Maggie's Farm

The President wants more college grads. As VDH noted in Triumph of Banality:

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.

Ferguson addresses Obama's Diploma Mill in The Weekly Standard. One quote:

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day, and a few of our recent posts on education, I am beginning to think that our American "system" of "higher ed" is obsolete.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.

A Liberal Arts degree was never meant to be practical, yet 30% of Americans have Bachelor Degrees: degrees that could mean anything, or nothing at all.

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.

A relevant post at Phi Beta Cons asks "How does the military manage it?"

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.

Confessions of a Community College Dean addresses a debate: are teachers "workers" or "professionals"? One quote:

I’d argue that how one understands tenure will have a great deal to do with which position one takes. I’ve suggested before that it’s reasonable to have tenure or unions, but not both, and this debate helped me crystallize that sentiment. Tenure is a lifetime commitment by the institution. (Since the badly-misguided repeal of a mandatory retirement age, this is literally true.) To suggest that a lifetime commitment somehow doesn’t carry with it some sort of reciprocal obligation strikes me as narcissistic, if not laughable. Legally, tenure amounts to ownership of a job. Having tenure and a union amounts to negotiating against yourself, an ethically dubious proposition worthy of an Illinois governor. Being insulated for life against the vagaries of the economy is a privilege, and a rare one; for that privilege to bring with it a certain responsibility for stewardship of the institution is only fair.

I always thought of teachers as professionals, but not since the unions seduced some of them. And I have never really understood the concept of tenure at all, especially in a world in which profs and teachers can be paid quite well, and receive perks and pensions that most other jobs lack. I happen to be a partner in a firm, but the Exec. Committee could let me go tomorrow if they wanted to and I would be on the street like every other working stiff. Nothin' wrong with that.

Over the last four decades, various philosophical and ideological strands united to contribute to the decline of classical education. A creeping vocationalism, for one, displaced much of the liberal arts curriculum in the crowded credit-hours of indebted students. Forfeiting classical learning in order to teach undergraduates a narrow skill (what the Greeks called a technê) was predicated on the shaky notion that undergraduate instruction in business or law would produce superior CEOs or lawyers—and would more successfully inculcate the arts of logic, reasoning, fact-based knowledge, and communication so necessary for professional success.

A therapeutic curriculum, which promised that counseling and proper social attitudes could mitigate such eternal obstacles to human happiness as racism, sexism, war, and poverty, likewise displaced more difficult classes in literature, language, philosophy, and political science. The therapeutic sensibility burdened the university with the task of ensuring that students felt adjusted and happy. And upon graduation, those students began to expect an equality of result rather than of opportunity from their society. Gone from university life was the larger tragic sense. Few students learned (or were reminded) that we come into this world with limitations that we must endure with dignity and courage rather than deal with easily through greater sensitivity, more laws, better technology, and sufficient capital.

My temptation is to quote the whole thing.

By coincidence, we read today via Insty that Harvard is scrapping The Canon. I'm like hip to that. Groovy, dude. How advanced! How Progressive! Let's do Maya Angelou and Sting and cool shit like that! Can you dig it?

Photo: Harvard College

Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, revisits the state of the campus, and its ongoing politicization. One quote:

Indeed, it is this failure--a failure to check the colonization of intellectual life by politics--that stands behind and fuels the degradation of liberal education. The issue is not so much--or not only--the presence of bad politics as the absence of non-politics in the intellectual life of the university.

Let me mention a couple of distinctions that I think we have lost sight of in recent years. The first is the distinction between academic freedom and free speech. Every time some wacko like Ward Churchill comes along shouting about the evils of American capitalism and the beneficence of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Native American Indians, or whoever, his defenders rally round and say, "Well, I may not like what he says, but he is simply exercising his right of free speech."

I say, No he is not. He is violating his obligation as a teacher to eschew politics and impart knowledge. There is an important distinction between the right of free speech--our rights as citizens in a free society to peaceful political dissent--and academic freedom, the more limited privilege accorded to suitably enfranchised members of a college or university to to pursue knowledge. As the sociologist Edward Shils once noted, academic freedom is "the freedom to seek and transmit the truth." It does not, Shils insisted, "extend to the conduct of political propaganda in teaching." In short, academic freedom is the freedom to do academic things: for teachers "to teach the truth as they see it on the basis of prolonged and intensive study, to discuss their ideas freely with their colleagues, to publish the truth as they have arrived at it by systematic methodical research."

Bottom line: Academic freedom is not the same thing as free speech. It is a more limited freedom, designed to nurture intellectual integrity and to protect those engaged in intellectual inquiry from the intrusion of partisan passions. The very limitation of academic freedom is part of its strength. By excluding the political, it makes room for the pursuit of truth.

Quoted from Peter Salins via Minding the Campus:

According to the most recent (2007) data, 45 percent of all colleges or universities, and 66 percent of public ones, have no admissions criteria at all. In the public sector - which accounts for three-quarters of all higher education slots - among the 34 percent of schools with some kind of admissions screen, 69 percent accept more than half of their applicants. Even among the remaining somewhat selective institutions, the majority either do not require admissions test scores or they accept most low-scoring applicants, with the result that the average verbal SAT for all college applicants is 532, and that for the math SAT is 537 (both out of a potential score of 800).

Naturally, the Obamas send their kids to elite private schools. Would not want them associating with the riff-raff or being taught by unionized teachers.

That's what wealthy Liberals do. Lefties seem to consist mainly of the condescending and/or guilty elites and the "gimme more" poor - and the young kids who know nothing about real life.

Public schools are for us proles, I guess. Us middle-class proles who work hard and pay our taxes and worry about our savings.

Palin's kids go to public school.

What is college for? I've been writing about that subject recently. Stanley Fish's essay of the above title begins thus:

Pick up the mission statement of almost any college or university, and you will find claims and ambitions that will lead you to think that it is the job of an institution of higher learning to cure every ill the world has ever known: not only illiteracy and cultural ignorance, which are at least in the ball-park, but poverty, war, racism, gender bias, bad character, discrimination, intolerance, environmental pollution, rampant capitalism, American imperialism, and the hegemony of Wal-Mart; and of course the list could be much longer.

So much for the humility of scholars. Read the whole thing.

Mary Graber at Pajamas notes that pomo English profs are making Solzhenitsyn disappear. Apparently he did not toe some party line or something. It's a sad piece to read. A quote:

...under “classroom strategies” in the Norton instructor’s manual, teachers are told that they are likely to encounter the problem of students accepting the “truth” of what Solzhenitsyn has to say: “Because the story answers to most of the myths and preconceptions Westerners already have about Soviet life, the problem will be to make sure that students read it with the same degree of resistance with which they would normally confront any other piece of fiction.” Here we have the apologists for communism directing teachers: All that you’ve heard about the brutality of communism is merely part of our “myths and preconceptions.” Students must be reeducated to “resist” the testimony of Solzhenitsyn as dramatized in his fictional account.

The fine rant below is from a commenter on the piece:

I know the tone and tenor of that barbaric gibberish–and that is precisely why I am not in graduate school. Pure shit, from theory to practice, from Lacan’s bunghole to their mouths, this highfalutin’ jargon is a daily testament that the university has gone slumming right off solid ground and into a nihilistic miasma. This is the language of decadence and exhaustion, of cowardice and self-loathing; it is the cadence of suicide, the scholarly language of insanity.

I do not feel pity for people who write and talk like that anymore (but imagine how diseased and fallow their souls must be like to have these pale shadows of ideas running around in their minds all day and night); I feel contempt toward their presumption to teach, and anger at their pestilential influence on the world around them. Word by word, phrase by phrase, they are putting young souls to sleep, droning on while the great project of human completion dies on their watch. To Hell with them, dead souls, empty-headed, clarifactors and frauds, apologists for evil, over-ripe fruit, they are the last men, the enemies of Rabelais and Goethe, they should be put in stocks and have rotten tomatoes thrown at them.

Bravo, commenter. Well-said. Solzhenitsyn himself warned about such fashionable nonsense in his famous 1978 Harvard Commencement speech (audio and print). If you haven't read or heard it, I recommend it.

From The Dartmouth.com:

Dartmouth alumni have the highest mid-career median incomes in the country in comparison to other college graduates, according to a survey by PayScale, Inc., a company that compiles compensation information across business sectors.

Hmmm. Maybe because so few of us become community organizers and politicians. Wah-hoo-wah.

Not quite related: Does the Ivy League turn people into arrogant jerks? One quote:

It's unseemly to ask for sympathy for having survived Yale, but the truth is, I'm still recovering from my experience there. Perhaps only the self-deprecating sense of humor of a Calvin Trillin can get across to the non-Ivied public what it was like without sounding boastful about answered prayers.

There are disadvantages to an elite education; I'm just not sure that they're the ones that Deresiewicz mentions. When I meet someone who went to Yale, I search for the haunted recognition beyond the Boola Boola. But no one wants to reopen old wounds. When pushed, some of my friends confess that Yale made them feel rotten and insecure, and they continue to judge themselves against the extraordinary achievements of their classmates. Others claim they have spent their lives disappointed to never again find such a rich intellectual environment.

Sheesh. And not a single mention of the rich "dating" environment. Maybe that's because it's about Yale...

And who claims that college nowadays is about "higher" education anyway, unless you are in the hard sciences? My view? Make high school a 3-year tough grind, and college a 3-year tough grind - and get these kids out of the grip of the educational industry and out into the world before they grow soft, soft-headed, and spoiled.

By Herb London at TCS. It begins:

In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called "The Cold War At Home." As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf Hitler. And victimology stands as the overarching theme of the course.

Communists in the United States are merely benign civil rights advocates and union supporters. The word espionage never once crossed the lips of the instructor.

An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been devoted to the "lavender persecution" - harm imposed on gay Americans. Presumably, this group was more adversely affected by McCarthy's allegations than others.

Despite the recent scholarship on the period such as Alan Weinstein's well researched book on Alger Hiss or Stanton Evans' biography of Senator McCarthy, views that do not fit the prevailing orthodoxy aren't entertained. Pounded into students is the view that America engaged in "totalitarian practices" not unlike the Soviet enemy we decried.

All-American Colleges: Top Schools for Conservatives, Old-Fashioned Liberals, and People of Faith. h/t, Dr Helen

Also via Dr. Helen, Choosing the Right College

Stuff White People Like. The book.

Hope our readers are enjoying this weekend. I am going for a ride over hill and dale and field and fountain with the Mrs. in an England-like cool foggy drizzle in a moment, but Jack, our Quarter Horse, looks a little lame this morning - maybe it's a sore hoof - and I'm not sure which animal I want to mess with today.

But I wanted to make sure to post this link to a discussion about Special Ed and "special needs" kids. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who are dealing with PDD and autism and the like in their kids and grandkids.

The author of this piece at Pajamas has personal experience as the parent of a disabled kid.

One quote from a piece with the above title by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar:

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

Read the whole thing (link above).

A photo of the Yale campus, designed to make clever if snot-nosed kids buy into the illusion that they are 19th century aristocrats at Oxford or Cambridge rather than the humble but literate Congregationalist pastors Yale was originally created to produce: