Maggie's Farm

That isn't news.  However, the egalitarian fantasy which nobody truly believes hangs over much of America's educational industry.

Efficient primary education for the masses probably does work best for the most according to the Prussian model which American schools adopted during the 1800s as primary ed became government-run. One-size-fits-all authoritarian ed is in fact efficient, if terrible for boys, to learn the basics of readin, ritin, and rithmetic that any citizen needs to function in the world. The fundamentals are not much fun unless there is competition added to the mix.

When the primary school basics are not achieved, I tend not to blame the school because there are too many external variables at play.

When it comes to post-primary ed, the external variables increase. Native curiosity plays a larger role, as does family support and structure, IQ, etc. etc. However, the Prussian model begins to work less well for boys as they grow up. But I am wandering from the topic: According to Albert Jay Nock, America's theory of education is off.

Either Support Our Politics or Find Another Field

That is disturbing on many counts.

People tend to forget that many if not most jobs are learned "on the job," if effect, in apprenticeship. Formal education does not teach you how to be a litigator or to be an orthopedic surgeon. They are learned by working under supervision.

In North Carolina, Industrial Internships Put Teens on an Upward Trajectory

How to be a good citizen, and how government works, seems long out of fashion. Civics was sort-of replaced by something called Social Studies, whatever that is.  Peter Wood: THE DANGEROUS RISE OF ‘THE NEW CIVICS’

It's not easy to be a good and worthy citizen of a town, a state or a nation, but it is one measure by which we all judge others.

Campus Speaker Disinvitations: Recent trends. 

I do not blame tiny minorities of obnoxious, noisy bullies. I blame spineless, castrati administrators. In recent years, even comedians have been barred from some campi. Indeed, Milo is more entertainer than anything else. Reminds me of the equally-charismatic and anti-establishment Lenny Bruce, also banned in Boston.

Not many ballsy people make careers as college administrators. 

What Professors Are Writing… No One Is Reading

The Institutionalization of Ideology in Sociology. When an area of academic study becomes a propaganda mill, nobody listens to them anymore.

Not really true, I think, but there is an obnoxious and arrogant minority which grabs the news and smears an entire cohort of eager and curious learners: Students don't want to learn anymore. They want to teach.

Humility is often in short supply among the youth, but if they lack the virtue of humility, life will correct that problem in good time.

It never hurts to ask the simple questions.

It might be because he doesn't know what he is talking about, or it might be because he has so much faith in government-run anythings. Which is like religion without a supernatural.

GW’s Decision to Ditch U.S. History Exemplifies How Elite Schools Fail Their Students

It is clearly time for that school to change its name.

American Studies: A Sad Tale of Academic Decline

From The Failure of Public Schooling in One Chart

If a kid can not produce a coherent, logical, grammatical essay by the end of secondary school, he probably never will. English Prof: 3 Reasons College Students Can’t Write.

It's not a college's job to teach that.

Maybe they got bored with Shakespeare and decided to go into politics instead: Humanities, Pretty Much Dead, Are Mostly a Hunt for Racism and Sexism.

Or perhaps helping to preserve and illuminate culture and history for future generations just didn't feel important enough. Sad.

Can organizational professionalism be taught?

People who rise to the top of organizations generally have more important skills than pure IQ. Knowing how to manage people up, sideways, and down is an essential organizational skill. So is knowing how to keep emotion out of it all, how to maintain a professional distance from others without being cold or aloof, how to gain authority without being a jerk, calm social and organizational judgement, and so on.

People who start their own businesses or other organizations often learn such things slowly, by trial and error. In my career, I found Covey's classic 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to be quite useful.

Perhaps professionalism can be learned, but not taught.

Higher Ed today entails so many more things than it seemed to in the elite colleges that I was familiar with as a lad. They were mostly general education/acculturation/cultural transmission schools for gentlemen (separate schools for ladies) with majors which often had nothing to do with any planned vocation.

In my provincial New England bubble-world, there was no awareness of vocational higher-ed other than the Major of pre-med, and Engineering. I guess I had vaguely heard of Ag schools but never heard of a "business major". It might be my ignorance, but it seems to me that a proliferation of vocationally-oriented higher ed programs has altered the historical meaning and purpose of "higher-ed."  Perhaps I am a dinosaur.

To what extent does it make sense for higher ed to be vocationally-oriented? Much of it already is.  But can educational institutions even judge what sorts of training will be of value in the future? Educating the workplace.

In the good old days, people learned many of these things from their parents. What One Woman Wishes She Learned in High School Illustrates Everything Wrong With Public Education

"Budgeting" money, though - what's that?  Today we have credit cards so we can get whatever we want whenever we want. Budgeting and living within one's means is obsolete, same as with government.

"... even leftists now “live in fear of some classroom incident spiraling into professional disaster.”

Politicizing everything is a sickness. Grown-ups putting up with it is worse.

Much of higher ed consists of trade schools of sorts - as in business or accounting majors, computer science majors, nursing, performing arts, engineering, etc. Another big part of higher ed is civilizational transfer with little practical work application.

I like trade schools and I like apprenticeships. Many entry level jobs are in fact apprenticeships even if not labeled as such.

The government shut-down of ITT Tech inspired Joe Bob Briggs to this: Why I’m Suing Vanderbilt University

I think America has thousands of dedicated teachers, thousands of time-servers, thousands of cynical and discouraged teachers, thousands of low-IQ teachers who "love kids" (which I have never believed or understood), and thousands of teachers having a great life nurturing kids.

Only Prussians could have designed the industrial, military model that American public education has applied since the mid-1800s. Then head-in-the-clouds John Dewey screwed things up even more in the US.

One of the fallacies is that kids are passive recipients of something called education. Another fallacy is that all kids are "creative," curious creatures who can be excited about "learning."

The industrial model focuses on curriculum, as it were a nutritional plan. Of course a curriculum matters, but everybody has his own opinion on what every citizen ought to know. I know I do. However, curriculum planners like to pretend that 50% of students have below-average IQs.

Don't Blame the Teachers - Years of misguided curricular theories are at the core of America’s educational shortcomings.

That might be just one part of the issue. As a victim of The New Math, I can relate.