The media, left and right, try so very hard to twist the facts into a story that confirms their views of the world.  Heather MacDonald explains in City Journal how the New York Times is so convinced that gender bias exists in math and science education (against females) that it ignores the salient facts.  One of those facts is that males saturate both ends of the bell curve, not just the high end. 

A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 [Times] article by Tamar Lewin-thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges.

MacDonald reminds us that feminists don’t seem to complain about the “gender bias” that results in males outnumbering females in the lowest score range.  But hey, let’s not let the facts get in the way of an interesting worldview.

In a practical world with a practical people, we demand a practical education.  So goes the thinking of most Americans, even if they mean different things when they suggest it.  And so goes the sad state of the humanities.  We’ve blogged much before on this much maligned human endeavor, and we will again, after reading this nice essay in The Wilson Quarterly titled “The Burden of the Humanities.”  First, the author explains how the humanities, these days, are like the “Ottoman Empire of the academy”:

[…] a sprawling, incoherent, and steadily declining congeries of disparate communities, each formed around one or another credal principle of ideology and identity, and each with its own complement of local sultans, khedives, and potentates.

So that’s one reason they struggle, because there’s no uniformity to them, no guarantee that what one means or professes in this humanities department (say, English) has any unity with something to do in another humanities department (say, Law or History).  Humanities used to mean one thing.  Now it means many things.  Who can wonder at why their study is failing?  It’s important to note that study of the humanities doesn’t preclude study of the more immediate arts of engineering, applied science, etc.  To support the humanities isn’t to spit in the face of physics.  Finally, the essay closes with suggesting a very practical, although not immediate, use of the humanities:

One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save ­us-­if they can recover their ­nerve-­is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, ­mood-­altering drugs, and ­all-­consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”

And I suppose you could suggest that the humanities are nothing but history’s collection of stories about and by the human race, telling of what it means to be human.  And if the humanities are stories, then they will never die, no matter how impractical they may seem, no matter how much funding they lose.  Stories are free, after all, but of course it doesn’t hurt to throw a little money at those who write them down for us.

In this unusual essay, Anders Henriksson, an assistant professor of history, has assembled a collection of some of his favorite paragraphs from the history essays of his students.  He teaches on the college level, mind you.  Here are some of my favorite lines:

• “History, a record of things left behind by past generations, started in 1815.”
• “During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged.”
• “In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular.”
• “Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy.”
• “An angry Martin Luther nailed 95 theocrats to a church door.”
• “Louis XIV became King of the Sun.”
• “The enlightenment was a reasonable time.”
• “At war people get killed, and then they aren’t people any more, but friends.”

All this, out of the mouths of our nation’s college students.

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, has just written a book that bemoans the condition of the young people in America called The Dumbest Generation, in mock homage, I suspect, to Brokaw’s book of a similar title. The problem, says Bauerlein, isn’t just the internet. It’s also the glorification of youth culture since the sixties, which – as Flannery O’Connor would say – put the bottom rail on top.

The glorification of youth was strongly reinforced by “progressive” educational theories emanating from our leading schools of education – theories insisting that the proper role for teachers is to act simply as “facilitators” who guide students in “constructing their own knowledge.” Supposedly, active young minds would do that if they were free to follow their own natural inclinations.

That theory took hold first in the lower K-12 grades and rapidly spread upward. Many college professors resisted it and continued to assign challenging reading material, only to discover that students either wouldn’t read it or if they tried, just couldn’t grasp it. As a result, professors have widely lowered their standards to accommodate the a-literacy of their students. In turn, that means that our supposedly highly educated populace actually contains a small and declining number of people capable of functioning at a high intellectual level.

Based on the review at The Pope Center, Bauerlein’s book isn’t your typical Kids-These-Days book. It’s a solid, reasonable, balanced assessment of why kids don’t really care to learn much these days and who’s to blame for it. All of us, in some way or another. The teachers who refuse to work hard at keeping high standards. The parents who complain when Johnny gets a bad grade because one teacher did have high standards. The school administrators who crave high admission rather than high thinking. The citizenry who mock intellectualism as elitist. And on and on.

Everybody, inside and outside the academy, seems to acknowledge the fact that college students and graduates cannot write very well.  The problem here is not just that they’ve spent anywhere between $50,000 and $200,000 to learn how to do it, among other things.  The other problem is that almost all of us have to write in our work, and when our writing is bad, we look like idiots.  We have to write emails, we write presentations, we write memos and handouts for meetings, we write résumés, we write cover letters, we write proposals, we write letters to colleagues.  A few spelling or grammatical errors can be forgiven - its for it’s, for example - but the truth is, and I always tell my writing students this: when you make a spelling or grammar mistake that your reader usually doesn’t make, your reader will consider himself more intelligent than you.  This doesn’t help your reputation at work.  And when you make a style or composition mistake - e.g., incomprehensible transitions, an abrupt conclusion, forgetting to state your point as early as possible - your reader just walks away thinking you don’t make sense, or don’t make it very well. So, as a group, students and graduates can’t write, but they need to.  William Major, an English professor, says much of the blame really does fall with English professors.  Because as a group, they idolize the teaching of literary theory and laugh at the teaching of writing.  They make all the graduate students and part-timers do it.

The English professor rarely teaches freshman writing courses because it is beneath her to have to worry over catchy introductions, pithy thesis statements, and thoughtful conclusions. Certainly she cannot be bothered by grammar and form, except briefly and in passing. There is a workman-like quality to the teaching of writing; it is as close to blue-collar as you can get in the liberal arts classroom. In my first tenure-track job at a community college I taught a five and five load, four of which were composition classes (far too many, to be sure). I felt like Lucy in the candy factory. We’re English professors; why work up a sweat?

Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences and English professor at the University of Chicago, insisted on teaching freshman writing courses.  Would that all lauded professors would stoop so low.  Maybe America’s college students would appreciate writing if they could tell that their most talented professors did, too.

We’ve blogged before about Berea College, a school that “accepts only applicants from low-income families” and doesn’t charge a dime of tuition.  Of course, they have a $1.1 billion endowment, “which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest.” 

But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

That’s the kind of school I like, a place where literary theory can’t soar to ridiculous places on waxen wings because those wings are dirty from shoveling manure.  Because it charges no tuition, Berea gets much of its income from - ta-da! - its endowment.  And with endowments between $16 and $35 billion, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford ought to take notice.

With its hilly campus, Georgian president’s mansion and old brick buildings, Berea looks much like any elite New England college. But its operating budget is less than half that of Amherst, which has a $1.7 billion endowment and about 100 more students. Faculty pay is much lower, and the student-faculty ratio higher […] To satisfy the work requirement, some students have jobs in the academic departments, administrative offices and labs, while others are assigned to the college farm, the workshops that make and sell traditional mountain crafts (its handmade brooms, especially, are well-known treasures) or the college-owned hotel, which anchors the town square.

Sounds a little like the College of the Ozarks, another school with a similar work requirement and a much smaller, more realistic budget.

Robert Faulkner was a successful information technology guy who wanted to go back to college and finish his undergraduate degree, working toward a BSBE (bachelor’s degree in business education) in the distance education program at East Carolina University.  He expected to get a college education.  But he got something else.

Almost all the courses I enrolled in (which included upper-level courses) appeared to be, at best, at a freshmen competency level. One course in the BSBE program was about instructing students how to be administrative assistants-that is, how to take notes, make flight arrangements, and fulfill other secretarial duties.

Another class required the reading of a short novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance (which is also a movie) that involved one person helping another person “find” himself. There was meaning to the story, but after reading it, we took an exam that consisted of remedial-level questions similar to, “What did John say when he found out about the game?”

My first reaction is to say, “Well, it sounds like a terribly mindless degree, and it’s online learning, so what’d you expect?”  But my second reaction is to be reminded that so many college programs, at bigger or better colleges and in more scholarly degree programs, are just as mindless.  Most young undergrads are not going to complain.  They like the low bar so they can spend time at the other kind of bar (I speak from anecdote and experience), or doing whatever it is they like doing rather than learning (and there are many options).  But because this man was paying his own cash and hadn’t much time to waste, he was able to see the scandal of it all.  You get what you pay for, and sometimes you don’t even get that.

The New York Times called it an “assault on Darwin.” The Louisiana Coalition for Science said it was an “embarrassment” and warned that it would attract “unflattering national attention.” Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State pointed out that “Louisiana taxpayers should not have their money squandered on this losing effort.” The ACLU’s Marjorie Esman threatened: “We’re known for suing school boards.”

On the other hand, it received overwhelming bipartisan support in the Louisiana legislature, with no senators opposing it and only three representatives voting no. And even some Darwinists agree with it. Self-described atheist Jason Streitfeld, writing in the American Chronicle, said it promotes “exactly what American students need: encouragement to think critically about controversial topics.”

So what’s all this fuss about? Reporter Mark Bergin explains in the current WORLD:

The Louisiana Science Education Act, which mirrors legislation receiving serious consideration in a handful of other states, protects the right of teachers and administrators “to create and foster an environment within public elementary and secondary schools that promotes critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion of scientific theories being studied including, but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.”

In other words, the bill supports a more thorough examination of controversial topics, complete with scientific explanations as to why such areas of study spark controversy. Anticipating suspicions of ulterior motives, the legislation also includes a proscription against its misuse “to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.”

Read all of Mark’s excellent article here.

Well, almost.  We’ve talked here before about listening to great university lectures through podcasts: I found free lectures and recordings from Yale, Princeton, and Oxford all through iTunes.  Just yesterday, and many of you may know of this already, a colleague told me about “Open Yale Courses,” a Yale website where you can choose either to watch or hear a full semester of an introductory Yale course.  The main page offers courses in philosophy, religious studies, astronomy, psychology, physics, political science, and English.  I’ll be spending my next month of lunches watching Professor Langdon Hammer teach Modern Poetry.  Here’s the page for the class, and here’s the course schedule.  I have little doubt that my watching will be in any way comparable to knowing the professor and being in the actual class, but it’s far better than watching bootlegged movies and YouTube drivel during my lunch break.

We recently blogged on the act of communion and how its abuse by an ignorant religion journalist might have warranted having her press pass taken away.  Here’s another communion controversy, but this one’s not about ignorance at all

In protest against student fees for religious services at the University of Central Florida, a student senator, Webster Cook, recently walked out of a campus Mass with the Eucharist.

Now, I might see how a rational man could have problems with funding the worship of a deity he might choose to ignore, even if I disagreed with him about the wisdom of ignoring that deity.  But this is ridiculous and profane.  Phi Beta Cons quotes the Catholic League: For a student to disrupt Mass by taking the Body of Christ hostage-regardless of the alleged nature of his grievance-is beyond hate speech.”  Now, in solidarity with the communion-desecrating Cook, a professor Paul Zachary Myers from the University of Minnesota has gone online to champion the cause:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? … if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some … I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare.

For the sake of our younger readers, I’ll ignore his next few sentences.

Correction: According to Phi Beta Cons, the source for this post, “Myers’s diatribe can be found at his faculty page on the university’s website.”  This is not the case, however, and so references to this supposition have been removed from the post.  HT: WMBloggers.