Category: Education

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

BYCU

I hung out at Central Michigan University quite a bit when I went to school at Alma College in the 1980s. These days, I only get back there when I go to Soaring Eagle, Michigan’s first indian casino and one of the few in the lower peninsula that allow my 18-year-old children to attend with me.

For some reason, CMU has been a “whipping boy” of one of my favorite writers, Joseph Epstein, who often refers to it when lamenting the “college is for everyone” culture we’ve lapsed into and, in general, the degradingly-laughable fall of college academics in general. Central isn’t a bad school by any means, but it is a degree factory, just like the vast majority of colleges these days. There’s no more shame in attending CMU than there is in attending any of the state universities that were established through land grants.

Here’s how Wikipedia explains how land grant colleges started: “The mission of these institutions as set forth in the 1862 Act is to focus on the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science and engineering (though “without excluding … classical studies”), as a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class. This mission was in contrast to the historic practice of higher education to focus on an abstract liberal arts curriculum.”

Such a mission obviously doesn’t apply just to land-grant colleges any more. Even my alma mater, the University of Michigan, a blue-blood among public universities, caters much to this “practical” education, although there definitely seems to be a “race to bottom” of sorts going on in this area that the blue bloods are resisting. “Colleges” are offering degrees in all sorts of things that would seem more vocational than education. A college in Michigan, for instance, teaches truck driving … 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 up in the public high schools? There are a few reasons, but the biggest is because the local public high school is often the only legitimate option in town for kids aged 14-18. Everyone has to fight to keep it the place they’re comfortable with, or else their kid is out of place in school or has to revert to homeschooling. Instill competition in the … Read the rest

Crushing the Youth

This article about the “college tuition bubble” is interesting, but its content doesn’t support its assertion. The assertion: College tuition is in a bubble that is about to get pricked. The content then gives eight reasons why college tuition is outrageously priced, but only one of the reasons explicitly supports the idea that the bubble is about to get pricked:

According to Bloomberg, publicly traded higher education companies derive three-fourths of their revenue from federal funds, up from just 48 percent in 2001 and approaching the 90 percent limit set by federal law. The fact that colleges are almost completely relying on borrowed money to finance tuition, up to the legal limit, means we’ve almost hit the breaking point. If not for the easy student loan money sloshing around, many colleges would go belly up tomorrow.

Of course, grossly-rising prices generally tend to get resistance from market forces. At some point, people just figure the price isn’t worth it. If that happens, a pop or deflationary puncture could develop: if people stop going to college, colleges will have to lower prices to attract students. Even better, if people stop going to college, the trend could catch on, leading more to a sudden pop than a slow leak. Or people could start demanding lower-priced alternatives, which could lead to cheaper online options (which are available, but the education establishment blocks them with protectionist accreditation requirements). Thing is, both of those market-correcting forces can be overcome–or at least resisted–by the Establishment. Such resistance leads to gross distortions, but that doesn’t stop the Establishment. It’s still throwing tons of money at the schools and talking about making college education available for all Americans, even though its flood gate of money has already distorted the prices in this area. * * … Read the rest

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 health in the long-run, just as a diet of newspapers and dime-store novels doesn’t benefit a person’s mind in the long run.

… Read the rest

This 2006 op-ed from the New York Times ought to be required reading for every prospective college student and every politician that makes student loans available: “A Little Learning is an Expensive Thing.” It’s William Chace, a former president of Emory and Wesleyan Universities. Excerpts:

The tuition increases here, just like those of our competitors, have outstripped the rate of increase in the consumer price index for years.

You will probably owe more than $20,000, on average, when you leave Laudable University. Graduates of public institutions will owe, on average, more than $15,000.

How will many of you begin your adult lives?

In serious debt. . . .

Laudable could be cheaper, but you wouldn’t like it. You and your parents have made it clear that you want the best. That means more spacious and comfortable student residences (“dormitories,” we used to call them), gyms with professional exercise equipment, better food of all kinds, more counselors to attend to your growing emotional needs, more high-tech classrooms and campuses that are spectacularly handsome.

Our competitors provide such things, so we do too. We compete for everything: faculty, students, research dollars and prestige. The more you want us to give to you, the more we will be asking you to give to us. We aim to please, and that will cost you. It’s been a long time since scholarship and teaching were carried on in monastic surroundings. . . .

Still on vacation, so slow blogging continues . . .

… Read the rest