In today’s Pope Center Clarion Call, Jenna Robinson writes about the findings that about half of the students who enroll in college every year are not regarded as “college ready.”

As we know, many schools will accept almost anyone, then they require the weakest of the weak to go through some remedial courses, after which the students are supposedly ready for college work.I have always doubted that a semester or two can make up for years of educational neglect and malpractice in K-12. Students who read poorly and have very limited vocabularies,for example, are not going to become good readers who are capable of reading (that is, comprehending) college-level literature and assigned books in most academic disciplines with a remedial English course— even an excellent one. Many of those courses probably aren’t rigorous and instructors don’t want to fail students because that depletes the number of paying customers.

When students (or as one friend suggests, “tuitioners”) start to realize that obtaining a college degree is apt to do them little if any good in the labor market, many of our mid- and lower-tier schools will find it awfully hard to stay afloat.

The film, now reissued on Blu-Ray for its 40^th anniversary, has a turbulent history.  Originally rated X, Kubrick had to re-cut it for an R but also withdrew the film from distribution in the UK where it was re-released only in 2000, after his death.  The American edition of the book which inspired Kubrick had itself been bowdlerized by the publisher (Norton) who amputated the final chapter creating a dark, ambiguous conclusion where Burgess’s 21^st chapter offered a consoling one.

Once, Kubrick’s opus was required viewing in my class about what a human being is and isn’t.   When Burgess/Kubrick’s sociopathic narrator, Alex, is arrested, he is subjected to aversive conditioning and becomes incapable of violent action (the conditioning also destroys his ability to enjoy “Ludwig Van”).  He is now “a clockwork orange,” what you get when you treat something organic as if it were a programmable machine; Alex’s prison chaplain protests that “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”  Voila, Kubrick’s film was perfect for the class, but, like Kubrick, I too withdrew it after one student became hysterical during the viewing, curling into a fetal position and shaking for an hour after class.  Apparently, Alex’s “ultra-violent” acts but ingenuous “of-course-you-understand” intimacy remain disturbing, even dangerous, enhanced by the timeless music, John Alcott’s cinematography, and Kubrick’s notoriously clinical eye.  The opening 90-second dolly back shot still chills the blood. Yet, cold as Kubrick’s films feel, he was an eminently sane man presenting a perennial dilemma–freedom vs. order.  In an interview with film historian Michel Ciment, he said

I think that when Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don’t think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”

Indeed . . . .  If only the outcomes-and-assessment-addled mandarins who run our “imperfectly structured” education system would take Kubrick’s words to heart, the job of rebuilding the humane studies might finally begin.

Peter Wood and I debated Education Sector’s Kevin Carey last week in a four-day online debate through Minnesota Public Radio. The assertion was: The drive to increase college enrollment threatens to lower academic standards.

You can find our debate here and the MPR forum (with comments by the moderator and readers) here.

Some main points from our closing statement:
1. Everyone should have access to college, but not everyone should go to college.
2. Most-educated is not the same as best-educated.
3. If almost everyone goes to college, a degree won’t signify any particularly noteworthy achievement.
4. A society that recognizes the laws of human nature – that each person is unique and that a one-size-fits-all approach won’t work – can then begin to help its rising generations to choose their paths. Such a recognition can also save higher education from trivializing itself into irrelevance.

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.

Krugman began his recent op-ed:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.”

But what everyone knows is wrong.

Krugman goes on to argue that more education does not necessarily lead to a stronger national economy, an argument that NAS and our friends at the Pope Center and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity have been making for some time.

Peter and Jason note that when someone as prominently on the left as Krugman acknowledges that the value of the college degree is weaker than it’s cracked up to be, we must be nearing some broader consensus about higher education’s worth.