You could find a dozen websites offering more trenchant progressive political analysis in five minutes.
Yet Professor Penn’s lesson has value to his students. They can learn the following important things:
1. In the course of your life, people with power will act badly with impunity.
2. People with power over you will use that power to indulge themselves in droning, whether or not their droning offers any value.
3. People can be tremendously talented and knowledgeable about Subject X and be useless louts about Subject Y. Often they’ll want to talk about Subject Y.
4. People think others want to hear their opinions about politics, and think their opinions about politics are insightful.
5. A significant part of developing as an adult is deciding how you will deal with points 1 – 4.
6. Huge amounts of government money pay for absolute shit.
7. People who nominally favor freedom of expression will drop it like a hot coal when their political biases are aroused. Case in point: many angry conservative people saying that Professor Penn should be fired for a banal political rant, even though he’s a professor at a state university enjoying First Amendment protections that are rather broad. Check the comments on the sites complaining about Professor Penn if you don’t believe me.
I submit those are all valuable lessons.
I think that it’s pathetic that these students are paying to hear Professor Penn indulge himself like that even for ten minutes. I think his calling out a student in class for seeming to disagree displays low character and an excellent reason to avoid his class. But I don’t see anything that merits firing from his position at a public institution, and I am not enthused about a system in which public universities will be policed for insipid partisanship by other partisans.
But how enthusiastic do you suppose Professor Penn’s students are about faculty free speech rights after sitting through that?
Ken White, “William S. Penn of Michigan State University Teaches Important Lessons To College Students”, Popehat, 2013-09-04
September 5, 2013
QotD: An important lesson for university students
August 27, 2013
What hath Horace Mann wrought?
Sippican Cottage on modern public schools:
I grew up in the same town as Horace Mann. I know all about public schools. The concept is as dead as a Pharaoh. The idea that universal literacy and a coherent public attitude toward citizenship would result in a better life for the country as a whole was a sweet one, and it worked for a while, until they “fixed” it. They’ve been fixing the hell out of it for over half a century now. They fixed it the way a veterinarian fixes dogs, to my eye.
Here’s Wikipedia‘s list of Horace Mann’s reasons for public schooling:
(1) the public should no longer remain ignorant
(2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public
(3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds
(4) that this education must be non-sectarian
(5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society
(6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers. Mann worked for more and better equipped school houses, longer school years (until 16 years old), higher pay for teachers, and a wider curriculum.
Let’s take them in turn, and see how Old Howlin’ Horace’s ideas have turned out in what’s called the public schools, but aren’t anymore.
1) Is that cursive? I don’t read cursive.
2) The public seems completely uninterested in what happens in public school, or they wouldn’t send their kids there. Anyone really interested in public schools is horrified by what they find out. Talk to a teacher about what they’re required to do in there — after they’ve had a few drinks. I have. One I spoke to referred to themselves as a “tard farmer.” Do you want to sent your children to a “tard farm”? We don’t.
3) My children are from a variety of backgrounds, all by themselves. We didn’t turn either of them away. Tell my Irish grandmother and wife’s Calabrian grandfather that all white people are the same. Bring a weapon to defend yourself. A “back-up piece” is probably a good idea if you’re talking to my grandmother, by the way.
4) Public Schools aren’t non-sectarian. They teach their own religion, and persecute any vestige of any other, except for momentary alliances with subcultures that will help them persecute what they feel is the dominant culture outside the school.
5) Parents are not allowed to enter a public school, even to walk their children to the door. Children are routinely persecuted for any behavior that deviates one iota from the what a militant vegan on a recumbent bicycle prefers. That’s not the spirit, method, or discipline of a free society.
6) Teachers are well-trained and professional — just not in delivering an education to children. They are trained to be vestal virgins in a weird temple that forgot where they put the statue of the deity of mammon they worship. If public school worked, everyone who graduated from it would be capable of teaching in one.The teachers in public school are as much at the mercy of this weird situation as the students. A teacher recently told us she has to keep a dossier on every child in the class, every day. That’s the Stasi, not Goodbye, Mr. Chips. They said that it’s not possible, really, so they have to make stuff up to finish it. All that time is subtracted from what little time they have for the kids in the first place. The teachers don’t know where all these weird directives come from any more than you do. They just don’t want to get fired for forgetting to rat out little Timmy if he chews his Pop-Tart in to a recognizable weapon-like shape. They go along to get along.
Update, 28 August: ESR posted a brief entry I have to quote in full.
Hunger Games for real
“Students can only have one serving of meat or other protein. However, rich kids can buy a second portion each day on their own dime.” This is from coverage of Michelle Obama’s national school-lunch regulations.
Protein-starving the peasantry so it will remain docile and biddable is a tyrant’s maneuver thousands of years old. I was unaware until today that this has become official policy in the American public school system.
How clever of them to sell it as a healthy-eating measure! That’ll get all the gentry liberals on board; of course, their kids will be buying that second serving.
Hey, Kids! It’s time for back-to-school bad journalism bingo!
The slow news days of August have reached the traditional back-to-school phase of page filling:
I love back-to-school time: the joy, the energy, the sense of limitless possibilities. It’s almost enough to make you forget about the tsunami of dreadful journalism that accompanies it.
There are basically three reasons for bad back-to-school journalism. First, higher education is complicated; it doesn’t lend itself to the simplistic narratives required for 800-word articles. Second, there’s a serious lack of decent data about higher education in Canada, what with the Millennium Scholarship Foundation gone, HRSDC no longer funding any decent Statscan surveys, and provinces and universities holding on tightly to their own data on the grounds that someone might use it to compare them against other provinces/institutions (and that would never do!). In this data vacuum, interested parties with their own agendas find it easy to peddle all sorts of demented, half-true factoids to journalists; hence, the frequent appearance of stories based on “data” which simply aren’t true.
The third problem is the lack of outcome measures. Everyone wants “good” education, but no one knows what that is. So journalists tend to fall back on input measures: small classes, students per professors, etc., which inevitably lead to a weird mythologizing of university life in the 1970s. Nothing wrong with the 1970s of course, but it somehow never quite clicks with op-ed writers that a major reason life was so great for students back then was that access was restricted to a fairly small elite, and that the comparative “failures” of today’s universities are largely the result of expanded access.
Here’s the Bingo card for you to play along at home:
August 4, 2013
The Day The Universe Changed – “The Way We Are”
Episode 1 of James Burke’s ground-breaking series “The Day The Universe Changed” which explores the evolution of Western Scientific thought starting from the fall of Rome.
August 3, 2013
Wendy McElroy on the “invasive weed” threatening public schooling
Her most recent article in The Freeman talks about homeschooling in the United States:
To government, homeschooling resembles a weed that spreads and resists control. To homeschooling parents, it is the flowering of knowledge and values within children who have been abandoned or betrayed by public schools. A great tension exists between the two perspectives. Homeschooling’s continued growth has only heightened it.
The federal government has reacted by attempting to increase its control over homeschooling, for example, by pushing for increased regulation of homeschool curricula. But the federal government is hindered by certain factors. For one thing, education is generally the prerogative of individual states. Nevertheless, the federal government can often impose its will by threatening to withhold federal funds from states that do not comply with its measures.
But homeschooling parents cannot be threatened by a withdrawal of money they don’t receive. As it is, they are paying double. They pay taxes to support public schools from which they draw no benefit and they pay again in homeschooling money and in terms of lost opportunities such as the full-time employment of both parents. The “profit” they receive is a solid education for their children. What they want from the government is to be left alone.
The federal government is also hindered by not being able to play the “it’s for the children” card that justifies so many intrusive policies. Homeschooled children routinely display better development than public school students.
A 2012 article in Education News called the “consistently high placement of homeschooled kids on standardized assessment exams … one of the most celebrated benefits of homeschooling.” Education News compared the quality of homeschooling to that of public schooling. “Those who are independently educated typically score between the 65th and 89th percentile on such exams, while those attending traditional schools average on the 50th percentile. Furthermore, the achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems … aren’t present in the homeschooling environment. There’s no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels, or race/ethnicity.” Studies also indicate that homeschooled children are better socialized with both peers and adults.
July 17, 2013
World’s largest cartography class commences
Greg Miller interviews the instructor of the biggest single cartography class … a vast online class of nearly 30,000 people:
Wired: How did you get interested in geography?
Anthony Robinson: I started my undergraduate education as an electrical engineering major. Then I just randomly took a human geography class, and it completely woke me up. Right away I knew I wanted to be a geographer.
[…]
Wired: What was the motivation for the MOOC?
Robinson: Here at Penn State I direct our online geospatial education programs. I was able to make the argument that this is needed. There isn’t one yet, and I’m sure there’s a lot of untapped interest in this stuff. When I meet someone on a plane and tell them I’m a geographer, they’re like “What?” They don’t even realize that’s a thing. Something like a MOOC, that’s free and has a high profile, might get more people interested in what we do.
Wired: Why is it just happening now?
Robinson: One thing that really helps right now is we’re past the age of having mapping software that takes you weeks and weeks to have the basics. The software I’m using in the course, ArcGIS Online, works in a browser. It’s very usable. It’s not perfect but it’s quite good. Also, there are tons of datasets that are available now and searchable. Those are things we spent weeks and weeks on even when I was an undergrad, and that wasn’t that long ago. The technology threshold that it takes to make a map and do some spatial analysis has now ratcheted down to the point where it’s possible to do this with people all over the world working on different technology platforms. I don’t think I could teach this class even two years ago.
July 16, 2013
Invisible witches preying on sleeping Zambian teachers
Yep, it’s back to the weird news season apparently:
The week has barely begun and already the gods have served us up a fresh piece of crazy. It seems that teachers at the Nashongo and Makaba primary schools in Siavonga, Zambia have threatened to abandon their posts after a rash of indecent incidents involving invisible witches. According to Chief Sinadambwe of the Tonga-speaking people, the saucy sorcerers have been projecting their spirits into the teachers’ bedrooms and molesting them. And they don’t even have the decency to call in the morning.
[. . .]
I could check my privilege and acknowledge that fear of incubi and succubi was also once common in Europe, or else write sensitively about a foreign culture still rooted in cultural tradition. But Zambia is a country on the move (with a growth rate of around 6.5 per cent, it’s outstripping the UK) and it’s not unreasonable to say that invisible sex attacks should not still be happening anywhere in the world in the 21st century — especially when they are reported by teachers, who one hopes would be educated to a point of thinking such things are a Medieval fairy tale.
Alas, it seems that randy psychic witches are still regarded as quite common in modern Zambia. Back in May, the Mbala District Commissioner also felt compelled to ask local “wizards” to stop molesting teachers and pupils at Chipoka Primary School — the second of such incidents in nine years. What’s worrying about these stories is that a) they represent a sort of sexual abuse in themselves, either because they foster mass delusion or else disguise genuine incidents of physical rape, and b) they encourage violence against so-called witches. Just this month, an elderly Zambian couple was accused of black magic, beaten and burned to death. How strange it is that we live in an age of science and light and yet some of the people that we share the planet with still exist in a state of superstitious darkness. If what they believe is preposterous, we should have no shame is stating it — especially if it also potentially dangerous.
July 13, 2013
The state’s constant interest in what’s in your kid’s lunchbag
James Delingpole on the most recent “Nanny knows best” appointee hoping to dictate what the kids are going to eat for lunch:
“Mr Dimbleby”, it seems to me, is coming perilously close to suggesting that the decision as to what children eat at school should be a matter for the State rather than parents. Can he really believe this? Is there nothing about saying this sort of thing that makes him uneasy?
I mean sure, I agree with him on the principle that a good, well-prepared hot meal at lunchtime is probably more filling and nourishing than a packet-bread sandwich and a packet of crisps. Problem is, not all school canteens offer quite the same range and quality you might find in — oh, I don’t know, let’s pluck a random example from the air, shall we? — Bekynton.
Having put children through the state system myself I know whereof I speak. A new caterer arrived at my daughter’s primary school to much fanfare and for a while the food was great and most parents gratefully abandoned packed lunches (which, let me tell you, are a real hassle for a parent to prepare because they have to be done fresh in the morning when you’re already in a rush having breakfast and getting ready for the school run) and welcomed the new regime. But then standards began slipping to the point where my daughter (who, like a lot of children whose staple diet is gastro-porn TV programmes from the Great British Bake Off to Masterchef, genuinely cares about food) couldn’t eat the stuff any more. Again: is “Mr Dimbleby” seriously suggesting that schools should force children to go on eating in the canteen regardless of how disgusting they find the food?
You hear similar arguments from well-heeled progressive types on the school system generally. “If only public schools were abolished and all those pushy middle-class strivers were forced to put their children through the state system, standards would rise across the board.” Well, possibly. What would more likely happen is that all those scrubbed, diligent, nicely spoken, polite young poshos would be dragged down to the level of the lowest common denominator. And in any case it’s not an experiment which has any right being attempted anywhere in a Western notionally free-market economy. Why not? Because it’s illiberal bordering on the totalitarian, is why.
This is hardly a new topic … last year I said:
I remember what kind of crap my middle and high school cafeterias offered … and if I’d forgotten to bring a sandwich with me that day, going hungry always seemed like the better choice. The food on offer always seemed to manage the difficult stunt of being visually unappealing (sometimes being actually disgusting to look at), nutritionally inadequate, and either utterly flavourless (the better choice) or actively nasty. No wonder the best sellers in the cafeteria were the milk cartons (especially the chocolate milk), pop cans, potato chips, chocolate bars, and Vachon cakes (all of which were pre-packaged and relatively invulnerable to further processing).
June 28, 2013
June 15, 2013
Ontario’s abusive relationship with sex ed
In Maclean’s, Emma Teitel talks about the failure of Ontario’s sex-ed classes to keep up with the times:
In the fifth grade, my friends and I had a special afternoon tradition. When school let out at 3:30, we would walk to Katherine’s house (a pseudonym), raid her fridge, go upstairs to her bedroom, lock the door and watch Internet pornography. Where were Katherine’s parents? They were at work. But it wouldn’t have mattered. When they were around, we just turned off the sound, or read erotic literature on a website called Kristen Archives. This is how we gained the indispensable knowledge that some women like to be ravished by farmhands, and others, by farm animals. The year was 1999. We had not yet sat through our first sex-ed class, but when we did, almost two years later, it was spectacularly disappointing. We had seen it all, and now we were shading in a diagram of the vas deferens.
Since our special after-school tradition came to an end over a decade ago, Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, Formspring, Instagram and Twitter have emerged. But against all logic, nothing has changed in the sex-ed business. Our century is literally on the cusp of puberty, and yet despite these enormous social and technological changes, we remain largely incapable of giving kids the resources they need to deal with their own puberty. I’m talking here, specifically, about the province of Ontario. As you read this, kids from Sarnia to Kingston — kids who, on average, have viewed Internet porn by age 11 — are probably shading in the exact same vas deferens diagram I did. There’s nothing wrong with the vas deferens — or so I’m told — but surely there is more to sexual education in the 21st century than anatomy and colouring. Ontario currently boasts the most out-of-date sex-ed curriculum in Canada. It was last revised in 1998, which means sex ed was out of date when I took it.
[. . .]
Kids shouldn’t watch porn, but they do. We can’t un-invent the Internet. And we can’t reverse puberty. Case in point: In 2001, one of the most determined voyeurs in our special after-school group skipped sex ed at the request of her religious father — for whom an hour of vas deferens shading was just too much to bear. He told her to go to the library instead, which was fine with her. Who, after all, could resist an afternoon with the Kristen Archives?
June 13, 2013
History without context
There’s a battle going on in Britain over the way history is taught in state schools:
Since the arrival of the national curriculum, public debate on school history has focused almost exclusively on what topics should be taught, namely whether the emphasis should be on British or world history. This debate has been fuelled by a steady stream of surveys revealing the ignorance of today’s school-leavers. One commissioned last summer by Lord Ashcroft found that while 92 per cent of 11- to 18-year-olds could identify the animated dog from the car insurance advertisements as Churchill, only 62 per cent could identify a photograph of Britain’s wartime prime minister. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Britain took place in the sky.
However, having become a history teacher at a state secondary school two years ago, I have realised that such debates miss the real problem. I was surprised to learn that since its inception the national curriculum has stipulated a sensible split of British and world history: every pupil between the ages of 11 and 14 is expected to study a chronological sweep of British history from 1066 to the present day. To understand the degradation of history teaching, one has to focus not on what history is taught, but how it is taught.
[. . .]
The main tenet of a child-centred view of history teaching is the idea that pupils should not be “passive” recipients of a teacher’s knowledge, but “active” individuals empowered to find things out for themselves. As a result, “chalk and talk” teaching from the front is heavily discouraged. After a senior member of staff observed one of my lessons, I was told that my role was to be the “guide on the side” rather than the “sage on the stage”.
Instead of learning through listening to teachers or reading books, pupils are expected to do so through projects. It did not take me long to work out why pupils are so ignorant of British history, despite spending over a year studying it (as laid down by the national curriculum). To study the Norman Conquest, pupils would re-enact the Battle of Hastings in the playground, conduct a classroom survey to create their own Domesday Book, and make motte-and-bailey castles out of cereal boxes. Medieval England would be studied through acting out the death of Thomas Becket, and creating a boardgame to cover life as a medieval peasant. For the Industrial Revolution, pupils pitched inventions to Dragons’ Den and lessons on the British Empire culminated in the design of a commemorative plate showing whether it was or was not a “force for good”.
Such tasks allow pupils to learn about history in an enjoyable and engaging way — or so the theory goes. In reality, all content and understanding of the past is sucked out, and the classroom begins to resemble the playground. An unfortunate side-effect is that pupils are frequently confused by the inevitable anachronisms involved in making history “relevant”. “Sir, how many Victorians would have had a TV?” I was asked. Imaginative tasks and projects can be excellent supplements to a history lesson, but when they become the mainstay of classroom activity, the consequences are disastrous.
Proponents of child-centred education are impervious to such criticism because progressive teachers have long denied the importance of knowledge in the first place. Instead, skills are seen as paramount. When I first visited my current school, the assistant head asked me how I intended to prepare for my new career. I responded that I was going to spend a few weeks boning up on my general historical knowledge. “I wouldn’t worry about that,” she said. “History is a skills-based curriculum. You should really be able to teach it without knowing anything at all.”
Update: Of course, the same issue with history appears in other countries too:
“Back to the hole in the boat: America is losing its historic literacy. Recently some 556 seniors surveyed at 55 of the nation’s top colleges — only 60 percent placed the American Civil War in the correct half of the 19th century. Only 34 percent identified George Washington as the American general at the Battle of Yorktown. Thirty-four percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant. At 78 percent of the institutions polled, no history whatsoever was required in the undergraduate program. Historian David McCullough said, “We are raising a generation of young Americans who are historically illiterate.”
May 9, 2013
This is water
In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.
We made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested. However, we encourage everyone to seek out the full speech (because, in this case, the book is definitely better than the movie).
-The GlossaryRead the full speech here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html
H/T to ESR for the link.
April 16, 2013
New study shows students of online courses learn as much as in traditional classes
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok summarizes the findings from a recent large study:
In a large, randomized experiment Bowen et al. found that students enrolled in an online/hybrid statistics course learned just as much as those taking a traditional class (noted earlier by Tyler). Perhaps even more importantly, Bowen et al. found that the online model was significantly less costly than the traditional model, some 36% to 57% less costly to produce than a course using a traditional lecture format. In other words, since outcomes were the same, online education increased productivity by 56% to 133%! Online education trumps the cost disease!
Bowen et al. caution that their results on cost savings are speculative and it is true that they do not include the fixed costs of creating the course (either the online course or the traditional course) so these cost savings should be thought of as annual savings in steady-state equilibrium. The main reason these results are speculative, however, is that Bowen et al. only considered cost savings from faculty compensation. Long-run cost reductions from space savings may be even more significant, as the authors acknowledge.
The university model we’ve known for centuries is long overdue for change. However, remember that just about every new communication technology was touted as being “revolutionary” for education: the printing press, radio, movies, TV, and now online courses. The traditional university model has survived each new technological breakthrough relatively unscathed.
April 8, 2013
“‘Cash for sick days’ doesn’t have the same populist appeal”
In the Globe and Mail, Barrie McKenna explains why there’s a widening fairness gap between public employees and everyone else:
The seven-month-long dispute [between the Ontario government and public school teachers] has exposed something much more disquieting: the widening fairness gap in the Canadian workplace. Thousands of public sector workers enjoy high salaries, guaranteed pensions and special perks that other Canadians will never get, regardless of how long or hard they work.
Public sector workers argue they’ve earned these gains through decades of tough negotiations with employers. And once promised, governments should not unilaterally revoke them. Fair enough. But it’s not an argument that’s likely to sway many Canadians, who exist in a parallel universe.
The ability to bank and monetize sick days is virtually unheard of in the private sector. Less than 3 per cent of the 1,336 private sector plans in Mercer Canada Ltd.’s client database allow employees to bank sick days, according to figures supplied to The Globe and Mail. That compares to 28 per cent of the 407 government plans tracked by the benefits consultant.
No wonder Ontario teachers chanted “respect teachers, respect collective bargaining,” while they suspended school sports, plays and other extracurricular activities for millions of students in recent months. “Cash for sick days” doesn’t have the same populist appeal.
April 3, 2013
Parenting classes are a waste of time and money
Elizabeth and I took parenting classes, as neither of us had much experience of dealing with infants or small children before our son was born. Although the instructor was good at being re-assuring that we’d do fine as parents, almost none of the “skills” we were taught were actually of much use after the baby arrived. Since those early-90’s days, parenting courses have become even more common, but as Frank Furedi points out, no more relevant to the actual needs of parents and their newborns:
The parenting programmes promoted by government are based on a mixture of prejudice and the pseudoscience of so-called parenting research. Such ‘research’ is underpinned by a fundamental transformation in the meaning of parenting, which has been turned from a relationship into a skill. The core assumption in the government’s proposal for parenting classes is that childrearing consists of a set of practices that need to be learned by mothers and fathers. These practices are depicted as skills which can be taught by those who have the requisite professional qualifications.
No one could dispute that childrearing is something that is learned by mothers and fathers. Every human relationship involves a continual process of learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. Parents need to learn how to engage with the imagination of their child, how to stimulate her and when and how to restrain her from doing something harmful. Successful parents learn on the job. However, the really useful lessons we are learning have little to do with abstract skills, but rather are about understanding the relationship we have with our children.
The question is not whether parenting has to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting cannot be taught because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And it is through the conduct of that relationship that people develop the insights and lessons suitable to their lives and conditions. One reason why professional intervention into family life is unlikely to have beneficial results is because each relationship contains something unique, which is only grasped by those involved in it.
[. . .]
However, the project of transforming parenting into a skill does have negative and potentially harmful consequences. When human relationships are recast as skills to be managed by professional trainers something very important happens in the way we conduct our personal affairs. As I argue in my study Paranoid Parenting such policy interventions cultivate a kind of learned helplessness among parents. Through exaggerating the complexity of child-rearing, parenting experts contribute to the eroding self-reliance of modern mums and dads. Inevitably, the principal outcome of such interventions is to distract parents from learning from their own experience. And yet learning from experience is the key to developing the confidence for making those crucial judgment calls that confronts parents on a daily basis.
