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.
I strongly suggest taking math, engineering, or a hard science as far as a kid can go in high school and/or college. If they only use it to read newspapers and magazines, it will train the mind and make a good impression on future employers. If a kid is a "no math creative," then I don't know what to say other than "I'm sorry to hear it."
This is Part 1 of the PBS series School Inc. It's a good intro to the history of American education, and a mind-opening intro to what education can be. I would not say that the South Korean system is great, or right for Americans, but competition and choice in education is a good thing.
Clearly, viewing education as a civil service job is not the best route.
Is there any fix for unmotivated kids? Well, yes and no. Watch it, if only because the teachers' unions hate the series. You might get hooked and watch the rest of the series. Enjoyable and...educational.
The Closing of the American Mind turned 30 this year. The fact that every five years now there is a retrospective is a testimony to its staying power, though it may also say something about the number of middle-aged writers on the right who cut their teeth on the book in their salad days. I count myself a member of that motley crew, having read and superficially understood it as a college junior and then periodically gone back to it many times over the years with gradually increasing background knowledge.
Higher ed will spend every penny they can squeeze out of citizens or out of government. It is about sales and marketing, and whatever the market will bear. Higher Ed is now a business, and tries to operate like one. Example: Colleges Stop Exorbitant Price Increases After Congress Caps Student Loans
Somehow, over time, and no doubt due in part to government involvement, the historically non-commercial areas of hospital care and higher ed have become commercial enterprises.
Stanley Fish is a very smart guy and like most such people, he occasionally says silly things.
There is this: Stanley Fish Says Free Speech is Not an Academic Value. That is correct in a very narrow sense, in the sense of his imagining a monkish medieval university, relatively insulated from society and politics, seeking knowledge, wisdom, and truth. Modern American higher ed is mostly anything but that.
Really, free speech and crazy debate is a fine tool in higher ed, in scientific research, and everywhere else. The highest value in academia? No. In society in general, surely its good outweighs the bad.
Adolescence became a social construct. Most of the research into adolescence, often viewed in pathological terms, began in the 1940s. Removed from genuine, real-life experiences and confined to a restrictive, artificial mass schooling environment, it is no wonder that adolescents often respond with apathy, angst, and anger. But this is not how teenagers have historically behaved, nor how they behave today in many parts of the world.
What makes it all worse is that summer jobs have disappeared with the volume of low-skilled immigration. Even relatively-prosperous kids have trouble finding the sorts of manual work they need to learn about life. I did summer "landscaping" each year during high school. It was an excellent education.
Entrenched in a static, factory model of education, American public schools haven't changed much since the Industrial Revolution. "School, Inc." explores the 19th century origins of mass schooling, noting how the Prussian system of compulsory schooling that was ultimately adopted in the U.S. squeezed out other popular forms of education, and prevented ongoing innovation.
Our public schools are a national disgrace with abysmal international rankings. Our test scores that haven’t budged in 40 years. Unions prevent bad teachers from being fired. Teachers are essential to academic outcomes but they are academically weak and unimpressive, the bottom feeders of college graduates. Administrators are crippled because they can’t fire bad teachers. We know what works in education. Choice will save our country by improving student outcomes. Charters have proven all kids can learn and poverty doesn’t matter. And so on.
All the conventional wisdom I’ve outlined in the previous paragraph is false, or at least complicated by reality. Any education reformer with more than two years experience would certainly agree that the public is mostly unmoved by rhetoric about teacher quality, tenure, curriculum changes, and choice—in fact, when “education reform” is a voting issue, the voters are often going against reform...
Tenure in higher ed is gradually being squeezed out by academic administrative greed. Ironically, however lefty academia is, money is their motivation. Like any other business, they want the best product at the lowest cost. Non-for-profit is no different from business, since administrators took over the thing.
Tenure will only endure where it is least justifiable; in unionized government schools: The End Of Teacher Tenure?
Tenure, I suppose, used to be a substitute for high salary, but that no longer applies. Guaranteed job plus high salary plus great benefits no longer exists in the real world. Outside government jobs, that is. Why is that?
If ever there were a narrative worthy of being subjected to “stubborn skepticism,” in (Yale President) Salovey’s words, the claim that Yale was the home of “hatred and discrimination” is it. There is not a single faculty member or administrator at Yale (or any other American college) who does not want minority students to succeed. Yale has been obsessed with what the academy calls “diversity,” trying to admit and hire as many “underrepresented minorities” as it possibly can without totally eviscerating academic standards. There has never been a more tolerant social environment in human history than Yale (and every other American college)—at least if you don’t challenge the reigning political orthodoxies. Any Yale student who thinks himself victimized by the institution is in the throes of a terrible delusion, unable to understand his supreme good fortune in ending up at one of the most august and richly endowed universities in the world.
But the ubiquitous claim that American campuses are riven with racism is not, apparently, one of the “false narratives” that Salovey had in mind. Not only did the president endorse that claim, but the husband-and-wife team who had triggered the Halloween costume furor penned a sycophantic apology to minority students in their residential college: “We understand that [the original e-mail] was hurtful to you, and we are truly sorry,” wrote Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis. “We understand that many students feel voiceless in diverse ways and we want you to know that we hear you and we will support you.” Yale’s minority students may “feel” voiceless, but that feeling is just as delusional as the feeling that Yale is not “inclusive.”
So Salovey’s claim that Yale resolutely seeks out and unmasks “false narratives” is itself a false narrative...
Formal and informal apprenticeships have survived in the US in many of the trades. As I have said before, legal training is basically apprenticeship too, since you do not learn how to be a lawyer in law school. Similarly, doctors learn how to be doctors in their paid residencies.
Donald J. Trump won the U.S. Presidency despite perpetuating sexism, white supremacy, xenophobia, nationalism, nativism, and imperialism," the course description reads.
What does that course cost the beleaguered parents? Parents who likely voted for Trump.
Surely, though, those must have been the reasons I voted for the guy. On the other hand, maybe I voted for him to be a sledgehammer.