Maggie's Farm

This is sort of brilliant, at Phi Beta Cons. Want to learn Math? Hire a Math teacher. 

A review of E.D. Hirsch's new book, The Making of an Educational Conservative, at Claremont. Hirsch is politically liberal, but he believes that people should know things. One quote from the review:

Hirsch holds out too much hope of converting the Left while not welcoming his natural supporters on the Right. He underestimates the education establishment's fear and hostility towards knowledge and rigor, presenting the past "sixty years without a curriculum" as a well-meaning and forgivable misunderstanding. But Progressive education must be understood as an anti-teaching movement as much as an anti-curriculum movement. Anyone who suggests American education should be different from what it is now is subject to merciless attack by those who claim they would teach children even if they didn't get paid, while their unions push one demand: higher salaries for less work.

It is happening. A good thing, indeed. Monopolies are bad policy, especially government monopolies. Monopolies do not respond to market demand.

However, I am an extremist. I do not believe in government education in any form. We did better before we had any of that. See John Adams and Abe Lincoln...

As I repeat ad nauseum, education cannot be "delivered." It can only be grabbed by those who wish to grab it. I also believe Harvard or Yale (your choice) diplomas should be an entitlement for all American kids on reaching age 21. Like the Wizard of Oz did.

Let's face it: How many Ivy grads know Fermat's last theorem, today? Or can translate Caesar or Plutarch? The education industry today is a giant rip-off and nothing more than a credential sales scam.

Would you, as an employer, hire a grad who majored in "Women's Studies"?

I interview for our firm, and I certainly never would do so. For Members Only: Feminism on Campus Today

Education loans: The Sweeping Federal Takeover You May Not Know About. One quote:

 ...perhaps the most troubling aspect of this new federal intrusion in the higher education marketplace is its underlying assumptions about the best way to control college costs. Whether it has been efforts to increase Pell Grants, or now this student loan fix, President Obama and his allies in Congress, driven I believe by the best of intentions, have assumed that increasing federal aid will help students better afford college. And there is no doubt that college costs have skyrocketed recently, more than doubling the rate of inflation over the past twenty years. However, every time the federal government has increased aid to students, colleges have turned around and raised tuition and fees accordingly.

Similarly from Michael Macchiarola's ''Too Big to Fail'' Goes to College:

Aided by the government-encouraged extension of credit, education costs have skyrocketed. In fact, it is fair to describe today's higher education price tag as having been reduced to a formula - where tuition seems to equal all the money a student can pay plus all the money a student can conceivably borrow. And, this same access-for-all government policy has made loan-eligible middle- and lower-income students easy prey for aggressive higher education and student-loan marketing. The end result has been an unprecedented, debt-fueled wealth transfer from students of modest means to the increasingly affluent higher education industry and its student-loan lenders. Unfortunately, as this damage continues to reveal its depth, its consequences are likely to become more evident by the day.

A generation of students has been reduced to the equivalent of the underwater homeowner: resigned to a fate where the amount owed to finance their schooling might be greater than the value of the education they received (and, therefore, beyond their capacity to repay it).

Government student loans and grants are little more than indirect handouts to the academic institutions in whose pockets they end up.

Marginally, maybe. Maybe, from being around curious, achievement-oriented, high IQ peers. From that, one might become competitive, inspired, and humbled - if one were not lucky enough to have those qualities in the first place.

Truth is, as I say here ad nauseum, that we don't know what "education" means beyond readin, ritin and rithmatic. A college degree can mean anything and nothing because becoming aware of the world and the world of the past, and the stories and the ideas of the past, cannot be fed. It must be taken. All edumacation is self-edumacation.

I think America would be better off if you could buy an Ivy League diploma online for $39.99 after answering a few questions about calculus, Julius Caesar, and Leonardo.

The Egalitarian Craze.

From a discussion about the current education of men in America at Chicago Boyz:

Boy/men seem not to be dropping out to “do” something but dropping out to do even less. The number of young marriages in which not only is the wife the breadwinner but the husband isn’t even taking care of children is increasing. These often dissolve – perhaps because women are too conventional to respect a mate who plays video games all day while they work or perhaps because women want children of their own rather than merely a needy husband. (No, I’m not going to diss a stay-at-home dad – I’m sure it is a useful choice; but many are childless marriages. Few women are at home for the years pre-baby.) And we should at least recognize that a woman does offer something in terms of child-bearing and child-nursing a man doesn’t. Besides, I don’t see choices – I see drift.

Like I always say, most men were made just for fishin, huntin, and lovin.

Addendum, from a post by AVI:

I started opining 20 years ago that feminist resentment was largely driven by women who had followed the directions and played by the rules, excelling in school - which was considered the automatic qualifier to success. We were all told To get a good job, get a good education, not just the girls. Then they left school and found that there were other, less-familiar laws of the marketplace which had seldom been mentioned. Heck, I felt the same way. Those boys and young men they had beaten, beaten fair and square at school, were finding all these other routes to success.

From the Pope Center (h/t, Doug Ross):

Our study of the University of Michigan, for example, found that in 2005 an in-state male with no parent ties to the school, a 1240 cumulative SAT, and 3.2 high-school grade-point average had a 92 percent chance of admission if black and an 88 percent chance if Latino – but only a 14 percent chance if white and a mere 10 percent chance if Asian.  Our study of six North Carolina schools – North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina campuses at Asheville, Chapel Hill, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Wilmington – found the same pattern. 

We have been promoting the documentary The Lottery. I see that the WSJ covers it: Storming the School Barricades - A new documentary by a 27-year-old filmmaker could change the national debate about public education.

Another one on the same topic coming out in the fall, Waiting for Superman.

It's a movement! People want choice, not government monopolies.

Weissberg: How Universities Breed Dependency.

Modern universities are providing a failure-free existence that eliminates an important component of a free society: self-reliance.

Charter School vs. Teachers Union School.

Imagine what might happen if we just had vouchers to go anywhere for primary education, as they have in Sweden.

I have attempted to make the case for that fact many times here. Among other data, a post with the above title offers this:

“of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate over the next decade in the United States, only seven typically require a bachelor’s degree.”

"...four-year institutions of higher education (IHEs) graduate less than 60 percent of their students in six years..."

So what? Given how lax American higher ed has become in requirements and expectations, I am surprised it's below 60%. Apparently, historically, American graduation rates have never been very high.

Quickest way to increase grad rates would be to simply sell degrees, or to hand them out for free like the Wizard of Oz.

Now I do realize that a "college degree" no longer necessarily means a Liberal Arts degree as proof that one has mastered a language or two, calculus, sciences, masterworks of philosophy, theology, and literature, etc: many colleges today entail various combinations of remedial education, high-school level coursework, and job training. Flunking out is a thing of the past, so lots of folks must just figure it's not worth the trouble. They could be right.

Genius Stanford educational experts started a charter school. Their ideas didn't work.

But will they learn anything from their experience?

I continue to believe that the average schoolkid learned more in the US in 1830 in one-room schoolhouses with hornbooks and the teacher armed with a good paddle, with the teacher supported by donations either in kind (eg firewood, or housing a teacher or providing him or her food) or in cash, by the parents of the kids who ran, and paid for, their school. 

And don't tell me "it's a more complicated world" now. It is not. Try training a horse, building a barn, making a living on a farm, making a winter coat from a couple of sheep, or smithing every iron item a family might need. Life is easier now. We don't even need to make our own beer, and 99.9% of us do not even understand how computers work. Including me.

Readin', writin', and 'rithmetic haven't changed one bit since then.

Is school supposed to be therapy?

Is therapy supposed to be a propagandizing school?

Crazy world.

It's about time somebody wrote this essay. Prof. Thomas Reeves at Mercator: What do professors want?. h/t, Mankiw. He is harsh about the academic life:

On the Left and Right money means power, and we "pointy heads" and "eggheads" are on the outside looking in. One thinks of Arthur Schlesinger Jr swooning over the Kennedys for the rest of his life because they gave him a title and a silent seat in some White House deliberations. Those making as much money as, say, an experienced furnace repairman account for little in this world, despite the PhD. How many academics even sit on the governing board that sets policies for their campus? It is all most humiliating. (To see how intelligently and objectively academics use the authority they have, examine the political correctness the suffocates the employment practices and intellectual lives of almost all American campuses. Aberlour's Fifth Law: "Political correctness is totalitarianism with a diploma.")

and...

One way to compensate for this bleak and futureless existence is to become involved in left-wing causes. They give us a sense of identity in a world seemingly owned and operated by Rotarians. And they provide us with hope. In big government we trust, for with the election of sufficiently enlightened officials, we might gain full medical coverage, employment for our children, and good pensions. These same leftist leaders might redistribute income "fairly," by taking wealth from the "greedy" and giving it to those of us who want more of everything. A "just" world might be created in which sociologists, political scientists, botanists, and romance language professors would achieve the greatness that should be theirs. It's all a matter of educating the public. And hurling anathemas at people of position and affluence we deeply envy.

I am sure Prof. Reeves has tenure, but he might need police protection too, after writing that honest piece.

"In the year 2000, American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, CA, was one of the worst-performing middle schools in the state."

So what happened?

At Am Thinker. Readers know how I feel: I want the Feds out of education. Should be a local thing, in the hands of the local taxpayers. 

Teaching should be a calling, not a government-unionized sinecure. What sorts of preachers would you get if you had unionized, government-employed preachers?

Or, for that matter, doctors?

Man, do I agree with Ramesh in Time. One quote from his piece of the above title:

We could probably increase the number of high school seniors who are ready to go to college — and likely to make it to graduation — if we made the K-12 system more academically rigorous. But let's face it: college isn't for everyone, especially if it takes the form of four years of going to classes on a campus.

To talk about college this way may sound élitist. It may even sound philistine, since the purpose of a liberal-arts education is to produce well-rounded citizens rather than productive workers. But perhaps it is more foolishly élitist to think that going to school until age 22 is necessary to being well-rounded, or to tell millions of kids that their future depends on performing a task that only a minority of them can actually accomplish.

The good news is that there have never been more alternatives to the traditional college.

Via Phi Beta Cons:

...the academic rigor in graduate ed courses is comparable to that in preschool. I put more work and effort into one week of an engineering or computer-science class than into a full semester of an ed class. Would you believe that an episode of Frontline was an acceptable source for a master's-level research paper? That Wikipedia was also an acceptable source?

A reminder of Heather MacDonald's Why Johnny’s Teacher Can’t Teach, from City Journal in 1998.

That essay was linked by George Leef's comment on the Send Fewer Students to College topic. Leef concludes:

If you think about the reality of higher education rather than its lovely facade, you have to drop the belief that we need to send more students to college.

At City Journal, Sol Stern on E. D. Hirsch’s Curriculum for Democracy: A content-rich pedagogy makes better citizens and smarter kids. One quote:

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy. If the Obama administration truly wants to have a positive impact on American education, it should embrace Hirsch’s ideas and urge other states to do the same.

The moral bankruptcy of academia: NYM

On college admissions, via No Left Turns:

"A recent study of the applicants to seven elite colleges in 1997 found that Asian students were much more likely to be rejected than seemingly similar students of other races. Also, athletes and students from top high schools had admissions edges, as did low-income African-Americans and Hispanics."

"Translating the advantages into SAT scores, study author Thomas Espenshade, a Princeton sociologist, calculated that African-Americans who achieved 1150 scores on the two original SAT tests had the same chances of getting accepted to top private colleges in 1997 as whites who scored 1460s and Asians who scored perfect 1600s."

Lunatics running the asylum: Melanie Phillips on the feral youth of England. h/t, Dr. Helen. One quote:

When I blamed the children’s poor discipline and concentration on the layout, the teacher looked at me with horror. ‘The pupils are working together, directing their own learning,’ she said emphatically. Children are now expected, for example, to be ‘independent learners’ in charge of their own education. (‘Why do teachers keep asking me what I want to learn? How am I supposed to know?’ one boy asked me in exasperation.)

Crowder pays them a visit to find out, and it's worse than I though. An embarrassment.

What are these morans (nb - that's the cool blog spelling) doing in any competitive college? Or any college? Are these simple souls our best and brightest?

What happened to the old saying: "You can't shine sh-t"? These dopey kids should have real jobs, where they could learn something useful to do, shine themselves up, and become a credit to themselves. I think colleges are ripping these people off - or their parents.

h/t, Carpe Diem:

Stanley Fish's essay

was prompted by a survey of freshman composition courses a few years back. Fish read lesson plans for 104 sections at his university and found that "only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues --- racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising." Writing courses taught by writing instructors should focus on writing, period. People should teach subjects in which they have some expertise (what do English graduate students know about globalization?), and materials brought into the course should not obscure stated aims (how does teaching about racism help students write better sentences?). This is to insist upon boundaries between disciplines---another no-no in current thinking---and to divide people into experts and dilettantes. It is also to endorse the goals of general education and examine how well a college curriculum delivers them. Hence the discussion of a new report by ACTA.

It bears the title What Will They Learn?

Read the whole thing at Minding the Campus.

From Prelutsky's The Case Against Mortarboarding:

If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools.  America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics.  What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian, studies.  And, then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents.

One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter.  “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies.”

Most people agree that the meaning of a college degree has degraded over the years, and is certainly no longer an indication of scholarship or advanced learning. With the commoditization of higher ed, colleges across the country have become glorified high schools. It cannot be otherwise, because most people aren't scholars. Just think about it: Does a college degree today guarantee that a person knows anything about anything?

Of course not, and employers know this.

I agree with Mr. Prelutsky that more people need training in trades, whether in apprenticeships of trade schools, whether in computer programming and software development, or in farming, carpentry and gunsmithing. A serious high school education ought to be a good start for anyone's life-long learning - if they want it.

Big surprise:

...when you look at the high-school NAEP scores, you see virtually no improvement in reading or math performance since the early 1970s, despite massive increases in taxpayer funding and reform fads galore.

Everybody knows that education costs next to nothing. It's the education industry that is expensive. Most people also know that "increased funding" and "reforms" are little more than political payoffs.

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...

Reason agrees (with a Reason video).

Photo: Harvard Yard. They can give you a pricey credential, but what you can do with it or chose to do with it, in the end, depends on you.