Tag Archives: education

College and Basic Arithmetic

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As Allysia Finley noted in her Wall Street Journal op-ed,

Kids in elementary school learn—or are supposed to learn—how to add fractions and round numbers. But many students at the University of California, San Diego—a top public university ranked sixth nationally by US News & World Report—can’t do either, according to a new analysis from the university. Read, and weep for the future of America.
Roughly one in eight freshmen lack rudimentary high-school math skills, defined as geometry, algebra, and algebra 2. It gets worse: students who had been placed in a remedial high-school math class in 2023 had roughly fifth-grade-level abilities. Only 39% could correctly round the number 374,518 to the nearest hundred—a third-grade skill.

The absolutely wrong answer is what UCSD is doing—setting up its own remedial arithmetic classes for its entering freshmen.

No.

Colleges/universities are not places for remedial education. They’re places in which to extend legitimate high school education. The managers of the so-called higher education institutions need to take two steps to reinstall that purpose and capability.

The first is to reject from admission who cannot do proper math—at the very least geometry (including executing proofs) and trigonometry, and then basic differential and integral calculus (Finley accurately described the current nominal requirement, but it’s much too light: algebra is a junior high level of arithmetic)—and dismiss those mistakenly admitted. One way to reduce the latter is to go beyond SAT and ACT scoring, which have dumbed down their math sections, and administer their own mathematics tests, emphasizing geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

The other step is to start tracking high schools whose applicants cannot do that basic math, and simply reject out of hand applicants from those high schools that have not taught math to that basic level. Those high school administrators will have demonstrated that they do not take education seriously, and so their schools are not worth the trouble of consideration.

Campus Extremism

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Robert George, multiply-titled Professor at Princeton University, had some thoughts on how to deal with this.

So what should we do? The answer isn’t complicated, but acting on it will take determination and courage. Colleges and universities must return to offering a rigorous liberal arts education that refuses to engage in indoctrination and challenges groupthink. College courses must actively cultivate the virtues of curiosity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, analytical rigor, and above all, dedication to the pursuit of truth.

He added this:

This might seem like an unattainable ideal, but it isn’t. I’ve seen firsthand that it’s possible. Twenty-five years ago, Princeton University authorized me to establish and direct a program in civic education dedicated to helping young men and women become determined truth seekers, courageous truth speakers, lifelong learners, and responsible citizens.

He succeeded in his small world, and he cited a number of examples at other schools. But these are anecdotes, not a general trend of success. At many of the other schools he touted, antisemitic and terrorist-supporting riots mostly peaceful protests seized buildings and common grounds, vandalized the buildings and generally prevented the sort of free-exchange of ideas George touted. Those destructive disruptions occurred while school managers meekly watched and many of the schools’ professors participated in the disruptions.

No. The only way to achieve George’s ideal, extremely worthy that it is, is to remove from schools those school administrators and professors, whether ideologues or simply too timid to oppose ideology over education. Both kinds are worthless wastes of payroll.

The detritus must be removed before cleanup can begin.

Religious Bigotry

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West Virginia had a requirement that all school students get vaccinated against the Wuhan Virus (my term, not the State’s), regardless of religious views regarding vaccines or how the vaccines are structured or made or from any other religious perspective. The State permitted no religious opt-outs at all. Raleigh County Circuit Judge Michael Froble waved the BS flag at that requirement and has ruled that parents can, indeed, opt their children out of the vaccination program based on their religious beliefs.

The larger question is why a lawsuit and judicial ruling was needed in the first place.

Is the State’s bar of religious exemption demonstrative of religious bigotry by the relevant State officials? Not necessarily. Some religion-based objections aren’t actually based on religion, but those false assertions are quite rare. It is strongly suggestive of officials’ religious bigotry, though.

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.