NAS Blog

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jay Schalin advances an alternative to the standard college experience, an experience that all too often leaves students with no more skill and knowledge than when they left high school. That alternative is apprenticeship combined with academic study. He points to one such program and suggests that the idea could gain wide acceptance as it satisfies the needs of both students and future employers.

Over at The Beacon, I have a post on the latest requirement that Something Else must be taught in K-12 history textbooks. This time it is gay history but the real problem is the politicization of textbook content. Result: history is just “one damn thing after another.”

In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal quotes Mark Zuckerberg, the kid from Harvard who heads the CEO of a company-not-yet-public. (Goldman-Sachs VIP insiders only, please). What disturbed me about the article is not that another company is breaking into the so-called China market after the Google row over censorship. I’m more disturbed by the mealy-mouth rationalization of Zuckerberg, who seems to have breathed in the multicultural fumes of higher education.

Zuckerberg stated:

“I don’t want Facebook to be an American company [God forbid!],” he said. “I don’t want it to be this company that just spreads American values all across the world. …For example, we have this [culturally constructed American] notion of free speech that we really love and support at Facebook, and that’s one of the main things that we’re trying to push with openness. But different countries have their different standards around that. …My view on this is that you want to be really culturally sensitive….”

This is the moral and cultural nihilism that bristles at “American values” and must be “culturally sensitive” and protect the “right not to be offended” lest you face a “hostile environment” charge–or worse. My students spew this because it starts K-12 and many of my colleagues are fond of the “free speech for me but not for thee” quote (Stanley Fish). And, of course, we must “understand The Other” (non-Americans). Or, as Zuckerberg put it: “understand the way that people actually think.”

Now, there is nothing wrong with “understanding the way the people actually think” but there is something wrong when you privilege these “other ways of thinking” at the expense of what you profess to “really love and support at Facebook” (that odd notion of openness and American values).

God help Mr. Zuckerberg, et al. as Iran goes ahead with its foolish autarkic plans to build a new operating system to impose the Islamic ethical code on all computer users in Iran. If or when Zuckerberg sells his out in Iran (and China), he will move one step closer to losing his soul and costing the lives of Others in foreign lands who had hoped that U.S. companies and Americans (of all types) might stand with them as they embrace dissident “American values” (as if they were peculiar to America).

“What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?

Mark 8:36

My post “Betrayed by Higher Ed” has occasioned so many comments and emails that I want to offer a group response.  Readers here and abroad expressed incredulity and dismay that a student of mine had reached college sophomore level without reading a single book.  My evidence is anecdotal, but while book-free students may not be the norm, neither are they the exception.  Unfortunately, even when students have read books in school, those books were usually politically-correct, multiculturalist drivel.  This is not news, as the academy has now devolved into third generation dumbing down.  A high school teacher emailed that

There is a pervasive attitude that `the kids can’t do it.’ Bullshit. Teachers won’t let them because it’s `easier’ to just read it all aloud in class (since it takes up more time) or just read some of it.  In a meeting today . . . two of my colleagues brought up dropping [Fahrenheit 451] since their students `couldn’t handle it.’  An AP teacher shared an assignment for Of Mice and Men. She passed around journal books where the students summarize each chapter on the left side of the page and then draw a picture on the right to represent a ‘theme’ of the chapter.”

This is what passes for reading and for writing, and it’s not just in high school.  Electronica’s erosion of reading ability means that reading books is no longerexpected at any level.  In a presentation last year, the Columbia University Core Curriculum directors sheepishly admitted that even their celebrated and historic program now finds it must resort to having students read excerpts rather than entire books.

Impoverished reading begets impoverished writing.  I also heard from Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review who struggles to preserve the meaningfully-researched high school history essay, a Herculean task when the previously mentioned AP teacher also “doesn’t assign an essay anymore because they are `too painful’ for her to read.”

So if teachers don’t have students read and don’t have students write, what do they do?  In The Intercollegiate Review (print only), R. V. Young writes about the decay of Freshman Comp., using as his example Jonathan Alexander’s composition class at U.C. Irvine devoted to developing “sexual literacy.”  According to his U.C.I. listing, Dr. Alexander “works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies.”  Dr. Young understandably despairs of reforming what he finds to be not an educational system at all but “a curious and uneven amalgam of job training, indoctrination, and custodial care.”

Amen, brother.

My former student Joshua, now ambivalently quartered at UC Santa Cruz (home of the fightin’ Banana Slugs and currently under Federal investigation for systemic anti-Semitism), has an article in Literary Matters about cheating.  Not students cheating; students who feel cheated.  He’s found a couple of excellent literature classes (Cervantes) but most just use books as a vector for stone-cold political ideology.

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].”

Josh devoured a copy of Hutchins’s The Great Conversation that he found (where else?) in the college library discard pile.  He says, “. . . the students I came into contact with seemed to react as I had. We felt we’d missed out on something essential by not being exposed to these works earlier.”

An Iraq War veteran, Josh notes that he was

inspired by The Iliad.  I read the Robert Fagles trans­lation and understood, finally, that this poem was not only about the Trojan War, but also about humanity and warfare. It might have been any war. It might be every war.”

In a similar vein, my current student Lisa says that “Before last semester I had never even read a book entirely. I realized how much I really enjoy it. Reading has opened up a whole new world for me. I am glad I finally got introduced into this world . . . .”

That they both say “finally” speaks volumes about K-16 education today.  Thankfully, The Great Conversation lives on, and it’s encouraging that more and more students, such as Josh and Lisa, are growing tired of being excluded from the dialogue.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Innovations blog, NAS president Peter Wood shares some insights about what has been lost in higher education:

I refer to the slow disappearance of the sense that higher education has anything genuinely “higher” about it. The notion that the academy should distinguish most important knowledge from the vast realm of knowable stuff somehow began to flicker out—when? The fifties? The sixties? As we lost the confidence to make that distinction, the college curriculum lost its essential shape. In a way, everything became an elective, even if some of the courses were still required.

That’s the subject of today’s Pope Center piece by Jenna Robinson. Most are rather weak when it comes to requiring a broad education.

In The Weekly Standard, Joseph Epstein makes a nice distinction between those who see man’s essential self as defined by what he hides and those who see man’s essential self as defined by what he does.  Hiding Man is a Freudian trope where outward actions result from uncomprehended inner drives lurking like bogeymen in the dark closet of individual being.  Doing Man is concerned only with results, not psychoanalysis; Doing Man says “judge me on my actions, regardless of my motives, desires, doubts, or fears.  I am what I have done.” A Hider is cynical, always on guard for the concealed jack-in-the-box in others or the monster under her own bed.  Epstein says

More people who have been infected by contemporary college education are likely to fall into the Hide camp than people who have been brought up free of higher education.  But among those who have been to college further distinctions can be made.  Business school and science graduates are likely to be Do’s; those in the humanities and most of the social sciences Hides. The Do camp has a moral grandeur wanting in the camp of Hides that comes from taking responsibility for one’s actions.  If one believes that we are what we hide, responsibility drops away because we are hostage to inner demons that, behind the scenes, are really calling the shots.”

Epstein’s dichotomy resonates with something Mark Edmundson said here the other night about higher education, that its goal seems to be “to undermine all aspirations to idealism.”  Reveal, debunk, demystify, revise, expose the Hider in each and all is the postmodern academy’s gloomy project. If becoming therapeutically adjusted to our hidden demons is the best we can hope for, life becomes just the search for jolts of pleasure from briefly-satisfied hungers and desires.  As Philip Rieff suggested, Freud (and the academy) offer man only “how to live with no higher purpose than that of a durable sense of well-being.”

Also at the Chronicle, April Kelly-Woessner has an incisive piece on outcomes assessment at her university and in higher education at large. She argues that the nation is less concerned about measuring how much students have learned than with ascertaining whether universities are being efficient stewards of funds to educate. She writes,

It is, of course, useful to measure student learning to improve our own educational programs. But professors are assessing student learning every day, as we grade papers, assignments, and exams. Good professors know what their students are learning and adapt their teaching when students fail to demonstrate adequate mastery of the material.

If we are to remain competitive as a nation, we must raise our standards and expectations of students. Yet institutional assessment activities, as currently structured, contradict the intentions of those who demanded accountability, by placing unnecessary burdens on our resources, by demanding that faculty members take time away from students and teaching to do what amounts to busy work, and by lowering institutional standards for student performance.

If the goal of institutional assessment is merely to distract external critics from their real demands, then the diversion appears to be working, at least for the time being.

However, if we in academe honestly desire to be free of external control, we will eventually need to recognize and deal with the public’s primary concern—the rising cost of higher education.

Her summary of the problems with outcomes assessment is compelling. Peter Wood’s 2009 evaluation of the movement reached similar conclusions.