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.
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.
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.