The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students' lack of skills, but of teachable character.

Breaking Patterns

At this school, usual excuses don't apply: The student population is black and poor--and highly proficient.

A north Minneapolis school at Olson Memorial Hwy. and Humboldt Avenue has demographics that seem a sure predictor of our state's most intractable education problem. The student population there is 99 percent black and 91 percent poor, and about 70 percent of the children come from single-parent families.

Such "racial isolation" is widely considered a formula for defeat—a hallmark of the cavernous "achievement gap" that separates poor, minority students from their more affluent white peers. In recent decades, Minnesota has spent billions of dollars attempting to narrow the gap but has little to show for it.

That's why the achievements of the school I just described should be shouted from the rooftops. In this year's state math tests in grades three through eight, this school outperformed every metro-area school district, including Edina and Wayzata. Its students outperformed all state students in reading proficiency (77 percent to 75 percent), and state white students in math proficiency (82 percent to 65 percent).

This extraordinary school is Harvest Preparatory School, a K-6 charter with five programs, including Best Academy, a K-8 boys program.

Black males are among our state's lowest-performing groups of students, but at Best Academy, 100 percent of eighth-grade boys scored proficient in reading. "Best Academy has the highest proportion of African-American boys of any institution in Minnesota," says founder and director Eric Mahmoud. "The only institution that competes with us is the prison system."

How have Mahmoud and his team worked this magic? Mahmoud is an electrical engineer by training. "At the factory I used to run, if we had a failure rate of 0.5 percent, we'd shut down the line until we figured out the problem," he says. "In our education system, we're failing with 40, 50, 60 percent of our African-American children, but we keep the system that turns out the same product, year after year."

Read more.

A Tottering Technocracy

by Victor Davis Hanson

Higher education is no longer affordable for many families, and does not guarantee well-rounded, well-educated graduates. A university debt bubble, in Fannie and Freddie fashion — together with the rise of no-frills private online certificate-granting institutions — is undermining traditional higher education. The symptoms are unmistakable: tuition spiraling far ahead of inflation; elite faculty excused from teaching to publish esoteric articles in little-read journals; legions of poorly compensated part-time instructors and graduate-student assistants subsidizing the privileged class; political orthodoxy as an unspoken requisite for membership in the club. An administrator is deemed successful largely for promoting “diversity” — rarely on the basis of whether costs stabilized, graduation rates increased, the need for remediation declined, or post-graduation jobs were assured on his watch. This warped system, which grew out of the bountiful 1960s, is now a vestigial organ, an odd-looking thing without an easily definable purpose. When will the bubble burst? If the four-year university cannot ensure its graduates that they will necessarily have a better-paying job and know more than the products of an upfront credentialing factory, why incur the $200,000 cost and put up with the political indoctrination?

This is only one of many brilliant paragraphs in the essay. Read the whole essay here.

The New Easy Path at University

The Race to the Bottom

by Schumpeter

IN MY day people who wanted an easy time at university studied geography or land management. Now, in the United States at least, the soft-option of choice is business studies. Business students of various sorts are the most numerous group on American campuses, accounting for 20%, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor degrees. They are also, according to a long article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, by far the idlest and most ignorant.

Read more.

Guarding Against Legal Action

Building a 21st Century Syllabus

By David Clemens

Fall semester brings some familiar rituals: the Buying-of-the-Spiral-Notebooks, the Checking-of-the-Book-Orders, and, most importantly, the-Tweaking-of-the-Syllabus. At one time, my syllabus was a single sheet of ditto paper; now it’s 15 pages bristling with warnings, caveats, and disclaimers. Advancing technology, eroding civility, changing pedagogy, frequent litigation and demands for accountability oblige teachers to cover their . . . policies.

Read the whole article.

On the Devaluation of Education

Doug Wilson aptly writes,

Almost thirty percent of American 25-year-olds and higher currently have a B.A. If true educational reform in higher ed takes root, over the course of a generation, we should be able to cut that number in half. If we don't cut that number in half, we will continue to "cut in half" our educational expectations. For example, if we said that our goal was to send every eighteen-year-old to basketball camp, and in the grip of a bizarre ideological frenzy, we insisted that we were going to reach the achievable goal of "every American learning how to dunk the ball," then there are only two possible outcomes. The first will be that reality will eventually set in, and we give up that fantasy, admitting that it was a fantasy. The second is what we are currently doing, especially in the humanities, and that is the achievable goal of lowering the net.

Read his essay on correcting the devaluing of education in "How Not to Lower the Net."

Should Everyone Attend College?

Thomas Sowell, one of my favorite writers and columnists, published his column for the week, "Another 'Good Thing'." I resonate with his comments throughout his column. Consider the following and then read the whole column.

As someone who spent years teaching at colleges and universities for students who ranked in the country's top 10 percent, I nevertheless encountered many students whose interest in intellectual matters was less than overwhelming, to put it charitably.

Many were bright enough but often gave the impression that they would rather be somewhere else, doing something else. Some of their teachers also thought that they should be somewhere else, doing something else.

My first main introduction to Thomas Sowell came by reading his book Inside American Education (1992). I commend it to you. It was reprinted in 2003 by Free Press.

Another Baylor President Fired

Baylor University fires President John Lilley

by Scott Farwell and Sam Hodges

The Baylor University Board of Regents voted today to fire the school’s president, John Lilley.

AP File 2005 Dr. John Lilley (right) embraced his former mentor, Baylor University music professor Dr. Robert Young, after Dr. Lilley was announced as Baylor's new president in November 2005. Baylor's Board of Regents fired Dr. Lilley for unspecified reasons Thursday, less than three years after he was hired.

The board, meeting in Grapevine, decided “the decision was necessary in order to unite Baylor’s many constituencies and move the university forward,” Howard K. Batson, the board chairman, was quoted as saying in a written statement.

Later, in a conference call with reporters, Dr. Batson was reluctant to link the board’s decision to one event in Dr. Lilley’s term, but suggested tension with the school’s faculty may have contributed.

"A lot of the faculty members were upset, and our faculty is important to us," said Dr. Batson. "The progress has not been as swift as some of us on the board would have hoped, in terms of bringing the Baylor family together."

Read the whole story.

The main purpose of education: Detecting "when a man is talking rot"

Roger Kimball has posted an article, "If I Ran the Zoo," on the NAS web site. He takes up a theme that I have often addressed, though not in any major way on this particular blog but elsewhere.

If there were a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Words, the word “theory” would long ago have been granted protected status as an Abused Noun. Academics wishing to use the word would be required to apply for a special license, submit character references from three persons never convicted of exposure to graduate-school education, and contribute to a fund for other unfortunate words. The case of “theory” is especially sad, because in it we have an example of serial abuse: first by the professors of literature, then the professors of “cultural studies” and kindred interdisciplinary redoubts, and lately by art historians and others “Theory” has a complicated history. It derives from a Greek word meaning “to look at, behold.” “Theory” in this sense implies a certain passivity on the part of the beholder: a theory gave us access not to something we made but to something we received when properly attentive. Today, however, we use “theory” in a sense close to the opposite of this etymological meaning. A “theory” nowadays is not so much what we see or behold as a mental scaffolding we imagine or project in order to account for what we see or behold. In short, theory, which once betokened an attunement or congruence with reality, now signifies a willful imposition. You even encounter people who use “theorize” as a transitive verb: “So-and-so theorizes the idea of freedom” (or art, nature, cookery, whatever), meaning that So-and-so embellishes whatever it is with a skein of owlish verbal irrelevancies. “Truth,” which once-upon-a-time was thought to be the end or goal of theorizing, is rarely spoken of, and then only in deprecatory scare quotes.

Kimball observes,

For theory as practiced in the academy today is primarily an instrument of politics, not inquiry. It is meant to insinuate a subplot of unacknowledged motives behind every declaration. When you hear—as you are always hearing these days—someone say that truth is “socially constructed,” that “knowledge is a function of power,” etc., it is a good bet that in the next sentence he is going to offer you a dollop of “theory” to support his claim.

Kimball quotes John Alexander Smith, Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, who made the following observation when he began a series of lectures.

Gentlemen, you are now about to embark upon a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Some of you, when you go down from the University, will go into the Church, or to the Bar, or to the House of Commons, or to the Home Civil Service, or the Indian or Colonial Services, or into various professions. Some may go into the Army, some into industry and commerce; some may become country gentlemen. A few—I hope a very few—will become teachers or dons. Let me make this clear to you. Except for those in the last category, nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life—save only this—that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.

Read the whole article intact.