How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture

A good piece on the destructive force of multiculturalism by Patrick Deneen, Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at Notre Dame.  Excerpt:

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

[...]

We have fallen into the bad and unquestioned habit of thinking that our educational system is broken, but it is working on all cylinders. What our educational system aims to produce is cultural amnesia, a wholesale lack of curiosity, history-less free agents, and educational goals composed of content-free processes and unexamined buzz-words like “critical thinking,” “diversity,” “ways of knowing,” “social justice,” and “cultural competence.”

Our students are the achievement of a systemic commitment to producing individuals without a past for whom the future is a foreign country, cultureless ciphers who can live anywhere and perform any kind of work without inquiring about its purposes or ends, perfected tools for an economic system that prizes “flexibility” (geographic, interpersonal, ethical).

In such a world, possessing a culture, a history, an inheritance, a commitment to a place and particular people, specific forms of gratitude and indebtedness (rather than a generalized and deracinated commitment to “social justice”), a strong set of ethical and moral norms that assert definite limits to what one ought and ought not to do (aside from being “judgmental”) are hindrances and handicaps.

Regardless of major or course of study, the main object of modern education is to sand off remnants of any cultural or historical specificity and identity that might still stick to our students, to make them perfect company men and women for a modern polity and economy that penalizes deep commitments. Efforts first to foster appreciation for “multi-culturalism” signaled a dedication to eviscerate any particular cultural inheritance, while the current fad of “diversity” signals thoroughgoing commitment to de-cultured and relentless homogenization.

Common Core Exposed

No big surprise.

Having a Family/Private Education Are Unfair Advantages

Philosopher Adam Swift knows that having a family gives children an advantage.  But lockstep with progressive ideology hellbent on upsetting traditional values, he follows it to its (il)logical conclusion: for the sake of the egalitarian utopia, we should be concerned about reading bedtime stories to our children because it gives them an unfair advantage; furthermore, private education should be abolished.  This is not the Onion, folks.  This is reality.

Read the entire excerpt::

‘I got interested in this question because I was interested in equality of opportunity,’ he says.

‘I had done some work on social mobility and the evidence is overwhelmingly that the reason why children born to different families have very different chances in life is because of what happens in those families.’

‘One way philosophers might think about solving the social justice problem would be by simply abolishing the family. If the family is this source of unfairness in society then it looks plausible to think that if we abolished the family there would be a more level playing field.’   

‘It’s the children’s interest in family life that is the most important,’ says Swift. ‘From all we now know, it is in the child’s interest to be parented, and to be parented well. Meanwhile, from the adult point of view it looks as if there is something very valuable in being a parent.’ [So instead of abolishing the family...]

‘We could prevent elite private schooling without any real hit to healthy family relationships, whereas if we say that you can’t read bedtime stories to your kids because it’s not fair that some kids get them and others don’t, then that would be too big a hit at the core of family life.’

‘I don’t think parents reading their children bedtime stories should constantly have in their minds the way that they are unfairly disadvantaging other people’s children, but I think they should have that thought occasionally,’ quips Swift.

‘It’s true that in the societies in which we live, biological origins do tend to form an important part of people’s identities, but that is largely a social and cultural construction. [TB: Care to give an argument for that?] So you could imagine societies in which the parent-child relationship could go really well even without there being this biological link.’

‘Nothing in our theory assumes two parents: there might be two, there might be three, and there might be four,’ says Swift.

‘We do want to defend the family against complete fragmentation and dissolution,’ he says. ‘If you start to think about a child having 10 parents, then that’s looking like a committee rearing a child; there aren’t any parents there at all.’  [TB: Oh, good, seems we're in excellent hands.  Thanks for pulling us back from the ledge of lunacy.  The rational cutoff, according to our family expert, isn't two but nine.]

As I have noted numerous times on this blog, progressives like Swift conflate ("social") justice with fairness as well as equality.  But justice, fairness, and equality are not the same.  Judgments about fairness and equality necessarily involve making comparisons, whereas judgments about justice need not.  I can judge that I have unjustly given you too little money simply by noting that I have given you less than what I promised for the work that you did irrespective of what anyone else has made. You can judge whether I gave you an unjust grade simply by looking at your work and my rubric in the course syllabus irrespective of whether I gave a fair/equal distribution of grades to the entire class (e.g. everyone including you got a "C").  

Instead of fretting about reading bedtime stories to his children, perhaps Swift should consider reading them this Bible story.

Why Our Children Don't Think There Are Moral Facts

Excerpt of Justin McBrayer's opinion piece in the NY Times with my commentary throughout:

What would you say if you found out that our public schools were teaching children that it is not true that it’s wrong to kill people for fun or cheat on tests? Would you be surprised?

TB: No.

I was. 

TB: You shouldn't have been.

As a philosopher, I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts. While there are no national surveys quantifying this phenomenon, philosophy professors with whom I have spoken suggest that the overwhelming majority of college freshmen in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

TB: That comports fairly well with my own experience.  

What I didn’t know was where this attitude came from. Given the presence of moral relativism in some academic circles, some people might naturally assume that philosophers themselves are to blame. But they aren’t. There are historical examples of philosophers who endorse a kind of moral relativism, dating back at least to Protagoras who declared that “man is the measure of all things,” and several who deny that there are any moral facts whatsoever. But such creatures are rare. Besides, if students are already showing up to college with this view of morality, it’s very unlikely that it’s the result of what professional philosophers are teaching. 

TB: It is true that most philosophers seem to be moral realists and not relativists (relativism may or may not be a species of anti-realism depending on how one defines moral realism).  But it could be that there are a few intellectuals who hold a large degree of sway over the intelligentsia more generally.  Richard Rorty comes to mind as an anti-realist (not just about moral truths but truths more generally) whose writings have been  quite influential even if not in philosophy.  In addition, though it is true that most students entering college are not influenced directly by philosophers, that does not rule out that they have been influenced indirectly way downstream.

So where is the view coming from?

Why Does College Cost So Much?

Part of the reason: Bloated administrations in part due to an increase in student loans.  Another part of the problem is ideology: colleges are often less about rigorous study and more about ideological indoctrination which costs money to implement.  See Subprime College Educations and Will College Bubble Burst From Subsidies and Problematic Boom in Higher Ed Administrators. [excerpts below].

To fix things I would start by eliminating the virtually useless government propped up accreditation agencies as I've discussed here and here.

As philosopher Robert Koons says in his excellent article on education: 

 Eliminate or ignore accreditation. The regional accrediting
bodies are little more than higher-education cartels, ensuring
that students can go to any college they like so long as they are
all the same. They discourage competition and are sustained
by the power of the federal government, which denies all
federal aid to students in non-accredited institutions. We
should replace “official” accreditation with private companies
that provide impartial, third-party assessments,

Excerpts:

For what have institutions of higher learning done with their vast increases in revenues? The answer in all too many cases is administrative bloat.

Take the California State University system, the second tier in that state's public higher education. Between 1975 and 2008, the number of faculty rose by 3 percent, to 12,019 positions. During those same years, the number of administrators rose 221 percent, to 12,183. That's right: There are more administrators than teachers at Cal State now.

In all, from 1987 until 2011-12—the most recent academic year for which comparable figures are available—universities and colleges collectively added 517,636 administrators and professional employees, or an average of 87 every working day, according to the analysis of federal figures, by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in collaboration with the nonprofit, nonpartisan social-science research group the American Institutes for Research.

[I]n 2009 the base salary of UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion was $194,000, almost four times that of starting assistant professors. And by 2006, academic administrators outnumbered faculty.
UC Davis has a Diversity Trainers Institute under an Administrator of Diversity Education, who presumably coordinates with the Cross-Cultural Center. It also has: a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Resource Center; a Sexual Harassment Education Program; a Diversity Program Coordinator; an Early Resolution Discrimination Coordinator; a Diversity Education Series that awards Understanding Diversity Certificates in “Unpacking Oppression”; and Cross-Cultural Competency Certificates in “Understanding Diversity and Social Justice.” California’s budget crisis has not prevented UC San Francisco from creating a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Outreach to supplement UCSF’s Office of Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity and Diversity, and the Diversity Learning Center (which teaches how to become “a Diversity Change Agent”), and the Center for LGBT Health and Equity, and the Office of Sexual Harassment Prevention & Resolution, and the Chancellor’s Advisory Committees on Diversity, and on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues, and on the Status of Women.

Why Obama's "Free" Community College Plan is a Terrible Idea

Here's an idea: I really like watching football in HD.  It should be free!  I love books, too.  They should be free as well!  I need a computer to blog.  Obama should make it free!  New clothes would be nice.  Free!  Everything should be free!  Wouldn't that be great?  And we can make it happen.  We just have to use the might of the most powerful government on the planet to make other people give us their stuff!  Who's with me?!

Sorry, I got a little carried away there thinking about how I could vote myself lots of cool stuff.  In all seriousness Obama's plan is a bad idea.

For starters, the federal government has absolutely no business meddling with something as important as education.  There is no power related to education ("education" is in fact nowhere mentioned) in the Constitution and all powers not mentioned are reserved for the states.  Some will of course give a torturous reading of the Commerce Clause, 14th Amendment, etc. but such interpretations are just that: tortured.  George Bush should have known better with his "No Child Left Behind" policy (of course GW was a neo-Con and not old school).

Second, it's a subsidy for fat-cat administrators over schools that already have a dismal graduation rate.

Third, there is a real worry that it will hurt private colleges many of which are ALREADY at a disadvantage since they do not receive public funds directly.  Look where my private college (OBU) ranks in faculty salaries, for instance (I couldn't fit the whole table in, so what you get are just full professors, namely ones that have been teaching for a very long time; but the same holds across the board):

InstitutionCategory | State	Full professors avg. salary	Avg. raise for continuing full professors	Count of full professors	Avg. total compensation for full professors
University of Arkansas at FayettevilleDoctoral | Arkansas	$115,400	3.5%	354	$141,900
University of Arkansas at Little RockMaster’s | Arkansas	$90,100	0.4%	147	$112,800
Arkansas State UniversityMaster’s | Arkansas	$83,700	3.1%	105	$105,700
University of Central ArkansasMaster’s | Arkansas	$81,300	3.0%	83	$101,000
Hendrix CollegeBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$79,900	-0.3%	37	$104,200
Southern Arkansas UniversityBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$78,900	1.5%	21	$102,000
Arkansas Tech UniversityBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$72,700	2.9%	61	$89,600
Lyon CollegeBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$71,000	0.0%	9	$90,800
Henderson State UniversityMaster’s | Arkansas	$66,500	2.8%	62	$81,400
John Brown UniversityBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$63,200	1.3%	27	$82,100
Ouachita Baptist UniversityBaccalaureate | Arkansas	$62,400	-0.5%	42	$81,700

Notice anything about the top and bottom? (I once interviewed for a Community College.  Thank heaven I didn't get the job.  But the pay would've been better than most of the private colleges I interviewed at.  The starting salaries here are in the low 40's.  The starting salary there--outside Cleveland--was in the 50's).

Fourth, it will arguably hurt religious institutions.  Public schools by their nature are not religious.  They tend to be bastions of political correctness for the very reason that they ultimately serve politicians.  (Of course there are leftist private institutions too).

Fifth, it is not free!  It will be paid for by taxation and in part by taxing college savings!?  Slate thinks it's a great idea (read it; it's hilarious).  This is classic:

It's also still a great idea. Unless, that is, you're really determined to subsidize college tuition for families with six-figure incomes so they can send their kids to Amherst or Brown. 

So not taxing interest made on savings (from money saved which has likely ALREADY been taxed at least once via income tax) is subsidizing the wealthy.  Only a born-again leftist could think that not taxing someone's savings' interest is subsidizing them.  Unbelievable--not to mention the fact that the majority of people with 529's saving for their kids' college make under $150,000!

Sixth, it makes a university education more like Grades 13 and 14 of high school.  This was exactly my wife's reaction when she first heard about it and it's the reaction of the author here.  I substitute taught for a year at public schools (and went to a good public school growing up) before I went on to do my Masters degree.  I never wanted to teach high school.  Why?  Because the students by and large take little responsibility for their education.  (I should know.  I was one of them!) They are FORCED to go and they PAY FOR NONE OF IT.  A college education is a privilege, not a right.

U.S. universities by and large are still the best in the world.  Germany can have its socialism and wonderful university vocational training.  We're not Germany nor should we want to be.  Unlike Europe, the Liberal Arts still has a foothold in the U.S. system. Don't fix what ain't broke.

Education and Accreditation Jargon Generator

Give it a try! It's fun!

Here are a few that I cranked out:

We will leverage interdisciplinary critical thinking for our 21st Century learners.

We will deploy outcome-based multiple intelligences through cognitive disequilibrium.

We will benchmark standards-based alignment in authentic, real-world scenarios.

We will cultivate mission-critical ESLR's with synergistic effects.

For my dim view of accreditation and outcomes-assessment see here.

Education in the U.S.: The Modest College and Imperial University

I found this essay on American higher education a very compelling read.  I may assign it in one of my classes.  It's unfortunate that most college graduates wouldn't be able to grasp the first half of it.  (It's doubly unfortunate that it would be news to most college professors as well.)

A few quotes:

"To understand the ethos of a people, examine their system of education. Educating the young is
the essential human act, and in the institutions of a society we can see most clearly the people’s
aspirations, their conception of our ultimate end, and their fundamental beliefs about human
nature and our place in the cosmos."
...
"Higher education began in colonial America as almost a perfect embodiment of the ancient
synthesis: a network of regional and confessional colleges, each prescribing a similar curriculum
of ancient texts, blending together the three strands of philosophy, rhetoric and theology, with
the aim of equipping a ruling class with the elevated taste, breadth of learning, and piety for
tradition that support a character of virtue."
...
"Empires rarely collapse as a result of external pressures. Military defeat is normally a symptom
of internal decay. Four factors contribute to this decay: imperial overreach, fiscal profligacy,
bureaucratic hypertrophy, and personal vice and corruption. There are signs that America is
moving inexorably toward a textbook-perfect case of imperial collapse."
...
"Over four years, the average college student has improved in writing, critical thinking and problem solving by only seven percentiles (0.18 standard deviations), a gain about one-quarter as great as was typical a generation earlier. Nearly 45 percent of students show no measurable gain whatsoever. This lack of progress follows predictably from grade inflation and the collapse of standards. Students reported spending on average less than twelve hours a week outside of class studying, with 37 percent spending less than five hours a week. Fifty percent had not taken a single course in the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing."

Hilarious Elementary School Field Day Poster

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to which political party the persons responsible for this poster are affiliated?