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.
Story here. We now understand that the SAT turned out to be basically a proxy for IQ. It makes sense to me for schools to be interested in IQ. Of course, there is far more to what a person might have to offer than IQ, but I think they ought to know that when making distinctions between applicants. Especially at a school like Chicago, which, unlike most of higher ed, requires that a graduate actually ends up knowing a lot of basic things which are not easy to learn.
I am just talking about Liberal Arts higher ed, of course.
Why do they even measure these statistics? Can't we just view people as people? I am confident that nobody in the board of ed is discriminating against whites, hispanics, and blacks.
I think one major impetus for my change was the fact that, despite being in default liberal environments all of my life, I nevertheless always adored the works of the Western literary tradition. And when I saw the 1980s’ multiculturalism taking over university campuses, and ignorant students who had never read the works of the Western canon feeling empowered to reject those works on the basis of the gonads and melanin of their authors, that to me was appalling.
Ironically, people I don’t think understand this distinction, in the 1970s, which was the height of this very abstruse literary theory known as deconstruction, that you mentioned, and that I was an uncritical acolyte of. However odd the theories of language were, holding that meaning is impossible, that the human self is just a fiction, a trope of language, we read the canon without ever once thinking to say, if I’m a female, “Oh, gee, I can’t read Milton because he’s a dead white male.” It never came up. So, I fortunately had a strong grounding in greatness, in beauty, in eloquence, in sublimity. And when that came under attack, that started to turn me away from the broader trends that were going on in academia.
The USA is the worst country in the world. Europe is a terrible ex-colonial place in its death throes, a quaint museum with food. European civilization is the worst the world has produced. The Western World is obsolete and evil, etc.
"Unprepared" is a euphemism with the hidden assumption that everybody, if "prepared," would be higher ed material. Of course, there are countless reasons why the assumption is wrong, but let's start with some of the obvious ones: half of the population has below-average IQ; many people lack the interest or the character traits needed for rigorous high ed (or for high school for that matter, but may want the diploma); many kids float through secondary school while benefiting minimally.
It's about W.H. Auden's humanities class at Michigan in 1941. This is not mass-market, fast-food education.
Its syllabus resurfaced a few years ago and provoked much commentary on its mass of 6,000 pages of the most powerful and challenging literature in the canon: The Divine Comedy in full, four Shakespeares, Pascal’s Pensées, Horace’s odes, Volpone, Racine, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Faust, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka, Rilke, T.S. Eliot. Auden even included nine operas. Opera in the 1940s was a popular art form, with millions of people tuning in each week to the Met’s Saturday broadcast, but it’s hard to imagine anything less consonant with millennials’ attention span than one of Wagner’s Teutonic enormities. Auden assigned three of them.
She's the young assistant teacher in Canada who got in trouble for showing a 30-second TV clip of Jordan Peterson in a class. A lefty who was mugged by greater lefties. She is smart and charming too.
All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy. The culture of the Plains Indians was designed for nomadic hunters, but is not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment. Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-"acting white" rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants. These cultural orientations are not only incompatible with what an advanced free-market economy and a viable democracy require, they are also destructive of a sense of solidarity and reciprocity among Americans. If the bourgeois cultural script — which the upper-middle class still largely observes but now hesitates to preach — cannot be widely reinstated, things are likely to get worse for us all.
There are so many things today one hesitates to preach, or even to utter. You can get in trouble. Crazy world in which it can be dangerous to say obvious things.
Articles like that are so misguided and cynical that it makes me sad. Clearly there are hundreds of sorts of education, some formal and some informal, some practical and some impractical.
I learned the Bible in Sunday school, in college, in church, and in a men's study group. Enriched my life greatly. Never helped me get a job.
"This commencement address will never be given, because graduation speakers are supposed to offer encouragement and inspiration. That's not what you need. You need a warning."
One of the most glaring perversities of the modern labor market is credential inflation. While the education workers need to do a job is quite stable, the education they need to get a job has skyrocketed since the 1940s. Sure, the average job is more intellectually demanding than it once was, but researchers find that only explains 20% of the workforce's rising education. What explains the remaining 80%? Employers' expectations have risen across the board. Waiter, bartender, cashier, security guard: These are now common jobs for those with bachelor's degrees...
What is higher ed for? It's used for all sorts of things, including credentialing, career training, adulthood-avoidance, beer-drinking, mating, social and networking opportunities, life-enrichment, a foundation for lifetime learning, etc. etc. From a purely career standpoint, there is no doubt that the first job somebody gets after higher ed can be the most important in career trajectory regardless of the school, major, or grades. Changing trajectory can be done, but it is more difficult if the first rung of the ladder is low.
Instapundit (Harvard Law grad) has often claimed that it is not the college education which is of value to employers. Rather, it signifes that the person is probably reasonably smart and reasonably diligent, so that filters out lots of people.
Of course, this does not apply so much to STEM students.
However, as higher ed reaches lower into the IQ and diligence levels, the significance of the degree is diluted. WHY COLLEGE FOR ALL IS A BIG MISTAKE
It depends on what college is for, and it seems to have many purposes these days including that of a long adolescent vacation. With coeducation, a heck of a lot of undergrad higher ed seems social and recreational. I have nothing against climbing walls or sex, however. Within reason, but is anything with adolescents within reason?
A somewhat disparaging article says Peterson’s been described as “the stupid man’s smart person,” which is a good enough euphemism for saying “effective public intellectual.” It's because he preaches "Count your blessings and get yourself together" rather than social change.
However, he is a polymath and speaks on all sorts of subjects including what seems to be his favorite theme: myth and religion. He is not a political conservative, as far as I can tell. He does believe in accepting facts and truth, though, which can sound conservative these days, and he questions everything. Also, he detests victimology as a psychological cancer.
Not to worry. It's an adolescent fashion, a fad. It will pass. These kids will graduate, find jobs in cubicles, enter the real world, and grow up. Not to mention that the "tenured radicals" will retire on the comfortable pensions provided by people with tough jobs without pensions.
Nobody writes a beach-reading book with the wit and dark craziness as Carl Hiassen, but he has a new book coming: