Muddling Toward Maturity Blog

IVY LEAGUER "INFILTRATES" FALWELL'S UNIVERSITY

Expecting to write an expose, he was surprised to find students "rigorously normal."  Story here.  (HT: HotAir) 

Update 4/23/09 - I went to Amazon.com to dig a little deeper into The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University.  The title strikes me as rather hokey, but judging from the reviews, Kevin Roose has written an exceedingly entertaining and fair-minded book.   Who should read the book?  (according to one reviewer)

* Any Christian who wonders how the un-indoctrinated view believers and their practices
* Anyone preparing to be an pastor, evangelist, missionary, or Christian educator - especially in a post-modern society
* Anyone planning to go to a Christian university (you'll understand the pros and cons of these institutions better after reading Kevin's book)
* Anyone on staff at Liberty University
* Liberals who have made sweeping generalizations about fundamentalist Christianity without honestly investigating it themselves.
* Anyone who wants to read a tremendously thought provoking and highly entertaining story.

Author Roose is posting a blog related to the book.

Homeschooling Boom in America

It's up 74% since 1999.  Reasons given (from a 2007 survey):

• Concern about the school environment, including reasons such as safety,drugs or negative peer pressure – 88 percent

• A desire to provide religious or moral instruction – 83 percent

• A dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools – 73 percent

• Nontraditional approach to children's education – or "unschoolers" who consider typical curriculums and standardized testing as counterproductive to quality education – 65 percent

• Other reasons, such as family time, finances, travel and distance – 32 percent

• Child has special needs (other than physical or mental health problems) that schools cannot or will not meet – 21 percent

• Child has a physical or mental health problem – 11 percent

more . . .

HOW AMERICAN TEXTBOOKS PROSELYTIZE ISLAM

Tony Blankley does it again.  He reveals what we need to know.  He begins his column (HT: HotAir) with this paragraph (emphases are my own):

I recently read a book that deserves the widest possible readership. The book is "The Trouble with Textbooks - Distorting History and Religion" by Gary A. Tobin and Dennis R. Ybarra. I have never met or talked with either of these gentlemen, but I can't say enough good things about this book. For all who believe that there is a fairly objective rendition of history that we are obliged to teach our children, this book reveals how shockingly far from that objective American education-and particularly school textbooks-have fallen.

It gets much worse.  Not his column, but what Blankley discovers about U.S. textbooks. 

In their conclusion, the authors quote the great historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis' observation concerning the willful bending of history: "We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments, religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was."

Blankley goes on to say:

The grievance group that has become particularly adept at influencing textbook publishing is the organized Muslim lobby. The founder of the Council on Islamic Education, the chief Islamic group for vetting textbooks in the United States, refers to his work as a "bloodless revolution … inside American junior high and high school classrooms."

He is, regrettably, right. While these days one may expect "sensitive deference" to Muslim sensitivities, the authors show how American textbooks have gone so far as to outright proselytize Islam.

Read on . . .

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE DISMAL -- SHOULD I SAY DISASTROUS? -- STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Here is VDH's thumbnail sketch of the State of California:

I think the wretched state of California, now looking at a fiscal disaster of roughly a $20-30 billion annual shortfall, should be a wake-up call for the Obama administration. Whatever California is doing — please don't follow suit!

With proposed increases, we will have the highest sales taxes (ca. 9%) in the nation, the highest state income taxes (10+%), and probably the lowest thresholds to get into those top brackets — and yet only about 380,000 Californians pay 40% of the aggregate income tax revenue.

In exchange, our schools, roads, airports, hospitals, and police are, to use a euphemism, not competitive. The CSU campuses make up the largest university system in the world, with the largest unionized faculty, and yet nearly 50% of entering freshman must take mandatory remedial math and English courses. We don't utilize our ample energy, mineral, and timber resources, but

1ST GRADERS IN CALIFORNIA TAKE A FIELD TRIP TO THEIR LESBIAN TEACHER'S WEDDING

Update 10/22/08 - Another California school pushes "Gay Day" for kindergartners.

***

Definitely amazing.  Click here to see a short video report produced by the San Francisco Gate.

The Family Research Center comments:

"It really is what we call a teachable moment," argued Liz Jaroflow, the interim director of a local California charter school. This is how she and other administrators rationalize the decision to take a class of impressionable first graders on a field trip to their teachers' lesbian "wedding." At the suggestion of a parent, Jaroflow herded the five- and six-year-olds onto a bus during school hours last Friday and surprised Erin Carder and Kerri McCoy at City Hall.

Now the unorthodox excursion is putting San Francisco's school district at the center of a national debate on counterfeit marriage. When asked what educational value the trip had,

The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List

Josh Kaufman produced the following:

Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.  (HT: Culture11)

GERMANY DECLARES WAR ON HOME-SCHOOLERS

CBN News reports the latest.

NEW BOOK ABOUT THE STATE OF EDUCATION TODAY: "FROM CRAYONS TO CONDOMS: THE UGLY TRUTH ABOUT AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS"

Jamie Glazov interviewed Karen Holgate and Steve Baldwin, the co-editors of the new book From Crayons to Condoms: The Ugly Truth About America's Public Schools

 FP: Give us a brief overview of what is taking place in public schools today. Why is this happening?

Holgate: We are seeing a dramatic shift in education from “effective” education, meaning concrete academics, to “affective” education, meaning the teaching of attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviors. One of the reasons for this “shift” is that activist legislators are mandating that teachers divert valuable classroom time from solid academics to the promotion of personal agendas.  (more . . . click through for examples!)

QUICK TAKES - with an educational slant

** *YouTube University: YouTube has struck deals with major universities, creating dedicated channels from which schools can distribute their media content. Check out the channels for UC Berkeley and University of Southern California.  (HT: Joe Carter at evangelical outpost)

** While checking out the above, I came across the Open Culture website, with a number of fascinating posts:

       -"Best Online Tool for Word Nerds" - "Lifehacker is running a good piece today that highlights a series of web-based language tools for anyone looking to figure out a word’s definition, translation, pronunciation, synonym, or antonym. Word nerds, this could be your lucky day…"

      - Graduation speeches on video anyone?  Click here. J.K. Rowling's speech at Harvard last week is here.

      - "Wanting to learn a foreign language?  "MSN-Sympatico has been running a piece that covers the ins-and-outs of learning a foreign language online. The piece highlights free resources that you can access on the web, including our collection of Free Foreign Language Lesson Podcasts, but also many other worthwhile materials. Free language dictionaries, flash cards, interactive games, language learning communities, international news and radio shows, formal university courses — they’re all listed here."

THE DEMISE OF THE HUMANITIES ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES TODAY

Christopher Orlet has written an excellent review of Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T Kronman. Key paragraph:

AT ONE TIME the purpose of a university education was to give future leaders an opportunity -- before they shouldered the dull burdens of civic responsibility -- to explore the purpose and value of life. By instilling a strong sense of history, of reason, of logic, of the best of what has been thought and said, a background in the Humanities would prepare a young scholar for whatever may lie ahead.

This, at least, had been the belief going back to Plato's Republic.

GEORGE F. WILL ON THE DISMAL STATE OF EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES

Though he touches on a number of subjects, Will also noted this fact:

Moynihan also knew that schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families and hence communities -- the primary transmitters of social capital. No reform can enable schools to cope with the 36.9 percent of all children and 69.9 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means, among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males.

John Leo - "The Hazards of Telling the Truth" - on Mary Lefkowitz's Demolishing of Afrocentric Baloney

Update 5/7/08 - John J. Miller posts an audio interview with Mary Lefkowitz.

- At a local college some years ago, I heard a guest lecture by Mary Lefkowitz, classicist at Wellesley College (now retired).  I recognized that she grounded her lecture in established fact and that she was a woman of uncommon courage in her willingness to confront Afrocentric nonsense.  What is Afrocentrism?  John Leo's column explains and at the same time spotlights Lefkowitz's most recent book, History Lesson: A Race Odyssey, "a personal account of what she experienced as a result of questioning the veracity of Afrocentrism and the motives of its advocates. She has advanced the intellectual case against Afrocentrism before, in "Not Out of Africa:How Afrocentrism Became An Excuse to Teach Myth as History (1997); here she takes a more personal approach..."

I am so glad I came across John Leo's article, published today in the Wall Street Journal.  Read it for background into the controversy and weep over the "kind of affirmative action program for the re-writing of history" that is Afrocentrism.  (continued on page 2)

SHARIA IN THE SCHOOLS: MONITORING THE AMERICAN MADRASSA

Michelle Malkin offers an excellent summary of Muslim attempts to produce Muslim schools at taxpayer's expense plus infiltrate school curriculum with Islamic-slanted textbooks.  Malkin's article is all the more useful for the embedded links that add depth and detail to the alarming picture.

** Update 4/15/08 - CAIR comes to the rescue.  Story here.

OBAMA DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THE CRISIS IN TEACHING HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES

As usual, Victor Davis Hanson says it best (my underlining):

Today a news item reported on Sen. Obama’s recent take on the current status of education:

“He said schools should do a better job of teaching all students African-American history "because that's part of American history," as well as women's struggle for equality, the history of unions, the role of Hispanics in U.S. and other matters that he suggested aren't given enough attention.”

"I want us to have a broad-based history" taught in schools, he said, even including more on "the Holocaust as well as other issues of oppression" around the world.”

But anyone familiar with the historical illiteracy of today’s college student understands that more of the “oppression” history that Sen. Obama is advocating is precisely the problem, not the solution. Our high school students already know who Harriet Tubman is, but not U.S. Grant or Shiloh. They have been introduced to Crispus Attucks, but not Alexander Hamilton. They know World War II largely as the Japanese internment and Hiroshima (cf. Reverend Wright on that), but have not a clue about the Bulge or Okinawa or the Munich travesty.

RANKING THE FREE ONLINE FOREIGN LANGUAGE COURSES

Click here.

The End of the University as We Know It

David Horowitz examines a new report put out by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) called "Freedom in the Classroom" and finds it a shocking departure from previous accepted academic standards.  (A shortened version of Horowitz's analysis can be found in a Weekly Standard article.  From that I quote the following):

In its latest response to complaints about the politicization of higher education, the American Association of University Professors has embraced a novel view: "It is not indoctrination for professors to expect students to comprehend ideas and apply knowledge that is accepted as true within a relevant discipline." Under this precept, put forth in the AAUP's recent report "Freedom in the Classroom," teachers are no longer held to standards of "scholarly" or "scientific" or "intellectually responsible" discourse, but to whatever

Does Education Improve Human Decency? No Indeed. (So Notes Dennis Prager)

Dennis Prager does it again.  He spells out truths, far from hidden, that nevertheless tend to elude people.  In this article he tackles the false notion that education leads to improved moral behavior.  Not so.  In fact, Prager says the record shows  that

The higher educated in Western society have been more likely to have awful moral values and more likely to support massive cruelty than the less well educated,

Read on for the evidence that conclusively supports his case.

The Next Great American Education Fad: In-School Yoga Classes

Michelle Malkin doesn't take kindly to the introduction (at taxpayer's expense) of mandatory yoga for high school seniors:

According to the piece, “Less Homework, More Yoga, From a Principal Who Hates Stress,” the head of Needham High School in the Boston suburbs is pushing “stress reduction” through better stretching and breathing. Principal Paul Richards, who last earned nationwide mockery when he ditched publishing the honor roll, is part-Oprah, part-Deepak Chopra, part-Richard Simmons, and all edu-babble.

Malkin asks:

Why stop at yoga? Tantric chanting, here we come. And, hey, Kabbalah has done wonders for Madonna. Let’s add hypnotism and acupuncture classes while we’re at it. Hot stone massages? Bonsai tree-clipping? No Relaxation Technique Left Behind!

Who pays?  Guess.

The Yoga Ed. program, created by Hollywood spouse/socialite Tara Guber, was funded with taxpayer grants from

Michael Barone on "Ivory Tower Decay"

Barone writes accurately, and indisputably, that

America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.  (more . . .)

Add to the above this further note  supplied by John J. Miller:

The Chronicle summarizes a new report on professors and politics:

Conservatives are a small minority within the American professoriate, according to a major study whose results were released on Saturday. The study — which is arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s — found that only 9.2 percent of college instructors are conservatives, and that only 20.4 percent voted for George W. Bush in 2004.   (more . . .)

Academic Freedom and the Problem of Indoctrination in the Classroom: NAS vs. AAUP

Stanley Kurtz tells us the historical importance of this debate in these words:

History in the Making   [Stanley Kurtz]

I’d like to urge folks to go an read what I think will someday be looked back on as an historic debate on the meaning of academic freedom and the problem of classroom indoctrination. At the Inside Higher Ed website, Peter Wood, of the National Association of Scholars, has just posted a powerful reply to the recent "Freedom in the Classroom" statement issued by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). (See "Truths R Us.") More important, Wood links to an extraordinary, formal, point-by-point response to the recent AAUP statement, co-authored by Peter Wood and Stephen Balch, and posted at the website of the National Association of Scholars (NAS).

Debates over academic freedom commonly hark back to now legendary statements by the AAUP from 1915, 1940, and 1970 on the topic. I believe that when future generations want to understand the nature of the debate over academic freedom and classroom indoctrination in our own era, they will hark back to the AAUP statement and the reply by the leaders of the NAS of 2007. This is history in the making, and compelling reading as well.

If for no other reason, you should look at Wood’s piece in order to read the "lost" section of the AAUP’s founding statement of academic freedom, which apparently exists nowhere else on the Internet, and which puts the AAUP of today to shame. But don’t stop there. These dueling statements on academic freedom and proper conduct in the classroom will resonate for years.

A Superior European Education?

Click through to this You Tube video.  You'll find it hard to believe. 
(HT: Tim at Random Observations)

The Scandal of Social Work Education

Update 10/15/07 - George Will offers an article on the same subject here.

**
Click here for a major report prepared by the National Association of Scholars.  The Executive Summary can be found here.

Update 9/20/07 - Peter Wood, the executive secretary of the NAS, offers a commentary.   Excerpts:

The NAS report, “The Scandal of Social Work Education,” tracks the ideological requirements for becoming a licensed social worker. You may have thought social work was about helping the unfortunate. No; up-to-date social work is about combating “poverty, racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and ageism” by advocating “social and economic justice.”

. . . Moral reservations about abortion? Doubts about gay adoption? Emily Brooker, a traditional Christian student, sued Missouri State University in 2006 after it brought her up on charges for

Political Correctness on American University Campuses

Update: 9/17/07 - Stanley Kurtz offers a powerful positive review of "Indoctrinate U."  He notes further that "folks in the Washington DC area have a chance to see it–and more. Indoctrinate U will be showing at the Kennedy Center as part of the American Film Renaissance film festival, which looks like it will be traveling to Dallas, Traverse City, and Hollywood as well. This festival will be showing a number of movies of interest to conservatives, including "The Call of the Entrepreneur" and "ACLU: At War With America."

**
Deroy Murdock writes of Indoctrinate U. as

a fascinating and jarring new film by first-time documentarian Evan Coyne Maloney. Supported by the Moving Picture Institute and premiering September 28 at Washington, D.C.’s American Film Renaissance festival, “Indoctrinate U.” CAT-scans the politically correct cancer that gnaws away at American higher education.

Murdock writes further:

Maloney reports that 91 percent of campuses restrict student speech. Brown University banned words that cause “feelings of impotence, anger, or disenfranchisement.” West Virginia University instructed students that “instead of referring to…‘girlfriend’ or ‘boyfriend,’” they should

Senators and Representatives Send Their Children to Private Schools

Congress believes in school choice -- for their own families.  John J. Miller writes: 

A lot of members of Congress are for school choice — at least for themselves. A new Heritage Foundation study finds that 37 percent of representatives and 45 percent of senators with school-age children sent their kids to private schools. That's almost four times the rate of the general population.

Interview with Roger Scruton, Author of "Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged"

Bernard Chapin has published his  interview with Roger Scruton, author of the new book, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged.  I thought the following quite on target:

BC: In the hopes of helping young minds combat cultural relativism and postmodernism, can you explain to us why we should study some writers over others? Why is Shakespeare a more important writer than Toni Morrison? How would you answer the question, “Who is to say which work is better than another?”

RS: Shakespeare is a more important writer than Toni Morrison because he presents a vaster array of believable characters, in strange situations brilliantly evoked, which put them to the test in ways that illustrate and command sympathy for the human condition. The question 'who is to say what work is better than another?' is easily answered: the one with good judgment. How is good judgment acquired? By studying the canon and making comparisons.

Bill Bennett - Failure to Teach American History Is Resulting in National Amnesia

There are so many things wrong with American education that one hardly knows where to begin.  But the failure to teach American history must rank near the top. In an important article, Bill Bennett points out that our children do worse in American history than they do in reading or math.  That strikes me as pretty amazing, and depressing.  Bennett gives examples of what textbooks teach (usually in a boring manner) and don't teach.

Who knows that America’s war against Islamist terror did not begin on September 11, 2001, but that Thomas Jefferson fought our first war on terror, against Muslim slave traders in North Africa who had enslaved some 1.25 million Europeans some 200 years earlier? Children are not taught this.

To remedy our huge knowledge-of-history deficiency, he suggests:

Let us call for a renewal. Begin with the texts. Let us have a national contest sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Department of Education for better history textbooks, and grant the

Britain and the "Culture of Coddling Kids"

Michelle Malkin on coddling kids.

British educators have now determined that "asking pupils to put their hands up when they think they know the answer to a question in class could make quiet children fall behind," according to the London Telegraph. To spare students from this awful terror, the British Department of Education is now recommending that children be given 30 seconds of "thinking time" before being asked to answer or told to discuss questions in pairs before answering. Instead of teaching students to conquer their shyness and stand up for themselves, educators will be encouraged to pamper them in emotional bubble wrap.

In the Hard to Believe Department: Sex Education in the UK

William Keenan writes:

British authorities promote sex education programmes that would make a sailor blush - and achieve record rates of disease and pregnancy.

We have just learned from a United Nations’ report that Britain is the worst place in the developed world in which to be a child.

. . . Not very long ago the Daily Telegraph ran a whole-page story headlined, Outrage over explicit sex lessons. Education correspondent John Clare described parents’ anger at 12-year-old children being given explicit sex lessons. In these lessons they were taught sodomy, oral sex with reference to “blow jobs” and mutual masturbation.

After carefully investigating the matter John Clare said he had come to three stark conclusions: “First the use of these crude and explicit materials is apparently widespread. Second, the school has not told parents precisely what their 12 year olds are being taught. And third, parents everywhere have virtually no hope of discovering the content of their children’s sex education lessons.”   (more)

Legos Banned: Seems a Bit Too Capitalistic and Individualistic For Some Tastes

John J. Miller has the story:

Perhaps you’ve heard about the schools that have banned tag. Or dodgeball. Or stories about pigs.

If so, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Hilltop Children’s Center in Seattle has banned Legos.

A pair of teachers at the center, which provides afterschool activities for elementary-school kids, recently described their policy in a Rethinking Schools cover story called “Why We Banned Legos.” (See the magazine’s cover here.)

It has something to do with “social justice learning.”       
              (Keep reading  if you have the stomach for absurdity.)

Time Mag: "The Case for Teaching the Bible"

Click here.

Narcissistic College Students

The Asssociated Press has an article  headlined:   "Study finds rising narcissism, self-centeredness among college students"

NEW YORK - Today’s college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

    ”We need to stop endlessly repeating ’You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. ”Kids are self-centered enough already.”
    Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.  (more)

Relativism on College Campuses is not a Substantive Position by Leftists, It is a Tactic

David French at Phi Beta Cons makes the point well:   

Our colleges are not overrun with either moral or cultural relativism. The problem is the opposite — moral and cultural absolutism that is occasionally so extreme that it would make a Bob Jones theology professor blush.

In a truly morally relativistic environment, there would be great difficulty in getting a straight answer from a professor, diversity dean, or student activist on the morality of same-sex marriage, for example. Or the justice of the Iraq war, or even the worth of Wal-Mart. Instead, does anyone have any doubt what the academic establishment’s answer is to any of the following questions: Was the Iraq war justified? Is consciously race-based affirmative action a proper response to historical injustice? Should achieving “diversity” be a central goal of the academy?

As for cultural relativism, does the academy paint a “warts and all” picture of indigenous cultures? Even the act of equating the Aztecs and Greeks (to take Murray’s example) requires that the academy magnify the flaws of the Greeks and minimize the flaws of the Aztecs, so that the culture that invented democracy is “equated” with a culture organized around human sacrifice on a mass scale. The “western civilization bad, other cultures good” formula of so many lectures and books is anything but relativistic. Simplistic, maybe, but not relativistic.

I routinely receive correspondence from concerned parents who worry about relativism. What they need to understand, however, is that academic relativism is a tactic, not a substantive position. When a student of orthodox faith or a person of traditional belief presents a position, they are often countered with the classic relativistic verbal shrug (i.e. “that may be true for you but not for me”), but when the shoe is on the other foot — when the issue is dear to the heart of the academic — the position could not be more absolute. Insults like “racist” or “sexist” or “homophobe” do not come from relativism, but from absolutism.

(HT: Constitutionally Correct)

Harvard Follies - A Further Descent into Feminist Madness Looms

Heather MacDonald reports :  "America's oldest university selects a dreadful president."

The feminist takeover of Harvard is imminent. The Harvard Crimson reported yesterday that the university is about to name as its new president Drew Gilpin Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. . . 

Faust runs one of the most powerful incubators of feminist complaint and nonsensical academic theory in the country. You can count on the Radcliffe Institute’s fellows and invited lecturers to proclaim the “constructed” nature of knowledge, gender, and race, and to decry endemic American sexism and racism. Typical guest speakers include left-wing journalists Susan Faludi and Barbara Ehrenreich. . .  

 This triumph of feminist ideology is a tragedy not just for Harvard, but for the American academic world, which will undoubtedly follow Harvard’s lead in elevating feminist politics to premier intellectual standing. (More)

Carol Ionone weighs in blaming former President Summer's backing down and the supine cowardice of science faculty from standing up to the radical and ferocious feminists.

The question arises, why didn't more scientists come to Summers's aid and defense?  The answer is that they are cowards. A friend tells me that they are afraid of losing their funding and even more, that they are really, really frightened of female anger. This reminds me of a professor who told me years ago that he had been through the Warsaw ghetto uprising, but that nothing incited melting fear in his heart like the sight of an angry feminist student approaching his office. What has happened to our society? Have testosterone levels so diminished that men are unable to stand up for what is right because they fear women?

Students Don't Read Books Anymore

Here's an interesting article bearing the title: "A Librarian's Lament: Books are a hard Sell"

Typically, many people in my line of work no longer have the title of librarian. They are called media and information specialists, or sometimes librarian technologists. The buzzword in the trade is "information literacy," a misnomer, because what it is really about is mastering computer skills, not promoting a love of reading and books.

Peter Berkovitz Reflects on the Modern University Today

This long article  by Peter Berkowitz surveys the chaotic state of the university curriculum  today.  The piece begins with these paragraphs: 

An auto repair shop in which mechanics and owners could not distinguish a wreck from a finely tuned car would soon go out of business. A hospital where doctors, nurses, and administrators were unable to recognize a healthy human being would present a grave menace to the public health. A ship whose captain and crew

HOW TO GO TO M.I.T. FOR FREE

The above is the heading of a Christian Science Monitor article that is truly fascinating.  The article begins this way:

By the end of this year, the contents of all 1,800 courses taught at one of the world's most prestigious universities will be available online to anyone in the world, anywhere in the world. Learners won't have to register for the classes, and everyone is accepted.

The cost? It's all free of charge.

The OpenCourseWare movement, begun at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2002 and now spread to some 120 other universities worldwide, aims to disperse knowledge far beyond the ivy-clad walls of elite campuses to anyone who has an Internet connection and a desire to learn.

Academic Moral Decline in Universities: Witness Middle East Studies

Most everyone recognizes the serious moral decline on university campuses today - the drinking, the cheating, the sexual anarchy.  But what about the academic moral health of the professoriat?  Winfield Myers writes about "the long, steady politicization of the American university, in which learning has become the handmaiden of 'progressive' ideologies."   "Nowhere," he says, "is this more obvious than in the field of Middle East studies."

In an era of worldwide conflict between civilized life and death-loving radical Islamist terrorism, Americans should expect learned men and women in university posts to address key problems — jihadism, extremist varieties of Islam, and suicide bombings — with an eye toward their defeat. After all, the freedom

THE PERILS OF AMERICAN IGNORANCE

Bruce Thornton begins his review of Robert Spencer's new book, The Truth About Muhammad saying:

Ambrose Bierce once quipped that war was God’s way of teaching Americans geography. He could have said “teaching us history,” for the enemy is emboldened by our ignorance not just of where he lives but of how he lives, his beliefs and values, and to understand these traditions we must understand their history. Unfortunately, in the current war against Islamic jihad we persist in ignoring the documented history of Islam and its beliefs, accepting instead the spin and distortions of various propagandists, apologists, and Western useful idiots.

A HOMESCHOOLING MOM TESTIFIES TO HER CHILDREN'S ENTHUSIASM FOR LEARNING

"Mother Skylark" writes:

It is Friday.  We have just finished our second official week of "school."  At home, of course.

It has been such a busy couple weeks with travel, many activities relating to work and education, and trying to get a certain amount of planning and routine in place.  I have felt overwhelmed and underprepared already.  The amazing thing is that that hasn't mattered so much.  Because we've chosen materials that will promote learning and curiosity and stimulate the children's minds and creativity, the children carry themselves through their studies quite eagerly.  I am little more than a guide.  I don't teach as much as place stategic materials or books or ideas in front of them and then step back to watch them interact with all the natural capacities and eagerness that are natural to children and which, I might add, formal schooling so often seems to strip them of.  It is one of the great rewards of home education to have your children begging to get their math books out and complaining when told it's time to put them away.

A CHILD'S DISCERNMENT OF GOOD WRITING

"Mother Skylark" recently posted:

I read recently that:  "English majors now find sustained prose a drag...a literature major at George Washinton University recently reported on a hands-up poll [taken in her class] revealed that only half of the upper-classmen had bothered to finish the assigned "All the Kings Men," a best-selling favorite of previous student generations. Why? 'Boring!' 'Too hard to follow.' Another classmate commented on Sarah Orne Jewette's beautifully written "The Country of the Pointed Firs" 'went so slowly that it seemed like it was written by a retarded person.' " She concluded by stating, "To read well, minds must be trained to use language, to reflect, to persist in solving problems."

It is one of many reasons we use well-written literary books in everything we study.  I have been reading to the kids once a week from a thoughtful devotional book for children called "Leading Little Ones to God."  Among the vast quantities of unspiritual silly rubbish we stuff into our children's minds because it's "Christian" this seemed to be a decent intelligent book.  However, today we were reading a retelling of the story of Joseph, under the category of "God turns our troubles into good" when SuperBoy interupted with, "The writer of this book does not know how to make good sentences.  She doesn't tell the story very well." (We usually

HOROWITZ'S "ACADEMIC BILL OF RIGHTS" REVISITED

David Horowitz has been campaigning a long time for a change in the indoctrination now taking place on university campuses.  [See my earlier post]  That, of course, has produced strong opposition.  Horowitz says,

Opponents of efforts to end political discrimination and classroom indoctrination on college campuses follow a predictable game plan:

• Deny these problems exist;
• Question the veracity of anyone who claims they do; and, finally,
• Misrepresent the supporters of academic freedom as the very witch-hunters they are trying to thwart.

Michael Berube’s new book, What’s Liberal About The Liberal Arts: Classroom Politics and ‘Bias’ in Higher Education, is a case study in these techniques. Berube is a Professor of English Literature at Penn State and a member of the National Council of the American Association of University Professors, which has cast itself as the chief antagonist of the movement for academic reform.

Horowitz offers a long response to Berube's book and to those resisting the academic freedom he proposes.

MEANINGLESS POSTMODERN ACADEMIC JARGON PRODUCED BY THE DADA MACHINE

From Matthew J. Franck over at Phi Beta Cons:

A friend at Marshall University in West Virginia, Steve Cooper, sends along a link to a priceless resource, the Postmodernism Generator. A masterpiece of programming, the PoMoGen will supply you with a short essay, utterly meaningless, grammatically correct, and complete with footnotes, in the most fashionable academic jargon of our time.  And best of all, the randomly generated but highly impressive-looking nonsense is brand new every time you visit the site or click “refresh.”  Visit the site for ten minutes, print out some samples, and go up for tenure in your favorite humanities or social science department!

This is truly amazing.  What a great example of gobbledygook sounding learned and erudite. 

Top 15 Universites in the World

In an article on the 100 best universities in the world, Harvard is ranked #1, followed by #2 Cambridge,  #3 Oxford, with Yale and MIT tied for 4th.   Then Stanford University (6), California Institute of Technology (7),  University of California Berkeley (8), Imperial College London (9) , Princeton (10), University of Chicago (11), Columbia (12), Duke (13), Beijing University (14), Cornell University (15).     American universities make up 11 of the top 15 spots.    Harvard has an endowment of 26 billion dollars.    (HT: Phi Beta Cons)

Columbia University - Scary, Unsafe Place of Mob Rule

Wow. . .    Universities are losing credibility, except as incubators of viciousness and mob rule.   Champions of reason?  Civil discourse?  Free exchange of ideas?  Forget it.   Do Ivy League Universities display leadership in intellectual seriousness?   What a joke!

Take a look at Columbia University students physically attacking the stage where Minutemen Project co-founder Jim Gilchrist attempted to give a speech.    Michelle Malkin has the story complete with video and  a liveblogged report.   

Randy at Rightwinged.com says

Malkin has had great coverage of these incidents over the years and I recommend doing some digging around her blog to learn more about past incidents if you're just learning about this pattern of intolerant liberal behavior. It only took me a minute to dig up this one post that links to many of these incidents.

COLLEGES SEEKING HOME-SCHOOLED STUDENTS

This Associated Press story says that more and more colleges are actively seeking out home-schooled students.    From the article:

Home-schooled students - whose numbers in this country range from an estimated 1.1 million to as high as 2 million - often come to college equipped with the skills necessary to succeed in higher education, said Regina Morin, admissions director of Columbia College.

Such assets include intellectual curiosity, independent study habits and critical thinking skills, she said.

"It's one of the fastest-growing college pools in the nation," she said. "And they tend to be some of the best prepared."

Tutors in India Helping U.S Students

According to a Reuters report,

BOSTON (Reuters) - Private tutors are a luxury many American families cannot afford, costing anywhere between $25 to $100 an hour. But California mother Denise Robison found one online for $2.50 an hour -- in India.

"It's made the biggest difference. My daughter is literally at the top of every single one of her classes and she has never done that before," said Robison, a single mother from Modesto.                               

Her 13-year-old daughter, Taylor, is one of 1,100 Americans enrolled in Bangalore-based TutorVista, which launched U.S. services last November with a staff of 150 "e-tutors" mostly in India with a fee of $100 a month for unlimited hours.

Taylor took two-hour sessions each day for five days a week in math and English -- a cost that tallies to $2.50 an hour, a fraction of the $40 an hour charged by U.S.-based online tutors such as market leader Tutor.com that draw on North American teachers, or the usual $100 an hour for face-to-face sessions.  (More)

This is a fascinating new development.

Getting a College Education: It Doesn't Just "Happen"

Jeffrey Hart, long-time English professor at Dartmouth, published an article on "How to Get a College Education."    The article carries the subtitle: "It can be done, even in the Ivy League, if you keep your eye on the goal of education."    Here are useful suggestions on what courses to take and what courses to avoid.  Hart's essay first appeared in 1996 and  National Review republished it on 9/29/06.   It is definitely worth a careful read.

Public Universities Now Pontificate on Biblical Texts Treating Homosexuality

I didn't know that public universities are now taking theological positions (!) concerning homosexuality.  David French, of the Alliance Defense fund, notes the following:

Faced with large and active religious student groups who are often engaged in public debate over the Left’s currently fashionable civil-rights issue — homosexuality — public universities simply cannot restrain themselves. They are taking sides, not just politically, ideologically, and culturally, but religiously.

Take this official statement from the Georgia Institute of Technology (in its so-called “Safe Space” training manual):

Many religious traditions have taught, and some continue to teach, that homosexuality is immoral. These condemnations are based primarily on a few isolated passages from the Bible. Historically, Biblical passages taken out of context have been used to justify such things as slavery, the inferior status of women, and the persecution of religious minorities.

Displeased that the State of Georgia is comparing those who hold traditional religious views of sexuality to slaveowners? At least Georgia does not make religious conservatives look as, well, silly as the University of Michigan does:

Some texts of the Old Testament are used to condemn homosexuality. Taken literally and out of context, Biblical passages can be used to justify slavery, prohibit the wearing of red dresses, and eating of shrimp and shellfish, and to reinforce the inferiority of women.

Such commentary strikes me as quite out of bounds.   Of course texts can be taken out of context, but that is not to say that the forbidding of homosexual practices are such texts.  So now universities have become expert in biblical hermeneutics?  See Robert A. J. Gagnon The Bible and Homosexual Practice: Text and Hermeneutics and also Robert A. J. Gagnon and Dan O. Via,  Homosexuality and the Bible: Two Views.   

Note:  ADF is challenging Georgia Tech’s Safe Space Training program in federal court.

The Overselling of Higher Education

George C. Leef of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy has written a paper with the intriguing title:  The Overselling of Higher Education.  Read the first two pages, the Executive Summary, and see if you don't agree with his thesis.  Then, if you like, read the whole thing.  I think higher education has definitely been oversold.  His suggestions at the end of the paper are worth reading and heeding.    His paper was published September 5th.

On September 20th, he added this post:

A friend of mine who does economic consulting work in Oregon and Washington came across my paper "The Overselling of Higher Education" and helpfully sent me the following anecdote:

I was meeting with sheet metal contractors and their union representatives in Seattle. I learned that they could not find enough people to fill their apprenticeship program. Here's their deal: they need people with solid arithmetic and algebra skills, and good work habits. The person is paid to work as an apprentice, taking some classes at the same time. Classes are free. After 3 to 5 years, the person becomes a journeyman sheet-metal worker. The compensation package is then about $50 an hour, which is both wages and benefits. That works out to about $65k wages and $35 k benefits per year. And the person has no college loans. The bright, ambitious ones can go into management. Yet they cannot fill the apprenticeship program openings. Nobody wants to do blue collar work; everyone has been told to go to college. The high-school counselors are the worst.

According to the conventional wisdom of the education establishment, young people who enroll in college and then take a assortment of courses, often taught by grad students whose motivation and pedagogical skills are questionable, that don't require much effort to pass, are adding wonderfully to their "human capital." Conversely, those who might enter an apprentice program and learn how to work with metal, a skill that's in high demand, are regarded as "leakages" from the educational pipeline.

That makes no sense. 

Agreed.

DON'T TRY HOMESCHOOLING IN GERMANY: YOU WILL WIND UP IN PRISON

Yes.  Homeschooling is illegal in Germany.  Here's  the story of one family's plight.   See also this account of homeschooling in Germany filed last year.