner except Saturdays, from 7-10. Except for seniors. No talking and no non-textbooks. There was a prayer before breakfast and dinner, which was rotated through the students regardless of their religion.
Yes, everybody had to be in a sport, every semester. And every teacher was "Sir" or Ma'am." No complicated "dress code" - just a school uniform which made school shopping very inexpensive. The beds were hard and the rooms were cold in the winter. The only TV was in the snack shop, which opened after sports and closed before evening chapel.
Everybody rotated through School Duties: Dinner serving, Sunday Faculty Tea serving, scullery duty, lawn care duty, janitorial duty in the halls and common rooms (dusting, vacuuming), etc. No excuses.
There was brief chapel every evening (announcements, a prayer, a Bible reading, a homily, a hymn), and Sunday church, all presided over by the Headmaster with all faculty (and with all spouses and families on Sunday) in attendance. All the features of a low-Anglican service. The Jewish, Protestant (which I am), Hindu, and atheist kids never were converted (as far as I know), but they did learn to appreciate the virtue of a daily rhythm of contemplation and worship. Plus they learned a lot about Christianity. It is worth knowing about.
Darn good organist, who was also a Music teacher.
My parents sacrificed quite a bit for me to go there: new cars, trips, etc. I am true to my school. I still miss it, in a way.
If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools. America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics. What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian, studies. And, then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents.
One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter. “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies.”
Most people agree that the meaning of a college degree has degraded over the years, and is certainly no longer an indication of scholarship or advanced learning. With the commoditization of higher ed, colleges across the country have become glorified high schools. It cannot be otherwise, because most people aren't scholars. Just think about it: Does a college degree today guarantee that a person knows anything about anything?
Of course not, and employers know this.
I agree with Mr. Prelutsky that more people need training in trades, whether in apprenticeships of trade schools, whether in computer programming and software development, or in farming, carpentry and gunsmithing. A serious high school education ought to be a good start for anyone's life-long learning - if they want it.
Our Editor wanted me to post this draft of a reminiscence about my wonderful boarding school (which will go unnamed), so here 'tis:
My boarding school had a required 4th form - sophomore - course we called "Shit He Wants Us to Know," which we labelled "Shwuk." Real name of the course was something like: 4th Form Required Headmaster's Course. That's where I got my love for stats, and lots of other things.
Besides How to Lie with Statistics - and a week on Liebnitz (who amazed him), the course also involved reading about half of the Bible - with a focus on Samuel - he made it great fun - and Moby Dick, plus one Shakespeare play which changed every year - and whatever else our Headmaster thought any person educated in his school ought to know. The history of Baseball, the history and chemistry of plastic, wood, and cement, Aristotle's Poetics, and how sails and windmills supposedly work. It also included the math of the Parthenon's design (those guys knew the keys to perspective way before the Renaissance), and every tiny detail of The Last Supper - including a discussion of the meaning of cannibalism in religion up to the symbolism of the Mass.
His class was like a real Intro To School. He was a Brit, an Anglican priest with an apparently blissfully affectionate marriage to a beautiful, reserved, distinguished lady who occasionally did book reviews for the NYT and The New Republic, and who loved to shoot grouse in Scotland. They were both shooters. They had four Ivy League boys, who, as I recall, who did extremely well forging their paths in life - at least one of whom returned to the private school world after making bags of bucks on Wall St. Another went to Yale Theological Seminary after Harvard College. I forget the others.
About The Last Supper, I remember him saying something like this "Would you eat human flesh, if cooked properly? Would you? Humans used to do it every chance they got. The Maoris called it "Long Pig" in the south Pacific because it tastes like pork. So they say. They made a feast of it when they were able to spear an enemy tribe in the jungle. Well, many claim you do it every week, if you are a believer, in Communion. In some spiritual sense, I do consume this human flesh too, but from a hunger of the spirit, not the hunger of the flesh. How wonderful it is that we reach back to stone age times for our most powerful ideas to nurture us. Drink this, this is my blood, shed for you. That is powerful stuff, ladies." And then "Now, Miss Bliss, tell us why Leonardo has Christ pointing to a glass of wine, and the what and why of the emotional reactions of the people at this Passover dinner. It's not a great painting, nothing to be nervous about - just a too-famous picture by a hugely talented mind. Explain to us what Leonardo might have had in his mind - besides wanting to get paid - when he painted this scene on the wall of the refectory. Begin on the left side." He was good fun, and there was always a twinkle in his eye.
The only political science was Plato's Republic and Burke's Reflections. Oh, a bit of Locke too. We all had to shoot rifles and shotguns, and learn the basic physics of ballistics. We learned renal physiology, because he though the kidney was a miracle in its ability to make sea-born creatures like us capable of maintaining ocean levels of salts under our land-dwelling skins.
We took a bus to West Rock (same geological formation as the Hudson Palisades) to learn Triassic paleontology and geology. Nothing superficial, he made us dig into it - with real shovels. A serious Christian (he wanted us to know Jesus, but he did not try to convert anybody because he assumed many or most of us were religiously-rebellious teens anyway). He loved Darwin and his Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals - we had to read it along with modern research on the topic. And Orwell's Politics and the English Language.
Class met twice a week in small groups of around 15-20, around a circular table. It was the best and perhaps most demanding course I ever took in my entire education. The volume of reading would be incredible to kids today. The guy was interested in everything - Adam Smith, baseball pitches, kidneys, aviation, chlorophyll - and he treated it all as an adventure and infected most of us with his curiosity about everything. His attitude was "Let's figure this out" because he never claimed to be smart. Never "This is what it is." For him, everything was "What the heck is this?" - whether a butterfly, Hamlet, Freud, God, Newton, or ballistics.
Plus, through this course, the Headmaster got to know each one of us personally, and he was one shrewd dude to do that. No slacker escaped his gaze, and committed slackers were sent packing for good, because he did not believe in offering treaures to those who did not wish to partake in treasure-hunting. If your mind wandered, he would say "Miss Bliss, I Will Throw No Pearls Before Swine. You can day-dream later, or you can do it at home with your Mommy and Daddy if you want." Then he would make you stand and try to explain what he had been talking about. Tough. Love. Loved life and loved people. A lifetime role model.
I recall there was no hiding in his classes. He just said "Stand and deliver, Miss Bliss. You have one generous minute. Tell us everything you know about the Bernoulli Effect." There was no paper and no exam: all based on class performance. That's the great potential of private schools: you can demand performance. And he had a school to run, so could not be bothered with reading puerile or stolen papers. He wanted to know what you had to say for yourself, and he only gave one "A" per group. For that A, he'd write you a gracious college recommendation.)
You cannot be a powerfully inspiring teacher without being a natural learner who assumes his own stupidity. His unique course followed his inquisitive nose, and the model remains with all of us. He did not teach so much as share his enthusiasm and curiosity, but you had better have the answer about how kidney tubules handle sodium concentrations - with the math: he had a talent for integrating things, from the biochemical level to the math to the culinary - he gave us his favorite recipe for steak and kidney pie with his method for not making it smell like a urinal as part of his sessions on the kidney. According to his interests, he would alter the course a bit each year.
It was his personal introduction to the life of the mind, to a life of curiosity. Doing this course was his great joy in life, probably a greater joy to him than his little old farmhouse in Greece.
Did we make fun of his enthusiasm? Of course. Young people do stuff like that. It means nothing.
We posted a little while ago about Sociologists complaining about not being a major factor in the Obama administration. Now I see the Anthropologists seeking political "relevancy."
Oh man, that is so 60s. So silly. What's the problem? Do social scientists feel disempowered? I think they should just stick to their knitting and find out fun stuff. It's not supposed to be useful: it's supposed to be pursuit of knowledge.
...when you look at the high-school NAEP scores, you see virtually no improvement in reading or math performance since the early 1970s, despite massive increases in taxpayer funding and reform fads galore.
Everybody knows that education costs next to nothing. It's the education industry that is expensive. Most people also know that "increased funding" and "reforms" are little more than political payoffs.
We have frequently opined here that too many Americans go to college, wasting time and money and extending adolescence in those who could and should be doing real things in the real world, and getting life experience instead of mastering beer pong and Leftist theory about how to remain a dependent throughout life on the effort of others. A solid high school education was good enough for Bill Gates, and ought to be a good platform for lifetime learning for them as wants it.
Anybody can go to the library and find a free book to guide them through Aristotle, Plato, Aquinus, Locke, Burke, and Hume. Anybody who doesn't feel moved to do so does not belong in college anyway: for them, it's just expensive day care as it was for Sebastian Flight.
Knowledge is cheap and readily accessible these days for all (thank God) - but learning is never easy.
The smart people I know just used their silly academic credentials so they could get a good apprenticeship in some useful and profitable line of work. That's what I had to do. My fancy law degree (which cost me lots of money) just gave me the chance to learn law afterwards. It is a dumb and/or corrupt system in which academic credentials, however empty or enriching, are required. Monopolistic, I believe, on the part of the Big Academia industry/cartel.
I have no trust in Big Academia. Like the tort bar, Big Academia is bought off and in the pocket of the Lefties. Follow the money...
Stanford University update, at Driscoll. This is all on their parents' hard-earned nickel, of course, but I suppose children must be children until reality makes them grow up.
Mandatory military service, as in Israel, might help, though.
The famous Sokol essay was published in 1996. It was just blather, but the "adventurous" editors couldn't tell. Maybe "adventurous" is a euphemism for not knowing what you are doing.
About five years ago, shortly before my term ended as a Regent of the University of California (UC), I was having a casual conversation with a very high-ranking UC administrator about a proposal that he was developing to increase "diversity" at UC in a manner that would comply with the dictates of California's Constitution and the prohibition against race, gender and ethnic preferences.
As I listened to his proposal, I asked him why he considered it important to tinker with admissions instead of just letting the chips fall where they may. In an unguarded moment, he told me that unless the university took steps to "guide" admissions decisions, UC would be dominated by Asians. When I asked, "What would be wrong with that?" I got an answer that speaks volumes about the underlying philosophy at many universities with regard to Asian enrollment.
The UC administrator told me that Asians are "too dull - they study, study, study." He then said, "If you ever say I said this, I will have to deny it." I won't betray the individual's anonymity because to do so would put him in a world of trouble - and he would, indeed, deny having said it. Yet, it is time to confront the not-so-subtle hand of discrimination against Asians that masquerades as "building diversity" at many elite college campuses.
In my dotage I have two young sons.Both are smart.And, I help and drive them.I worry about whether I’ll instill enough in them so that after I’m a goner they’ll be able to handle life’s decisions well.I also worry how well the major financial investment in college will work out.
So I got drawn into a series of blog posts from the American Enterprise Institute about a study listing colleges’ graduation rates, based on US Department of Education gathered data.The discussion has centered on why many rankings don’t make sense.The latest post reveals that colleges are not under any compunction to accurately report data.
For example, “Arkansas Baptist College, which boasts a 100 percent graduation rate in the database, admitted that the school’s data were reported erroneously.”An author of the AEI study comments: “It is worth noting again that these data are congressionally mandated and collected by a major federal agency. Would we tolerate such inaccuracies from the companies who report workplace injury rates to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the state agencies that administer the food stamp program?”
I don’t think my sons will end up at Arkansas Baptist College.But, before Washington funnels hundreds of millions or many billions of taxpayer dollars into higher education, it does seem reasonable to require greater accountability, of Washington and of colleges.
Vitruvius at SDA recommends the highly enjoyable and accessible MIT required freshman year intro Physics courses - Classical Mechanics and Electricity and Magnetism. Prof. Walter Lewin, who teaches both, says his goal is to make the student love Physics, and to see the beauty in it. He succeeds. (If you fail one of the required courses, you are sent home.)
I don't know why any college would bother lecturing on these topics when they can use Dr. Lewin's recordings. Both entire series of lectures are on YouTube, for those of us who could not have gotten into MIT with an H-bomb because of our B+ in BC Calc:
Prof. Lewin makes it all vivid, clear, and entertaining, and the math is straightforward and clear as a bell. Plus no exams, so it's a wonderful way to get some free education, or to refresh your old, fading memories.
For me, Physics, Music (which is Physics + a twist by the human soul), and Religion merge into one sublime cosmic entity which is the awe-inspiring, terrifying, love-inspiring miracle of Creation. I have never understood how anyone can feel like they can feel close to God without knowing all the Physics they are capable of, but I know that is stupid of me.
As we enter graduation season, it's time to re-post P.J. O'Rourke's 2008 Commencement speech. His first piece of advice:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.
There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
The Dems seem to want everybody to go to college. I want everybody to get a solid HS education, but many will not. Not because of the schools - because they don't want it.
As I have said many times here, one does not "get" educated: one takes it - or does not. As it is, how many colleges are glorified high schools, diploma mills, or propaganda factories?
The Dems want student loans to be a federal entitlement. That would basically make colleges and universities fully under the thumb of the feds, which will lead to everything becoming politicized. Also, they want to eliminate private college loans. Does this all sound sort of familiar?
In part, their wishes sound like a government full-employment plan for PhDs in unmarketable subject areas, and one more power grab over independent and private institutions.
I graduated at the top of my class with a double major from a good college; I did not enter graduate school because I couldn’t take one more minute of the postmodern gibberish being peddled in every department and by nearly every instructor, at all times. Even the visiting lectures were hopelessly corrupted by the barbaric and unlovely LitCrit jargon: “Jane Austin and the Deterritorialized Gaze: Possession, Feminism, and the Other in 19th Century England” I’d rather watch TV, thank you. I spent my entire time reading the great critics and scholars of the preceeding generations and largely ignored my professors; Harold C. Goddard has more thoughtful things to say about Shakespeare than all the current crop of pedagogues could collectively put together in their lifetimes.
Lastly, and I feel I can say this with authority, the university is the least free place to speak your mind in the United States. At any time you might slip up and find yourself before a tribunal of administrative jellyfish, being castigated by a howling lunatic from some immaterial discipline demanding your immediate expulsion. It’s not worth opening your mouth, because no one will even see the need to come to your defense. The hard and natural sciences sail along, imperiously indifferent to the fate of the humanities. By the time they realize that the barbarians have stormed the gates, and taken the city below, their floating island will have been over-run with the same hordes of irrationalism, misplaced sentiment, self-loathing, and muddleheaded thinking that doomed their sister schools. Once language is detroyed, it becomes impossible to even articulate the grounds of dissent, or remember when things might have been different.
One of the most pressing needs that conservatives and honest liberals have is to rebuild the university; not to create a new model, but to reinstate the grand one that once existed and must exist again if our common culture is to re-establish a fellowship with wisdom.
We, the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences Diversity Committee, use the term “diversity” to mean the desirability and value of many kinds of individual differences while at the same time acknowledging and respecting that socially constructed differences based on certain characteristics exist within systems of power that create and sustain inequality, hierarchy, and privilege.* The College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences is determined to eliminate these forms of inequality, hierarchy, and privilege in our programs and practices. In this sense, diversity is to be actively advanced because it fosters excellence in learning, discovery, and engagement.
* These characteristics include, but are not limited to ability, age, body size and condition, class, color, ethnicity, gender, gender expression, geographical and cultural background, health status, national origin, political affiliation, race, religion, sexual orientation, and veteran status. [Asterisk in original.]
Perhaps it was aiming for satire, but overshot the mark.
Does aptitude matter at all? Does ability matter? Does anything matter, except skin tone diversity? As far as I can tell, the anti-test movement in edn is all about skin tone.
Tests are designed to discern and to objectively measure ability and knowledge, to - and here's the word - discriminate the competent from the less so. Crazy thing is that the SAT was introduced precisely to provide objective measures to eliminate favoritism and to reward merit.
Georgia born-and-raised, and CT resident Flannery O'Connor died of lupus at 39 in 1964.
A collection of her occasional pieces, Mystery and Manners, was assembled by her friend the translator and poet Robert Fitzgerald. In that collection is a gem of an essay, "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade."
In my teaching days, no single document shaped my thinking as much as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders. "And what if the student finds this is not to his taste?" O'Connor asked. "Well that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed."
In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but, by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.
No child needs to be assigned Hersey or Steinbeck until he is familiar with a certain amount of the best work of Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, the early James, and Crane [we can quibble with the names; I certainly quibble with Cooper’s inclusion], and he does not need to be assigned these until he has been introduced to some of the better English novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The fact that these works do not present him with the realities of his own time is all to the good. He is surrounded by the realities of his own time, and he has no perspective whatever from which to view them. Like the college student who wrote in her paper on Lincoln that he went to the movies and got shot, many students go to college unaware that the world was not made yesterday; their studies began with the present and dipped backward occasionally when it seemed necessary or unavoidable.
The high-school English teacher will be fulfilling his responsibility if he furnishes the student a guided opportunity, through the best writing of the past, to come, in time, to an understanding of the best writing of the present. He will teach literature, not social studies or little lessons in democracy or the customs of many lands.
And if the student finds that this is not to his taste? Well, that is regrettable. Most regrettable. His taste should not be consulted; it is being formed.
The unions own the public schools. Not "the people" and not the parents. It's a darn pity. Betsy with details.
Schools began in America with families chipping in to hire a schoolmaster, and building a log cabin schoolhouse with their hands. And supplying the firewood too, from their woodlots.
We post frequently on the sickness infecting Western liberal arts education - the spineless relativism which causes them to doubt, or to hate, themselves, and to denigrate everything that is cheerful, loving, grateful, positive, appreciative of their heritage (and of their work itself, which is as "Western" as can possibly be - "Western" to a fault), Judeo-Christian, and freedom-oriented.
Harvard Chaplain supports death penalty for apostates. Ah, the Religion of Death. He's probably not afraid to say that he wants death for me too, as a Christian who will not submit to Islam. That comes next. Not to worry: our flaccid generation will commit cultural suicide when asked to do so.
We have often opined here that the real purpose of a liberal arts education is life enrichment rather than to enhance one's future in commerce.
As usual, my views are hopelessly old-fashioned. Tim Black at Spiked discusses the subject in The Modern University: You Get What You Pay For. It's the UK, but it applies in the US too. One quote:
Underpinning the fees debate – indeed the thing that makes the fees debate possible – is this contemporary degraded idea of university education. Gone is the ivory tower; in its place stands the glass-fronted hub of much-mooted, never-seen economic growth. The establishment of the UK Department of Innovation, Universities and Skills is itself testament to the shiny new role laid out for the twenty-first century university. In his first speech as secretary of state for the department in 2007, John Denham stated: ‘To compete and prosper in this world, to respond to the needs of leading global and national businesses, we must enable many thousands more people to study and graduate each year. To become a world leader in skills, as Lord Leitch recommended, we must aim for at least 40 per cent of adults to have higher level qualifications by 2020.’ (6)
How Chaucer helps a nation compete in international business is beyond me, but I would not want to live in a world without him. Tim Black, like me, wonders what this is all about. Another quote from his piece:
The transformation of higher education into a glorified, paid-for training service has, likewise, turned what might once have been aspirant scholars into very demanding customers. Students today come not so much to learn, as to consume the ‘educational product’ on which they have just splashed several thousand pounds. In the proud words of the 2003 government white paper, The Future of Higher Education, students are at university for the ‘acquisition of skills’ (8). Their future earning potential depends on it. In this sense, the NUS’s alternative to tuition fees – a loan to be paid back dependent on earnings – seems like the demand of little more than a consumer watchdog.
It has not always been this way. In his 1853 treatise The Idea of a University, JH Newman defined it as ‘a place [for] teaching universal knowledge’ (9). Such notions of the integrity of university education were not nineteenth-century oddities. They were informed by a deep, anti-utilitarian sense of the intrinsic value of culture and knowledge, something perhaps best expressed by Newman’s contemporary, Matthew Arnold, as the ability to ‘turn a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’. The university enshrined such freedom. It demarcated a place outside the demands and interests of commerce and business. The value of education bore no relation to monetary value; indeed its ‘uselessness’ was its virtue. Such humanistic ideas of the university accompanied the expansion of higher education provision in the 1960s. In the 1963 Robbins Report on giving more social classes the opportunity to attend university, the committee wrote ‘[the] search for truth is an essential function of the institutions of higher education, and the process of education is itself most vital when it partakes in the nature of discovery’ (10).
Bring me up to date, please. What is college for these days? Life enrichment? Creating an informed citizenry? Nurturing of scholars? Work certification? Job training?
While searching info about Kenyon (it was Paul Newman's alma mater, along with EL Doctorow, Robert Lowell, William Rehnquist - and Rutherford B. Hayes), I stumbled upon an op-ed written for the NYT by Kenyon's Director of Admissions: To All the Girls I've Rejected.
It's about how colleges are dealing with the disproportionate numbers of female applicants they have been seeing over recent years, and why they feel forced to raise their admissions standards for them. It's Gender Discrimination!
I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.
When I picture the pile of mendacity this chart represents, and then season it with the images of the LUGS gettin' it on under the watchful eyes of their Sauron, Obama, and Che posters, the desolate furtive groping interspersed with the endless acts of contrition and permission necessary to disrobe a feminist toward the center of the chart, and the beautiful frosting of a vision of the bell curve ends getting together by accident during an all night trance party, I forgive Wellesley everything. You finally came across. You're checkbox comedians after all.
I've read that a Wellesley student once reported that she switched her iPod to Bach while waiting at crosswalks, because she didn't want anyone to know she was listening to the Spice Girls if she got hit by a bus when the light changed. I bet that girl's off the charts, baby.
How come I always thought that merit was supposed to be the solution to genetic and ethnic bias? I guess not. Racism and ethnicism are the new anti-racism and anti-ethnicism. Silly me to have trouble with that, after all this time.
With this obsession with the genetics of skin tone, why don't we simply revert to the old way, where our genetic blood-line determines what we get to do? No, I have no African blood (well, way back we all do), or royal blood either. English serfs mostly - essentially slaves (does that give me a leg up?), I believe, back in the 1400s. Hard workers who survived long enough to reproduce. A random knight or two, I believe, for whatever that's worth, and a few clergymen.
College students’ reading habits ain’t what they used to be, laments Ron Charles, a senior editor at The Washington Post’s Book World.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s monthly list of best-selling titles on college campuses, Mr. Charles notes, has lately been dominated by the vampire tales of Stephenie Meyer and the inspirational stories of Barack Obama. Forty years earlier — amid the passion of civil rights, Vietnam, and the women’s movement — student tastes ran more along the lines of Howl, Soul on Ice, and the poetry of Sylvia Plath.
Today “we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet they’re choosing books like 13-year-old girls — or their parents,” he writes. “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.”
Not everyone shares his alarm, reports Mr. Charles. Mike Connery, who writes for the Web site Future Majority, says that the top titles are simply what people are reading to escape. They absorb their politics through blogs and social networks, he says.
Mr. Charles isn’t buying that argument. “For the Twitter generation, the new slogan seems to be ‘Don’t trust anyone over 140 characters,’ he writes. “What you see at the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that’s so uncool.” —Don Troop
Ed. note: One more of those "the kids these days" pieces. But if Soul on Ice and Sylvia Plath are anybody's idea of soulful, I must live in the wrong universe.
Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues. Niceness presents itself as benevolence, but is often merely an evasion of hard decisions that the realities of human nature require. And it has spread throughout our societies because it is often popular with voters. The road to hell, it is said, is paved with good intentions, and so is a good deal of democratic politics.
and
In our compassion, we have confused egalitarian 'fairness' with justice, and we have created a monstrous sense of entitlement.
Wherever standards are destroyed and merit is redefined, a sense of entitlement necessarily follows. This is true in any aspect of society. In the field of education, it manifests itself in the demand by students for high grades when they are not earned.
And this has resulted thousands of defrauded young people who graduate with diplomas they cannot read, apply for jobs they cannot do, and are forced to remain in minimum wage jobs forever, because they cannot read, write, or perform basic computations.
President Obama also promises historic new rates of high-school and college graduation. Again, he seems to think the present problem is the absence of money — as if brilliant, gifted, and motivated young people are ending up at McDonald’s rather than doing quantum physics because the bogeymen “they” raised the bar and didn’t give them enough college scholarship support.
Actually, Obama's goal is easily accomplished: just lower the bar. I happen to believe we need fewer college grads, and to make the High School diploma meaningful again. America needs more plumbers, electricians, handymen, mechanics, gunsmiths - and fewer Women's Studies majors.
The assumption here is that the way to make somebody a competitive worker is to send him to college, an idea that will astonish anyone who's ever been served in a restaurant by a waiter with a master's in art history. This is just the first of the confusions that dog the president's proposal, which for the moment exists only in hypothetical form. Another confusion comes from his hazy definition of what the problem is.
On re-reading my post the other day, and a few of our recent posts on education, I am beginning to think that our American "system" of "higher ed" is obsolete.
A Liberal Arts education was designed for gentlemen-scholars, the few who were driven by curiosity, towards careers in the clergy, or to produce new teaching professionals. Good citizenship, and the practical tools to function in the world were taught in the lower years. The basic furnishings of the mind, as reader MM would term it.
The democratization of higher ed, via things like the GI Bill, turned higher ed into a job credential. These days, I seem many young people who enjoy and are inspired by college in the old-fashioned way - but a very large many who "just need the piece of paper" and who cheat, screw, and drink their way through it while avoiding anything difficult or challenging.
The social consequence is having masses of non-scholars living extended childhoods at a ridiculous cost to their parents. While enjoying the luxury to some extent, many are also frustrated by a yearning for independence and adulthood, and the desire to do something real. Famous college drop-outs like Bill Gates, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Noel Coward, Woody Allen, Warren Buffet, Charles Dickens (grammar school drop-out), Albert Einstein (high school drop-out), Robert Frost, J. Paul Getty, Horace Greeley (high school drop out), and Bob Dylan are among them.
This site lists many of the rich or famous who either dropped out of high school or college. In some cases, grammar school - when you used to be allowed to do that.
I'd like to see more of our high school grads out there working, and getting night course education in areas of expertise they might like to pursue. I'd like to see more apprenticeships too.
We keep hearing about all the jobs that "require" a college degree — as if the work were so hard that a bright high-school kid couldn't possibly learn to do it. But as the writer of this e-mail points out, the military has jobs that call for a great deal of training, intelligence, and responsibility and manages with young people who for the most part have never gone past high school in formal education...
If I had the time and brains, I'd redesign the entire thing with high school as the core, with a core mission. I'd expect each school board to decide what kids need to know to get a HS diploma. I'd also consider reducing high school to 3 years and liberal arts degrees to 3 years. Do our readers have any ideas?
The "best" students are often the most diligent and dutiful, but not necessarily the most passionate about learning or the smartest. Fairly or not, women and Asian students are often viewed in that light. The University of California reputedly sets limits on their Asian student acceptances.
Profs often find the "best" students boring to teach. Tom Wood at the NAS discusses. One quote:
Some years ago a friend mentioned that a professor at Berkeley he knew had either left for another teaching job or quit teaching altogether (I can’t remember which). The professor had no complaints about the salary, his opportunities to do research and writing, or his department colleagues. In most respects, he was quite happy at Cal—except for the students. And in fact, his complaints about the students were quite limited and specific. He had told my friend that the students were very, very good academically. They could and did do the work. They kept up with the course material, and did well on tests. But they were boring. They weren’t passionate. They weren’t engaged. And because the students were boring, he had come to find teaching boring. So he gave up his tenured position for some other place in academe, or perhaps outside academe altogether.
Being old-school folks with an appreciation for the variety of interests and talents that exist in different people, we view education as having three components:
1. What everybody needs to know to function as a citizen in a free republic 2. What somebody needs to function in a job 3. The opening up of the life of the mind without regard to utility
#3 is, of course, what the original Liberal Arts college education was designed for. It was assumed that #1 was accomplished already, and #2 for most non-professional jobs.
Prof. Fish is not happy with the invasion of the marketplace into academia, but I think it is inevitable; inevitable because employment demands are requiring college degrees, whatever they might be and however silly such requirements might be. It's about monopoly credentialization, like education degrees.
We all know people with good IQs but without degrees who know more and are more interested in life than most of the folks we know with fancy degrees. I need not refer to George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Bob Dylan, or Bill Gates: I need only refer to our appliance repairman who is an impressive Shakespeare scholar (about whom I have posted here in the past).
The identity of the "college" has changed enormously over time, as has the amount of stuff to learn about. In 1700, many barbers doubled as dentists and surgeons, and our few colleges were as much about producing educated and literate Congregationalist ministers as anything else. Things have changed. A "college degree" can mean almost anything now.
A quote from Fish's piece:
What is happening in traditional universities where the ethos of the liberal arts is still given lip service is the forthright policy of for-profit universities, which make no pretense of valuing what used to be called the “higher learning.” John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: “Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that ‘expand their minds’” nonsense.
The for-profit university is the logical end of a shift from a model of education centered in an individual professor who delivers insight and inspiration to a model that begins and ends with the imperative to deliver the information and skills necessary to gain employment.
In this latter model , the mode of delivery – a disc, a computer screen, a video hook-up – doesn’t matter so long as delivery occurs.
Yes, it's a downscale, mass-market Kollege-Mart now. Read Fish's brief, poignant NYT essay, The Last Professor.
That's the title of Stanley Fish's oft-quoted 2003 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
It is not paranoid to state that the Left, since the 60's, has targeted non-profits of all kinds, including churches and universities, as easy take-over opportunities, and the "nice" but well-intentioned, naive, denizens of these worlds frequently rolled out a red carpet for them.
Where else would they go besides into politics and non-profits?
Some of the most innocent organizations in the US succumbed, especially the national headquarters. The dues go from Dubuque and Atlanta to DC and NYC, where they are used as their HQ staff see fit, ie often promoting, advocating, and lobbying for left-wing causes. (Check to see what some of your favorite charities are doing with the dollars that go to their HQ, but you need to dig deeper than just checking their happy websites. Follow the money!)
Same thing with the universities, which are similarly naive and well-intentioned non-profits. But I digress.
Fish's central statement:
"My concern, however, is not with academic time management but with academic morality, and my assertion is that it is immoral for academics or for academic institutions to proclaim moral views.
The reason was given long ago by a faculty committee report submitted to the president of the University of Chicago. The 1967 report declares that the university exists "only for the limited ... purposes of teaching and research," and it reasons that "since the university is a community only for those limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness."
In fact, a lot of sociologists are as offended by Darwin as your average Creationist.
Just two years ago, in his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Troy Duster, an eminent sociologist at New York University, went so far as to suggest that any sociologist who embraced genetic approaches was a traitor to the discipline. Two of the biggest problems facing sociology, he argued, were the "increasing authority of reductionist science" and "the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes 'inside the body.'" If anything defined sociology, Duster said, it was its role as "century-long counterpoint" to such efforts to connect the roots of social problems to biology.
We have frequently opined here that too many Americans go to college, wasting time and money and extending adolescence in those who could and should be doing real things in the real world, and getting life experience instead of mastering beer pong and Leftist theory about how to remain a dependent throughout life on the effort of others. A solid high school education was good enough for Bill Gates, and ought to be a good platform for lifetime learning for them as wants it.
Here's something worthwhile and wonderful. 
as Flannery O'Connor's 1963 essay called "Total Effect and the Eighth Grade." It concerned neither guns nor violence, neither cliques nor experimental approaches to the treatment of adolescent depression. It was about . . . books. In defending the teaching of the great works of the Western canon rather than those of the modern day (which kids far preferred), she said something wise, the sort of thing an adult might say. She said that the whims and preferences of children should always, always be sublimated to the sense and judgment of their elders.
A Columbia prof teaches a highly diverse class of Columbia's famous and required 
I've been to a lot of colleges. I've seen geeks, dorks, nerds. Committed frat-icide by keg. Met gobs of the artsy fartsy stripe, too. Seen plenty of pencil pushers in their dorm room chrysalis. But in all my travels, I've never been to a grimmer hive of humorlessness than Wellesley College. I'd rather have two teeth out than go to a party at Wellesley College. But they've finally come across with one good laugh. Check out the chart. That's the self-reported rate of virginity among the denizens of Swellesley, according to their own Counterpoint magazine.