Monk

Mr. Timothy Olmstead is no 'Welcome Back, Kotter". He's not Jewish, for instance. But he does have a whacky sense of humor.

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Olmsted resigned after the district placed him on paid leave in the spring after parents complained that he called black students "fat, black and stupid" and told them, "you will never amount to anything" and "you only have one parent," WCCO reported.

The teacher also allegedly forced black students to sit in the back of the classroom, or sit with their desks facing the wall.

"He told the whole entire class that it is easier for him to teach rich white folks than poor black people," Tolbert told WCCO.

[...]

But the educator has a record of controversy. The St. Paul School District reported in 2002 that Olmsted gave a sixth grade girl a birthday card with sexual innuendos, and requested that she read it to the class. He was also accused of giving a graphic description of castrating horses and throwing testicles into a field to feed cats.

-- News-LJ

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online. President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

-- David Brooks at The New York Times

If I were in my twenties today and still fairly new unto the world, I could see myself checking out these new online offerings, but at this point, when I am fairly stale and rotting in the world, I find that my personal reading and book-blogging is more than enough for me, just needing something to amuse myself.

What follows when a belief in objectivity and truth dies away in higher education? In time an educated person comes to doubt that purpose and meaning are discoverable​—​he doubts, finally, that they even exist. It’s no mystery why fewer and fewer students in higher education today bother with the liberal arts, preferring professional training in their place. Deprived of their traditional purpose in the pursuit of what’s true and good, the humanities could only founder. The study of literature, for example, was consumed in the trivialities of the deconstructionists and their successors. Philosophy curdled into positivism and word play. History became an inventory of political grievances.

-- Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard

Andrew Ferguson is touting the reissue of Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”, a twenty-fifth anniversary edition. The book blames liberalism for the woes of today’s intellectual climate, particularly when it comes to college education. And liberalism doubtlessly bears its share of the blame, with the backlash against the dead white men that have dominated and ruled Western civilization.

However, conservative Republicanism also shares in the blame, reducing everything to business and dollars, notwithstanding its demagogic bow to religion and Christianity. One reason why ‘the big questions’ do not draw college students anymore is because such study does not pay. It does not even pay well enough for colleges to continue providing such instruction, much less for the students who must then go out and make a living. Students are focused more on Wall Street than on Plato and Shakespeare, because the big questions and pure intellectualism do not pay in our mega-corporate world, save for a few exceptions, such as Allan Bloom.

The fact that students pay companies to writer academic papers for them is not new. Usually, though, I hear that teachers and professors are good at sniffing those out. Of course, one would be left wondering how do such businesses thrive then? This is the first account I have seen from the ghostwriter, and, you know what, he is actually a delightful writer. Since he is used to having others palm off his work as their own, I'm sure he won't mind if I just copy his stuff here.

( Fun read )

Charles Murray: For most people college is a waste of time

But I'm so much more cultured!

“On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit a cool white light and the thermostat is set to 69 degrees. In the girls’ room, by contrast, the walls are yellow, the light bulbs emit a warm yellow light and the temperature is kept six degrees warmer, as per the instructions of Leonard Sax, a family physician turned author and advocate who this May will quit his medical practice to devote himself full time to promoting single-sex public education.”

-- Elizabeth Weil for The New York Times

A long article that I haven't even skimmed, but I thought it might interest others...

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To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

-- Stanley Fish for The New York Times

Humanities may be a good in itself, but that is not going to bring more money into the enterprise. Rather like me life.

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Here is some headturning news of how the Japanese are now envious of India's education. The world evolves, and you certainly don't hear of anyone envying America's primary and secondary schools. Asia in motion.

( article )

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“It’s no longer reasonable to debate whether the problem exists,” said Sunil Iyengar, director of research and analysis for the endowment. “Let’s not nitpick or wrangle over to what extent is reading in decline.”

-- Motoko Rich for The New York Times

A new study links the decline in test scores to a decline in time that people spend reading. And we are now just talking about reading for pleasure, not just time spent on high-end reading.

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