Category: Education

Greatly enjoying The Great Courses Plus subscription. This time of the year brings long hours in the garden. I love it, but it starts to be a bit much after awhile, with my mind subtly shifting from “We must cultivate our garden,” and all the artistic and spiritual metaphors it evokes, to “Damn, this is a grinding waste of time.”

Podcasts help, but they’re like blogs: a decent source of information, but with emphasis on entertainment and production rather than reliability and accuracy.

Enter the Great Courses Plus. Curated, edited, taught by experts in their fields. The fare isn’t as good as it used to be, but it’s still awfully good. Ten years ago, I would’ve given their fare a “9.5” These days, I give it an “8.” In the old days, it was rare to get a bad course. These days, you have a much better chance, but with the “Plus,” you don’t have to buy the lecture to find out that it sucks. If the lecturer grates, delete it. If the presentation is confusing, switch to something else.

Interesting: I’ve long railed against female sportscasters doing men’s sports. Their voices simply don’t “fit” the game. Women aren’t on the field playing, so there is something incongruous about listening to them announce the game.

(Aside: I really dislike the “urban” accent of many black athletes, but in the context of announcing a game? It … Read the rest

The great Stoic Epictetus pointed out that education is the means to freedom.

Unfortunately, education today frequently becomes the means of slavery.

Everyone knows that the cost of higher education keeps escalating. Even the excellent tax advantages of educational IRAs and 529 plans haven’t made it easier to pay for college because education inflation outstrips the plans’ benefits.

A handful of families can afford to pay for their children’s education, but most cannot. So what do those families do?

The children get student loans.

The result? The loans often hound the children into their forties, forcing them to work intensely to pay the principal and interest. Does a man with a snootful of office life and savage commutes dream of what so many great men, from Epictetus to Russell Kirk, lauded: a leisure tinged with slight poverty, a small amount of money but a large assortment of books, a meager stock portfolio but a blooming garden, a mediocre car but lots of time with his children?

Tough.… Read the rest

Student Loans

The student debt problem is getting more and more press . . . and more attention in Congress. The whole debate infuriates me. The federal government created this mess by throwing a ton of money at the higher education establishment, which caused tuition rates to rise astronomically over the past 25 years, so now students have to go deep in debt in order to afford it. Congress now wrings its hands and points accusing fingers at the private lenders and college admissions officers, even though the federal government put in the systemic conditions that created the situation.

You want to eliminate the student loan problem? Stop the federal government from guaranteeing the loans, stop the federal government from providing Pell grants and other forms of tuition assistance, stop the federal government from otherwise funding higher education. The price of tuition would drop through the floor, putting it in reach of everybody except the poor and near-poor.

I know, I know: That’s not fair to the poor. Well, tough. It is fair. It’s neutral, which makes it fair. And besides, there’d still be need-based private scholarships and part-time college course work while a person works a full-time job. So 20% of the population would have to struggle to get their family out of that lower 20%. That’s fine. It’d greatly lessen the burden on the middle 70%.

The more I think and read … Read the rest

Politically Incorrect Speech Upheld

In case you missed, it a federal Court of Appeals court seems to have brought a dose of common sense to its First Amendment jurisprudence. A high school student wore a shirt that said, “Be happy, not gay.” She wore it the day after her school allowed a “Day of Silence,” which was held to draw attention to the harassment of gay students. The 7th Court of Appeals ruled that a school that “permits advocacy of the rights of homosexual students cannot be allowed to stifle criticism of homosexuality.” Link. You know what would be wonderful? If schools would jettison the political slant altogether and focus on more boring things, like math and reading. But no, the self-righteous don’t deem things like “Days of Silence” as political, but rather as fundamental human rights instruction and no more out of line than teaching about the Civil Rights movement or instructing kids to respect their elders. * * * * * * * The Solution. It’s all very frustrating, but as I’ve pointed out before, we can get rid of most of such controversies in one fell stroke: eliminate the monopoly of public education. If people have a choice of schools, they can choose the school that fits their attitude and disposition, instead of turning every public school building into an ideological war zone. You ever wonder why these fights flare … Read the rest

Finally, I Post a Small Tribute to the Cardinal

The puzzling Roger Scruton recently penned a borderline-beautiful tribute to Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University. Check it out. Excerpt:

The university is a society in which the student absorbs the graces and accomplishments of a higher form of life. In the university, according to Newman, the pursuit of truth and the active discussion of its meaning are integrated into a wider culture, in which the ideal of the gentleman is acknowledged as the standard. The gentleman does not merely know things; he is receptive to the tone, the meaning, the lived reality of what he knows. Thus, for Newman, “the general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already.” The university of Newman’s day was a place in which men (and it was then an institution for men only) lived for scholarship, and arranged their lives around the sacrifice that scholarship requires. It was not simply a repository of knowledge. It was a place where work and leisure occurred side by side, shaping each other, and each playing its part in producing the well-formed and graceful personality.

Another great quote from the same article:

Under a president whose knowledge of

The Reading Illiterate

“A reading-writing education as such has benefited nobody, has elated nobody spiritually or culturally. There is no need to go to the other extreme and to believe that the knowledge of the three R’s is basically destructive, but nothing is more stupid or unrealistic than to judge the level of other countries by the number of illiterates.”

And, as a corollary, nothing is more stupid or unrealistic than to judge the level of our country by the number of literates.

It reminds me of a Dear Abby column I saw earlier this year. A mother wrote, saying that she couldn’t get her children to read, until she came up with this novel approach: she turned off the volume on the TV and turned on close-captioning. The result: The children had to read in order to watch TV! Dear Abby was elated with the advice and passed it onto her readers.

Such idiocy could pass for intelligence only in a culture of mass education. The three R’s are valued as ends in themselves, instead of means to greater things. Reading for the sake of reading is about as healthy as eating for the sake of eating. Eating of any sort is good as opposed to starving, and reading of any sort (even the close-captioned reading) is better than no reading, but a diet of potato chips and ice cream doesn’t benefit a person’s … Read the rest