Recently in Education Category

Look, you've got to feel bad for University of California system students, who are now facing a staggering 32 percent increase in tuition (or the equivalent thereof) in the next academic year. From the NYT story:

Indeed, many of the long-term demands are beyond the reach of the Santa Cruz administrators, including the impeachment of Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system; the elimination of the Regents' positions; and an end to all student fees and student debts.

Good luck with that, kids. Like I said, you have to pity them facing that kind of tuition hike, but what is the state university system supposed to do, given that California is close to broke?

I spoke with a high school teacher friend the other day, who mentioned that one of the most frustrating aspects of his job today is getting otherwise bright kids to read.

What? I said.

"They can crack the alphabetic code," he said. "But they can't stay focused and comprehend what they've read. And if they run into something that doesn't seem right to them, they simply don't believe it. I'm not talking about differences of opinion; I'm talking about facts. They don't even form an argument against it, they just decide that it doesn't feel true to them, so it must not be."

I see this kind of thing all the time in trying to discuss politics and current events. Do you? And you teachers among the readership, do you see this kind of thing in your students? To what do you attribute it? I say postmodernism, emotivism and the fragmented media environment. But you knew I would.

A reader writes to say that his five year old came home from public school kindergarten with a flyer alerting parents that the kids are about to have a whole week of "Just Say No to Drugs" education. It shocked him that kids as young as this are being subjected to this sort of thing, and made the reader and his wife consider whether they would be better off getting their kids out of the public school environment, and homeschooling them.

He wrote me asking for homeschooling advice. I told him a couple of things from our experience. First, be realistic. Homeschooling is not for everybody, and it's no panacea. You have to have a certain amount of idealism to get through the tough parts, but understand that there probably will be tough parts. Not everybody is ideally suited to be a teacher, nor are all kids suited to home learning. If you can go into it without illusions, you'll do better.

Second, I said, by far the greater burden of homeschooling will fall on your wife, if you're like most families. As a husband, that means you have to play a crucial support role. If your wife is busy homeschooling, she's not going to be able to cook and clean like she otherwise would. You can step in there by doing this work yourself, hiring a housekeeper to come in once or twice a week, and so forth. Also, you can pick up some of the homeschooling tasks if you can. Furthermore, you'll need to be there to support your wife emotionally when she has a bad day with the kids (and she will). If you think of homeschooling as something your wife does with the kids, it won't succeed.

Those were two things off the top of my head. For you who are now homeschooling, or who once homeschooled but no longer do, what would you advise this reader? Don't chastise or be argumentative here; I mean for this to be a helpful post to him and to all readers who are considering homeschooling, or who might be struggling with it and need some tips.

Did you realize that in the last generation, there has been a startling drop-off -- a near-collapse, actually -- in the number of college humanities majors? Prof. William Chace, writing in The American Scholar, takes on the problem from the English Department:

What are the causes for this decline? There are several, but at the root is the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself. What departments have done instead is dismember the curriculum, drift away from the notion that historical chronology is important, and substitute for the books themselves a scattered array of secondary considerations (identity studies, abstruse theory, sexuality, film and popular culture). In so doing, they have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books.

Chace tells a long, fascinating and depressing story of how broader social and economic changes have marginalized the humanities in colleges. But he focuses his frustration on how English departments have done so much harm to themselves, by turning the study of the beauty and the wisdom of literature and language into a bloodless, clinical dissection of this or that Theory. Chace, who is a veteran professor of literature, says there is no center or coherence to teaching English literature nowadays, and therefore a dissipated sense that its study is important. The withering and decay of the profession can no longer be hidden, he writes:

Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves--the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or "acting assistant professors." These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.'s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn't here anymore; our technology is obsolete.

Discuss.

By the way, I'm hearing that schools of journalism are thriving these days. I cannot figure out why. The job market is terrible, and is not going to get any better in the foreseeable future. Veterans are trying to leave before they're driven out by circumstances. Far more than what's happened to English departments, I think, this is an externally driven matter for journalists (though we are aware that we have made mistakes that hurt ourselves too). It is often pointed out to us journalists that the public is consuming more journalism than ever before. The problem is not a lack of interest in what we do; there is far, far more interest in that than in what English professors do. No, the problem is that because of the Internet, there is no longer a way to pay for what we do, and no longer a way to compel people who consume our products to pay us for what we do. I bring this up here not to start another discussion about the decline of journalism -- really, I'd rather hear from English students and professors, and also teachers and students in the humanities about their situations. I only bring it up to say that I would actively discourage any college student from majoring in journalism, unless he or she couldn't imagine doing anything else, and had a clear idea of how hard their professional lives were going to be for an indefinite period. If I had college-age children, unless they were on scholarship and were intensely passionate about journalism, I would throw myself in front of them to keep them out of journalism school. It's not that I don't love journalism; it's not that at all. It's what I do, it's all I've done, and it's what I love more than almost anything. Rather, my fear is that my child would rack up indebtedness and waste his college years studying something that he won't be able to support himself doing.

Anyway, the decline of English and the humanities in university. Discuss.

Bill O'Reilly did a segment last night (embedded below the jump) about a short film supposedly being shown in some California schools. It's a cartoon about a cross-dressing boy who has fun wearing his mom's bikini, part of a package of gay-friendly films being sent out to California schools that request them. Youth in Motion, the San Francisco gay activist group distributing the films, claims that over 250 schools have requested their materials; here's the map showing the schools; without naming the schools, there's no way to verify this.

Here, from the group's own website, is its description of the "Bikini" film featured on O'Reilly (you can see part of the film if you go below the jump and watch the segment):

Bikini Lasse Persson 2005 7 min. Sweden

An animated musical, Bikini stars a young boy, dolled up in his mother's yellow swimsuit, who is afraid to come out of the locker room. With the encouragement of a pair of happy twins he emerges, but their lady friend would rather receive all the attention herself.

Set to the classic 1960 song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini," this short offers an entertaining take on finding the courage and acceptance to express one's gender with honesty and style.

That's one of several short films included in this unit sent to schools. You're also encouraged to download the "curriculum guide," which includes passages like this:

Gender Expression

Watch: Screen the short films eddie and Tomboy and pose the accompanying discussion questions (see page 12).

Discuss: Revisit the gender chart you created earlier. Do you need to revise the placement of certain terms or images? Is the class still able to define a "real man" and a "real woman?" Is there a growing gray area between these two genders?

Engage: Ask students to create a circle map or draw a picture of a perfectly gendered person--the ideal man or the ideal woman. Next, ask them to create a circle map or draw a picture of themselves (or use magazine images again to create a collage for each).

Ask students to consider the different ways they express their gender: In what ways do they conform to societal expectations for their gender? In what ways do they deviate from these norms? How does this challenge or change their definitions of male and
female, man and woman?

The curriculum guide that accompanies this stuff makes it clear that under California law, not only does a school not have to inform parents if it intends to show this material to schoolchildren, but parents are not allowed to remove their children from the classroom. Why? Because this is not intended as sex education (which does retain an opt-out provision), but "anti-bias training."

So: your California middle-schooler is shown the cute Swedish cartoon about a cross-dressing boy, and is asked in his classroom to consider ways he expresses his gender, and you, Mom and Dad, have no say in it. That's the law.

Where are we going with this? Why are we doing this? I agree with Bill O'Reilly, who said he wishes no transgender person any harm, and anyone who tries to harrass a transgender person should be strongly dealt with. But come on! You can teach basic respect and civility without getting into all of this advocacy. This is about imposing a radical cultural agenda on captive schoolchildren, and disempowering parents who might object. It is a hostile act toward traditional religious people and social conservatives, and ought to be seen as such -- just as a public school curriculum teaching gay kids that something is wrong with them should be out of bounds. Why do we have to bring the culture wars into public schools like this? No wonder people homeschool, or want out of public schools. Or want to leave California.