Albert B Fernandez's List: Education

• Florida governor Rick Scott. Citing the miserable economy, Scott argued that precious state tax dollars should go to support science and tech studies, not “educate more people who can’t get jobs in anthropology.”
• University of Connecticut president Susan Herbst
• we’re supposed to live.
• Not only do the humanities teach “critical t
• ,” says Herbst, they also “teach us how
• hinkin
• An FDR brain-truster, he went on to become a law professor at Columbia. In a 1960 speech, he took American universities to task for having “run away” from their duty to teach, as Herbst puts it, “how we’re supposed to live.
• Up until the ’60s, most colleges and universities required all students, regardless of major, to study the great works of philosophy, literature, politics, art, and music. If you examine the course catalogues of today’s schools, you’ll find
• that fewer than 2 percent of them still offe
• r a common core curriculum
• Western Civilization survey courses, which were a staple up until the ’60s, are today “virtually extinct” across the country.
• Moral and cultural relativism are the thin gruel that the universities feed their students’ hungry souls.
• Academically Adrift, found that 45 percent of the students it surveyed showed little improvement in their critical-thinking capacities after two years of college. After four years, 36 percent continued to show little improvement.

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• The American education gospel is built around four core beliefs. First, it teaches that access to higher levels of education should be available to everyone, regardless of their background or previous academic performance. Every educational sinner should have a path to redemption. (Most of these paths now run through community colleges.) Second, the gospel teaches that opportunity for a better life is the goal of everyone and that education is the primary — and perhaps the only — road to opportunity. Third, it teaches that the country can solve its social problems — drugs, crime, poverty, and the rest — by providing more education to the poor. Education instills the knowledge, discipline, and the habits of life that lead to personal renewal and social mobility. And, finally, it teaches that higher levels of education for all will reduce social inequalities, as
• they will put everyone on a more equal footing. No wonder President Obama and Bill Gates want the country to double its college graduation rate over the next 10 years.
  
• They decry the fact that schools in poor communities have become dropout factories and that only the wealthy can afford the private preparatory schools that are the primary feeders to prestigious private colleges. The higher education Establishment recognizes critics like these as family. They accept the core beliefs of the education gospel and are impatient only with its slow and incomplete adoption.
• Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks, co-authors of the 2008 paper “Leisure College USA: The Decline in Student Study Time,” access to higher education may have gone too far. Our colleges and universities are full to the brim with students who do not really belong there, who are unprepared for college and uninterested in breaking a mental sweat. Instead of studying, they spend time talking on the phone, planning social events, chitchatting about personal trivia and popular culture, and facebooking.
• Faculty members demand less of these students, according to Babcock and Marks, both because they are incapable of doing more and because they will punish faculty members with bad evaluations if they are pushed to try harder.
• colleges, out of craven financial motives, do not squarely face the fact that not all of their students are “college materia
• Institutions at the tail end of academic procession are, as David Riesman once put it, “colleges only by the grace of semantic generosity.”
• Today’s restrictionists are not snobs but staunch meritocrats: people who made their way through the schooling system, and who believe in it. They are dismayed by what the system has become in an age they see as one of near-universal access.
• James Rosenbaum, the author of Beyond College for All, for example, has argued that many students have no use for the abstract intellectualism of liberal arts course work.
• What they need instead is basic literacy and numeracy, good training for occupational life, instruction in “social skills” (how to present oneself to an employer and colleagues, including no visible tattoos or loud music on home answering machines), and teachers who can connect them to potential employers and provide reliable information to employers about their students.
• On average, students socialize more than 40 hours a week but attend and prepare for class only 26 or 27.
• Even among English majors in the University of California, half say they do less than 80 percent of the assigned reading in their courses. If English majors do not read, what can we expect of business or communications majors? The answer is, not much. Nearly two-thirds of all UC students said they do less than 80 percent of the reading for their classes.
  
• the new restrictionists (whose ranks also include Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory; PayPal founder Peter Thiel; and Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires, among others).
• Professor X’s students are nurses, firemen, and claims adjusters. None have any literary interests, and very few know how to compose a clear paragraph, much less an arresting essay.
• X’s standards are not particularly high. The fundamental principle is that writing “should not wobble
• Many have read fewer than 10 books in their lifetimes. They have never studied grammar. Adherence to the sloppy, elliptical language of texting and tweeting has become an acceptable way to hide the fact that these students are not
• capable of composing
• adequate English sentence
• do not have an archetype of good writing in their minds. As X notes, such an archetype is created over the course of a lifetime, not in a 15-week semester.
• X is scandalized that his students are going deeply in debt for an education that is not particularly useful to them, and from which many will not emerge with degree in hand. He rails against the “magic” business model of colleges and universities: Assure your students that a college degree is required for any decent job (whether the education they receive is related to the work they will eventually be doing or not) and pave your school’s way to rich
• In X’s eyes, colleges are as guilt
• y as the mortgage lenders of gulling hapless consumers into taking on too much debt for a
• shot at the American D
• ream.

• We don’t like to admit that one student may be smarter, sharper, harder working, better prepared, more energetic, more painstaking — simply, a better student — than another … Our quest to provide universally level playing fields has made us reluctant to keep score.
• In books like In the Basement, students who live in wealthy suburbs are off the hook, not only because they tend to be better prepared for college, but because they do not face the long odds or deep indebtedness of X’s students. This includes a large number of students who are destined for college simply because they were fortunate to be born into families in which both parents went to college, where ideas were discussed around the dinner table, large words were used in the household, and academic expectations were set high. Some of these well-to-do high school achievers also loaf in college. The difference is that they loaf around with others like themselves, and they carry their social networks and their prestigious college names with them into the labor market.
  
• The United States has been notably unsympathetic to German-style apprenticeship programs. Instead, our vocational training “system” is a patchwork of regional voc-techs, community colleges, for-profits, union-sponsored programs, and corporate training. Unlike in the German system, employers do not participate directly in support of most American vocational training institutions and programs. Students in Germany are trained for a particular occupation, and they cannot easily move to a new one
• Another heresy, and a very old one, is the idea that schooling provides education for servitude rather th
• n freedom.
• Paul Goodman, John Holt, and Ivan Illich carried the “free the students” flag.
• For them, children are born creative and curious, only to have the schools drum out these natural dispositions in order to create good soldiers for “the system.”
• It is difficult for anyone who has had a Lord of the Flies experience to see children simply as nature’s darlings hammered into servility by schooling.
• f educati
• nal Romantics, as Hannah Arendt observed in a 1954 essay on “the crisis in education,” is to obliterate as far as possible the distinction between play and work — in favor of the former
• The goal o
• John Marsh is a proponent of another old heretical sect: the “fool’s gold” group. These heretics specialize in debunking the social progress beliefs of the educational gospel.
• Left to its own devices, he argues, expansion of the educational system will produce not social equality but credential inflation: the condition in which higher levels of education (or distinctive brands of ed
• cation) are necessary to “buy” standards of living previously asso
• with lower levels (or generic brands) of
• education.
• As workers attain the bachelor’s degree, middle-class incomes become associated with the attainment of master’s or first professional degrees, and access to truly powerful opportunities requires attendance at an elite institution.
  
• 
    For “fool’s gold” heretics like Marsh, higher education promises what it cannot deliver. They reject the premise put forward by Carnegie and his disciples: Education, they argue, does not necessarily offer a ladder to the good life. Because of the collapse of the labor market for
• workers with only high school degrees, higher education is a defensive necessity, but all it offers most people is a way of running in place.
• One reason that education cannot solve problems of inequality is that most jobs do not in fact require high levels of education. Far from becoming a society of hyper-rational and high-powered “knowledge workers,” as theorists of post-industrial society predicted, the United States is becoming a society of hospital orderlies, cashiers, compliance officers,
• and computer technicians — to judge by its fastest-growing occupations.
• College educated professionals and managers constitute just 15 percent of the work force.
• If the size of the professional-managerial stratum is relatively fixed, the educated children of the well-to-do will find ways to keep all but the most determined children of the working classes out. They will size each other up by comparing the quality of the schools from which they graduated, how articulately they can discuss current affairs or their summer travel experiences, and how they navigate any number of other cultural checkpoints.
• Finally, there is the “true educators” sect, to which University of Chicago professor of education Philip W. Jackson belong
• Drawing on Hegel, Kant, and Dewey, Jackson has an answer.
• etween mimetic and transformative education.
• Mimetic education “gives a central place to the transmission of factual and procedural knowledge from one person to another, through an essentially imitative process.” By contrast, transformative education seeks to accomplish a
• ckson distinguishes
• qualitative change … a metamorphosis” and particularly addresses “all those traits of character and of personality most highly prized by the society at large.”
• Mimetic education, in other words, imparts knowledge; transformative education does so as well but, more importantly, it changes people
• For Jackson,
• It is a moral enterprise, because it seeks to make everyone it touches better than they currently are.
• Because education is about truth, it is also about correction. The possibility of elevation, as Hegel knew, requires the negation of error. Yet b
• elationship between teacher and student
• education is a
• They must want, at some level, to be like the teacher.
• For many, the interest of the school is found primarily in the opportunities for socializin
• and extracurricular activiti
• Whole quarters can pass without a teacher being able to identify a single student who is able to
• ith the course materials
• ritical dialogue
• engage in a meaningful c
• hts about the flaws of dominant doctrines
• etrating insi
• Heretics often offer pen
• “true educators” live in a rarefied world of one-on-one tutorials and private education, one that, however inspiring, is utterly divorced from the contexts in which most teachers actu
• lly work
• letes a college degree.
• Nearly 30 percent of the population com
• A few
• jobs require specialized skills that can only be acquired in technical programs, but most
• jobs are relatively routine. They require workers to know basic literacy and numeracy, but other skills can be picked up
• The most important requirements are that workers show up and do their jobs every day, feel comfortable working with people from a variety of backgrounds, and know how to find information they need in non-routine situations. Following the directives of supervisors is essential. Reliability and steady effort are highly valued.
  
• on the job.
• Dedicated work is not required in college because it will not be required at work. In most jobs, showing up and doing the work is more important than achieving outstanding levels of performance.
• If families and schools do not have the resources to prepare students for success in most cases, that’s fine, because too many well-prepared students would put pressure on the system to offer rewards that it cannot supply.
• states are withdrawing funding from public colleges and universities on the theory that the benefits of pu
• lic education are mainly privately consumed and should therefore be paid for by those who gain fr
• m them
• Severely underprepared students are channeled into community colleges where they rarely emerge from remedial and developmental courses.
• No longer supported very well for their efforts to provide access, public universities are raising tuition and competing aggressively for full-paying and international students.
  
• Concerted efforts are going into bringing greater “accountability” to colleges and universities through assessments of student learning outcomes. These efforts are likely to bring modest gains in tested skill and subject areas, as occurred in K-12 education at the beginning of the “accountability era” in the 1980s, together with greater disengagement from the learning of untested subjects and skills and the further de-professionalization of college teaching. These measures can advance mimetic education in small ways, but they will not encourage a truly transformative education for anyone.
• Improvement will require breaking down our large institutions as often as possible into smaller groupings of learners by creating first-year learning communities, salting in more seminars into the curriculum, capping upper-division courses, encouraging undergraduate res
• earch, and requiring senior projec
• “clicker” technology, which allows all students to answer questions posed by the professor, providing immediate feedback to the professor about how many students understand lecture points.) It will require mo
• re opportunities for students to be held publicly accountable for performing what they are learning — not just in anonymous tests and clicker polls, but in the presence of their classmates

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• Education had very little impact on responses, we found; survey respondents who’d gone to college did only slightly less badly than those who hadn’t. Among members of less-educated groups, brighter people tend to respond more frequently to online surveys, so it’s likely that our sample of non-college-educated respondents is more enlightened than the larger group they represent. Still, the fact that a college education showed almost no effect—at least for those inclined to take such a survey—strongly suggests that the classroom is no great corrective for myside bias.

• Unfortunately, Brill is completely ignorant of a vast body of research literature about teaching. Economists agree that teachers are the most important influence on student test scores inside the school, but the influence of schools and teachers is dwarfed
• by nonschool factors, most especially by family income. The reformers like to say that poverty doesn’t make a difference, but they are wrong. Poverty matters. The achievement gap between children of affluence and children of poverty starts long before the first day of school. It reflects the nutrition and medical care available to pregnant women and their children, as well as the educational level of the children’s parents, the vocabulary they hear, and the experiences to which they are exposed.
• Every testing program shows a tight correlation between family income and test scores, whether it is the SAT, the ACT, the federal testing program, or state tests.
• Like Brill, she is angry at the school system, but for very different reasons. What she experienced firsthand was “grossly underfunded schools,” with overcrowded classrooms, deteriorating and mouse-ridden buildings, and dirty bathrooms with no toilet paper or soap. Unlike Brill, she is critical of the fact that suburban schools “spend double, sometimes triple, the amount of money per student that New York City spends” and that schools generally continue to be racially segregated. Far from detesting the union at her school, she was grateful that it was there to fight for better conditions and to represent her when she had to deal with an abusive principal
• When test scores become the goal of education by which students and schools are measured, then students in the bottom half—who will inevitably include disproportionate numbers of children who are poor, children with disabilities, children who barely speak English—will be left far behind, stigmatized by their low scores.

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• For the power that is in you, as Emerson suggested, may be new in nature. You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and college is the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass
• others). The best reas
• n to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.
• Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the soul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. No one will ask you, in the words of Emerson’s disciple William James, what their “cash value” might be. No one will suggest that you might use Plato as your bible for a week
• o to help you change your life.
• e Pla
• or a year or longer. No one, in short, will ask you to u
• (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the end, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth

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• Who you even have the possibility to be starts at conception. If you think genes don’t affect how people behav
• , consider this fact: if you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do. These statistics alone indicate that we cannot presume that everyone is coming to the table equally equipped in terms of drives and behaviors.
• (For ex
• ample, the major public-health movement to eliminate lead-based paint grew out of an understanding that ingesting lead can cause brain damage, making children less intelligent and, in some cases, more impulsive and aggressive
• And every experience throughout our lives can modify genetic expression—activating certain genes or switching others off
• der a decision to move or speak. It feels as though free will leads you to stick out your tongue, or scrunch up your face, or call someone a name. But free will is not required to play any role in these acts. People with Tourette’s syndrome, for instance, suffer from involuntary movements and vocalizations. A typical Touretter may stick out his tongue, scrunch up his face, or call someone a name—all without choosing to do so.
• his same phenomenon arises in people with a condition known as chorea, for whom actions of the hands, arms, legs, and face are involuntary, even though they certainly look voluntary: ask such a patient why she is moving her fingers up and down, and she will explain that she has no control over her hand. She cannot not do it. Similarly, some split-brain patients (who have had the two hemispheres of the brain surgically disconnected) develop alien-hand syndrome: while one hand buttons up a shirt, the other hand works to unbutton it. When one hand reaches for a pencil, the other bats it away. No matter how hard the patient tries, he cannot make his alien hand not do what it’s doing. The movements are not “his” to freely start or stop.
• ents, and those with choreic movements, Kenneth’s case illustrates that high-level behaviors can take place in the absence of free will.
• As with Tourette’s sufferers, split-brain pat

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