Sunday, February 19, 2006

Higher Learning, a Tutorial

Quick quiz: Is the cost of a college education worth it? (No.) Is there an alternative? (Yes.)

Let's say that you're the parent of a high-school senior who has finally sent off all her college applications. (Feb. 1 is about the last deadline.) The fog of stress has lifted, and a sense of normalcy has returned to family dinners. Now it's time to check your savings account. If your daughter or son is accepted at one of the 10 most expensive schools in the country--George Washington University, say, or Kenyon College--then your tuition bill will be more than $33,000, a figure that doesn't include room, board, books and fees, which can total about $12,000 more a year. If little Madison is bound for the University of Wisconsin at Madison, you'll fare better, but even state-college tuition can be rough: The University of Massachusetts, for example, costs about $14,000 a year, including room and board, if you're a state resident and much more if you're not.

There are federal loans and grants, of course. And private schools often provide financial aid to half of their students, a kind of capitalism/socialism hybrid according to which the families with money subsidize those without (the Swedes like this sort of thing). But even so, higher education has to be considered one of America's greatest market failures: absurdly expensive, with little price competition, tuitions increasing ahead of inflation and no good gauge to measure quality. After all, Cornell might be worth $30,000 a year, but is La Verne University, in La Verne, Calif., worth $22,800, not counting room and board?

If any industry is crying out for new models--for a little Yankee ingenuity--it's higher ed. Other models do, of course, exist. They are cheaper, more efficient, lower-frills, but none of them seems likely to work in the U.S. A brief survey of these competing versions suggests that Brown, Vanderbilt and Ohio State have little to worry about. Take the "Wikiversity" (please). It's a movement spun off Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia whose software allows users to build, maintain and edit new entries. There are now Wikipedia entries for everything from Luke Skywalker to the Gospel According to Luke--over 950,000 entries in English, according to the site, with more than one million more in languages like French and German. True to the open-source movement, the Wikiversity is a never-ending, user-generated online compendium of syllabi, primary sources and even courses taught by volunteer faculty.

The Wikiversity will sound familiar to anyone who remembers the "open university" movement of the 1960s, which emphasized open admissions and distance learning, just as the Wikiversity does. But whereas Britain's Open University, for example, has no admission requirements, it does seek out talented, well-trained faculty, which it hires and pays. Very few courses have been posted so far at Wikiversity, but the early signs are not encouraging: The "head" of creative writing is a 23-year-old whose own poems contain lines like: "Desire is an acid soaked wand."

At first glance, the Wikiversity looks similar to the online universities that already exist, like the University of Phoenix. Founded in 1976, Phoenix bills itself as "the largest private university in the United States." Phoenix, which is for-profit, has dozens of campuses, but the majority of its 315,000 students learn by computer. There is something to be said for this model. It's cheap: The Philadelphia campus charges $10,800 for a full-year online course load. The many campuses and online options do serve working men and women, parents and others who can't carve out time to go back to school in the traditional sense. And the online student is not distracted by fraternity initiates wearing silly beanies, freshman sex ed, sensitivity training or weekend kegstands.

But for such an education to be worth the money, the professors have to be good, and with a faculty of many thousands, most of whom never meet each other, quality control must be quite the challenge. I might hire a secretary with an online degree, but I don't want my nurse to have received her master's over the Internet.

So if you conclude that the best learning is done face-to-face, and that some subjects--foreign languages, laboratory science, physical therapy--can't be taught without human contact, then are we condemned to $30,000 tuitions? Not necessarily; you have a few other options. If you're willing to forgo intercollegiate sports, fancy dorms and the senior class dance, you could attend any number of European state-funded universities that rival ours in intellectual quality and cost far less. And hey, if you're really willing to scale down on certain frills of college social life, remember that the Roman Catholic Church will happily pay for the education of seminary students headed for the priesthood.

But I have a better solution, one that's even more radical but allows you to stay in your American suburb, work within the old-fashioned American free market and avoid religious vows. How about banding together with some other students to hire tutors? There are thousands of under-employed Ph.D.s in America who could be paid to offer college-level courses in your living room. If 10 students banded together and put up $10,000 each--students who, say, couldn't care less about football, don't need a Women's Center and have no urge to join Delta Delta Delta--they could hire two high-end intellectuals, pay them $50,000 each and get personal instruction.

The learning might well be more intense than the usual lazy college classroom, the demands more concentrated, the instruction more neatly tailored to the abilities and needs of each student. Many a doctorate-owner has overlapping areas of expertise. Tutor A could teach, for instance, religion, history and politics in the mornings, while Tutor B could teach law, literature and grammar in the afternoons. Actual essay tests would be possible with such a small group; papers too: No longer would the teacher feel the need to avoid writing requirements lest he be stuck, for hours on end, having to read the bad student prose of, say, a huge survey course.

For research, students could use the public library or buy short-term passes to university research libraries. For fun, the class could read novels, play pickup basketball at the public park or, on snowy days, watch cable TV--the Learning Channel, of course. Speaking of which, my cable costs $40 a month, a lot cheaper than what most colleges charge their captive dorm residents--yet another reason to abjure the overpriced American university.

Americans like their churches big, their servings of Coke big, their universities big. But in schooling, big has become unbearably expensive. We may as well try returning to the small: a teacher, some students, some books. Such an arrangement used to be reserved for the wealthy aristocracy in ancient Greece or Enlightenment France, but now it would actually result in a much lower tuition bill for the middle-class American family. As a postmodern Marxist tutor might be the first to tell you, you have nothing to lose but your debt, and you have a world to win.

Source






CALIFORNIA SCHOOLS TO BECOME HOMOSEXUAL INDOCTRINATION CAMPS

(AB 606 is a draft law presently before the California legislature)

It's no surprise that liberals in the California legislature are continuing their efforts this year to convert our public schools into indoctrination camps where young, impressionable minds are manipulated to fit nicely into the liberal mold. Our schools have ceased to teach children HOW to think and instead teach them WHAT to think.

It is becoming increasingly more difficult for parents, especially conservative, religious parents, to safeguard the hearts and minds of their children enrolled in the public school system. Young children are being told that they should embrace thoughts and ideas that directly conflict with what they are taught in the home. Public schools are no longer partnering with parents in the goal of teaching children concrete academics. Instead, they are becoming institutions that generally consider parents as the adversary. Conservative parents stand in the way of children becoming leftist soldiers, a new generation of activists who can carry the banner of ultra-liberal causes.

AB 606 (D-Levine, Van Nuys) is the most recent and most outrageous example of the liberal agenda for our public school children. AB 606 was amended in late January to require broad-sweeping changes to indoctrinate school children concerning homosexual, bisexuality and transsexuality. As amended, it would require California school districts to take specified actions to increase awareness and prevent incidences of discrimination and harassment based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender. It would also encourage curriculum read by young school children to contain information on accepting and embracing these various forms of sexuality. If a school district fails to comply with the provisions in AB 606, the state superintendent has carte blanche discretion to withhold state-funding from that school district. Although the stated goal of AB 606 is to prevent "violence," the real goal is to teach children to accept and celebrate different versions of sexuality.

In order for you to understand exactly how disastrous AB 606 really is, you need to know a little background information. AB 606 builds on AB 537, the California Student Safety and Violence Prevention Act of 2000 (SSVPA). AB 537 added two new forms of discrimination (actual or perceived sexual orientation and actual or perceived gender) to the list of discrimination prohibited in California's public schools. In the spring of 2000, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin established the AB 537 Advisory Task Force to identify, research, and recommend guidelines for implementing the SSVPA. The goal was to ensure that "AB 537 did not become another law that sat on a bookshelf."

AB 606 is an effort to codify (make mandatory) some of the more outrageous AB 537 Task Force recommendations. The AB 537 Task Force recommended that "exemplary educational resources" be used to "eliminate discrimination, harassment, and hate-motivated violence based on actual or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity." The AB 537 Task Force recommended that resources be used to "create positive, grade-appropriate visual images that include all sexual orientations and gender identities for use in school common areas throughout the school year."

The Task Force also recommended that public schools "acknowledge lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender historical figures and related events, concepts, and issues in the revisions of content standards and curriculum frameworks, when appropriate." Additionally, it recommended that public schools "identify and expand the available lesbian, gay, bisesxual, and transgender resources for school library materials."

These specific goals are satisfied by AB 606. AB 606 would repeal current provisions in the law that keep curriculum from being forced on school districts in order to advance SSVPA objectives. In other words, AB 606 would mandate that curriculum and classroom time be used to teach children to embrace homosexuality, bisexuality and transsexuality. While AB 606 does not spell-out that pro-homosexual curriculum will be forced on young school children (and supporters of AB 606 would never acknowledge this), because AB 606 removes the protections against pro-homosexual content in curriculum, this will be the result.

Before we can fully understand what is intended by AB 606, it is necessary to look at the AB 537 Advisory Task Force recommendations. Because the task force recommends "positive," pro-homosexual "visual images" and recommends that pro-homosexual "concepts and issues" be included in curriculum for young school children, that is exactly what will happen if AB 606 passes. And don't forget - the state superintendent can withhold money from a school district if he determines they are violating the provisions in AB 606. One of the recommendations that could be made by the superintendent for a school district to be compliant is for them to integrate pro-homosexual curricula.

AB 606 doesn't seem that extreme until you read the task force recommendations. When taken by itself, it is difficult to understand the full extent of AB 606's goals. But the task force recommendations are loud and clear. AB 606 would likely lead to all public schools being required to do what San Leandro High School has done. At San Leandro High School, a rainbow-flag poster, with pink triangles and other symbols of homosexual pride, and containing a pro-homosexual message, has been ordered to be posted in all classrooms. Five teachers have protested, based on their religious convictions. This has resulted in a standoff between these teachers and the school administration.

Pushing homosexual indoctrination on young children is being packaged and sold in the name of "preventing violence." No one wants incidences of violence to occur on school campus. Violence is never acceptable on public school grounds. AB 606, however, goes beyond addressing violence on school campus. If the goal were simply to prevent violence, legislation could be enacted to ensure that public school administrators promptly address all incidences of violence when they occur, regardless of what they are about. AB 606 is not about safe schools, it's about molding and shaping the minds of young children to accept various forms of sexuality regardless of what their parents or religious beliefs tell them.

Far-left activists want to push parents out of the equation and seize classroom time so that they have unrestrained access to young children. If AB 606 becomes law, it's only a matter of time before it violates parental rights and infringes upon both parents' and students' religious convictions.

Source





'Pappy' Shot Down by Campus Ignoramuses

It's well known that college students today aren't as educated in our nation's history as they should be, but it's still hard to grasp the mind-bending political correctness just displayed by the University of Washington's student senate at its campus in Seattle. The issue before the Senate this month was a proposed memorial to World War II combat pilot Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, a 1933 engineering graduate of the university, who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his service commanding the famed "Black Sheep" squadron in the Pacific.

The student senate rejected the memorial because "a Marine" is not "an example of the sort of person UW wants to produce." Digging themselves in deeper, the student opponents of the memorial indicated: "We don't need to honor any more rich white males." Other opponents compared Boyington's actions during World War II with murder.

"I am absolutely bewildered that the Student Senate voted down the resolution," Brent Ludeman, the president of the UW College Republicans, told me. He noted that despite the deficiencies of the UW History Department, the complete ignorance of Boyington's history and reputation by the student body was hard to fathom. After all, "Black Sheep Squadron," a 1970s television show portraying Colonel Boyington's heroism as a pilot and Japanese prisoner of war, still airs frequently on the History Channel. Apparently, though, it's an unusual UW student who'd be willing to learn any U.S. history even if it's spoon-fed to him by TV.

As for the sin of honoring a rich white male, Mr. Ludeman points out that Boyington (who died in 1988) was neither rich nor white. He happened to be a Sioux Indian, who wound up raising his three children as a single parent. "Colonel Boyington is luckily not around to see how ignorant students at his alma mater can be today," says Kirby Wilbur, a morning talk show host at Seattle's KVI Radio. Perhaps the trustees and alumni of the school will now help educate them.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

***************************

No comments: