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13 November 2006
Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:44:19 GMTIt has been said, only too truly, that Plato was the inventor of both our secondary schools and our universities. I do not know a better argument for an optimistic view of mankind, no better proof of their indestructible love for truth and decency, of their originality and stubbornness and health, than the fact that this devastating system of education has not utterly ruined them. In spite of the treachery of so many of their leaders, there are quite a number, old as well as young, who are decent, and intelligent, and devoted to their task. ‘I sometimes wonder how it was that the mischief done was not more clearly perceptible,’ says Samuel Butler, ‘and that the young men and women grew up as sensible and as goodly as they did, in spite of the attempts almost deliberately made to warp and stunt their growth. Some doubtless received damage, from which they suffered to their life’s end; but many seemed little or none the worse, and some almost the better. The reason would seem to be that the natural instinct of the lads in most cases so absolutely rebelled against their training, that do what their teachers might they could never get them to pay serious heed to it.’
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies
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30 January 2006
Mon, 30 Jan 2006 16:31:00 GMT Why "No Child Left Behind" Does Not Work for our Schoolsvia Kjell Olsen2304 days agoWhat is going on in today’s public classroom is this: the opportunity for teachers to open children’s minds and create lifelong thinking skills is being systematically and surgically removed by educational bureaucrats, politicians and administrators under the reform banner of “No Child Left Behind”.
I was a sophomore when NCLB took effect, and my high school didn’t have anywhere to go but down. As an upperclassmen, I was past the basics courses in which 45 kids would get thrown into a room with one teacher (a lab science course!). I in fact managed 4 quite pleasant years. But anyone could tell that things were deteriorating fast.
Children need more than basic skills. They need the chance to become motivated learners. They need the chance to be nurtured, to be loved. Education is not a business, a computer game, or a military operation. But to NCLB advocates, with their power-point presentations and their charts and spit-shined loafers and double-breasted suits, it is all this and more.
Intangibles are all I’ve ever taken from school. I took calculus my junior year, passed the AP exam, and can’t remember which one is an integral and which a derivative. I’ve gone to public school all my life, and been quite impressed at the caliber of my teachers. Most of them had a quite significant impact on me.
And not because they taught me what 2+2 equaled. -
29 January 2006
Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:50:00 GMTSpring Semester
So I’m a few weeks into my second (real) semester of college. I’m taking 19 credits, which comes out to five classes. I have most of my work MWF, with four classes at about one hour each. I start at 9:15 and go until 11:30; break for lunch; then go from 1:00 to 3:20. Tuesdays I don’t have anything, and thursdays a Data Structures lab and Economics of networks.
I’m still not sure about college. It’s damn expensive, even at a public school. I can’t say I hate it, but neither can I rationalize going into debt over it.
I keep thinking there are better things I should be doing, and whether or not I manage to ever graduate will mostly come down to biting the bullet and ignoring that “this is a waste” feeling to come out of it with the requisite piece of paper.
But I said I’d try out a year, and can’t say that its been a complete waste.
French 3011
Reading and Analysis of Texts. So far we’ve just started looking at french poetry. I’m surprised at how much french I know. Last spring I did some reading on my own (Le Petit Prince, Petit Nicolas, Rhinocéros) and got to the point that it’s not so much of a brain stretch to understand written french. But renaissance poetry kind of throws a wrench into all that comprehension.
CS 1301
We’re getting to go at things with scheme, which looks like fun. We’re not exactly moving fast yet, which always bugs me. I resent that fact that we’re made to take quizzes about programming on paper. They seem a bit
antitheticalretarded to me. I rely heavily on the computer when I’m programming, there really isn’t any need to sit down and memorize constructs and the finer points of syntax – the compiler tells you.Renaissance/Reformation
I woke up one morning having nocturnally decided that I was going to take a class on the renaissance, and looked for one in the catalog, and there was one. The Renaissance is an interesting subject. I spend most of the time in any history class trying to draw parallels between now and then, and like to hope that right now we’re in a dark age and just ready to be reawakened into a new age.
Data Structures
Another computers course, I’ve been cutting my teeth on java for the first time. Having a bit of experience with ruby, java sucks pretty hard. It’s nice to learn something new, but it could be something a lot cooler then java. Unfortunately there’s probably one or two more course for which I’ll need to have a handle on java.
In class the other day I said we should quit java, and the prof (same as in my 1301 course) made some noise about how much she liked smalltalk, so I’m going to see whether or not I could steer the course away from java. We’d maybe get to spend time on a second language, but java still seems requisite.
Open Source vs. Proprietary Techonology: The Economics of Networks and Innovation
Most obnoxious title ever. But probably my most interesting course. It meets once a week for a two hour block, and is all discussion (vs. lecture). Right now we’re reading free culture. So far I’ve come out of both the meetings excited for the next one, which hasn’t happened in any of my classes for awhile.
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14 January 2006
Sat, 14 Jan 2006 09:44:27 GMT On the Uses of a Liberal Educationvia Kjell Olsen2321 days agoHere’s a good rant on how colleges are devolving into northern outposts of Club Med.
What they will not generally do, though, is indict the current system. They won’t talk about how the exigencies of capitalism lead to a reserve army of the unemployed and nearly inevitable misery. That would be getting too loud, too brash. For the pervading view is the cool consumer perspective, where passion and strong admiration are forbidden.
But such improvements shouldn’t be surprising. Universities need to attract the best (that is, the smartest and the richest) students in order to survive in an ever more competitive market. Schools want students whose parents can pay the full freight, not the ones who need scholarships or want to bargain down the tuition costs. If the marketing surveys say that the kids require sports centers, then, trustees willing, they shall have them. In fact, as I began looking around, I came to see that more and more of what’s going on in the university is customer driven. The consumer pressures that beset me on evaluation day are only a part of an overall trend.
Colleges no longer have admissions departments, they have marketing divisions.
How did we reach this point? In part the answer is a matter of demographics and (surprise) of money. Aided by the G.I. bill, the college-going population in America dramatically increased after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them, schools continued to grow. Universities expand easily enough, but with tenure locking faculty in for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it’s not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a fat meal digested by a boa constrictor—the colleges turned to energetic promotional strategies to fill the empty chairs. And suddenly college became a buyer’s market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken more and more into account. That usually meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.
In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees conferred in America were in the humanities; by 1993, that number had fallen to 13 percent.
Universities have come to serve, and not challenge, their students.
It’s not that a left-wing professorial coup has taken over the university. It’s that at American universities, left-liberal politics have collided with the ethos of consumerism. The consumer ethos is winning.
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23 December 2005
Fri, 23 Dec 2005 13:43:00 GMTWhat is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge—the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations, to become guessers. If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on.
Please, don’t you do that. But let me warn you, if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you—and now I have to guess—about ten to one.
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21 October 2005
Fri, 21 Oct 2005 08:51:45 GMT Higher Education Podcastsvia Kjell Olsen2406 days agoMetaFilter rounds up podcast directories for Stanford, Princeton, and UW Madison.
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18 September 2005
Sun, 18 Sep 2005 15:55:00 GMT Against School: How public education cripples our kids and whyvia Kjell Olsen2438 days agoI just started college, and I’m as close as ever to deciding it’s not the right thing for me. I had quite a hunch I wouldn’t enjoy college, but thought it merited a try. I hate it more then anything I’ve done to date so far, it’s just fucking banal.
Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
...the Prussian system [emulated in american public schooling] was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers.
Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.
After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.
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09 September 2005
Fri, 09 Sep 2005 00:09:00 GMTA bit more on college
So I’m still ambivalent about college. I don’t know how much it’s helping me learn. I’ve always been a fiercely individual learner, and I’m not yet sure whether or not college is the right place for me. I decided to attend college more by default, I didn’t quite have anything else to do that would satisfy me entirely. I thought I should at least give it a try. But I’m still only lukewarm at best about it’s value, and what the fuck am I doing here when I don’t think it’s the best thing for me?
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20 April 2005
Wed, 20 Apr 2005 17:29:52 GMT The New York Times > Education > Teachers' Union Sues Over No Child Left Behindvia Kjell Olsen2589 days agoSo if you hadn’t yet heard, Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act is a shitty law that does nothing but suck resources away from schools for creating and administering tests on a state level, and then pulling funding from “underperforming” schools. Between that and cuts in national and local government budgets for education, public schools are really eating shit right now.
I’ve missed out on most of the NCLB act, it’s really just starting to kick in now that I’m on my way out of High School, but my school has been tumbling a steep slope for the last few years. Budgets for things like the language department (my favorite) and the art department have been cut drastically, auxiliary district funds have been consolidated into the principal fund1. I can’t say that all this is due to the Bush’s educational platform, Minnesota’s governor is also a jackass poorly funding education, but it’s great that the NCLB act is starting to be contested.
Both the Utah bill, which requires educators there to spend as little state money as possible in carrying out the law’s requirements, and the teachers’ union lawsuit filed today, rest heavily on the same section of the federal law, which forbids federal officials from requiring states to spend their own money on the law.
I sure hope this law gets taken down, in my experience it’s really helped to mess things up. I can’t say it’s just because of school funding, but in the last six years my experience in public schools has dramatically worsened, and something is really going wrong in one of the most important parts of America right now.
1 By thousands and thousands of dollars to just my high school, I can’t remember exactly, but all the teachers took the time the day after the 2004-2005 year budget came out last year to draw out financially what is happening, Language dept. had something like 1/4 of the funds from the district that they did before.
2 Which leaves individual departments within individual schools around the district with even less to buy supplies and pay teachers.
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27 February 2005
Sun, 27 Feb 2005 15:36:31 GMT Governors Work to Improve H.S. Education | MetaFilterKjell Olsen2641 days agoGreat comment on a metafilter thread I completely agree with:
High school has no context—no real-world, socially rich setting in which what kids learn can have real meaning. The whole thing is driven by abstract threats of abstract assesments and the promise of college or lack thereof.
If students were doing things, making things, planning their lives, experiencing real consequences (and not verbal reprimands from bureaucrats), exercising self-discipline and evaluating themselves, we’d be turning out adults, in every sense of the world. High school graduates would be real members of the world and not the spindly numbskulls we usually guess them to be. -
Sun, 27 Feb 2005 12:16:51 GMT
Governors Work to Improve H.S. Educationvia Kjell Olsen2641 days ago
The nation’s governors offered an alarming account of the American high school Saturday, saying only drastic change will keep millions of students from falling short.
Yeah, that’s me. But I’m out this spring and on to ‘the real world,’ and I couldn’t be more excited.
Most of the summit’s first day amounted to an enormous distress call, with speakers using unflattering numbers to define the problem. Among them: Of every 100 ninth-graders, only 68 graduate high school on time and only 18 make it through college on time, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
“On time?” School is becoming too much like just an assembly line, I don’t think people should be judged as to how “fast” they “get out.” College just seems retarded to me right now, so maybe I’ll go and maybe not. I’m graduating with highest honors (whatever that means) this spring, I’ve been plenty successful in high school – but does that mean that I’m a failure if I don’t finish college by 2009?
America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that they’re broken, flawed or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools even when they’re working as designed cannot teach all our students what they need to know today. Bill Gates
I do agree with this statement a lot. In looking back at my education the years I feel that I learned the most were fifth and sixth grade, and I wish I still could be learning at the level I did then. I just went and went, and accomplished all sorts of things.
But what I really feel I learned those two years wasn’t that important as measured by the CAT test, or the MBST test (both which I scored incredibly high on) or even the more recent SAT or ACT (also) but in how ever since I’ve been motivated to learn for myself.
Since then I just haven’t cared as much for any of my schoolwork, my ‘learning,’ or my grades – but I sincerely feel that I did learn what is important to learn in school – the ability to be able to learn.
And I really wouldn’t encourage the governor’s council to just raise standards, because all I can see that doing is driving the number of struggling students through the roof. You need to give students who don’t already have a reason to learn a reason – and you need to do it promptly. Because there are a lot of kids who don’t care about college these days, both on the talented side of average and the struggling side who can think of better ways to live then struggle through another four years of mechanized and oppressive “learning.”
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19 February 2005
Sat, 19 Feb 2005 23:32:44 GMT The New York Review of Books: Colleges: An Endangered Species?via Kjell Olsen2649 days agoI might be on my way to college, and rightfully unexcited about it. Seems less like a real opportunity to me now then a doctored certificate of my ‘education.’
In academia, in short, no less than in other privileged corners of American life, money is being funneled into the hands of a relative few. Once-shabby college towns have become boom towns where old dives remembered fondly by alumni are now upscale restaurants to which today’s students bring their high-limit credit cards, and parking lots are crowded with student SUVs.
Amid these troubling developments, one hopeful sign is the growing public debate over who should go to college and how they should be paid for. Yet one hears comparatively little discussion of what students ought to learn once they get there and why they are going at all. Over my own nearly quarter-century as a faculty member (four years at Harvard, nineteen years at Columbia), I have discovered that the question of what undergraduate education should be all about is almost taboo.
College has come from times in which it served to develop strong moral character, pronounced christian faith, to become an engine of elitist intellectuals. As the university system grew and sophisticated, the chief incentive for professors to uproot themselves to another institution would be the lessening of their teaching burden.
At exactly the time when the struggle to get into our leading universities has reached a point of “insane intensity” (James Fallows’s apt phrase), undergraduate education has been reduced to a distinctly subsidiary activity.
The history of American higher education amounts to a three-phase story: in the colonial period, colleges promoted belief at a time of established (or quasi-established) religion; in the nineteenth century, they retained something of their distinctive creeds while multiplying under the protection of an increasingly liberal, tolerationist state; in the twentieth century, they became essentially indistinguishable from one another (except in degrees of wealth and prestige), by turning into miniature liberal states themselves—prescribing nothing and allowing virtually everything.
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01 February 2005
Tue, 01 Feb 2005 15:29:28 GMT St. John's CollegeKjell Olsen2667 days agoWow, an interesting looking college:
St. John’s College is a co-educational, four year liberal arts college known for its distinctive “great books” curriculum.
The all-required course of study is based on the reading, study, and discussion of the most important books of the Western tradition. There are no majors and no departments; all students follow the same program.
Students study from the classics of literature, philosophy, theology, psychology, political science, economics, history, mathematics, laboratory sciences, and music. No textbooks are used. The books are read in roughly chronological order, beginning with ancient Greece and continuing to modern times.
All classes are discussion-based. There are no class lectures; instead, the students meet together with faculty members (called tutors) to explore the books being read.Another school I’ve looked at is Evergreen, but the only colleges I’ve applied to are pretty run of the mill… I don’t like school much.
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11 December 2004
Sat, 11 Dec 2004 22:21:32 GMT The Goal is Excellence by Launa Ellisonvia Kjell Olsen2719 days agoI might have to use this as a source for an argumentative synthesis I’m writing for English.
What do I have to do so that my students will “pass the test” on the new standards? I have to create an emotionally safe classroom where students are comfortable thinking for themselves, asking questions, following their ideas, and reflecting on their behaviors.
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Also somewhat recently
