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.

The Economist has a great story about successful, private, for-profit (!) schools run in, of all places, Sweden.  Get out of town!  It all started in 1994, when they’d been without sun for too long, and went nuts.  Now, as long as you meet “basic standards,” you can “open a new school and take in children at the state’s expense.”  The thing is, the city must pay the school managers whatever they would have spent on the school themselves, which comes to around $10,000 per year.

Children must be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis-there must be no religious requirements or entrance exams. Nothing extra can be charged for, but making a profit is fine.

The article highlights Kunskapsporten (which means “Knowledge Portal”), one firm who runs several schools for profit, and in a rather amazing and shocking turn of events, they want to keep their customers and so they do everything they can to keep quality high, while also being innovative.

Youngsters spend 15 minutes each week with a tutor, reviewing the past week’s progress and agreeing on goals and a timetable for the next one. This will include classes and lectures, but also a great deal of independent or small-group study. The Kunskapsporten allows each student to work at his own level, and spend less or more time on each subject, depending on his strengths and weakness. Each subject is divided into 35 steps. Students who reach step 25 graduate with a pass; those who make it to step 30 or 35 gain, respectively, a merit or distinction.

The other ideas are just as interesting.  Wake up, America.  Destroy the unions.  Go Sweden!

Vance Fried, a professor of management at Oklahoma State University, has applied an interesting idea to the standard model of college.  He essentially tried to create a theoretical model of a college aimed at the “value” customer, the kind of student who wants a high-quality product at a reasonable (but not cheap) price.  As an example, Fried says this student would be more likely to buy a 22K Toyota than either a 10K Chevy or a 105K Mercedes - because the Toyota is the smartest buy for the money.  He called his theoretical college the ”College of Entrepreneurial Leadership & Society (CELS).”  Not a very attractive name, but he’s a management professor, not a creative writing professor.  

CELS will offer a broad curriculum that provides students with a strong liberal education, appropriate technical skill for entry level+1 jobs, potential to be general manager of an organization in their chosen profession early in their career, plus foundational skills and knowledge for life outside of work. Majors will be offered in Behavioral Science, Business, Communication Arts, Education, Engineering Science, Information Technology, Letters & Civilization (interdisciplinary humanities), Public Affairs and Science & Technology.

Fried explains that CELS would cost ”under $8,000 per student.”  This is per year.  He then explains that his college doesn’t cut corners: “[A] laptop is included in tuition, the Division III football stadium has a Jumbotron, etc.”  This is all very fascinating, and Friend suggests that he designed his theoretical college using a few common sense ideas, including getting rid of highly specialized and fragmented majors: “Intellectually fragmented arts and science majors and highly specialized professional majors are not appropriate for an undergraduate education.”  Sounds very classical.  Fried’s model also sounds like a common sense university that would give students, their parents, and the world what it needs.  Its existence doesn’t eliminate graduate schools elsewhere, where CELS graduates can get more specialized educations in language, law, medicine, literature, theology, etc.  I love it.  Let’s do this now.

Oh, we talk too much about the politicization of the modern university and how all the professors are nutballs who believe and teach all kinds of hog tripe.  As with anything else in the world, it’s not such a black and white issue.  Some really terrific professors believe some really terrible things.  Some really terrible professors believe some really terrific things.  And so on.  This story in the Times does suggest, though, that the stereotypical radical leftist professor is dying out in higher education.  Or if not dying, at least retiring, just like Boomers everywhere.

“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.” Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty.

This would only be a good thing, ideologically speaking, if the Replacement Professors were more balanced, more moderate on political issues, less willing to toe the leftist line.  And they seem to be that way.

“Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” [two researchers] wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third.  When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger.

So, hey.  There’s something good coming from the giant swell of retiring Boomers. 

We pick on J.K. Rowling a lot here, or at least we have in the past.  Not for anything she’s done, of course, but instead to rib her readers for their passion, insisting as they do that her books are, like, so readable.  Which they are, I imagine.  Anyhow, Rowling delivered the commencement address at Harvard University a few weeks ago, and she had some pretty terrific things to say in it.  Take this excerpt:

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Now, that’s an author I can like.

Phi Beta Cons, in a post about this article, reminds us of the virtues wrought in a soul by spending time with the great works of Western Civilization.  The article compares Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Frederick Douglass, and how their experiences reading the great works of the West was vital to their discovering a better way of life.  One, from Muslim Africa.  Another, up from slavery.

[F]reedom does not float on the ether, but is conveyed through cultural forms. Neither [Hirsi Ali nor Douglass] read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Neither was inspired by abstract ideals of freedom and equality but rather through the concrete embodiment of these ideals in literature.

The post, and the article are worth reading.

There are two kinds of moms.  The kinds who put their kids in daycare, and the kinds who don’t.  The former group is subdivided into those who work and those who play.  The latter group consists of women who work at home or who have family to tend to the babies.  In my experience, women only hang out with other women who share their proclivities for, or against, daycare.  Women on one side of the line typically have strong feelings about women on the other side of the line.  At least that’s my experience.

My wife was a nanny for several years, and then worked at a daycare for a year.  The daycare was the most exhausting job she’s ever had.  All I could think was: you get to wear shorts and tennis shoes all day long, you get to develop real relationships with children, you get to be outside much of the time, and so on.  All she said in reply was: I spend my day cleaning snot and human waste from objects and people, including myself; I work with colleagues who are irrational, demanding, exhausted, and confused (the babies and the staff); and I spend much of my energy wondering how much these children would be better served by care from a member of their own families, including their parents.  And as for me, after working in the nursery during Sunday school and church for a few Sundays, I think I’ll keep my day job.

In Standardized Childhood sociologist Bruce Fuller describes how in the last 40 years, increasingly desperate working parents have turned to formal institutions to care for the youngest of children-in 1970 about 25 percent of 4-year-olds were in preschool; by 2000 more than 60 percent were. He describes America as having a “ragged non-system of child care” with the most recent statistics showing there are 113,000 nonprofit preschools across the country “situated in YWCAs, church basements, even licensed homes where women take in small gaggles of children.”

Over the decades, policy debates have raged and quieted over the need for and the benefits of universal preschool. (We’re currently in a quiet period.) But no one has resolved the tension between parents’ desire for day care that is high-quality and low-cost. Low-cost means low pay for the workers, which means high turnover, which means lower quality.

Daycare is a tender, complicated issue, because it touches on issues of gender roles, parenting roles, economic abilities, and ultimately the formation of the character and minds and abilities of our children.  So it won’t surprise me if some of your comments are full of invective.