Tag: education

Why would the police need to investigate students simply attempting to finish their homework at school instead of taking it home?

A second-grade teacher in Northern California was placed on leave while a school and police investigate accounts by students that classmates engaged in oral sex and stripped off some of their clothes during class, officials said Friday.

As Spacebunny wryly noted, clearly homeschooling parents are going to have to significantly broaden their curriculums if they are going to keep up with the public school standard. And the amazing thing is that now it’s become common knowledge that homeschoolers are scholastically ahead of their group-schooled peers, critics of homeschooling actually attempt to use the “socialization” argument.

If the critics simply applied the same standards to public schools that they would like to apply to homeschoolers, the public schools would have been banned already.

Wine, women, and song would arguably make for a better and more educational investment:

You are told that to make it in life, you must go to college. You work hard to get there. You or your parents drain savings or take out huge loans to pay for it all.

And you end up learning … not much.

A study of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

The ironic thing is that this near-complete lack of learning doesn’t stop the average college student from believing that he’s somehow learning something by osmosis. The most cocksure and clueless critics are almost invariably college students, who aren’t learning anything substantive at their universities but haven’t been smacked in the back of the head by reality yet either.

The crazy thing is that even the Voxiversity quizzes, which cost you nothing at all and take me about 30 minutes to write, are more challenging than anything you’re likely to encounter in a history or literature class at an Ivy League university.

Even very good grades to go with the requisite university degree don’t indicate anything more than the possession of a pulse and a large student loan. And the problem isn’t limited to the United States:

The universities awarding the highest proportion of firsts or 2:1s last year were Exeter, where 82 per cent of graduates received the top degrees compared with just 29 per cent in 1970, and St Andrews – Scotland’s oldest university, where Prince William met fiancée Kate Middleton – where the figure was also 82 per cent compared with just 25 per cent in 1970. Imperial College London and Warwick both granted 80 per cent firsts or 2:1s last year, compared with 49 per cent and 39 per cent respectively in 1970. At Bath University the figure was 76 per cent last year compared with just 35 per cent in 1970.

I’m not saying that credentials aren’t important in practice if you’re concerned with getting past the HR gatekeepers. But the important thing is to understand that you’re not purchasing an education any longer, you’re just buying an employment ticket. So, your object should be to figure out the fastest, least expensive way to buy the ticket that will get you where you want to go. That may mean a conventional 4-year degree at a private university, but it may not now that more and more quality schools are offering degrees online. The important thing is to approach the process with open eyes and an open mind.

And, of course, to pursue an actual education on your own because you’re certainly not going to get it at a university. Given what we’ve learned in looking at the undergraduate and graduate science curriculums, even those with the sort of hard science educations that require university schooling have to admit that pretty much everything they’ve learned outside their core scientific discipline has been learned outside the academic system.

This is a rather interesting historical insight courtesy of an Instapundit reader:

We are somewhat poorly served by applying the term “education” to what is now much more properly referenced as “schooling.” Those two used to overlap almost completely, and some the the greatest damage wrought by easy funding with other people’s money is that from pre-K to Ph.D. schools these days offer bloody little real education apart from the sciences and engineering. Things are likely to change.

Eight hundred years ago education was controlled by the church. Groups of independent scholars, using Latin as a common language, began to congregate apart from the church to pursue a true education. By mid-12th century this grew into the university movement — Hic et ubique terrarum (here and anyplace on earth) as they said in Paris in 1163. It took a century or so, but by AD 1400 the church no longer controlled education.

In our time education is controlled by the universities and their lower level minions. Once again groups of independent scholars, using English as a common language have begun to congregate apart from the universities — internet, home-schoolers, independent researchers, and many others — to pursue a true education. The pattern is repeating, for the very same reasons. Hic et ubique terrarum indeed.

A friend of mine who is a well-regarded university professor took a look at a few of the Voxiversity quizzes not long after we had finished the study of Thucydides. He remarked that the quiz was harder and more comprehensive than any test that would be given at his university. I think one can quite reasonably argue that it is now not only possible, but probable, that one can get a better education outside the elite university system in four years than one can inside it. One can’t obtain marketable credentials, of course, but then, the whole point of the email was to distinguish between schooling credentials and a genuine education. And, of course, the ironic thing is that the university’s usual defense of the humanities depends upon the importance of education rather than credentials.

Speaking of my own ongoing education, I was delighted to receive some Christmas gifts that may or may not make an appearance in a future Voxiversity, including the complete Plutarch’s Lives, Cicero’s The Republic and The Laws, and best of all, The Landmark Arrian. I can also attest that Tim Layden’s book about tactical NFL inventions from Pop Warner’s Single-Wing to Jim Johnson’s Double-A Gap Blitz, Blood, Sweat and Chalk is a light and easy read, but it is as interesting as Peter King claimed it to be.

It’s time to start cracking down hard on anti-Christian academia, who are not only violating common sense in their attempt to keep Christians out of the ivory towers they fund, but also Federal employment law:

In 2007, C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer at the University of Nebraska, was a leading candidate for a job running an observatory at the University of Kentucky. But then somebody did what one does nowadays: an Internet search. That search turned up evidence of Dr. Gaskell’s evangelical Christian faith.

The University of Kentucky hired someone else. And Dr. Gaskell sued the institution. Whether his faith cost him the job and whether certain religious beliefs may legally render people unfit for certain jobs are among the questions raised by the case, Gaskell v. University of Kentucky. In late November, a federal judge in Kentucky ruled that the case could go forward, and a trial is scheduled for February. The case represents a rare example, experts say, of a lawsuit by a scientist who alleges academic persecution for his religious faith….

The UK employment debacle is one of the sillier atheist misconceptions of science put into practice. You may recall Sam Harris’s absurd polemics in the Wall Street Journal and The Moral Landscape, in which he insisted, contra all the available evidence, that the head of the Human Genome Project, was incapable of performing science due to his Christianity. (This is yet another example of the reliable New Atheist preference for nonsensical pseudo-logic to confirmable facts and correctly applied reason.)

The ironic thing about the academic insistence on conformity to cross-disciplinary dogma is that if it were consistently applied, it would render at least 50 percent of the academics in American instantly unemployable. If one considers all of the left-wing biologists and physicists who reject the most basic tenets of economics, to say nothing of all the female humanities professors who reject the very concept of biological differences and patriarchal male science, adoption of the Kentucky standard would mean a professorial purge of such a scale to make Stalin blush.

Given how badly they are outnumbered in America, you would think atheists and other statistically insignificant belief-groups would want to think twice before supporting a legal standard that permits barring those possessing specific beliefs from obtaining employment. But then, as I have often demonstrated, atheists tend to more often honor reason in its breach instead of its application.

Like many others, including Bill Gates, I was very impressed with Khan Academy’s creation of 1,600 short online lectures on various subjects from the French Revolution to calculus. However, I was more than a little underwhelmed with the short collection of economic lectures, especially when the very first one on inflation began by getting the very definition of inflation wrong. So, I have begun producing a short series of video lectures on the difference between inflation and the Consumer Price Index using OpenOffice Impress in combination with the Camtasia software that Mr. Khan uses for his lectures. I hope to have the first one uploaded to YouTube this weekend; they don’t take very long to make so my goal is to produce one per week and incorporate a quiz at the end of each series.

I’m not a fan of lecture-based learning myself, but I have learned that I am in the distinct minority in my preference for reading rather than listening or viewing. Hence the experiment. My question is this: what subjects beyond an inflation series would be of interest to the Ilk? Some of the various ideas that have occurred to me are a chapter-by-chapter study of Paul Samuelson’s Economics, a critical series addressing Sam Harris’s latest book, a series on Shakespeare or Dante in the vein of Isaac Asimov’s massive doorstop, or, of course, a series on the prospects for a Japanese naval invasion of the American West Coast in 1942. Does anyone have any better ideas?

ican going to graduate to now:

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else….

I, who have no name, no opinions, and no style, have written so many papers at this point, including legal briefs, military-strategy assessments, poems, lab reports, and, yes, even papers on academic integrity, that it’s hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I’d say education is the worst. I’ve written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I’ve written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I’ve synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I’ve written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I’ve completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.

You might want to keep this in mind the next time that someone tells you that he’s smarter than you because he has a science degree. Between the adherence to outdated and demonstrably false theories, the enlargement and concomitant devolution of the matriculating students, the grade inflation and the outright fraud, it is obvious that academic credentials mean absolutely nothing anymore regardless of which university has issued them. Consider what the following statement implies about the quality of doctorate and graduate degrees being cranked out by the paper mills.

“[A]t the time I was writing PhD papers and graduate theses for clients, I was myself an undergraduate student. Someone without a bachelors degree was writing work that should have qualified me to get a doctorate at least once a week.”