learn

Three Things Colleges Don’t Want Us to Know

Universities are in the knowledge business, and the creation and dissemination of it is at the very core of what colleges do. Yet some forms of knowledge about higher education itself are either unknown, or hidden from the public. Why? Release of the information would prove embarrassing and possibly even costly to the school. 1. […]

Simone Weil and the Condition of Schooling Today

“We can only lean on what offers resistance.” So writes the historian Oswald Spengler in The Hour of Decision (1934). Seven years later, Simone Weil incorporated this principle in her declaration that the key to academic studies is an undivided focus on each particular subject at hand, with no concessions to the student’s aptitude or preferences. Weil’s […]

Student Apathy – Public Enemy Number One

Two More Reasons Why College Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be

George Leef so thoroughly dismantled Help Wanted Thursday and Friday that there’s not much for me to do but poke around the rubble. Let me take up two collateral points that are too little discussed. First, the assumption that a college degree means that the student has learned much of anything, let alone how to […]