Don't believe the line that studying the humanities is a job killer

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

Zachary First, Managing Director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University, opines at PayScale.com on just how misguided is the question: “Can we, in economic terms, justify investing in a degree in the humanities?”

Read the rest here.

The Classical Reason for Calculus

From my post today at Exordium, the blog of the Classical Latin School Association:

 In a recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Tianhui Michael Li and Allison Bishop question the utility of teaching calculus in high school. The reason? There are other fields of mathematics better suited for preparing a student for the job market.

... The irony is that classical education, whose purpose, along with passing on a common culture, is to train the mind, is the only philosophy of education that can provide a justification for calculus. Why study it? Because it will help a student to think better.

Read the rest here.

Inoculate your children against cultural barbarism with a dose of Rosemary Sutcliff

As a new cultural Dark Age extends its shadow over our culture, it is good once in a while to transport yourself back to a time when the old virtues went unquestioned.

In an excellent article from one of the best blogs going on one of the great historical fiction writers for children, Rosemary Sutcliff. Our family read her Eagle of the Ninth (recently turned into a feature film) and other books about Roman Britain:

Though primarily a children’s author, the depth and quality of Sutcliff’s canon resonates strongly with readers of all ages. As with numerous British children’s writers (Alan Garner and Susan Cooper, for example) whose formative years coincided with the struggle against Hitler, Sutcliff’s work displays clear distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, civilized conduct and barbarism. There is no post-modern ambiguity, equivocating or hedging of bets here. We also find a firm commitment to the value of law and order (inherited from the Pax Romana) and an overarching belief in the significance and intrinsic worth of Judeo-Christian civilization. 

Her novels, at times, have a distinctly valedictory feel, almost as if Sutcliff herself was waving goodbye to what she recognised as civilization. 

Read more at the Imaginative Conservative.

National merit scholars at Highlands Latin School

This just in ...

Three out of thirteen Highlands Latin seniors were recognized as National Merit Scholars. Maggie Collum and John Sweeney were recognized as National Merit Semi-Finalists and Jackson Walter was recognized as a National Merit Commended student. 

Nationally, less than one and one half percent of college bound seniors are recognized as National Merit Scholars.  At Highlands Latin, 23% of seniors and 20% of all HLS graduates since 2005 have been National Merit Scholars, the highest percentage of any school in Louisville. 

Highlands Latin offers a classical, Christian education for students in K-12 in a unique 4-day schedule.  Find out why HLS students achieve such great academic success our our Open House on Sunday, November 10th.

Read more about Highlands Latin School here.

The next battle in the academic left's War on Knowledge: Social studies standards

Another tentacle has reportedly grown on the Common Core monster that promises to suck even more knowledge out of the minds of your children.

We go now to Frederick M. Hess at the Enterprise Institute for an update:

Yesterday, on Constitution Day, a coalition of social studies organizations issued their “College, Career and Civic Life (C3) Framework for State Social Studies Standards.” One of the partner organizations was the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools co-chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. Now, the exercise had more than a little irony, given that the organizations went out of their way to ensure that these “social studies standards” make no mention of the U.S. Constitution—or other historical events, dates, or persons. 

Susan Griffin, executive director of the National Council of Social Studies (NCSS), explained, “Many state standards in social studies are overwhelmed with lists of dates, places and names to memorize – information students quickly forget.” Instead, she said, the new framework would help states establish “fewer, higher, and clearer standards for instruction in civics, economics, geography, and history,” the standards emphasize “critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry.” Without delving into what students should actually know, the new C3 framework, explains an accompanying fact sheet, “Intentionally envisions social studies instruction as an inquiry arc of interlocking and mutually reinforcing elements that speak to the intersection of ideas and learners.” 

... 

Frederick? Frederick? Are you still there? Well, we've lost Frederick. But you can get the rest of his report on the new social studies standards here.

I have said before that the people who talk the most about "critical thinking skills" are the least able to explain exactly what they are. But we may now have a breakthrough.

What the permissivist educational establishment appears to mean by "critical thinking skills" is the process of eliminating content knowledge from the minds of children. So when you hear them using contentless expressions such as "critical thinking, collaboration, and inquiry," pack up the minivan and flee to the hills before your children's minds are turned into mush by the Common Core monster.

Does Common Core lower the standards for some states?

The Common Core Standards, just the most recent attempt by the public schools to look like they are improving things when they're really not, are facing an increasingly hostile public. Here's Charles Chieppo and Jamie Gass at the Hechinger Report:

The bloom is surely off the rose of Common Core, the new English and math standards pushed by Washington, D.C. education trade organizations and the Obama administration. In the last few months, a number of states have paused or de-funded implementation of the standards; others have pulled out of the consortia developing tests tied to them. In a recent Boston Globe op-ed marking the 20th anniversary of the Massachusetts education reform law that triggered dramatic improvements in the performance of Bay State students, Tom Birmingham, one of the law’s principal authors, wrote: “the political vectors will all tend to push the new standards to a race to the middle … In implementing the Common Core, there will be natural pressure to set the national standards at levels that are realistically achievable by students in all states. This marks a retreat from Massachusetts’ current high standards.” 

...  Most high-performing states also had rigorous standards prior to Common Core. For them, the new standards represent a significant step down from the academic rigor that was the foundation of their success. 

Compared to Massachusetts’ previous standards, Common Core reduces the amount of classic literature, poetry and drama taught in English classes by 60 percent. Goodbye Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Edith Wharton.

Read the rest here.

HT: The American Conservative.

The Education that Time Forgot: Get ready for the newest round of permissivist education

The newest thing in education, circa 1930s rural Alabama.

In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, a largely autobiographical account of her own childhood in small town Alabama in the early 20th century, she writes about going to school at about the time the the so-called "progressive education" had reached the rural south.

Scout is upbraided in class by her teacher when she discovers that Scout already knows how to read. A "faint line appeared between her eyebrows" as she "discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste." Her teacher was part of the vanguard of the progressivism of the 1920s that was working to replace, among other things, phonics instruction with what later came to be called the "look/say" method of reading and is now called "whole language."

"It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind," she says, and goes on "waving cards at us on which were printed 'the,' 'cat,' 'rat,' 'man' and 'you.' No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic revelations in silence." The teacher, it turns out, was also scandalized by the fact that Scout writes in cursive. "We don't write in the first grade, we print. You won't learn to write until you're in the third grade."

And of course there was the teacher's admonition that Scout's father was no longer to read to her: "You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage--"

Scout's brother Jem, conflating the progressivism of John Dewey with the popular library cataloging technique, calls this new teaching methodology, the "Dewey Decimal System":

The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first. Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and way crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything--at least, what one didn't know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped him from getting at books.

Books. Pesky things. Get in the way of education.

Obscured somewhat by the haze of time and seen through the eyes of a six year-old girl, this is Lee's description of the rise of "unit studies," "cooperative" education, and "project-oriented" learning. Gussy it up a little, add a few technological bells and whistles, and you have the so-called "21st century learning" now being marketed by the educational establishment at the newest thing.

Ever since the 1920s, schools have had to suffer through cyclical attacks of educational nonsense. There was the newest thing in education in the late 1920's. And the new newest thing in education in the late 1940s. And the newer new newest thing in education in the late 1960s. And then the newest newer new new thing in education in the late 1980s. We're overdue for the newer newest newer new new thing in education right about ...

Now.

Here is just one example, in last Sunday's Lexington Herald-Leader, about what is being called "21st century learning":

"I never know what I'm going to see when I walk by a classroom," she said.

This teaching model is a far cry from the traditional "sit and get," said Madison County Schools superintendent Tommy Floyd.  

 "(Today's students') learning looks a lot different than what (older generations) experienced in school," Floyd said. "We sat in a row, we listen to somebody do all the talking, we took some kind of a written test and then we went out the door. Why does learning have to stop at 3 o' clock? Why does it have to stop at the door?"

Floyd has apparently been caught in some kind of time warp. Did he fall asleep up in the mountains after playing ninepins with a bunch of grizzled men in Dutch clothes?

For a public educator to say we need to "get away from the traditional classroom" is like saying that we need to work to stamp out smallpox; that we need to move beyond the Commodore 64 computer; or that the army needs to replace the cavalry with a more modern, mechanized fighting force. I wonder what the reaction would be if someone tried to start a movement to convince people to replace their black and white televisions with color sets?

But then, these were actual advancements, whereas the fads and gimmicks constantly being generated by the education establishment are anything but that.

The most notable characteristic of the newest thing in education is how old it is. It's really the old new thing repackaged. So-called "child-centered" learning gets trotted out in this 20-30 year cycle, goes into hybernation in teachers colleges, then gets trotted out again when everyone forgot how badly it worked the last time--and the time before that, and the time before that.

In fact, it never really goes away. After its third mutation in the late 1960s, the traditional classroom had been  eliminated in most public schools--and we see the results today. You wonder exactly what people like Floyd are referring to when they refer to these legendary traditional classrooms from which they are seeking a change.

Where, in the public system, are these "sit and get" classrooms that we must eliminate?

Although many private schools still have them (and work quite nicely, thank you), they are now mostly a phantom in the minds of permissivist propagandists from the education establishment. Virtually every teachers college in existence has been doing nothing but training teachers in permissivist techniques since about the 1970s (maybe even earlier).

Try to go out and find any teachers college that offers a class in how to teach intensive systematic phonics anymore--or in traditional, drill-based math instruction, or how to run an ordered classroom.

Happy hunting.

In fact it's kind of humorous how little the rhetoric changes. It always involves an emphasis on:

• "child-centeredness" (which manifests itself practically as a neglect of skills and subject matter) 
• the importance of "fun" in the classroom (which manifests in the outright ridicule of memorization, drill, and practice)
• "cooperative" learning (which ends up meaning the shunning of order of any kind, whether in subject matter or classroom management)
• teachers who "facilitate" rather than, say, teach (the ideal progressive classroom is one run by students instead of the teacher)
• "hands-on" student activities (as opposed to books. Remember them?)

You can go back to the 20s and the 40s and the terms are almost identical. This chart, on the University of Chicago's website, is typical. But if you go back and look at textbooks from teachers colleges from the 1940s, you'll find charts that are identical to this.

The only thing that ever seems to change is the name of the newest thing. There was "progressive" education, then the "life adjustment" movement, then "open classrooms," and then "outcomes-based education." And now, "21st Century Education."

I'm sure rural 1930s Alabama is known for many things. But as a model for education in the 21st century?

How knowing Latin helped one reporter get the scoop of a lifetime

"Qui res mundi vellet scire linguam Latinam cognosciat."

If you don't know what that means, then join all the reporters who missed one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the 21st century.

When Pope Benedict XVI recently abdicated the papacy, he did it in a speech that was supposed to be about the canonization of three saints. But all of a sudden, he began almost whispering in Latin.

Giovanna Chirri, the Vatican reporter for ANSA, the leading news wire service in Italy, was covering the regularly scheduled speech. She immediately realized what the Pope was saying.

She knew Latin.

She quickly called Vatican spokesman Frederico Lombardi to confirm what she thought she had heard: that Benedict was going to do something that no pope had done for 717 years: voluntarily step down from his office. But Lombardi could not be reached.

Chirri then reported to her editor at the ANSA News agency that the Pope had just announced his abdication. But the editor got cold feet, and a heated argument ensued between the reporter and her editor, the editor doubting her story, and Chirri insisting that her Latin was good enough to understand what the Pope had said.

At 11:46 a.m. GMT, ANSA sent out the alert to a surprised world. Chirri had scooped the rest of the press corp because she knew Latin.

Oh, and that Latin sentence above? It means, "He who wants to know what's happening in the world should know Latin."

Forbes explodes some of the liberal myths about homeschooling

An interesting article in Forbes magazine about homeschooling. Turns out that many parents are teaching their kids reading, writing, arithmetic, how to be good, and how to think.

The question is, of course, how are they going to survive in tomorrow's world without the necessary indoctrination in diversity and training in job skills that may or may not be relevant to what is actually needed in the economy in five or ten years?