It's my alma mater, so I think it's a good place. Tough but supportive sort-of: they will certainly toss you if you don't want to get with the program.  Many claim that Andover has smarter, more competition-minded kids, but a colder atmosphere. A visit to Phillips Exeter Academy.

The Exeter Harkness table. You can't hide. 

By coincidence, Jeb Bush at Andover. 

In my view, most of the elite New England prep schools are extremely demanding academically, socially, athletically, and emotionally. The stress and frequent misery and humiliation are part of their mission, like boot camp. Nobody gets As. These schools feel that if one kid gets an A, that is just proof they are not pushing the kids hard enough. I got 2 As in four years, and I worked my butt off. The mandatory 3-hour study hall every evening helped me learn, and the mandatory chapel, formal meals, lights-out, no TV or radios, and other structures helped center me. After class on Saturday mornings we had choir practice, then sports. Sundays, sleep late, then required church, formal lunch, 2 hrs study hall - then free for the rest of the day but you had better be ready to be called on, on Monday morning: "You read the essay, yes? And Madison's paper? So defend Madison's position on ... in light of the new Constitution."

Sad to say, these academies are not as structured these days but remain academically rigorous.  

Caught with tobacco, drugs, drink? Sent home for good in shame, immediately. Sports required for 3 hours every afternoon, regardless of ability. Sex? We were not coed quite yet, which helped concentration enormously. 

Are we witnessing an epidemic of PC bullying? Of course, and the contagion has spread out of academia to the real world. People have become fearful of what and how they talk, as if we were in the old East Germany. Fact is, you can pass yourself off as a victim, you can bully and intimidate all you want.

The argument is that only certain (usually academic) elites can be rational, so it is the job of our moral and intellectual superiors to protect us from bad ideas, bad words, and unhindered speech. Good, concise piece: Yes, Political Correctness Really Exists - Social media gives new muscle to German Marxist Herbert Marcuse's arguments against free discourse.

The(se) tensions in (John Stuart) Mill’s defense of intellectual freedom were recognized in the 19th century. What we now call political correctness was first articulated in the 1960s by the brilliant German-born philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse’s achievement was to turn Mill’s argument for free discussion, at least in a modern Western society, against its explicit conclusion.

Marcuse undertakes this inversion, worthy a black belt in dialectical reasoning, in the 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” In it, Marcuse argues that the marketplace of ideas can’t function as Mill expected, because the game in rigged in favor of those who are already powerful. Some ideas enjoy underserved appeal due to tradition or the prestige of their advocates. And “consumers” are not really free to chose, given the influence of advertising and the pressures of social and economic need. Thus the outcome of formally free debate is actually predetermined. The ideas that win will generally be those justify the existing order; those that lose will be those that challenge the structure.

There is truth in that notion that the biggest megaphones are loudest, but this concern  misunderestimates people - even the benighted hoi polloi like us who believe everything on NPR. As you might expect, here at Maggie's we take some amusement from a world full of loony-tunes and liberal fascists -regardless of the size of their megaphones -  because we have faith that good old American common sense and resourcefulness will endure and see through the insanity.

Indeed, I believe the Left would be happy to hinder my free speech. I have no desire to hinder theirs, even though I sometimes feel it is fundamentally malevolent. As we often claim here, the desire to control others is a form of mental illness.

CS Lewis: Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

For an amusing take on the topic, Another Progressive Self-Excommunicates Over Political Correctness Thugsquads

We all understand many of the reasons for credential inflation. Most of it is quite absurd.

Here's Another Reason for Credential Inflation:

 Employers keep ratcheting up their educational credential demands to sift out people who, on the basis of their lower credential levels are presumably less competent and trainable. It’s not just the business sector that contributes to credential inflation — so does government.

Memorize everything you can which you find worthy. Poetic verse, biblical verses, aphorisms, and song lyrics most lend themselves to it, but so does anything worthwhile.

Actors readily learn an entire play, so why not we? Memorized verse always comes in handy. Orality, Literacy, and the Memorized Poem - Hearing art's heartbeat.

Crazy times, sad times.

All You Need to Know About the ‘Learning Styles’ Myth, in Two Minutes

The average college freshman reads at 7th grade level

It seems not to mean much, these days. What Does “College Ready” Mean?

My impression is that higher ed is an industry today, government-subsidized. They will take almost anybody regardless of IQ, character, academic achievement or curiosity, etc. and run them through their credentialing machine for big bucks.

MacDonald: The latest campus fad, which sees racism everywhere, will create a new generation of permanent victims. Her article makes me feel unsafe as it seems to trivialize the feelings of the most vulnerable, marginalized, and irritable among us, such as me.

There is a book called Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back but it's about dealing with mental illness.

International students now make up 17% of all U.S. graduate students

The schools want their money.

Not Asian-Americans, but Asians from Asia:

They’re far outpacing Americans, particularly on the quantitative section of the test. Many B-school admissions officers say that a score on the quantitative section is the best predictor of success in an MBA program.

One result of these disparities is that Americans’ percentile rankings have dropped, even though their raw scores have remained constant in recent years. With Asia-Pacific students applying to and attending American business schools in large numbers, some schools complained to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT. As the WSJ put it, schools “don’t want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.”

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.

It always seemed to me to be just plain babysitting: Research on Early Childhood Ed Still Unpersuasive

"Early childhood education" is probably really unionized government day care under a marketing name.

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.

Here's the idea: Hacking Higher Ed With Competency-Based Education

Related, competency exams may be racially-biased via disparate impact. Here's that whole story, from Bill McMorris:  How the Supreme Court Created the Student Loan Bubble - It all starts with Griggs v. Duke Power Co.

Danielle Henderson spent six years and $60,000 on college and beyond. The effects of that education? Not as advertised.

What was advertised?

Walsh:  My Fellow Americans, It’s Time to Boycott College:

 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.

George Leef:

 “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.

Stossel: Give parents some choice! Our kids' education should not be controlled by a monopoly

Hess: How the Common Core Went Wrong:

 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.

How British Snobbery Ruined U.S. Colleges: ‘Freedom From Speech’ Author Speaks

FIRE is on my annual donation list, and it's getting near that gifting time of year.

From The Closing of the American Mind Revisited:

 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.

Investments in luxuries for the brats: Colleges drift away from their academic priorities:

 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.

From Lukianoff:

 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.

Why Do Teacher Unions Hate Eva Moskowitz?

No surprise. It has nothing to do with education.