This is not so much in response to Mary Flanagan’s essay, “The Classroom as Arcade,” recently published by Inside Higher Ed, which features a vivid observation of a student in class who “check[ed] out from a class he likes” to play a role-playing game on an electronic device while others “openly engaged with their Facebook pages,”…
What follows is about 10% of a long but very engaging article, “Colleges Are Full of It: Behind the Three-Decade Scheme to Raise Tuition, Bankrupt Generations, and Hypnotize the Media,” published today in Salon. Its author is Thomas Frank, who edits The Baffler magazine (which, if you haven’t read it, is well worth a visit:…
In this morning’s e-mail, I found the following two items, one right after the other: first, from University Business, their daily newsletter with this header, “Four Shot at Seattle Pacific University,” and then from Sen. Patrick Leahy, writing for Stand with Students, “Give students a fair shot: join Elizabeth Warren and me in supporting student…
‘Oh, I shouldn’t try to teach them anything, not just yet, anyway. Just keep them quiet.’ So says one of Evelyn Waugh’s characters in his hysterical novel Decline and Fall. That was 86 years ago. Today, the line wouldn’t elicit even a giggle, of course, so far have our conceptions of education declined. Education, as we see it now,…
My wife hates Faulkner. With a passion. So when we got married, there was no problem with my raiding her book collection and appropriating the novelist’s Light in August. I still have the copy, its blue-and-white cover, inside my wife’s signature in a girl’s handwriting, and a few notes made in the margin, mostly dutiful…
Once upon in the ’80s, a time of undergraduate education I experienced as a student and can vouch for, dorm rooms at colleges looked surprisingly dingy. This was the case also at very expensive liberal arts schools, one of which I attended. I remember being slightly taken aback upon seeing my dorm room for the…
John Dewey starts off Experience and Education (1938) with this: MANKIND likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Or, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities. When forced to recognize that the extremes cannot be acted upon, it is still inclined to hold that they are…
Clifford Adelman’s recent essay featured by Inside Higher Ed, “The Continued Coming of Second Language Students,” put both a smile and a frown on my face. I know that kind of display does not count as a formal or sufficient response in the field of education, so let me be more specific. I smiled because…
That’s how Jamienne Studley, Deputy Under Secretary at the Education Department, regards the Obama administration’s proposed system of ranking colleges. “This is not so hard to get your mind around.” Actually, it is. All blenders have a single purpose. They take certain types of organic material and combine them into products of chosen consistency. They can be judged…