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I direct you to this NY Times op/ed by Eugene Hickok, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Deputy Secretary for Education under the current president.
While a few of his points are so basic it's hard to argue (who wouldn't want graduation rates to improve?), the rest you have to wonder about quite a bit. He makes a point about "civic literacy" (code, I suspect, for being able to regurgitate bits of history and government on demand), but I'd think having been a big mucketymuck in the Education Department, he would have been harping on this for high school students and such, that it shouldn't be postponed until post-secondary education. There is no differentiation between the amount of teaching that is done by professors at smaller colleges & universities and faculty at large research institutions. One can throw in the amounts of research a faculty member is expected to accomplish for promotion and advancement across the variety of colleges and universities that are out there.
Of course, his mention of an "academic bottom line" makes me wonder - what, exactly, is his notion of an "academic bottom line?" Anyway, something to read and perhaps even fume about for a while....
October 11 2006, 18:59:48 UTC 5 years ago
Wow, what a neanderthal. I just love it when people criticize things they don't know about.
Is he aware that only one hundred years ago, spending your precious academic years studying NOVELS was considered, if not the height of frivolity, at least a very lightweight major?
October 11 2006, 19:36:18 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 19:42:57 UTC 5 years ago
Serious students took the "Classical" track. Partiers and "hearties" on the other hand (those who were content to settle for the "Gentleman's C") would opt for "Modern Languages", which was of course considered absolutely lightweight.
Gone are the days.
October 11 2006, 19:54:20 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 21:33:43 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 21:41:54 UTC 5 years ago
Med students cheat almost as much as buisness and engineering students which is another reason why this whole testing thing doesn't work. Cheating at ancient Greek and Latin is not so easy. It is very very easy to find out who knows what they are doing and who doesn't without tests. Ask my students. I even make the boys cry.
October 11 2006, 21:49:03 UTC 5 years ago
They do it all with Lego and fuzzy felt now.
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October 11 2006, 19:03:30 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 19:31:23 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 20:10:29 UTC 5 years ago
"MFA in Drama? What are you going to do with THAT?"
October 11 2006, 19:13:46 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 20:12:21 UTC 5 years ago
I am of the opinion that any lack of civic literacy is caused by lack of engagement of pre-college students, which is only worsened by teaching to tests, which is what the "No Child Left Behind" legislation encourages. I had classes back in junior high and high school which encouraged involvement of students in the material by encouraging discussion and exploration of controversial parts of theory of government and history. I also had classes that were deathly dull because they were oriented to regurgitaion of facts.
Presentation of "civis literacy" as a set of facts instead of as a clash of processes of philosophy, ideology, and politics ensures many students don't retain anything they learned. Of course, learning processes isn't something that is as easibly testable as learning "facts".
October 11 2006, 20:12:09 UTC 5 years ago
"Faculty members decide what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if, indeed, they teach at all. This is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses."
Ummmmmm....not quite. The author doesn't seem to have a grasp of how things are really done at most universities. That, or he's skewing what little knowledge he has in order to make a more sensational arguement.
October 11 2006, 20:44:24 UTC 5 years ago
While I would probably agree that too many people escape with a college degree in their hands without this skill, I definitely don't think that a 'civics test' of the nature I've seen floating around lately in connection with this (although I don't know if it's the one mentioned here) is any way at all to measure it.
October 11 2006, 20:57:52 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 21:59:21 UTC 5 years ago
"I know the paper was supposed to be 5 pages, and I only wrote 3...but it was a good paper. Even though I didn't do the assignment, a D+ is harsh and unfair."
Sorry. See you in class. And no, I'm not changing your grade. No 4.0 for you.
October 11 2006, 23:33:06 UTC 5 years ago
It's just unbelievable to me, these things. To me, college is also in large part about the student - someone who wants to learn, will. Of course, I think students should be held accountable to that via grades, which they sometimes aren't, but it's not always the professor's fault when a student doesn't learn.
October 11 2006, 21:38:48 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 21:43:31 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 21:46:13 UTC 5 years ago
Clearly he should be fired.
October 11 2006, 21:49:39 UTC 5 years ago
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October 11 2006, 21:48:43 UTC 5 years ago
October 11 2006, 22:24:24 UTC 5 years ago
My respect for the american education system was pretty much lost the first week of class, when I learned that one of my students was fulfilling her history requirement with "the history of sports". And this was a top 20 University.
Now, I'm sure that the history of sports probably will stand her in good stead in a future career in the corporate world, where the ability to contribute to the water cooler chit-chat is more important than pretty much any skill you can imagine. Sports trivia will probably help her there.
But what the hell was the point of a "history requirement" if it can be substituted with something that has absolutely nothing to do with history?
If high school didn't do the job of filling students in on world history, then yes, a generic mandatory history class would be a good thing for college. But for heavens sake, let it be an overview of world history, not the history of black authors named Mike in the 1930's or something equally focused.
In the meantime, we'll get a whole cadre of people who are allowed to vote on things like the teaching of evolution without having taken basic biology, or global warming without basic chemistry. Bah.
October 12 2006, 16:27:02 UTC 5 years ago
We've already got that. In my hometown (Baltimore) only approximately 50% of the adult population has a high school diploma. Of those people who had some high school, how many took and passed basic biology and chemistry? And, if they did, how many remember what was taught 10 years afterwards?
Down here in Texas, it's not uncommon to hear "I don't believe anything scientists/doctors tell me." And it's also not completely unheard of to drop out of college, or grad school, upon marriage.
October 12 2006, 00:46:58 UTC 5 years ago