Entries Tagged 'Education' ↓

Patrick Henry College is known for its internships. One of our journalism students, Heather Terwilliger, scored an internship with USA TODAY. That is huge in itself, a plum opportunity and getting it was a great accomplishment for Heather. But her accomplishments on the job were so great that the paper started publishing her stories! With a byline! That almost never happens with an intern. Instead of making her fetch coffee and do the filing, the editors had her write feature stories that were being read by their 3 million readers. That’s impressive and a tribute to Heather and to her college that gave her such a good education and that boasts such gifted students. I was actually planning to blog about that, but then Heather outdid herself.

Because of her homeschool connections, Heather knew about the California court ruling and its significance in banning homeschooling before anyone else in her vast newsroom. She pitched the story to her editors. Drawing on her contacts, she wrote with staff reporter Greg Toppo the story, scooping everyone else. (You will notice some details that did not show up anywhere else.)

But this is the killer: HEATHER TERWILLIGER IS ONE OF THOSE HOMESCHOOLED KIDS FROM CALIFORNIA that the court thinks are so educationally disadvantaged!

A California appeals court has ruled that children must be educated by a state-credentialed teacher and NOT by their parents! See Homeschoolers’ setback in appeals court ruling:

“California courts have held that … parents do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children,” Justice H. Walter Croskey said in the 3-0 ruling issued on Feb. 28. “Parents have a legal duty to see to their children’s schooling under the provisions of these laws.” Parents can be criminally prosecuted for failing to comply, Croskey said.

Go to The Home School Legal Defense Association for breaking news, analysis, the chance to sign a petition, and information about what may be done. (The HSLDA and Patrick Henry College where I teach share facilities. I’ll try to monitor this and keep you posted.)

UPDATE: Read the HSLDA response and the litigation being prepared.

Young people today know hardly anything about history, literature, or Western culture. We knew that, but study proves it. Among the findings,

Among 1,200 students surveyed:

•43% knew the Civil War was fought between 1850 and 1900.

•52% could identify the theme of 1984.

•51% knew that the controversy surrounding Sen. Joseph McCarthy focused on communism.

I’m positive my students here at Patrick Henry College know all this stuff. What amuses me is the way they often draw a blank at pop cultural references. Ask them about Britney Spears, High School Musical, and similar staples of the adolescent universe, and you often just get a blank stare. They WILL, however, tell you all about Homer, Dostoevsky, and deToqueville.

Patrick Henry College, where I teach as a Literature Professor and which I administer as the Provost, stands in stark contrast to the institutions and educational methods that I have been criticizing.  We offer a classical Christian education with the highest academic standards to some of the best and the brightest young people in our nation.Once each semester, we dismiss classes for a day that is devoted to what we call a “Faith and Reason Lecture.”  A speaker, usually alternating between an outside scholar and one of the scholars on our faculty, delivers to the entire campus community a substantive academic presentation exemplifying Christian scholarship.  After the lecture, we discuss it over lunch, then break into our Christian study groups (an ongoing book study led by a faculty member) to talk about it in depth.  Then we all meet together for a panel discussion with other faculty members, and then an extensive period of Q&A from our students.Our lecture this semester was by my colleague David Aikman, an Englishman who spent 23 years as an international correspondent with “Time Magazine” and is currently our writer in residence and one of our history professors.  He spoke on the subject of a new book that will soon be released, a consideration of the “New Atheists” currently in vogue.  Here is his paper.Today I thought I’d post just a couple of tidbits, things I learned from what Dr. Aikman said. I am not even trying to do justice to the way he took apart Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. You can read that for yourself. (I’ll try to remember to post something on his book when it comes out.)

 P.S.:   I’m having trouble making paragraphs on this WordPress blog software.  So please don’t think I don’t know how to sort out my prose properly.  And if anyone knows how I can fix the problem–I’m striking out on “help”–please let me know.

Susan Jacoby wrote an op-ed piece, based on a book she is releasing, entitled The Dumbing Of America.  She decries the anti-intellectualism of America today, citing the rank ignorance about history and geography that is rampant today, as well as statistics such as 40% of Americans have never read a book in the last year.  She also discusses how our culture tends to denigrate intellectuals as “elitists,” as opposed to the down-home democratic ideal of average “folks.” What she neglects to address, though, is that when it comes to anti-intellectualism, our elites are the worst offenders!  It is precisely our intellectual elites–university professors, cutting-edge artists, culturally-in-tune authors–who are denying the efficacy of reason, insisting that truth is relative, and holding onto exploded ideas (such as Marxism and neo-Marxism) against all evidence.  Who is training the teachers and writing the curriculum that have gutted our young peoples’ education and deprived us of our knowledge base?  Who is denying that there is such thing as truth or goodness?  Who is denying the existence of beauty and purposefully making art that defies the canons of classical aesthetics?  Most common “folks” have better sense.  So I agree with the author in lamenting the dumbing down of our culture.  But until not just the “common people” but the intellectual elites who need to change their thinking.

The Washington Post has sure been publishing some good articles about today’s education debacles, which tells us that even the liberal establishment is waking up to the necessity of actually educating children, as opposed to what contemporary educational theory is doing.  Today’s edition included a feature entitled Parents Rise Up Against A New Approach to Math.  It’s about a math textbook entitled “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space.” It tackles the problem of  multiplying six times three, by having students make six marks on a piece of paper in a little box and to do that with three boxes.  Then count how many marks.  And it does away with the traditional way of adding big numbers, in which you put them into columns, add each one, and carry as needed.  Instead, students are taught to make pyramids, in which they first add up the ones, then the tens, then the hundreds, then the thousands, then put them all together.      Defenders say this method, which scorns memorizing “math facts,” teaches the concepts better.  But it makes math harder, not easier, and it is doing nothing to improve test scores.    I admit that classical education may be lagging in the math department.  The new classical schools are doing little with the Quadrivium, the other four liberal arts (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music).  The Trivium, which is being implemented to great effect (grammar, logic, and rhetoric), has to do with mastering language and what you can do with it.  The Quadrivium has to do with mathematics (yes, even in the way music was taught).    This, I think, is the new frontier for classical educators.  Yes, there is Saxon math, but it seems traditional (which is better than the contemporary), rather than classical, as such.  Does anyone have any suggestions about what a classical approach to mathematics  might look like?

You know all of that research into “learning styles,” whether a child is a visual learner or an auditory learner or whatever?  Well, we are finding that, while there is an element of truth to it, attending to such things does not seem to matter much in children actually learning more.  The key factor in learning is grasping meaning, a concept that evades any of these sensory approaches.  (While cultivation of meaning is what classical education is all about.)

More vindication of classical education, which cultivates knowledge (grammar) AND understanding (logic) AND application (rhetoric).  As opposed to various contemporary methods which, for reasons I cannot understand, fixate on only one of these dimensions of education and denigrate the others.   This article discusses the fad of   critical thinking, including the admission that educators cannot even define it!  The various approaches are incoherent,with  the most obnoxious version being “just question everything.”  More substantive scholars say that being able to think critically requires (again, see below) CONTENT.  You have to think ABOUT SOMETHING.  Whereas much of the critical thinking curriculum is all process, trying to provoke content-free thinking.   (The classical solution:  DIALECTIC, featuring questions AND answers, as in that great model of classical education, the catechism, which, properly used, helps the student answer the question, “what does this mean?”)

The notable scholar E. D. Hirsch is offering a radical new proposal:  That schools actually teach CONTENT.  Ever since Dewey, the assumption has been that schools don’t need to teach knowledge; rather, they should teach processes.   (Classical education, of course, teaches both.)   Here Hirsch shows how the efforts to teach reading, as in No Child Left Behind, are failing. Gaining comprehension in reading, according to the research he cites,  involves building upon other KNOWLEDGE of what the reading is about.  You can’t just teach comprehension as a process.

Here is someone who got through grade school, graduated from high school, graduated from college with an education degree, became a teacher, and taught in a high school for 17 years  all without knowing how to read! 

The president of the venerable William & Mary College, Gene Nichol, has been forced out of office. He represented, to me, everything that was bad about higher education today (to which my own institution, Patrick Henry College, is a laudable alternative). President Nichol was the one who yanked the cross out of the college chapel, an example of that politically-correct “tolerance” of other religions that is, in fact, intolerance of Christianity. He also allowed on campus the traveling “Sex Worker’s Art Show,” featuring prostitutes and porn stars touting their wares, an example of the academic culture’s current embrace of moral degradation.

The Board of the university is saying that those highly-public controversies were not the reasons they decided to get rid of the president, and that may be, since failure to notice what is wrong about such things is generally accompanied with other kinds of incompetence. Students are complaining about Nichol’s ouster, but alumni, to their great credit, felt ashamed of their school and doubtless exerted their influence.

Thanks to Frank Sonnek for alerting me to this piece by literary critic Stanley Fish, trying to figure out what the value is of literary study.  He begins with a fine reading of some lines from George Herbert, and he nails Herbert’s Reformation emphasis on how Christ does EVERYTHING for our salvation.

Fish became a big postmodernist theorist, but he was also a first-rate George Herbert critic.  In fact, he was, like me, an early promoter of a Reformation reading of Herbert’s spirituality, in contrast to the Roman Catholic interpretations that dominated the scholarship until then.

So Fish tosses off this brilliant little example explaining a line from Herbert.  And, in fact, his overall discussion shooting down the various claimed uses for this sort of thing (to change your life?  not really.  to make you a critical thinker?  other things can do that too.  to enrich your conversation in the culture?  or make the conversation duller.  to promote liberal thinking?  but conservatives read the same texts) is pretty much true.

But what he is no longer able to do, given his postmodernist worldview–which makes him have to explain everything in terms of a “community of discourse”–is to use classical, Aristotelian analysis, whereby some things, such as a poem and studying a poem, are good IN THEMSELVES.  Not everything HAS to be “useful” (good because it leads to other goods).   The pursuit of things good in themselves was also the hallmark of a classical, liberal arts education (as Cardinal Newman explains).