The Blog of Record

The Internet, separating the class from the college:

Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.

Unless the government decides they are too big to fail, of course.

Because market society doesn’t afford them the wealth and status they think they are entitled to.

So basically, sour grapes, but the author (a professor of philosophy at Harvard) has an interesting explanation of how intellectuals acquire this unreasonably high idea of their own value that market society fails to bear out. Based on his theory, what’s surprising is not that so many intellectuals hate capitalism and free-market distribution of social rewards, but that some don’t.

“Homework racis’.”

Eric Holder, Obama’s black Attorney General, called for a dialog on race in his “nation of cowards” speech. He should have been careful what he wished for, because he got it – and it doesn’t sound like something he would have expected to hear.

A long article about the new twist the Internet brings into the old question of whether schoolchildren will be better off learning some general facts about history, geography, etc., or just how to use the means of finding out information when they need it.

A former winner of the BBC quiz show “Mastermind” recently took part in a pub quiz which came down to a tiebreaker between his team and a group of young people who were relying on BlackBerrys. Anyone familiar with quizzes these days knows that this can happen, whether it is under the table or outside in the smokers’ zone; the combination of wireless internet access and Google searching is simply too powerful for some to resist and for others to prevent. In this case, happily, virtue triumphed and the team led by the Mastermind champion won. Then afterwards a young woman from the losing side came over and asked in baffled tones: “How did you get that?” So attuned was she to the idea that answering quiz questions was a task to be outsourced to the internet that she seemed not to understand the idea of general knowledge that was kept in the head.

Is this where we are heading? A Google search, once you have keyed the words in, takes a broadband user less than a second, and the process will only get quicker. As for those laborious keystrokes, voice-recognition technology will enable us to bypass them. And soon pretty well everybody, from schoolchildren to drinkers in pubs, will be online pretty well all of the time. In that context, perhaps there is no longer any point in keeping facts in our heads. If you want to know who wrote “Skellig”, or whether Norway is a member of the European Union, or what Cary Grant’s real name was, you ask your laptop or your phone.

I teach undergraduates, and I am prepared to bet that many other teachers have found themselves wondering whether they are seeing this force at work.

When you know how to use Google, you know everything. Right?

This is from a couple weeks ago but it makes a great Fourth of July story: “Khadijah Williams, 18, overcomes a lifetime in shelters and on skid row”.

As long as she can remember, Khadijah has floated from shelters to motels to armories along the West Coast with her mother. She has attended 12 schools in 12 years; lived out of garbage bags among pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. Every morning, she upheld her dignity, making sure she didn’t smell or look disheveled.

On the streets, she learned how to hunt for their next meal, plot the next bus route and help choose a secure place to sleep — survival skills she applied with passion to her education.

Only a few mentors and Harvard officials know her background. She never wanted other students to know her secret – not until her plane left for the East Coast hours after her Friday evening graduation.

It’s not clear why she was homeless in the first place but it probably had something to do with the fact that her mother was 14 when she was born.

From an article by Prof. Mark J. Perry.

(Via Tom McMahon.)

Or, rather, they deserved Churchill (you may remember him – the fired plagiarist professor who believes 9/11 victims needed killin’):

Ward Churchill’s civil suit to be reinstated to his teaching post is apparently in court.  Churchill is arguing that the nominal reasons for his termination (mostly shoddy academic work) were not alone enough to have normally justified his termination, and that he was in fact fired for his remarks about 9/11.  This is an important distinction, because tenured professors can generally not be fired for exercise of first amendment rights, no matter how wacky their statements.

In a post that spawned a number of angry emails, I actually said I thought Churchill was fired improperly.  There is plenty of evidence that the Native American studies department at Colorado, and gender/racial studies departments in general, have never enforced any sort of academic rigor, and it is hypocritical to suddenly discover such rigor for this case.  Churchill has been rewarded and promoted historically for much of the same work he is nominally getting fired for now.  Further, examples are legion of heads of various elite university racial and gender studies departments who exercise the same or less academic rigor as Churchill but whom no one is criticizing.   As I mention in my earlier post, Cal State Long Beach hired a paranoid schizophrenic who had served prison time for beating and torturing two women as the head of their Black Studies department.

Frankly, Colorado is getting exactly what they hired.  They weren’t looking for a research mastermind.  They were looking for a politically correct hire to fill a void and create a department that made them look nice and progressive on paper.  And that is exactly what they got.

Those racial and gender studies departments sure aren’t created because anything that can be called work with a straight face is expected from them.

Someone should start marketing this magic stuff:

Children who have a drink of water before sitting tests fare up to a third better, researchers have found.

The reason why isn’t clear, but it could be that information flows more smoothly between brain cells when they are well hydrated.

In one of the first studies of its kind, researchers from the University of East London looked at the effects of water on the performance of almost 60 boys and girls aged between seven and nine.

Half were given a 250ml glass of water to drink, and 20 minutes later, both groups were subjected to a battery of tests. One test, designed to assess visual attention and memory, involved spotting the differences between two cartoons. The water-drinkers scored 34 per cent better, the research journal Appetite reports.

They also did 23 per cent better on a more difficult version of the test and 11 per cent better on a third task that required them to cross out specified letters from a sequence. In tests designed to assess short term memory there were no differences between the two groups.

A former D.C. public school teacher on Obama’s education proposals, which she generally likes:

If the programs and priorities Obama outlined are really, truly implemented, then perhaps it will be time to give teaching another shot. But before that happens, he’s going to have to put our money where his mouth is.

A blogger from Howard County, Maryland, writes about his experience with student financial aid (edited a bit):

Well my FAFSA (free application for federal student aid) is done and it does not look pretty.  Naturally we do not qualify for any federal aid and we do not qualify for any need based financial aid that private colleges offer.  So one college that my daughter applied to wants us to pay 25K a year towards a 34K cost.  Thanks but no thanks.  Here are my two concerns.

1.  Family A (our family) save and budget for 21 years.  We have less than 100K on line 40 of our 1040 and yet we have too much in savings to qualify for aid.  We made hundreds of decisions to save that 10 or 12K per year for our retirement.  Family B (another family) had the same income but drove nicer cars, lived in bigger houses and went on fancy vacations.  Guess what?  They get 60% off on their college bill as they have no money.  What’s the lesson being taught there?  I have no problem with kids from broken homes or those who are in poverty getting need based aid.  Yet anyone earning over 50K should not get aid based on what they have saved.  Why punish those who are doing the right thing while others are spending their lives away.

2.  My daughter has 14K in CD’s and a checking account.  She has worked for three years as a babysitter, tutor and as a retail clerk for almost a  year.  It’s been several days a week for nearly every week now.  She is quite thrifty and has saved 90% of income.  Another child could have easily spent $400 per month over the last three years on clothes /cars/what nots and be penniless.  Our daughter’s money counts like 90% towards her cost of education.  Does that seem fair?  What behavior does that encourage?

So at America’s private colleges it’s “each pays according to one’s ability to pay-each receives according to one’s needs” or darn near close to that.  Yup its spread the wealth.  Can you imagine if one had to buy a car based on that idea?  Bill Gates would be paying 200K for a Prius.  Its not only spread the wealth but good behavior is punished and bad behavior is rewarded. 

What galls me most is the college that my daughter applied to is not a liberal-liberal arts school.  It’s one of the most conservative private schools in America.   Yet it runs its financial aid program  like it was located in Cambridge Mass.

 Victor Davis Hanson:

If we wish to get health-care costs under control, then we should at least be honest with the American people and admit that we are all paying a collective fortune largely for three reasons: (1) to keep functioning into their 60s those who drank, smoked, and ate too much and in a past era would have passed on at 60; (2) to give us all an extra three to five years of mobility and functionality after we reach 75; (3) to fit us up with IVs, feeding tubes, and respirators so that in our last six months of life we can die in a rest home or among machines and specialists in a hospital rather than in our own home with a few morphine tablets for pain and a bowl of soup with a straw on the nightstand.

Good news:

Kids in the U.S. made significant gains in math since 1995 and score above average on international fourth- and eighth-grade tests in the subject, according to a study released Tuesday.

The findings contradict a persistent view in the United States that its children are lagging behind the rest of the developed world.