DISDAIN FOR KNOWLEDGE

Cognitive scientists are generally agreed that one of the most important faculties of the human brain and its associated sensory apparatus is the ability to detect patterns. It is patterns that make the world intelligible, that carry meaning, that make it possible for the past to be a guide to the future. So primordial and so powerful is this faculty, however, that it brings with it also a large capacity for error, for imputing patterns where there are none, or at least none that are meaningful.

It is with that in mind that I hesitate to claim that I have detected a pattern in some things that I have read lately. But denying that there is a pattern in these bits of published news and opinion strains my bump of skepticism. See what you think.

1. A student at the University of Iowa published an opinion piece in the campus newspaper titled "On schooling's useless lessons." The upshot was that she is in college to qualify for her chosen profession and cannot understand why she is required to take courses in subjects she deems irrelevant to her goals. Listen:

"[M]ost students aren't going to be mathematicians, historians, or chemists. So why do we have to take these classes?...

"Not only did the gen-ed classes waste my time and money, but they also hurt my GPA..Statistics and astronomy bored me, so I opted not to attend class and neglected to study for them..As it turned out, my GPA was below3.0 after my first year. I had to take summer classes to raise it..I cannot imagine what I would have done if I were not admitted [to my chosen professional course]. I would have had to change my major.

"How is this fair?"

If that doesn't break your heart, you're made of sterner stuff than I.

2. A week later an AP wire story appeared in my local newspaper, informing me that an heiress to the Wal-Mart fortune has surrendered her 2004 degree from the University of Southern California after a classmate revealed that she had done the Walton scion's homework for over three years, netting about $20,000 for her efforts.

3. Same day. New York magazine published an article that opens thus:

"This story begins, as it inevitably must, in the Old Country.

"At some point during the tenth century, a group of Jews abandoned the lush hills of Lucca, Italy, and -- at the invitation of Charlemagne -- headed for the severer climes of the Rhineland and Northern France."

The author is a frequent and, presumably, trusted contributor, and New York magazine is, so far as I know, a respectable publication. So who was responsible for fact-checking? If you haven't caught it yet, here's the problem: Charlemagne died in 814 CE. No one is expected to know that particular fact, but many generally educated persons might recall that he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor at Christmas in 800. This would make his survival into the tenth century highly unlikely on the face of it.

Two points define a line; are three sufficient to establish a trend? Let me just note that the student's intended major was journalism; that the heiress's degree was from the Annenberg School for Communication at USC; and that, obviously, the New York author is a working journalist. One, already in the business, evidently doesn't know a simple fact of history (and didn't check it out). The other two have made quite manifest, in their distinctive ways, their disdain for knowledge.

But my aim is not to disrespect journalists or the schools in which they train. The problem I am suggesting is far wider. Thus my last piece of evidence:

4. Same day. The Wikipedia, an online project to create an encyclopedia by means of contributions and editing by volunteers, irrespective of their knowledge of their subjects or ability to write coherently, has just lately begun to come to grips with the fact that some substantial proportion of the articles thus generated are substandard. They have therefore launched "Project Galatea," whose aim is to have still more self-selected volunteers impose "large-scale, sweeping stylistic improvements." Note that the improvements hoped for are stylistic, not a matter of accuracy or adequacy. In the "Philosophy" of the project, prospective stylists are told this:

"While there is no need to be an expert on the article you're working on (in fact, there are some advantages to being completely ignorant of the subject to start with), by the time you're done, you will have at least a working knowledge of the topic."

Another point, spang on my line. How worried ought I to be? How worried are you?

Here is what I wonder: Whence this notion that citizens, especially those who aspire to careers of informing the rest of us, need not bother with what once would have been considered the common body of knowledge? And where on earth did the idea arise that knowledge might actually be a hindrance?

I do not blame computers or the Internet. Well.except for one thought that gives me pause. How is it that these tools that were to make achieving our lofty goals easier have instead been commandeered to move the goal posts?

What or whom then to blame, if any? Nicholas Carr has written lately in his blog "Rough Type" about the other-worldliness of much of the literature of the World Wide Web and the simple, communal, yet transcendent virtues it is imagined to foster. He notes, too, the strong preference for the amateur over the professional. I'm inclined to see this as a particular instance of a more general phenomenon, the replacement of the adult by the adolescent as the paradigm citizen.

Adolescents already know all they need to know. They are uninterested in what may have come before them and confident that it did so for naught. They see instantly into the heart of the world's problems and believe them to be simple of solution. They value sincerity, authenticity, getting real, over experience or effort. Approved attitude trumps informed opinion with them, and does so by means of social pressure rather than by, say, demonstrated efficacy. And their sense of entitlement can sometimes border on solipsism.

More here




MORE ON THE NYC DISASTER

From top down, starting with Chancellor Klein, the Mayor has relied almost exclusively on non-educators to set policy about matters in which they have no expertise, but impose with raw and unmonitored power. They have abolished curriculum and replaced it with a single, mandated teaching style and methodology that has been discredited and despised by almost all educators, except those whose careers tend to prosper and wallets fatten by its advocacy.

The public has a stake in the demoralization of the entire public school professional staff citywide. Some people see educators' universal loathing for Chancellor Klein as nothing more than spoiled unionists griping because someone is finally standing up to them and showing them who's boss.

It is bad enough to show contempt for teachers in every way imaginable, plus more that nobody ever dreamed possible. But worse yet is the devastating damage being done to a whole generation of children, whose alleged educational gains under Bloomberg and Klein are fraudulently manufactured by their corrupt consultants and press agents.

The reign of Chancellor Klein, under union and sanity-busting Mayor Bloomberg, has formed many unholy alliances, among the most spectacular of which is Columbia University Teachers College. In the past, its admirers hailed TC as the high temple of progressivism. Throughout the twentieth century, with only minor exceptions for deviant professors who strayed from the party line, Teachers College could reliably be counted on to instill generations of new teachers and administrators with pure progressivist doctrine. In recent years, those who entered its hallowed halls were greeted by a bronzed head of John Dewey, the patron saint of Teachers College. Given its devotion to progressivist principle. Teachers College became home to critics of standardized testing and standardized instruction. With the advent of the Bloomberg/Klein era of education reform, Teachers College has abandoned almost all of its progressivist principles in exchange for power over the school system's instructional program and millions of dollars in grants and contracts.....

Teachers College, though it has been paid to help set the tone, is not wholly to blame for some of the bizarre and unprecedented antics of the current Department of Education. In the last hour since I started this essay for the New York Resident, I got two phone calls from bewildered teachers. One is a thirty-four year master teacher in Region 3 who was formally censured by the principal because he was sitting at his desk taking attendance during a ninety-minute class session. Teachers are under orders to be circulating around the room every minute. This teacher has for decades spent 6 hours after school for no extra pay, every day, communicating with parents, planning lessons and processing papers.

The second received a letter in his file reprimanding him for asking why it is required to use a stopwatch issued by the DOE to time precisely the mandated length of each lesson. Mayor Bloomberg is no more the "education mayor" than China is a "people's republic." The schools are suffering from a reign of terror and our children have been made into caged birds that can neither fly nor sing.

(Excerpt from another post by RedHog)




UK: Asbo bars London teenager from going to school: "A teenager has become the first youth in Britain to receive an anti-social behaviour order that bans him from going to school. The two-year Asbo on Gary Addy, 16, stops him from going within 50 metres of any educational premises in the east London borough of Newham unless he has prior permission from the headteacher. Police and officials from Newham council imposed the order last Thursday after staff at Eastlea community school in West Ham complained that the teenager assaulted them with eggs and water in July."

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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"

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