J. M. Anderson is author of The Skinny on Teaching: What You Don't Learn in Graduate School.
Like many commentators and candidates, Fareed Zakaria, the eloquent host of CNN’s GPS, has turned out a new book on higher education. In Defense of a Liberal Education laments that today’s students are pressured into thinking of college as a time to prepare for the global marketplace, discouraged from dreaming big, and told to acquire […]
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College is becoming the new high school–and in many respects, already is. Colleges and universities are remediating more and more students in basic skills, and increasingly teaching them content material that they should have learned in high school. The proliferation of dual-credit/dual-enrollment courses has helped to accelerate this trend while further blurring the distinction between […]
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Toward the end of Phaedrus–Plato’s masterful dialogue on rhetoric and erotic love–Socrates introduces an interesting argument with implications for us centuries later. The argument is that the written word promotes superficial understanding because reading erodes discussion and the habit of discourse. People will come to believe they know much, but “for the most part they […]
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By J.M. Anderson MOOCs are all the rage. Not a day goes by without someone extolling how they will transform and rescue higher education: they will democratize it; they will revolutionize it; they will make it more affordable. In an essay here yesterday, Richard Vedder outlined their promise of positive impact. At the same time, […]
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< I argued yesterday that the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) is both necessary and a good thing–but I must add that it just can’t work now. It has the potential to transform American K-12 education, but the plain fact is that it is destined to fail because current teacher education programs neither prepare […]
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It’s no secret that most high school graduates are unprepared for college. Every year, 1.7 million first-year college students are enrolled in remedial classes at a cost of about $3 billion annually, the Associated Press recently reported. Scores on the 2011 ACT college entrance exam showed that only 1 in 4 high school graduates […]
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We have entered a new digital era that appears to have made the traditional trappings of higher education–e.g., fixed curricula, going to lectures, even physically attending a college or university–about as necessary to getting a college degree as the telegraph is for sending messages. Out with hierarchy, structure, and the top-down approach to higher education. […]
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In his recent book, Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, Andrew Rosen writes: “It’s rare for anyone to lay out a clear case as to exactly what the problem is with private-sector education.” Ok, here it is. The problem is not, as Rosen says, that the pairing of the words for-profit and education makes […]
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In an essay in the Wall Street Journal plugging his new book “Coming Apart” (which I haven’t read yet), Charles Murray writes about a new American divide: “We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the […]
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As a dean at a rural community college in Illinois, I recently served as a judge for a history fair for seventh and eighth graders at a local school–an assignment that involved a real surprise. When the Social Studies teacher gave me the grading rubric, I saw only three categories: Superior, Excellent, and Good. I […]
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http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/12/the_many_problems_of_online_ed.html
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Several years ago Harper’s Magazine ran two articles on “The Uses of Liberal Education.” One article, subtitled “As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor,” was written by Earl Shorris, and describes how poor and underprivileged members of our society were eager to study the great books and benefited from them. He devised a […]
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For yet another glimpse of what’s wrong with higher education, read “Teaching Them How To Think,” the story of George Plopper, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. After attending a conference on teaching and learning in 2004, Plopper had an epiphany of sorts, and now uses Bloom’s Taxonomy to assess […]
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In my last essay here, “This Is A Bold Plan For Higher Ed?”, I commented in passing that most books on higher education these days – including Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education? – fail to address the real crisis in higher education: poor teaching. That prompted Ms. Dreifus to ask if I had […]
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Mark C. Taylor’s Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf) is neither as bold nor as innovative as he would like us to believe. What purports “to begin a national conversation about transforming our institutions of higher learning” merely continues the postmodern assault on higher learning that began in […]
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Dear Assistant Professor: Congratulations on your new job! Whether you’re a visiting professor or on the tenure-track, consider yourself among of the lucky. As someone who ran the academic treadmill for eight years—I taught at a community college, at two four-year liberal arts colleges, and at a state university until I landed a permanent position […]
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In 1977 the great mathematician and teacher Morris Kline published an indictment of academe in a book aptly called Why the Professor Can’t Teach. Kline not only blamed “the overemphasis on research” as the “prime culprit” for the poor quality of undergraduate education, he also blamed professors—especially tenured professors—for ignoring their “moral obligations to students” […]
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In his recent essay, “Why the Great Books Aren’t the Answer,” Patrick Deneen is correct about many things. He is correct to criticize conservative supporters of great books like Allan Bloom and William Bennett who see them as a throwback to the “good old days” of liberal education. He is correct to point out the […]
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