Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Nerd News: Hey, Let's Make a College Degree Even More Meaningless! Plus a Rant!

Check this out from Inside Higher Ed's little piece on Obama's education plans. (My emphasis in boldface.)
A speech he will give this morning to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce will mostly reinforce and expand on proposals he has already made -- such as locking in annual increases in the Pell Grant and aiming to significantly raise the proportion of American workers with college training. But senior administration officials who briefed reporters on the speech late Monday suggested that Obama would focus more than he has to date on the administration's intent to hold states and colleges more accountable for ensuring that students who enter college succeed once there.
Translation: We want equality of outcome. Geez, you know where I stand on that: you can offer equality of opportunity, but there is no way to guarantee equality of outcome in a fair and free society. (Really, reductio ad absurdum or not, the only way to guarantee it is to squash all the high achievers so we'll have a great big morass of equal mediocrity.)

(Rant beginning in 3...2...1...)

Back to the pie-eyed delusion of "everybody successful in college": how is this supposed to happen without dumbing down college to still more moronic levels? YES, I SAID IT. I shall also say that in too many ways already a college education has become a joke. (Except in the classrooms of the few, the proud, the stubborn old-school holdouts.)

And hey, who's going to hold the STUDENTS accountable for their own success or failure, eh? If one of my students fails my class, I absolutely do not think it is my fault or my problem (much less the fault of the university). Anyway, the vast majority of my students do well. I offer the same opportunities to all my students for extra help if necessary; the onus is completely on them to do something about it. In the end, success is up to the student.

Here's another idea. Some people who go to college don't finish because they can't handle it. This is the case for various reasons. And that's just the brutal honest TRUTH. Not everybody needs to go to college anyway; some folks will be better served by going to a trade school or taking some training and going to work. Or try this on for size: some people who go to college can't handle it because they've had almost no meaningful education in high school. I know I spend far too much time helping freshmen students make up deficiencies before I can even move onto the real college classroom material. (I.e., it's hopeless asking a kid to analyze and contextualize -- say -- a primary historical source if the kid -- for instance -- cannot grasp basic writing skills or has no ability to look at history except as a great big Whack-A-Mole game of "Let's Find the Oppressor.") Learn the three R's and then get back to me. Oh, and learn some work ethics too. All too often the only significant thing that students learn in high school is pompously unfounded self-esteem and the toxic idea of diva-like entitlement to everything without working for anything.

I'll tell you this too. Remember Obama's great big speech to Congress a while back? The one where he flourished around this supposedly magnificent idea about "education"? Right that, a fellow nerd/teacher and I were on the phone talking about it. The mood was despair. The phraseology: "OMG. OMG." We work hard as the teaching peons of academia, and I'll tell you this: I felt fully then as though Obama had just declared -- to great Congressional applause and pop-up standing ovations by the Nancy Pelosi-crats -- that he was going to make my job and life even more difficult. (And that's not even getting into stupid economic policy!)

In the end:
  • "Everyone in college" = lowering admissions standards.
  • "Everyone successful in college" = lowering just about every other kind of standard.
  • "Success" itself becomes meaningless. It'll simply mean "Hey, I showed up, mucked about, and collected a piece of paper. I iz a collej gradooyet!"

One more rantful thought: whenever the government gets involved in anything, that thing usually ends up getting worse. Don't even get me started on student loans or No Child Left Behind. Plus, I do NOT want ANY (MORE) GOVERNMENT EDU-CRATS breathing down the necks of nerds. As some other teacherly friends and I were just discussing last week, the whole education superstructure is a mess because most of the high muckymuck policy-pushers in it do not teach and have no pragmatic or realistic idea of what teaching IS and what the actual classroom is even like. (And NO, the classroom is NOT some laboratory for social engineering!)

Oh, oh! And this bleeding-heart social-engineering idea about how everybody should go to college. It's almost exactly like the bleeding-heart social-engineering idea about how everybody should own a home. That turned out really well, didn't it? I'm just SAYING. (Previous ranty post here.)

One last bit from the Inside Higher Ed piece to gild the lily:
The administration officials said that the president would also stress the need for states to develop and use data systems that can track the progress of students from preschool through college. Many states have systems for different pieces of their education systems, but relatively few states have integrated them into one common system and even fewer have refined them to the point that they produce useful data.
BIG BROTHER NERD IS WATCHING! Oh, for goodness sake. Of course, I am philosophically against big databases of personal information.

As for the whole general idea of "improvement" in education, I want to know "improvement according to whom" and "improvement as measured by what."

(End of rant.)

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