Once Upon a College: More for the college-is-in-trouble files

Sunday, April 29, 2012

More for the college-is-in-trouble files

Here's yet another article about the current difficulties in higher education.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-imperiled-promise-of-college.html?hp

What I don't yet understand is, with the particular dynamic described, why aren't more students applying to technical and scientific degree programs? Is it just math anxiety? Or something deeper.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Given the state of public education in America today, fewer students are prepared for academia. I see the results of this phenomena in my classes each semester. The first few weeks of the new semester is spent bringing students up to speed on how to think, how to write, and how to make logical arguments. I think it is far more than simple math anxiety. I think it is an entire generation, unprepared for the rigors of higher education.; May 3, 2012 at 11:08 AM

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What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Sunday, April 29, 2012

More for the college-is-in-trouble files

1 comment:

What this is about

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