Tuesday, August 19. 2008
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.
Friday, August 15. 2008
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.
We have often opined here that the traditional BA may have outlived its usefulness, keeps the average kid out of the real world too long, and has become so degraded in its rigor as to be of little meaning other than as an expensive, Wizard of Oz credential. A quote from Charles Murray's piece in the WSJ (h/t, Flares): Outside a handful of majors -- engineering and some of the sciences -- a bachelor's degree tells an employer nothing except that the applicant has a certain amount of intellectual ability and perseverance. Even a degree in a vocational major like business administration can mean anything from a solid base of knowledge to four years of barely remembered gut courses. The solution is not better degrees, but no degrees. Young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews. That measure should express what they know, not where they learned it or how long it took them. They need a certification, not a degree.
The BA degree was created for scholars, and as a foundation for the professions. It meant that you knew Latin and Greek, probably German and French, the sciences, math, and history - but it mostly meant that you wanted to be a scholarly person who intended to study stuff for the rest of your life. I think I'm on safe ground in saying that that is no longer the case. Education is such a huge, entrenched industry today that things are unlikely to change, but it's still worthwhile thinking about rational alternatives.
Tuesday, August 12. 2008
 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.
Saturday, August 9. 2008
A re-post from the archives Before we hear about the depressed and suicidal freshman entering class of 2005 in the New York Post, this report examines and collates the spiritual and religious patterns exhibited by the college freshman class of 2004. It reveals kids with a lot more going on than mere existential angst. Yet, they still need to be told that the journey they are on will never come to a finish, they will never be sure that this is "it" and in the end, it will not have been how they spent their time while on the journey nor who they befriended or where they sought solace. In the end, no matter what their age, they will always just remain "babes in the woods." A quote: "How often do we encounter a research program that addresses a set of questions so central, so pivotal, so critical, and in retrospect, so obvious, that we wonder aloud why no one thought to ask these questions before?” —Lee S. Shulman, President The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Sunday, August 3. 2008
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.
Sunday, July 27. 2008
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.
Saturday, July 5. 2008
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.
Sunday, June 29. 2008
 We re-post this essay by Gertrude Himmelfarb each year. One quote, on the thoughtful Columbia guy Lionel Trilling's thoughts about T.S. Eliot:
Marxism was not the only thing that Trilling (by way of Eliot) called into question. He challenged liberalism as well. Totalitarianism, Eliot had said, was inherently "pagan," for it recognized no authority or principle but that of the state. And liberalism, far from providing an alternative to paganism, actually contained within itself the seeds of paganism, in its materialism and relativism. Only Christianity, Eliot argued--the "Idea" of Christianity, not its pietistic or revivalist expressions--could resist totalitarianism, because only Christianity offered a view of man and society that promoted the ideal of "moral perfection" and "the good life." "I am inclined," Trilling quoted Eliot, "to approach public affairs from the point of view of the moralist." Trilling hastened to qualify his endorsement of Eliot in "Elements That Are Wanted"; he did not believe morality was absolute or a "religious politics" desirable. But Eliot's vision of morality and politics was superior to the vision of liberals and radicals, who had contempt for the past and worshiped the future. Liberals, in the name of progress, put off the realization of the good life to some indefinite future; radicals put off the good life in the expectation of a revolution that would usher in not only a new society but also a new man, a man who would be "wholly changed by socialism." Marxism was especially dangerous, Trilling found, because it combined "a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be."
A "new man" was all the rage for those who wanted me to be just like they weren't - but who wanted people like me to become some subservient but heroic prole they fantasized about. They were just the new version of the same "old men" of history - self-anointed for "virtue" and "wisdom," and seeking power and perks on our backs and on our nickel while they spun their grand theories. I think they forgot that proles like me learned to read in the meantime. Eliot, and Trilling, knew otherwise. Photo: Lionel Trilling. As demanding a Prof as you could ever have. The equally-great Jacques Barzun was out of that same mold: dignified, formal, remote, but willing to give you two chances to prove that you weren't a complete idiot and just an educated fool. No tolerance for fools, and these guys had a radar for glib assertions, shallow sentiment, and cant - and for out-of-context quotes. Academic boot camp is what these guys offered you.
Friday, June 27. 2008
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: 
Monday, June 23. 2008
An excerpt from an excerpt from an Alan Charles Kors essay in New Criterion: The power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials. As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his “Going Broke by Degree,” they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.
Saturday, June 7. 2008
That's the title of the commencement address J.K. Rowling delivered at Harvard. One quote: Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this. I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
Read the whole thing, or watch the video, at Harvard Magazine
Saturday, May 31. 2008
 A Back to Basics education with 24 students in one room, and a teacher salary of $240,000. This is great. It would entail a meaningful pay cut for me, but I'd do it in a New York minute for the joy and challenge of it. Can I say whatever I want, and can I use my whip?
I have always claimed that John Adams and Abe Lincoln got better educations than our public school kids get. Of course, they were not the average kids - and you don't "get" an education anyway - you "take" one. Or not. It is no longer PC to acknowledge that relatively few are able, interested, motivated, or inspired to engage in a serious classical education. For good reason, too: it's not practical and it's difficult, and most jobs do not require calculus or music theory. Result? Watered-down non-rigorous gruel and As and degrees for all, accompanied by a dose of leftist propaganda and multicultural BS. And that's OK, because you cannot get wisdom in school (except maybe a basis for historical wisdom, but that's easy to do on your own once your Mom teaches you to read). Now back to do the bidding of She Who Must Be Obeyed in the gardens. Adding "organic material," ie our recent truckload of slightly aged manure (a sweetly odoriferous and oozing mountain in the back driveway) from my dairy farmer pal, to the new perennial beds. I will have to dig it in, 2' deep. I will dump some on top of my vegetable garden too, as mulch to be dug in next Spring. Then horseplay later, if it doesn't rain: I could use a sherry or two for courage and a vintage stogie this afternoon, followed by a good gallop over hill and dale with the Mrs. to let today's cool Yankee wind clear my head of the nonsense in life. If rain, maybe indoor horseplay with the same goal. Editor note: Photo is an early 1800s one-room schoolhouse in Norwalk, CT
Sunday, May 25. 2008
 This is a re-post from 1682:
Thomas Brewton on Locke's view of the centrality of wisdom and virtue in education: Wisdom follows from the foundation of virtue. Wisdom is knowing how most effectively to manage one’s affairs with foresight. Acquiring it is a product of good temper, application of mind, and experience. Wisdom can only be initiated by the teacher, as it is a life-long process of learning from experience how to apply the lessons of virtue. What the teacher can do is to hinder the student from being cunning, what today we call playing the angles, or being street-smart (both of which are end products of John Dewey’s pragmatism, now taught as situation ethics, the idea that you make up the rules for each situation that arises).
Closely related to virtue and wisdom is the concept of good breeding, which flows from the love of God. What Locke meant by the term was an Aristotelian mean between extremes: the student should not be too bashful or gauche in dealing with other people, nor should he be prideful and too full of self-importance. He summarizes the aim as “not to think meanly of ourselves, and not to think meanly of others.” Ill breeding reveals itself in “too little care of pleasing or showing respect for those we have to do with.” The aim is “that general good will and regard for all people, which makes everyone have a care not to show in his carriage any contempt, disrespect, or neglect of them; but to express, according to the fashion and the way of that country, a respect and value for them according to their rank and condition.” Students are to be schooled against roughness, fault-finding (denunciation or ridicule), and being contradictory and captious.
Read entire here. Brewton's website here. Image is Locke - not our friend Tom Brewton.
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