Linky Friday: Education
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”
– T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Linky Friday: Education
[Ed1] Elite-College Admissions Are Broken: The racial-discrimination lawsuit against Harvard, which goes to trial this week, raises questions about far more than affirmative action.
[Ed2] Study: Kids’ health outcomes have more to do with parents’ level of education than income
[Ed3] Laying blame after the fact: Ex-Newtown officials defend handling of shooter’s education.
[Ed4] More Money, More Problems: For-Profit Postsecondary Education M&A Poised For Quiet Comeback .
[Ed5] Important distinction between the two: How to Stop Delegating and Start Teaching.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iqxJK6gSlE&w=560&h=315]
[Ed6] “Higher” education: No retrial for ‘sex on plane’ teacher Eleanor Wilson.
[Ed7] You would think, at least: Teacher banned for life after marrying 13-year-old girl .
[Ed8] Interesting perspective: Six Artists Working as Teachers Share the Lessons They’ve Learned.
[Ed9] Creative: How a Teacher in Rural Oklahoma Started a Science-Fair Dynasty.
[Ed10] Familiar story, this time in Canada: Ontario school board accused of pressuring teachers not to teach ‘racist’ To Kill a Mockingbird.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DCpwTH4dY0&w=560&h=315]
[Ed11] Somewhat of a moot point, but here it is anyway: Should Brett Kavanaugh be stopped from teaching at Harvard Law School?
[Ed12] Meanwhile, labor trouble brewing for Scotland: Union urges teachers to turn down ‘divisive’ pay offer.
[Ed13] Short Answer? It’s complicated: Why are teachers in Europe paid so much better than those in the United States?
[Ed14] The “Talk” but with more boundaries: The New Birds and Bees: Teaching Kids About Boundaries and Consent .
[Ed15] Old Concept, but renewed interest: Teaching to the student, not the test.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7VTDTOVCa0&w=560&h=315]
Ed13: I am always dissatisfied by these kinds of articles because it is a worthy subject and I am not left with much information. You get a sentence on how Europe’s social welfare state considers education a right but not anything on whether Americans consider education to be a right. We don’t explore how much America’s general anti-intellectual bent hurts teacher pay or not, etc.Report
Also, the UK considers healthcare a right, and yet the NHS frequently has labour disputes over pay and conditions. Declaring something a right just means you want the government to give it to you, it doesn’t mean you’re willing to pay the taxes necessarily to fund it properly.Report
[Ed1] I am prepared to believe that a process designed to keep Jews out of Harvard is now keeping Asians out. I’ve read that Harvard’s objection to Jews was that they didn’t enhance the prestige of the institution enough. They became doctors, lawyers, and dentists and settled down to a nice comfortable existence outside the public eye. As if that’s a problem.
Also I endorse the idea that we’ve become too obsessed with the “name” schools.Report
I agree about the ‘name’ schools. The very fact that people know what HYPS means is an indication that name has become a bit too important.
This is not to say that institutional reputation is not for nothing, but when your ‘name’ is that important, it becomes easy to let quality slide because you remain buoyed by the name. People stop looking hard at the quality of the end product. And it’s unlikely HYPS school would ever allow itself to become a bottom tier school, the possibility of just being a mediocre school is real, and it would take a long time for people to really notice.Report
And the fact that the general public doesn’t really think of Harvard as a private school the way we do say, Bob Jones University is important.
Everyone just accepts that Harvard is essentially the gateway through which all our elite passes, everyone from corporate heads to government officials.
So the selection criteria for this private university serves as a proxy for “Who Gets To Run America”.Report
There’s a prevailing sense, and I’ve written on this myself elsewhere, but the college transcript has fallen prey to CV-itis, that is like the resume just has to check of certain boxes without telling you anything about the quality of the actual candidate. The gatekeeper/proxy analogy is a good one; it’s just something you do to get into certain circles more so than the education involved.Report
That TH White quote above has long been one of my personal mottoes (in the aspirational, not braggadocio sense of such).
<3.Report
[Ed1] I’ll voice my continuing dissent from the notion that Harvard or any other elite school is engaged in “affirmative action,” in the sense of remedying historic racial discrimination. Public universities were pretty much precluded from doing so in Bakke. Harvard and the other private colleges can do what they want as far as I’m concerned, but if they wanted to do something called affirmative action, they would need to take into consideration wealth and community poverty levels and not count foreign students in this mission.Report
If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR seems relevant here (and to our discussion of lotto winnings elsewhere) – a long and discursive essay/review about Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas.Report
To be honest, I’m not convinced that elite university admissions are the best point in society to do justice; I just think they should not receive unearned merit. If I were up to me, I would tax them like as the same as a profit-making petro-chemical company, and let the government spend it on public goods. I’m open to similar treatment for hospitals, huge philanthropies, mega churches operating coffee shops and movie theatres, and charter schools, etc.Report
The incoming freshmen who *aren’t* rich (workstudy students I get to know) at this particular elite-ish institution are regularly shocked by the existence of and then by the size of elite college endowments. I start them with ours (bad enough) and then move on to HYPS and their like.Report
I think years ago Yglesias or somebody in the Vox set argued that with wealthy elites really wanted to give a lot of money to education where it is needed, they should give money to community colleges and other low-level higher educational institutions rather than the elite universities they came from. The point was that most of the students who tend these elite institutions are affluent and the institutions are very wealthy themselves. The lower status institutions need the money and so do their students though.Report
Eh, it’s like anything else. It’s not about “philanthropy”. It’s about maintaining tribal advantages.
(“Privilege” was what we called it until it got turned against us.)Report
Yes, we all know its about maintaining tribal/class advantages. Thats why wealthy donors give to high status schools that mainly have an affluent student body and job recruiters that go there. Its why Maribou posted the above link about why wealthy people that want to do good should really be class traitors.Report
Oh, I wouldn’t use the term “class”. You might be able to change your class, after all. (My grandparents were what we used to call “working class” back when we had one and my mom was solidly “middle class” and I think that Maribou and I have achieved some variant of “upper middle class”.)
I very much think that it’d be possible to be philanthropic in such a way that would play the “hey, let’s you and him fight” game between two opposing tribes (one of which would be a threat to one’s own). Even if, on the surface, it looks like you’re helping people not in your class… well… it’s not about class.
SSC talked about this, of course.
(Edit: Now that I think on it, Moldbug did too)Report
@leeesq Yeah, our school is constantly stressed out that alumni have relatively low giving rates to the college relative to our “peer institutions” and my response is always “but do they have relatively low giving rates to *the rest of the world*?” (they don’t, btw, far as we can measure, they have higher ones.)
If the money is flowing outward from this center, I feel like we’re doing a good job, not a bad one.Report
Ed1: The problem is that the number of qualified students as increased while the number of elite institutions have remained constant since 1945. If anything, getting to HYPS is even a bigger golden ticket than it was at any previous time in American history except maybe the Guilded Age. As Doctor Jay notes, Asian-Americans face something of the same social prejudice that Jews faced in the late 19th to mid-20th century, that we are a bunch of unclimbable grinds. People on my side try to get around this and blame legacy admissions to save affirmative action but it isn’t going away.Report