Concepts like National Standards and Core Curriculum sound well meaning at first glance, but parents and educational administrators need a quick refresher course in how totalitarian states operated within living memory. Both the Soviet Union and the Nazis were top-down socialist ideologies who legally imposed their own indoctrination on vast populations. Few suspected…
Parents are prone to accept hype if it’s convenient for them to do so. It’s not hard for the worst colleges to window dress when they need to. Famous American colleges are resting on past laurels, and this is true of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, as well. Early on, colleges were conservative and…
The US Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start Program began as part of LBJ’s Great Society campaign to have the federal government manage families and society in general. More welfare spending seemed to logically imply improvement and renewal. Government babysitting meant that both parents could work more–and consumer spending would soar. …
Of course, the debate still rages as to whether attendance should be required at all in college classrooms. Why not just give students credit who already know the course knowledge? Medieval Europeans actually handed out doctoral degrees based on the candidate’s knowledge in oral exams where learned doctors “examined” the scholar who sought the same title. …
College presidents tend not to be academics these days. Rather, the are fundraisers and managers whose primarily mission is to increase the financial well-being of the institutions they serve. The assumption is that money is the prime mover in human enterprise. Being too educated could be a liability. First get the money,…
Higher education is a big ticket item in the American taxation system. Both parents are being sent away from the home to fund the cultural promise that a college degree is the only ticket to lifelong success. But faculty control over the day-to-day educational process is lower than ever. Academic quality is down everywhere. …
In most public schools across the US, top-down central planning is much in evidence. Everything from textbooks to lesson plans to one policy after another is tricked down to the local level from state (and federal) think tanks on high. It’s a cookie cutter rational and logical world that looks good on…
Today’s post on a sister site mentions a new book, Letters to a Young Progressive, by a teacher who is attempting to save a young student from the “default” pitfalls of America’s mainstream secular and liberal culture: “It seems that working, career-minded parents have less time than ever to spend with teens these days. This…
Conservatives have always supported diversity as a worthy goal. We think of the British Empire in its prime, helping older, stalemated cultures come up to speed with modernity. While the British exported their own models, especially by example, they respected the right of native peoples to retain their own identities. Progressives…
School consolidation comes up every now and then in the news as if it were newly discovered as a panacea for solving budget problems. Since the word “consolidated” conjures up (rightly so) images of impersonal, rational educational warehouses, the word isn’t mentioned now in many new editorial articles advocating “shared resources.” Consolidation is…
