Robert Pondiscio, AEI Senior Fellow, in his commencement address to the Atlanta Classical Academy, said this, in part:
We didn’t stop watching movies. We stopped watching them together.
And if we’re not careful, we won’t stop learning—but we may stop learning the same things. We may stop learning together.
One more thing: we will (not may) stop learning as quickly or as thoroughly. The interaction, the joint questioning, facilitate learning to the nth degree.
In her Free Expression piece concerning the Harvard faculty’s vote to limit the number A grades (but not A- and lower grades) awarded to the school’s pupils, Mary Julia Koch had this:
It’s a fair point that a scarcity of A’s could crank up the competitiveness among an already ambitious group of college kids.
It’s a fair point? What, exactly, is wrong with competition among the pupils for the better grades, and so for the benefits ensuing, beginning with a less stressful and sooner successful job hunt? What’s wrong with increasing the level of that competition?
Harvard’s pupils, even after this grade inflation move (as small as it is), have no idea of the level of competition in our relatively free market economy. Those pupils have no idea of the benefits of competition, from improving their own skills to producing better products and services at the companies that employ them to the follow-on of more and better jobs and better pay.
One professor who doesn’t like the quota said that
she didn’t become a college professor to “rank my students against one another for the convenience of potential employers.”
But that’s precisely the purpose and the benefit of such rankings, and her attitude insults those students who take her classes. College graduates are not simple members of a commodity pool from which a company can select at random. Companies want to hire only the best because that’s what produces the best goods and services, which in turn maximizes the companies’ ability to thrive and grow and do R&D, which in the end maximizes job growth and so employment opportunities. One of the most important tools a company has in discriminating among a pool of brand new college graduates is an honestly done GPA.
The answers to my prior questions is that there’s nothing wrong with competition or with increasing competition. That’s what makes all of our lives better, including those of Harvard’s pupils, who now will be required to level up their game.
Pennsylvania’s Progressive-Democrat governor Josh Shapiro is providing the latest demonstration. As the WSJ editors noted in their piece,
Only a third of Philadelphia students were proficient in English, and a quarter in math, on state tests last year. That’s the horrifying return on school district spending of about $32,000 per student, according to the Commonwealth Foundation.
The State does offer tax credits to private entities and individuals who donate to privately run scholarship programs, but those programs don’t come close to covering the cost to parents of pulling their students out of the State’s failing public school systems and enrolling them in private schools.
Shapiro stands sharply in the way of any improvement, though.
Even though the State’s legislature is moving to increase the value of existing programs, Shapiro is demanding that much of the funds sought must be diverted public-school supplemental activities rather than private-school tuition.
Shapiro is actively blocking legislative efforts to create new tuition vouchers worth much more.
Shapiro refuses to opt the State into the Federal government’s education scholarship tax-credit program, even though that program is funded exclusively with Federal tax dollars and wouldn’t cost the State a single Continental.
This active obstruction of children’s education is as abusive as any direct emotional abuse. If we want our children actually to be educated, if we want this sub rosa abuse to be stopped, we need to stop electing Progressive-Democrats to office.
Here, in higher education, or what passes for higher education. There were two letters in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Letters section with excuses for American pupils in higher education, or even just getting into a higher education institution.
One lamented, using rowing as his example, the dearth of foreign students on his college’s rowing teams compared with today’s dearth of American students on those same teams. The rollover, he wrote, was due colleges actively recruiting winning athletes world wide and how that global recruitment squeezed out those American wannabe athletes, which in turn deprived those American wannabes their college educations. Even with his excuses, he’s on the right track with his concluding questions:
Is it not US universities’ main charter to educate productive citizens? What’s the purpose of collegiate sports in America?
Then there’s the other letter-writer.
When colleges take applications from other countries, the talent pool becomes the world. This affects American teenagers, who are squeezed out of the competition. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point into the most competitive schools in the same way top forehands and serves are no longer an entry point onto the tennis team … It gives us a chance to reflect on what we owe young Americans versus the importance of going for the absolute “best product” on the court or in the classroom.
This one hinted at the source of the problem, but it’s unclear to me that he understood his hinting. Top scores and grades from US high schools are no longer an entry point…. There are two areas of responsibility here. One is with the teachers unions dominating public high schools. Those unions are more interested union perks than they are in doing something about the well-documented years of decline and collapse of their student products as demonstrated by those students’ test scores. These are students who have no business even applying to any college or university: their union teachers have left them totally unprepared for a rigorous college/university education, or even for life in the real world earning their own way in any sort of job.
The other is with those students themselves, and their status consciousness and notorious lack of work ethic. Work hard and get ahead is the American middle class mantra, and it’s a Truth. What’s lacking in too many of today’s high school student population, though, is any understanding of that “work hard” part.
For example, our farmers are complaining about a lack of farm workers to help them get their crops planted and then harvested. Ranchers have spoken of the same lack in handling their cattle ranches, feed lots, and dairy facilities. How many of today’s teenagers spend their summers detasseling corn, picking lettuce, mounting up and herding cattle, shoveling feed or operating the feeders on those feed lots, milking dairy cows or operating the milking machines? And, by the way, earning some college money along the way.
The competition in life for American children has gone global. So what. Those children need to work hard so they can compete globally. And one more thing: today’s parents need to lose their self-focus and work with their children, helping them, encouraging them to work hard enough during the school year and during the summer to be able to compete globally.
Complaining about competition gone global is a loser’s game.
I wrote a bit ago about Yale’s “Reform” report. Lauren Noble, Buckley Institute founder, in her Monday letter to The Wall Steet Journal‘ Letters section, pointed out a couple of glaring omissions in that report that she’d spotted.
First, in 2021 Yale eliminated the process by which alumni could run for a spot on its governing board by petition. Alumni now only have the illusion of choice in who guides their alma mater. They select between Yale’s hand-picked candidates whom Yale prohibits from publicly discussing their views on issues. How does Yale expect to earn back the trust of the public if it doesn’t even trust its own alumni?
The Party candidates aren’t even trusted by those who chose them to speak properly in public? Hmm….
Second, Yale’s DEI efforts aren’t addressed. A recent Buckley Institute report found there are over 200 DEI staff still at Yale almost a year after the university supposedly ended its signature DEI program. Seventy-five of those staff were given new titles with less controversial terms. Yale needs to confront rather than hide from the legacy of these programs.
Again, I say,
Hmm….