Category Archives: education

What He Said

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Reposted from PowerLine:

Dear Anonymous Professor:
You are profoundly detached from the real issues affecting us, our families, our country, and the world today.
We are the most depressed, anxious, suicidal, obese, addicted, and indebted generation in American history, and the first to be worse off than our parents. We are forced to take pointless courses, buy outrageously expensive textbooks for information freely available online, and serve as a captive audience in a system where everyone—from publishers, administrators, and banks to professors like you—profits while we drown in debt.
The numbers don’t lie: almost 40% of students drop out, burdened by loans but no degree. Half of those who graduate end up in jobs that never required a degree in the first place. A bachelor’s degree has become a $100,000 high school diploma.
What caused this collapse, you ask?
You and your ideologies did. You are no longer educating us to build, compete, and lead. You are indoctrinating us to deconstruct, resent, and surrender.
In economics, you promote Marx and Keynesian financialization, offshoring, and money printing—policies that make homes unaffordable and force us to work two jobs just to pay bills. You omit Austrian School economists like Mises and Hayek, who defended the free markets that built the unprecedented prosperity we enjoy today. You smear capitalism as “oppressive” while pushing the actually oppressive redistribution schemes that have failed everywhere they’ve been tried.
In psychology, you idolize Alfred Kinsey as the father of the sexual revolution and John Money as the one who coined the word “gender” as separate from sex. Yet you never tell us that Kinsey gathered data from pedophiles who abused babies, and that Money’s theory was founded on his experiments with the Reimer twins, both of whom committed suicide from the trauma.
In literature, you replace Shakespeare, Dickens, and Dante with a racist DEI quota system, choosing books based on race and victimhood instead of merit. The more “marginalized” the author, the less their work is critiqued and the more you celebrate it.
In sociology, you force-feed us feminism, an ideology that teaches women to resent men, motherhood, and family. You glorify Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan but hide the inconvenient truth: that single, childless women are the unhappiest demographic, while married women in Christian households report the highest life and sexual satisfaction.
In history, you teach that slavery was America’s unique sin, ignoring that it was universal until White Christian nations abolished it first. You never mention the 600,000 Americans who died ending it, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery squadron that liberated 150,000 slaves, or that slavery still thrives in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
In philosophy, you prioritize Marx, Freud, and Foucault—the philosophers of disorder—over Aristotle, Aquinas, and Locke, who built the foundations of virtue, natural law, and liberty. You conveniently leave out that the philosophical purpose of freedom is to do what is good, not to do whatever we want.
In political science, you present the genocidal failures of Marxism, socialism, and communism as “viable alternatives” for academic debate, while downplaying the brilliant, liberty-ensuring architecture of our Constitution. You dismiss foundational mechanisms like the separation of powers and the Electoral College as archaic flaws, and ignore the wisdom of the Federalist Papers, because you are racist toward the White Christian males who authored them.
In the sciences, you deny the biological reality of sex, even though every single one of the 60 trillion cells in the human body is either male or female, and no amount of hormones can change that. Instead of helping people with body image and mental health issues, you promote their permanent and irreversible mutilation to virtue signal.
And we could go on. But the bitter irony is that you stand on the shoulders of the giants who built this country, this state, and this university, using your cushy job to spit on their legacy and the values that have given you everything you enjoy today. You take parents’ life savings and teach their kids to hate them, their faith, and their heritage, causing fights over Thanksgiving dinner.
You aren’t teaching us how to think; you’re teaching us what to think. You turned a marketplace of ideas, where each side is supposed to be heard equally, into an indoctrination camp where only the approved party line is parroted. You created the first generations in world history without love for their God, their family, or their country—and then wonder why they’re miserable.
Meanwhile, China, Russia, and our competitors teach their engineers calculus and physics, not gender studies and wokeness. They laugh at us as they dominate in AI, energy, and manufacturing.
So why are you scared when taxpayers demand a return to excellence? Why fear being recorded? What are you teaching that can’t stand scrutiny? Lobotomies and eugenics were once taught, too. The gender unicorn is just the current pseudoscience.
You’re not scared of politicians. You’re scared of losing your six-figure, taxpayer-funded salary because your indoctrination model is failing. What you’re seeing around you is a call on Texas A&M, the nation’s universities, and the West to become once more the leader of the educational world, as it is the leader of the free world. We need engineers, not ideologues: builders, not critics.
We need more Charlie Kirks, not more Ibram X. Kendis. We are your customers, your bosses, and your product is broken. Don’t gaslight us for demanding a better one.
Justino Russell
Texas A&M Student
P.S. I want to defend the truth, so I’ll sign my name. If you were teaching the truth, why didn’t you sign with yours?

What the student said, indeed. To which I add: is that cowardly anonymous “professor” even a professor, or is he just some random pogue BSing away?

“How on Earth is that a Problem?”

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Harvard has awakened to its problem with grade inflation, and the students it has admitted are having their own problem.

A recent internal report found that Harvard is dishing out too many A’s, and that the current undergrad system is “failing to perform the key functions of grading” and “damaging the academic culture of the College more generally.”

In an honest grading system, taking a letter grade scale of A-F, where A is best, F is failing, and C is average, it wouldn’t be the case that a school, much less an allegedly elite one like Harvard, would be dishing out too many A’s. Under such a grading regime, the large majority of grades would be C’s—after all, the majority of a population clusters around some measure of average, whatever the population is. Maybe 10% of students would get A’s and 10% would get F’s. The rest would be roughly evenly distributed between B’s and D’s.

The grades lower than A would (or should) be spurs to work harder and do better. Those getting F’s would be candidates for dropping, or being dropped, out of Harvard and so no longer wasting their parents’ money.

Consider some numbers reflecting the level of effort Harvard’s students put into their classes.

The average time students spend studying outside class has barely changed, from 6.08 hours a week for each of their courses in fall 2006 to 6.3 hours this spring, according to the report by Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education.

Let’s assume a heavy class load of four classes, each meeting three times per week for an hour and a half for each meeting. For spring 2025, that works out, according to my run-of-the-mill third grade arithmetic, to some 18 hours per week in the classroom. Those 6.3 hours per week per course on “homework” works out, according to that same arithmetic, to 25.2 hours per week of homework. That sums to 43.2 hours per week on classwork.

That’s an outer bound. When I went to a top-drawer private college, I took four classes per week, but those that met three times per week met for one-hour sessions. The classes with hour-and-a-half sessions met only twice per week.

Oh—the strain.

The nature of the students’ problem is made plain by this plaint from one student:

You admitted these students because they have straight A’s, and now they’re getting a lot of A’s, and it’s, like, “This is a problem.” And I’m thinking, how on earth is that a problem?

What these Precious Ones need to understand is that they’re no longer competing with run-of-the-mill high school students for grades. Now they’re competing with a much higher, much more capable, collection of students, students who really are their peers. It’s a different population than the one of which they were members in high school. Of course the grade definition of “average” has gone up, as has the grade definition of “superior” and “best.”

What Harvard’s managers, and especially its teachers, need to understand is that, after explaining this difference (which should be obvious to the students; they are, after all, the cream of their high school classes), there’s no need to discuss the matter further. The students who can’t handle the new regime of grading—being expected actually to work for their A’s—need simply to be dropped from the school.

A Thought

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Colleges and Universities are facing budget problems in the current and beginning to grow age of fiscal discipline after decades of profligate spending on one great idea after another and rampant hiring of school staff and management squads having little to nothing to do with academics. In their Wall Street Journal piece, Sara Randazzo and Heather Gillers distilled the problem to its essence:

As schools scramble to make cutbacks, they face broader questions about what kind of university they can be in this new era of financial constraint.

Here’s an idea. Work with me on this, it’s a-borning: how about these institutions turn their focus onto teaching and away from publishing and from pushing the latest politically correct claptrap, the latter which these days is illustrated by DEI bigotries and one-sided sexual offensivenesses “investigations?”

Get rid of all that non-academics-related staff bloat, freeze the gussying up of their labs with froo-froo that serves only to enhance academic shower appearances, take away the publish or perish foolishness that produces little more than word salads with science jargon dressings, reduce the rate of jobs-for-life awards, and stop fancying up student housing with stuff that does nothing to enhance studying and socializing.

Education Parity

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There are two paths for achieving some sort of “parity” in education. One path is through pushing for equality of opportunity. This path is exemplified by New York City’s gifted and talented programs that identify gifted children before they reach school age and try to funnel them into educational programs that are tailored to enhance their giftedness and encourage them to learn more and faster—to excel. This is a reflection of Theodore Roosevelt’s each man shall be guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. Roosevelt was speaking economically, but the guarantee applies just as surely to education systems. That equality of opportunity makes each person—each student—equally capable of reaching his full potential, however large or small that might be from student to student.

The other path for education parity—it really is binary—is to push for—parity—in educational outcomes. This is the path Progressive-Democratic Party New York City Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani espouses. Mamdani promises to eliminate the city’s gifted and talented program under the fiction that children will benefit more from experiencing the breadth of ability in their peers than they will be harmed from being held back to the pace of their peers. Mamdani’s claim extends to insisting that the gifted children will, in the end, be unharmed from being restrained.

Oh, sure, Mamdani gussies up his move:

Mr Mamdani argues that New York City’s gifted programs have produced racially inequitable outcomes, and therefore all students should remain in the same classrooms, regardless of ability.

This is a Mamdani paraphrasing Woodrow Wilson: [removing gifted and talented programs] is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you [parents]. This is deeply insulting to those parents and to their children. This is Mamdani saying in so many words that black children and brown children are intrinsically inferior to white children and Asian children, they cannot hope to compete in school, and so they must get the protections of holding back the white and Asian children.

It’s inconceivable to Mamdani and his fellow Progressive-Democrats that blacks and browns could easily compete did they have the same access to opportunity as their white and Asian fellow children.

Wrong Answer

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A study of Purdue’s entering freshmen class of 2018 indicated that women freshmen who didn’t get their preferred class on registration were significantly less likely to graduate in four years than were their women counterparts who got their preferred class on registration. (There was no significant effect for that year’s male freshmen, but that’s neither here no there for this post.) Leave aside the various limitations of this study; focus on the particular outcome.

This is a conclusion of one of the study’s authors, Kevin Mumford:

Our estimates suggest that reducing course shutouts, particularly for STEM courses, can be an effective way to improve female-student outcomes[.]

No. Lowering standards—which is what “reducing course shutouts” amounts to, if only through increasing the class sizes of those courses that are in such demand—is not the way to improve women’s graduation rates.

The answer is insultingly wrong, too, suggesting as it does that women students need to be coddled in order to function in college.

What is necessary is to take steps to help these women overcome a disappointment that doesn’t bother men by helping them identify classes that are effective substitutes of their preferred class, classes that cover the same subject with a different professor, or is in a different section under the same professor, or take the preferred class in a subsequent semester, or….