Why Schools Are Not Producing Scholars

John Tierney relates the story of an elementary school teacher in West Virginia who led her students in a campaign to prevent school officials from shutting down a garbage recycling program. The program was so uneconomical it made no sense to keep it going. But the teacher was determined to preserve her students’ status as eco-nuts.

As Tierney asks,

If we want our children to be scientifically literate and get good jobs in the future, why are we spending precious hours in school teaching them to be garbage collectors?

High Esteem — But No Clue

A new study suggests that the self-esteem movement may have gone too far in building self-confidence in kids.

Decades of relentless, uncritical boosterism by parents and school systems may be producing a generation of kids with expectations that are out of sync with the challenges of the real world.

In other words, self-esteem is not merely taught, it is developed through a pedagogy of discipline and challenge, reinforced by positive reward.

Just imagine how these out-of-touch, feel-good young adults will skew elections once they are old enough to vote. Oh, wait, . . . .

The Tyranny of the Left

Ralph Peters places the modern Left, with it’s desire to silence opposition, in its proper historical context. Every totalitarian regime in recent history has been an enemy of free speech.

The extreme left loves to pretend it stands for freedom. It never has and never will. From the Reign of Terror in Paris onward, its core agenda has been the tyranny of egomaniacal intellectuals. The hard left hates an open debate – especially these days, when it’s out of new ideas.

The left pretends that campuses should enjoy freedom of speech, yet activist students shout down, harass and even attack speakers whose views they dislike. That’s brownshirt behavior, folks – as surely as show trials are Stalinist.

Math and Gender

A new study was trumpeted by the media last week, indicating that girls do no worse on standardized math scores than boys. Clearly, the commentary added, the disparities of the past were due to social preconditioning, not genetic differences, and our war against this evil stereotype is finally paying off.

Heather MacDonald took a closer look at the study, and discovered that, once again, the media reported only part of the story, the part that seemed to match their agenda. There was another angle they conveniently ignored: “while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges.”

Boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Men and women are inherently different, in ways that we are still struggling to understand. To deny this basic fact of human nature is not only intellectually dishonest, it suppresses the diversity that academics insist is so vital among the human community.

Moderation in Academia?

Sick of the leftist, politically-correct nonsense that infests so much of higher education these days? Just wait a few years — the current crop of Marxist baby-boomer professors is gradually being replaced by younger, more moderate colleagues.

Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.

If great historical epochs help shape a generation’s political and cultural outlook (think the Great Depression, WWII, Vietnam, Watergate, etc.), then ponder the effect of the Reagan revolution and the fall of Communism on the generation that came of age during that time — and are now rising up through the ranks of academia.

The Latest Trojan Horse from Higher Ed

Who could possibly be opposed to “sustainability”? A lot of Americans, that’s who — if they really understood what is being sneaked in under that label.

John Leo spells out the details of what is included in the push for “sustainability” by higher institutions of learning. It’s not merely a commitment to using fewer trees.

Peter Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) says, “It turns out that virtually the entire agenda of the progressive left can be fit inside the word ‘sustainability.” Adam Kissel of the educational watchdog group the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) wrote: “Documents written or promoted by residential life officials demonstrate that sustainability is a highly politicized comprehensive agenda including positions of such topics as affirmative action, gay marriage, abortions, corporations and worldwide distribution of wealth.” In addition, the movement apparently features codewords within the master codeword “sustainability.” “Secure livelihoods” and “strong economies” seem to mean redistribution of existing wealth, not economic development to create new wealth.

In other words, it’s just another effort to indoctrinate students in the dogma of the left.

Britain Creates a “Why Bother?” Economy

That’s according to a recent report from a British think tank. A complex welfare system coupled with a moribund education system has created a subclass of citizens who have no motivation or even capability to work. As Van Helsing comments,

Basically, liberalism has reduced humans to farm animals. Just like chickens are raised by farmers for their eggs, welfare dependents are raised by the State for their votes.

What is the future of a democracy that operates on that principle?

Gender Discrimination in Higher Education

Christina Hoff Summers warns of a coming federal crackdown on gender discrimination in math and sciences in higher education. If Title IX is applied to these departments the same way it has been applied to college athletics, “equality” will be achieved by decimating the ranks of men who can apply for those positions. The long-term effect will be devastating to our national interest.

The continued excellence of American science and technology is vital to our security and prosperity — and depends on an exacting meritocracy and, at the top, an intensity of vocational devotion that few men or women can achieve.

Of course, as Glenn Reynolds notes, why should the feds stop there? Have you noticed the glaring gender discrimination that exists among elementary school teachers?

The Evolution Debate

While I was in Miami last week, I watched a show on the Discovery Channel called “Before the Dinosaurs,” a documentary on the reptilian creatures that supposedly inhabited the earth before the dinosaurs evolved. It was a very slick production, using state-of-the-art CGI graphics to create scenes so realistic that you’d think it was filmed. In fact, it was designed to mimic a real documentary, the sort of thing you’d see on “Animal Planet.” For example, as large creatures lumbered by, the “camera” would shake, or when a predator ripped into his prey, “blood” would splatter on the “camera” lens. The narrator even described insignificant little behaviors to give the scenes added realism, like the two male reptiles fighting each other who would do some sort of push-ups to display their aggressiveness. How could scientists possibly know that little detail?

The whole thrust of this documentary, of course, was to further solidify in the minds of viewers the unassailable fact of evolution. Evolution is so thoroughly established, we might as well make the documentary as real as possible.

But like every other scientific theory involving processes we cannot directly observe, evolution is still subject to debate — and its adherents have cause to stack the evidence and silence their opposition. A new documentary is coming out soon that addresses the difficulties in evolution, and the intellectual chicanery that props it up. Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed is the brainchild of Ben Stein. Matt Barber has reviewed the film, and it promises to be a good one. I’m looking forward to seeing it.

Submit — Or Be Expelled

They claim the debate is over on this one, too, but the skeptics just won’t go away — thank goodness. Ben Stein has a new documentary coming out this spring on the ideological war against those who would question Darwinism.

I remember well as a junior high school student in the early 1960’s the furor that arose when some educators wanted the freedom to merely mention evolution as a possible alternative to the traditional “divine origin” theory of cosmogony. Today, the controversy has been completely reversed: secularists control the reigns of power in academe, and those who even question Darwinism are silenced without mercy.

If it was a “freedom of speech” issue in the 1960’s, why is it not a freedom of speech issue today? (Hint: It was never about free speech.)

[Thanks for the link, Kay!]

The Gender Gap in College

No, it’s not what you think.

After decades of pushing and prodding young women to step out and compete with men, the pendulum has now swung the other way. An editorial in The Detroit News bemoans the dearth of young men in colleges these days.  The editorial references a recent study that points to systemic failures in K-12 education which cause boys to check out of education altogether.

There are methods besides affirmative action — rejected by the voters — to make school, and ultimately college, more welcoming to boys. Among them: Fashioning school days around the needs of boys, including physical activities to balance desk-based learning. As school budgets shrink and global competition requires more demanding curriculums and learning from students, recesses have been less commonplace.

Teachers also need to rethink how they teach boys, whose language abilities develop more slowly than girls. Students who have strong language skills tend to do better in tests — and thus, boys are less likely to excel.

School districts and the state also need to examine the needs of young men to help them stay in high school. Male students struggle more with impulsive behavior and long-term thinking, experts say.

Thus, studying for a long-term payoff — a college degree some eight years away — is tougher for some boys than it is for girls. So schools should invest in short-term incentives to keep young men in school.

And the nation needs to rethink its emphasis on desk-based jobs in which some young men lack interest. High-tech trades and job creation are needed for the millions of men who lack an aptitude or passion for sedentary work.

The feminization of education may have inspired a generation of girls to reach for the stars, but at the cost of leaving behind a generation of boys. The system needs to return to a more balanced approach that recognizes — and builds upon — the innate differences between men and women.

Promoting the Military in the Academy

This is long overdue.

Finally, the Pentagon is using some smart P.R. to get out the message of what the military is accomplishing in Iraq. And they’re getting that message out, of all places, on university campuses.

The “Why We Serve” program . . .

. . . sends recently returned veterans across the country to share their decisions to join the military and their experiences abroad with the public. The program started with presentations to mostly small community groups but branched out this fall to college campuses.

The vets encounter an occasional hostile question and snooty professor complaining about the the “one-sided” nature of the presentations (as if the other side is not represented on today’s campuses??). But overall, the response has been positive. At a recent event at Syracuse University,

The program ended with a lengthy standing ovation from most of the crowd.

“I feel like there is another side that everyone needs to hear,” said Samantha Wilder, a Syracuse freshman from Williamsburg, Va. “There are pictures we never see. There’s a side we never see.”

Thanks to these programs, students are now able to see that other side.

Untangling the Hook-Up Culture

Kathleen Parker offers yet another endorsement of Miriam Grossman’s campaign to expose the health risks of the current hook-up culture on college campuses. The empirical evidence for the physical and emotional damage of hooking up, especially in young women, is so overwhelming that there must be some reason university health professionals are pretending it doesn’t exist.

Grossman is most concerned that politically correct ideology has contaminated the health field at great cost to young lives. As Grossman sees it, when the scientific facts contradict what is being promoted as truth, then ideology has trumped reality. . . .

Because sex ed is based on the assumption that young people are sexually active with multiple partners, kids have been led to believe by mainstream health professionals that casual sex is OK. That’s a delusion, says Grossman, because scientific data clearly indicate otherwise. Casual sex is, in fact, a serious health risk.

Rather than spread that word, sex educators have tweaked their message from urging “safe sex” to a more realistic “safer sex,” any elaboration of which would defy standards of decency. . . .

Parker notes that young coeds are beginning to wake up to the hoax, and are longing for the quaint old days of dating and developing emotional trust with a potential mate — without sex.

Grossman has written a book on the subject that should be read by every young woman before going off to college: Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student.

Zero Tolerance Nazis — Public Education Strikes Again

Maybe there are some details here that I don’t know about, but this incident really takes the cake. In Mascoutah, Illinois:

Megan Coulter, an eighth-grade student at Mascoutah Middle School, was hugging her friends goodbye after school Friday when vice principal, Randy Blakely, saw her and told her she would receive two after-school detentions.

Blakely had previously warned Coulter that she was in violation of the school’s policy on public displays of affection after she was seen hugging a student at a football game.

The school’s policy says that “displays of affection should not occur on the campus at any time.” . . .

Mascoutah Superintendent Sam McGowen said today that the district’s policy helps prevent misunderstandings and unwelcome expressions of affection.

Zero tolerance policies have become all the rage in school districts, who use them to deal with contraband weapons, drugs, and — as in Mascoutah — displays of affection. But while they remove the responsibility for educators to actually think about anything, they end up backfiring, punishing kids for the most innocent childish behaviors and creating a firestorm of ill-will.

Charles Sykes documents a number of such cases of zero tolerance run amok, and concludes with this thought:

“Nature,” as H.L. Mencken once observed, “abhors a moron.” The same obviously cannot be said of school boards, who often hire them as principals.

And all this time, I thought conservatives were intolerant control freaks.

The Decline of Higher Education in America

Michael Barone has posted an excellent piece on the sorry state of academic integrity in America’s universities and colleges.

I am old enough to remember when America’s colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America’s colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.

“Freedom of Speech!” — Unless You’re Conservative

Cal Thomas documents numerous cases of how “freedom of speech” is practiced on university campuses when a conservative speaker is giving the speech. Curiously, the same standard is not applied to liberal speakers, or even an avowed enemy of our way of life, like Ahmadinejad.

Thomas calls for more even-handed treatment:

Before we allow more of our enemies into America and give them a freedom unknown in their own countries, we should at least demand reciprocity. Their president gets to speak in America? Our president gets to speak in Iran.

Their president has access to our media? Our president should have access to their media. And while we’re at it, how about for every liberal who gets to speak on campus, the school must also invite a conservative.

I’m not holding my breath. Although I sense that some of the students are beginning to get fed up with the hypocrisy.

It’s 1933 Again

Historian Arthur Herman notes the parallels between Columbia University’s invitation to Iranian thug-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a resolution of neutrality passed by Oxford University’s Debating Union as war clouds loomed over Europe in 1933. Winston Churchill called the resolution “abject, squalid, shameless.”

Adolf Hitler got the clear message of the 1933 Oxford Union debate: We will not oppose you. Regardless of Bollinger’s “tough questions” yesterday, Ahmadinejad the Iranian president is bound to use his speech to a hall of “open-minded” Americans as a major public-relations victory – and to see it as a clear sign that his enemy is divided at its heart.

As Churchill said, “There is no place for compromise in war. That invaluable process only means that soldiers are shot because their leaders in council and camp are unable to resolve.”

He added, “In war the clouds never blow over; they gather unceasingly and fall in thunderbolts.” It was the falling thunderbolts of Nazi bombs that finally convinced the appeasers of the ’30s that they had been wrong. New York City has already gone through its Blitz. What more will it take before Bollinger and his cohorts admit their squalid mistake?

Tag — You’re Dead!

Consider two unrelated items getting attention lately:

• A new book, Lone Survivor, written by Marcus Luttrell, a former Navy SEAL who was the sole survivor of a deadly ambush in Afganistan in 2003. He and his three buddies were involved in a running gun battle with 200 Taliban for over two hours, until the others were dead and Luttrell gravely wounded. You can read a gripping account of his ordeal in an interview with Glenn Beck. The book is a bestseller.
• An elementary school in Colorado Springs has banned tag on the playground, “after some children complained they were harassed or chased against their will.”

The juxtaposition of these two items provides a sad commentary on our times. A culture that refuses to let its children play tag for fear of hurt feelings, will eventually end up with no warriors who can defend its existence.

The Study of War in Academia

Victor Davis Hanson recently penned an excellent article on the decline of military history in institutions of higher learning. The post-Vietnam anti-military atmosphere that has descended on universities in recent decades has produced a generation that is woefully uninformed on the great lessons from past wars.

John Leo recently interviewed Hanson to explore this topic further. When asked if the study of military history will ever return to academia, Hanson gave an insightful response:

I’m afraid an entire generation must pass first. Those who came of age in the university in the 1960s and 1970s—now department chairmen, deans, senior theses advisors, scholarly associations’ presidents, etc— wanted this revolution of easy arm-chair therapeutic moralizing and self-appointed censure of perceive contemporary sins, got it, turned off the students, forfeited hard-won standards, and lost their public readership—and now must suffer the consequences of irrelevancy for a generation. It is not an accident that a David McCullough or John Keegan or Martin Gilbert now writes outside the campus. Vibrant military history has gone on-despite or perhaps even because- of the failure of the academia.

Hanson offers cautious hope that the success of war stories in the popular media (Saving Private Ryan, Band of Brothers, 300, etc.) is taking up the slack left by a misguided intelligentsia.

The High Price of Free Love

College campuses are hotbeds (so to speak) of casual sex. The result is an epidemic of emotional and physical health problems, especially among young women. Yet college health officials are in a state of denial about the issue.

Chuck Colson reviews a book on the subject, Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student, written by Miriam Grossman.

Instead of declaring war on the hook-up culture, Grossman says, political correctness decrees that campus doctors pretend the problems it causes don’t exist. If they do acknowledge them, they risk being fired—which is why Dr. Grossman originally published this book anonymously. After all, doctors are not supposed to be judgmental. But as Grossman points out, doctors pass judgment all the time when it comes to other health issues.

“We ask about childhood abuse, but not last week’s hookups,” she writes. “We want to know how many cigarettes she has each day, but not how many abortions are in her past. We consider the stress caused by parental expectations but neglect the anguish of herpes, the hazards of promiscuity, and the looming fertility issues for women who always put career first.”

When it comes to sexual harassment and date rape, campus health professionals are eager to help. But they don’t support groups for women who want to practice abstinence or who are suffering the after-effects of an abortion.

We ought to get angry about this. The secular world is engaging in something they often accuse Christians of—living in a “false reality.” But anyone who ignores a mountain of medical evidence is not only living in a false reality, they’re endangering people’s lives.

For more on this subject, see an excellent interview with Dr. Grossman at National Review Online, and an earlier book review by Mona Charen.

God and Texas

My native state has added the words “under God” to its state pledge of allegiance. The pledge is required, along with the U.S. pledge, in all public schools, unless parents sign a request for their children to be exempted.

The new pledge (new words in italics):

Honor the Texas flag; I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.

What do you think are the chances of something like this happening in, say, New York?

The usual suspects are complaining about separation of church and state, blah, blah, blah.

Suppression of Speech in Academia

Robert Brustein, writing in The New Republic, sees a similarity between the speech police on modern university campuses and the Islamic radicals who are killing everyone with whom they disagree.

Burning and banning newspapers is not to be equated with beheading blasphemers or blowing up dissidents. But the same temperament that issues a fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses, or threatens Danish cartoonists with death for insulting Islam, animates the American passion, on behalf of political or religious pressure groups, for suppressing offensive speech. People who believe their feelings have been hurt share the same DNA as those who believe their faith has been insulted. Both groups demand or inflict punishment considerably in excess of the original offense.

Freedom of expression is a fragile right, one that is so easily lost in the zeal to defend orthodoxy.  We must work tirelessly to safeguard it — and that means tolerating some speech that we find offensive.

And Good News in Academia

A Wall Street Journal editorial notes several examples of reform taking place on college campuses across the country, as students, alumni, parents, and other supporters are pushing back against the radicalism that has run the show for the last few decades.

Colleges and universities have largely brought this stakeholder activism on themselves–when they decided to become instruments of fashionable politics instead of repositories of knowledge.

Bias in Science?

A couple of articles recently crossed my monitor, illustrating the wide gap between the profession of objectivity in science, and the reality of bias.

First, this article on dark energy in Parade Magazine by Dr. Meg Urry, incoming chair of the Physics Department at Yale University. The article provides a glimpse into the fascinating advances in our understanding of the role of dark energy in our universe. As an aside to the story itself, Dr. Urry notes that the changes in our understanding of this topic illustrate the nature of science itself.

Science is not a set of beliefs that one constructs. Instead, scientists observe nature, then develop theories that describe their observations. Science is driven by nature itself, and nature gives us no choice. It is what it is.

As new facts emerge, scientific theories can be proved wrong or in need of modification, but scientists cannot ignore them. Eventually the facts will lead to the right theory.

This is an excellent summary of how the scientific method is supposed to work. But there is a dark side to science that belies this “search for truth” label.

Consider this article by Ken Connor at Townhall.com bemoaning the fate of Guillermo Gonzalez. Dr. Gonzalez, an astronomer at Iowa State University, has been denied tenure, despite a distinguished and productive academic career. Why? Despite denials from the university, the only plausible reason is because he is an advocate of intelligent design, having co-authored a popular book on the subject, The Privileged Planet. As Connor laments,

What is the state of academic freedom when well qualified candidates are rejected simply because they see God’s fingerprints on the cosmos? Isn’t the Academy supposed to be a venue for diverse views? Aren’t universities supposed to foster an atmosphere that allows for robust discussion and freedom of thought? Dr. Gonzalez’s fate suggests that anyone who deigns to challenge conventional orthodoxy is not welcome in the club.

The reality is that, despite Dr Urry’s lofty description of how science works, scientists can and do ignore the facts of nature, for all the same reasons that religious zealots ignore them. For all their pompous protestations of objectivity, the evidence indicates that scientists—especially in academia—are just as susceptible to the ravages of prejudice as the rest of us.

Men’s Study Departments?

I got a chuckle out of this response from a reader of Dr. Helen’s blog, commenting on a discussion involving a feminist law professor in a university Women’s Studies Department:

Women’s Studies Department?

We need a Men’s Studies Department where I can get tenure for writing tedious papers about the history of logo placement on NASCAR vehicles.

Self-Defense in a University Culture

I was already thinking along these lines, but Michelle Malkin, as usual expresses it so much better than I could have:

American colleges and universities have become coddle industries. Big Nanny administrators oversee speech codes, segregated dorms, politically correct academic departments and designated “safe spaces” to protect students selectively from hurtful (conservative) opinions — while allowing mob rule for approved leftist positions (textbook case: Columbia University’s anti-Minuteman Project protesters).

Instead of teaching students to defend their beliefs, American educators shield them from vigorous intellectual debate. Instead of encouraging autonomy, our higher institutions of learning stoke passivity and conflict-avoidance.

And as the erosion of intellectual self-defense goes, so goes the erosion of physical self-defense.

There were a few students at VT who somehow overcame this culture of passivity, and fought back with what they had at hand, thus saving lives.

Yet more evidence that our universities do not adquately prepare young people for the real world.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn comes to the same conclusion:

It’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

No Lefties Need Apply

For all the scorn that is directed at institutions of higher learning for the hard left mentality that so dominates them, it is important that we call attention to a group of educators who are definitely swimming upstream. The National Association of Scholars is

an organization of professors, graduate students, college administrators and trustees, and independent scholars committed to rational discourse as the foundation of academic life in a free and democratic society.

Among the many concerns they address through their programs are the following:

• Politicization of scholarship and teaching, and the substitution of social reform for the pursuit of knowledge
• Use of sexual, racial, or other criteria unrelated to merit in hiring, in promotion, and in student recruitment
• Dogmatic hostility to Western civilization, and turning the study of non-Western cultures into an instrument for denouncing American society
• Unfair treatment of colleagues suspected of holding “politically incorrect” views
• Suppression of students’ freedoms of speech and association
• Tendency of administrators to placate activists rather than enforce rules even-handedly

The group has affiliates in universities in most states.

Mr. Smith Goes to Dartmouth

Dartmouth University, like most prestigious institutions of higher learning, has long been a bastion of political correctness, leftist intellectualism, and bureaucratic bloat. But in recent years, that hegenomy has been shaken by change at the top. Three outsiders have been elected to the board of trustees, on the strength of alumni voters who are disgusted with what the university has become.

Now a fourth “change” candidate is threatening to come on board. The administration, as expected, is waging a campaign to derail this latest interloper, but it’s a little awkward. The candidate, you see, is a self-made, highly successful black man, Stephen Smith.

Among Mr. Smith’s planks is his commitment to restoring genuine freedom speech on the campus:

A marketplace of ideas cannot flourish as long as self-censorship casts its pall over the Dartmouth campus and the price of speaking out may be bullying by the College administration or official discipline.

Voting by the alumni is currently underway. Good luck, Mr. Smith!