NAS Blog

In case you missed it, there was a remarkable story by Eli Saslow in yesterday’s Washington Post about the terrible job market facing recent college grads. Saslow’s article illustrates the problem as it effects one individual. It’s extremely well-written and is currently at the top of the WaPo list of most e-mailed articles.

Given the problems facing higher education today, this speech on the purpose of college delivered by Justice Wendell Phillips Stafford at the Sesqui-Centennial of Dartmouth College in 1919 seems as timely as ever. Here is an excerpt:

(The spirit of college) has shown itself in men who never knew how the inside of a college looked. When Lincoln jotted down the main facts of his life for the Congressional Directory, he wrote: “Education defective.” And yet, tried by the test we are applying now, he was college-bred. The question is not, whether you studied Euclid in a classroom or stretched out on the counter of a country store. The question is, whether you mastered it. Lincoln did. And the thews and sinews of his mind, which he developed so, stood by him in the day when he threw Douglas down. John Keats was as innocent of the Greek language as the new curriculum assumes all men should be; yet out of some stray book on mythology the ” miserable apprentice to an apothecary ” contrived to draw into his soul the very spirit of Hellenic art, until he left us poems which Hellenists declare to be more Grecian than the Greek. He, too, was college-bred, as we now mean it, for he was impelled by that determination to subdue and fructify his powers, with the aid of all the past has left us, until they yielded something glorious and undying for his fellow men. His spirit was not the spirit of the dove, but of the eagle:

“My spirit is too weak! Mortality
Weighs heavily on me, like unwilling sleep;
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die,
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.”

If I am right, there lie wrapt up in this determination those three aims: (1) to discipline one’s powers and make them fruitful; (2) in order to accomplish this, to make use of all that men have gained before us; and (3) to devote these powers and acquisitions to the common weal. The advantage the college has is this: that here the determined spirit finds the tool-shop and the arsenal. That spirit itself the college can foster and encourage but cannot create. It can and does lay open to its use the weapons and the tools. It can and does teach, in a fair, general way, what men thus far have done. It leads the newcomer to the point where they left off, and says: “Begin here, if you would not waste your time. This territory has been conquered. Go forth from this frontier.” It also shows the worker of the present day what other men are doing. It brings him into touch with them, that he may put his effort forth where it will tell the most.”

Stafford’s entire text can be found here.

Theodore Dalrymple comments in the Telegraph on a government requirement that new nurses in the UK will have to hold a degree-level qualification beginning in 2013.

Dalrymple sees no intrinsic reason why nursing can’t be taught at university. But he questions whether our whole ideal of university training hasn’t become culturally distorted.

Here’s a quote:

Unfortunately, power and status – unlike wealth and knowledge – are zero-sum games. The importance of power and status to the leaders of nursing became clear to me when I read the coursework a state enrolled nurse had to do for conversion to state registered nurse (in the days when these two levels of nursing still existed). The coursework had almost nothing in it of a technical nature: it was all a subdivision of what might be called resentment studies. Foucault was more of an influence than Florence Nightingale.

BTW, according to Amazon, Dalrymple’s new book is supposed to be out any day. But you can read an extract from the book here.

Sandra Stotsky has an excellent article in City Journal discussing how our education schools are failing to deliver on math education – because they have become over committed to some progressive ideas about math education which really don’t work as well as traditional teacher-directed approaches. She notes that:

The heart of the disagreement between progressive math educators and mathematicians is whether students are acquiring a foundation in arithmetic and other aspects of mathematics in the early grades that prepares them for authentic algebra coursework in grades 7, 8, and 9. If not, they then cannot successfully complete the advanced math courses in high school that will prepare them adequately for freshman college courses using mathematics.

In reading a bit about this subject, in seems that although there are many sincere and intelligent people on both sides of the debate, in the end it comes down to building curricula based on the best evidence of what works. As Stotsky suggests, a part of the problem with our ed schools is that they tend to produce only research which supports the researchers’ own preconceptions. One supposes that part of the reason for this is that doing large-scale scientific studies has become so expensive. Nonetheless, if our ed schools wish to remain at all relevant they need to begin to hold themselves to higher evidentiary standards.

Maurice O’Sullivan has an excellent article in the latest issue of Change magazine, (subscription required), on the shortfalls of the current liberal education movement.  He argues that the liberal-education movement rests upon several myths, such as a spurious belief that a narrow focus on processes such as “critical thinking” can somehow take the place of the rich content found in the traditional liberal-arts curriculum.

Sullivan writes:

For those of us who believe that success in business and the professions will come relatively easily to students who have been well prepared to engage in all the dialogues of life–an engagement that requires a broad range of historical and contemporary knowledge; the ability to reflect deeply on that knowledge and to evaluate it critically; and the ability to present informed opinions orally and in writing in a clear, powerful, and sophisticated way–the relentless movement toward narrower and narrower career education is disconcerting. And claiming that the smattering of knowledge provided by a liberal education component offers an adequate balance to narrow majors seems both disingenuous and dangerous.

Readers unfamiliar with the current state of the liberal-education movement might also want to browse through this issue of the Association of American Colleges and Universities’ publication Peer Review which, we are told,  “illustrates the potential for public health education as a vehicle for liberal learning“.