Math wins.
I think that Warren Buffett was very foolish to outsource his philanthropy to Gates.
And yes, as long as you’re asking, I do in fact think that I’d be spending the money a lot smarter, and doing a lot more good with it, than the Bill and Melinda Foundation.
“Zombie” has been running a frightening series on the state of our educational system all week. Here’s today’s installment, but there are links to the previous ones.
Some wisdom for students, from Walter Russell Mead, on how to survive the coming popping of the academic bubble.
…your education dollars. Part of the Republicans’ platform this fall should be to abolish the Department of Education. No one would be able to accuse them of going back to “Bush’s failed policies” with that one. Well, at least not credibly.
Breeder of terrorists.
Not surprising, really, when one reads about how disdainful of free speech they are. For others, of course, not them.
I see articles like this, and can only shake my head in dismay and amazement.
Dewey’s project is complete. The entire public school system has to be razed and rebuilt from scratch.
…that college isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be:
…many young people who could profit from a college education are more likely to do so if they don’t go straight to college from high school. My wife, who formerly taught English literature at Rutgers, was just the first of many college faculty to bring this to my attention. The students who have come to college after a hitch in the military or working for a few years know why they are in college, why they are taking a particular course, and what they want out of it, in ways that kids fresh out of high school seldom do. Apart from that, quoting my wife, “Henry James wasn’t writing for nineteen-year-olds.”
I’ve probably told this tale before, but I not only didn’t go to college from high school, but I didn’t even take the SATs in high school (I never did). I worked as a VW mechanic at the local dealer for a few months until I got laid off in the 1973 recession (which hit Flint particularly hard — over 20% unemployment at the time). After that, I was ready for school. I attended Mott Community College (which was just across the street from my house — the shortest walk I had to school in my entire career, including elementary), taking math and science courses in preparation for a transfer to an engineering school, but never got the associates degree. I transferred to Ann Arbor after two years, and from stories I heard from my fellow upper-classpeople, I got a better grounding in the basics than they did in their giant lecture courses (my physics class had ten people in it).
I think that the academic bubble is not far from bursting.
[Update a few minutes later]
More on the expanding bubble.
Apparently in the interest of “diversity,” being a member of the 4H Club (and don’t even think about it if you’re a leader of such an organization, reduces your chances of getting into many private colleges:
what Espenshade and Radford found in regard to what they call “career-oriented activities” was truly shocking even to this hardened veteran of the campus ideological and cultural wars. Participation in such Red State activities as high school ROTC, 4-H clubs, or the Future Farmers of America was found to reduce very substantially a student’s chances of gaining admission to the competitive private colleges in the NSCE database on an all-other-things-considered basis. The admissions disadvantage was greatest for those in leadership positions in these activities or those winning honors and awards. “Being an officer or winning awards” for such career-oriented activities as junior ROTC, 4-H, or Future Farmers of America, say Espenshade and Radford, “has a significantly negative association with admission outcomes at highly selective institutions.” Excelling in these activities “is associated with 60 or 65 percent lower odds of admission.”
Espenshade and Radford don’t have much of an explanation for this find, which seems to place the private colleges even more at variance with their stated commitment to broadly based campus diversity. In his Bakke ruling Lewis Powell was impressed by the argument Harvard College offered defending the educational value of a demographically diverse student body: “A farm boy from Idaho can bring something to Harvard College that a Bostonian cannot offer. Similarly, a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer.” The Espenshade/Radford study suggests that those farm boys from Idaho would do well to stay out of their local 4-H clubs or FFA organizations — or if they do join, they had better not list their membership on their college application forms. This is especially true if they were officers in any of these organizations. Future farmers of America don’t seem to count in the diversity-enhancement game played out at some of our more competitive private colleges, and are not only not recruited, but seem to be actually shunned. It is hard to explain this development other than as a case of ideological and cultural bias.
I’d love to hear their explanation for this.
This looks like an interesting course:
Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourses—cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history—fit together?
Big History answers that question by weaving a single story from a variety of scholarly disciplines. Like traditional creation stories told by the world’s great religions and mythologies, Big History provides a map of our place in space and time. But it does so using the insights and knowledge of modern science, as synthesized by a renowned historian.
This is a story scholars have been able to tell only since the middle of the last century, thanks to the development of new dating techniques in the mid-1900s. As Professor Christian explains, this story will continue to grow and change as scientists and historians accumulate new knowledge about our shared past.
I and others actually tried to condense this story down to something that can be told in forty-five minutes or so at the dinner table, which we tell on Moon Day (coming up two weeks from today, on the forty-first anniversary of the lunar landing).
What was really interesting, though (and what mindless stereotypers on the left will find boggling) was that it was a Google ad at National Review…
Scott Ott, on the disastrous state of the American educational system, thanks to the unions and collectivists. They’ve achieved Dewey’s dream.
And this seems related:
There’s good news for American education. About three-quarters of residents — 74% — know the U.S. declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776. The bad news for the academic system — 26% do not. This 26% includes one-fifth who are unsure and 6% who thought the U.S. separated from another nation. That begs the question, “From where do the latter think the U.S. achieved its independence?” Among the countries mentioned are France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
Actually, as a commenter points out, it raises the question — it doesn’t “beg” it (a phrase that confuses many people). Which is also a symptom of deteriorating education, even among the supposedly educated.