"...back eddies of the world..."

Please go to my new website:   http://richardsubber.com/the-wisdom-of-samuel-butler/

and sign up for daily email alerts so you can

keep getting this daily reminder about my poetry, book reviews

and other blog posts. Thanks!

The wisdom of Samuel Butler

A cultured condemnation of higher education

Read the full post with pictures on my new website:

http://richardsubber.com/the-wisdom-of-samuel-butler/

Pay your taxes to rebuild schools

About half of all American schools were built more than 50 years ago, and they’re wearing out. Get ready to pony up your school taxes to renovate and rebuild them.

1950s school building

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives “public school facilities” a grade of “D” because of declining budgets for building maintenance, repairs and new construction.

Many of our schools are nearing the end of their useful life.

You want your kids to go to decent, safe schools, right?

You know what you have to do.

 

1950s school for black kids

Too many PhDs

"Tuition" isn't really what college costs

"...build strong children..."

Dead poets talking....

"Blood-and-thunder" for only 10 cents

"...the peregrines..."

The umbrella thing....

Global climate change: ka-ching!

Chautauqua, revisited....

....another 3rd grade tour

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Chautauqua, revisited

The 19^th century successes of the Chautauqua Institution of New York have always appealed to me. I believe I would have been thrilled to attend the profoundly educational lectures of the itinerant speakers who followed the Chautauqua circuit. For some Americans—and for many middle-class women—the Chautauqua offerings were the closest thing they could get to a higher education.

The Chautauqua Institution was founded in 1874 as a teaching camp for Sunday school teachers. The concept spread through the United States. At its peak in the 1920s the movement offered a broad range of lectures and music on both religious and nondenominational topics, in more than 10,000 communities. By 1940 the network of originally Victorian-style centers of learning and culture had lost their mass appeal, after enriching the lives of more than 45 million men and women. Today, the Chautauqua Institution on the original site is alive and well, and still attracting many thousands of participants annually.

In the late 19^th century, the notion of family vacations was becoming popular, partly as a result of increasing affluence and the expansion of rail travel. In a recent issue of The Massachusetts Historical Review, Anita C. Danker wrote:

“…a significant number of largely middle-class Americans chose to make constructive use of their increased leisure time, a by-product of industrialization, in ways consistent with their values and religious beliefs.”

The Chautauqua centers were attractive destinations. One such place was the New England Chautauqua Sunday School Assembly at Mount Wayte in Framingham, MA. From 1880-1918 it offered a steadily diversifying assortment of lectures and performances, drawing a dedicated audience from the area that would become MetroWest Boston. Those folks wanted to vacation in comfort and style, and they also were committed to a high-quality experience. Rail service to Mount Wayte was busy.

Danker explains:

“One form of vacation consistent with middle-class values and the moral climate of the New England region was the religious retreat…A critical mass of ordinary Americans displayed another powerful need, compatible with the ideal of a Christian vacation: the purposeful employment of leisure time for education and individual self-improvement.”

A reliable corps of attendees was “middle-class women, whose access to higher education was restricted by tradition and circumstance […they] formed the bedrock of the institution.”

Think of TED Talks without the clip-on microphone.

Source:

Anita C. Danker, “Redeeming the Time: Learning Vacations at the New England Chautauqua Assembly,” The Massachusetts Historical Review, Massachusetts Historical Society, Vol. 17, 2015, 67-97.

....another 3rd grade tour

Blame the men!

The old blanket fort

Mindset: think about it

Too many PhDs

Arms around the world....

Women who pioneered electronic music

The times they are a-changin'....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Too many PhDs

Most of us don’t have PhDs, so maybe this tidbit is of limited interest, but….

There aren’t enough jobs in academia or the business world for all of the folks who succeed in getting their doctorates each year—not by a long shot.

A recent story on NYTimes.com says:

“The lure of a tenured job in academia is great — it means a secure, prestigious position directing a lab that does cutting-edge experiments, often carried out by underlings. Yet although many yearn for such jobs, fewer than half of those who earn science or engineering doctorates end up in the sort of academic positions that directly use what they were trained for."

In biomedicine, fewer than 1 out of 6 grads with the “Philosophiae Doctor” degree can get one of those tenure-track jobs.

I’m no fan of academic tenure, or tenure of any other stripe. I think it’s nuts to guarantee lifetime employment to anyone, be she a smart prof or a Supreme Court justice or anyone else.

It’s too easy to say that anybody who wants a doctorate should be free to get one. Most of those pre-doc students are being subsidized by their colleges or someone else (including taxpayers).

Of course, I know that many of those students graduate with a bundle of college loans, but nevertheless, we—individually and collectively—are paying for too many folks to get an expensive education that has way less than the presumed payoff for the PhDs and the rest of our society.

The old blanket fort

Mindset: think about it

Arms around the world....

"Tuition" isn't really what college costs

Women who pioneered electronic music

The times they are a-changin'....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

“Tuition” isn’t really what college costs

Here’s a new take on “tuition”:

At many (maybe most) colleges, the tuition “sticker price” isn’t really the per capita figure for what it costs for the institution to keep its doors open. In any event, most students don’t pay the sticker price, so what’s the information value of the “tuition” number?

Danielle Allen, at WashingtonPost.com, recently wrote that the posted annual tuition at your college “is as good as useless.”

She says: “At elite colleges and universities, the actual cost of educating any given student for a year is greater than the “sticker price.” For the 2014-2015 school year, Amherst College calculated a cost per student of $95,600.”

Ooops, sorry, I just lost my lunch. It seems to me to be beyond all reasonable question that at most colleges it shouldn’t cost anything close to $95,600 to keep Maryanne or Juan in a decent room, well-fed, with access to the internet and a decent library, and give him/her a decent education for nine months.

Allen also notes:

“Tuition decisions made by elite colleges and universities are actually decisions about whom to subsidize. The lower the sticker price, the more the well-to-do are being subsidized for an education that costs well above the sticker price. The higher the sticker price, the more the subsidy is shifted to the less well-off.”

Let’s hold for another time the discussion about who’s paying for the subsidy (alumni, taxpayers) and the issues that make student loans unmentionable in some polite company.

Read Allen’s complete take on tuition here.

In simplistic terms, here’s the point: college costs too much and a college education increasingly has a dubious cost/benefit rationale.

Allen says the tuition/sticker price is a useless piece of information.

Is there any way to have some straight talk about the desired and presumed benefits of getting a college degree?

\>>>>>  UPDATE  <<<<<

Here's a current comment on college expenses from Mary Bromley at Cornerstone University:

"...build strong children..."

Dead poets talking....

Kids will be kids—update

It started out as a "bachelor's" degree....

Let's stop pretending about grade inflation

Homework....think again....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Too many books, so little time

How I wish the worst problem for kids could be

        figuring out which book to read!

Whoa

The good old Dewey Decimal System

The history of spoiler alerts

Check it out!

Yeah, a blanket fort

Pillow talk

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Mindset: think about it

Book review: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success

By Dr. Carol S. Dweck, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006

277 pages

This is one of those books that knocks a hole in your head and then fills it up with startling knowledge.

Dweck wrote this rather chatty book about a very serious subject: the mindset that influences much of your life, and can literally play a critical role in your success or failure at work, at school, among your friends and at home with your family.

Here’s a simplistic summary of her findings based on years of teaching and research:

There is a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. A mindset is a frame of mind that enables you to interpret what’s happening in the world around you, and to determine how you will feel about it, and how you will act and react.

I’ll take a stab at briefly defining the two mindsets in my own words.

Fixed mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of whether it validates your static view of your own abilities and self-worth, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as confirming that you are talented and wonderful, or proving that you’re stupid and worthless. You can’t change, and you’ve got to grab what you deserve.

Growth mindset—you interpret most everything that happens to you in terms of feedback about your motivation and your performance, in other words, you see the events and people in your life as part of your continuous quest to learn and achieve your goals and enjoy your relationships with others. You can change, and you can learn to do better.

Of course, it’s possible to have different mindsets in different circumstances, and it’s possible to have some mix of the mindsets.

Dweck says you can learn to have a more effective growth mindset, and you can teach others, kids and adults, to embrace a more effective growth mindset.

We can always learn, we can always build up our talents, we can always get smarter, and we can help ourselves to have more enjoyable lives.

This all makes sense to me.

I don’t think I learned everything Dweck can teach me, so I’m going to read the book again.

Book review: The Sea Runners

Here's one for your reading list

Book review: Waterloo

Book review: Orphan Train

"...somewhere hot..."

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

It started out as a “bachelor’s” degree….

There’s a plain Jane reason why that four-year sheepskin is called a “bachelor’s degree.”

In the 11^th century, the men who went to college for their first degree attained a respectable mastery of knowledge, but it wasn’t enough to set them up for good jobs.

Hence, they were generally unable to support a family, and thus remained bachelors until they went further in their studies.

In common parlance, they earned the “bachelor’s” degree.

Seal of University of Bologna

The first Western university was the University of Bologna in Italy, established in 1088. The University of Paris opened its doors about 60 years later, and the University of Oxford was created in 1167.

1644 sketch of Harvard's first seal

There is some high-toned dispute about the founding date of the first American “university.” Harvard, without a doubt, was established in 1636 as the first “institution of higher learning” in the English colonies.

DelanceyPlace.com cites Kevin Madigan’s Medieval Christianity in explaining the impact of universities on the development of Western civilization, starting about the mid-point of the Middle Ages.

By the way, the academic powerhouse we think of as a “university” was originally an outgrowth of the medieval guilds, and the name “university” is shorthand for universitas magistrorum et scholarium, that is, a "community of teachers and scholars.”

Sometimes a university is more than that, and sometimes, less. That’s a story for another time.

Let's stop pretending about grade inflation

Homework....think again....

Get crazy!  Let your kids go outside and play

Maybe your kid shouldn't go to college

What it doesn't say....

Book review: Dead Wake

Okay, it’s “O. K.”—OK?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Let’s stop pretending about grade inflation

The Washington Post just put another stick in the eye of the folks who like to believe that grade inflation isn’t real. See it here.

There’s a great chart in the posting on WashingtonPost.com. It shows that for a sample of 400 four-year colleges—big and small, Ivy and not, public and private—45% of the grades in 2013 were As. Almost 34% were Bs.

In her commentary, Catherine Rampell said:

“These findings raise questions not only about whether the United States has been watering down its educational standards — and hampering the ability of students to compete in the global marketplace in the process. They also lend credence to the perception that campuses leave their students coddled, pampered and unchallenged, awarding them trophies just for showing up.”

In the last 75 years, the percentage of As has tripled while the percentage of Bs has stayed about the same. Why isn’t that a great big scandal?

If you were a straight-A student in 1940, you were something.

Now, a straight-A student is something else.

Stop promoting the kids who aren't ready

"Tools" on campus?

A different fix for education

The 3 Rs....a little history

That textbook racket

Grade inflation....still crazy after all these years

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Homework—think again….

Homework. You know what I’m talking about. It’s one of those things, gotta do it. Practice makes perfect, right?

Try thinking twice about homework, maybe it’s not alright.

The first public school in the North American colonies—the Boston Latin School—assigned homework to its students because the Puritans were sure that “practice makes perfect.”

In the middle of the 19^th century, there was some sentiment that homework wasn’t entirely healthy for kids. In 1900, the Ladies’ Home Journal and pediatricians across the country started a movement to cut back on homework in favor of exercise and outdoor play. That didn’t last long.

The Sputnik scare and the Reagan administrations’ A Nation At Risk report cranked up the pressure for more homework to boost scholastic test scores.

Students today are doing about 50 percent more homework than their counterparts in the 1980s.

Of course some after school book work can be beneficial to students, but the modern pile of homework also contributes to student stress and lost playtime and lost sleep.

The trouble is that there’s no rigorous evidence that a lot of homework does a lot of good.

Here’s an excerpt from a new book on what ails our public schools:

“…excessive homework does more harm than good…Scientific research demonstrates that in many cases, homework does nothing to improve students’ academic performance…In 2006, Duke University’s Harris Cooper surveyed fifteen years’ worth of homework studies conducted across the country. The conclusion: homework was found to have little to no benefit before high school and diminishing returns for high school students as the hours spent doing it increased.”

Some homework helps some students. Parents and teachers should start believing that.

Source:

Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015, 69-74.

Get crazy!  Let your kids go outside and play

Maybe your kid shouldn't go to college

What it doesn't say....

Preschool school: is it the right thing?

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

Stop promoting the kids who aren't ready

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Get crazy—let your kids go outside and play

Kids aren’t playing enough. Plain and simple.

As in: play time, unstructured, lots of imagination, no adult direction or rules, you know, playing outside, building the pillow fort, making up stories about monkeys and ghosts, “I’ll be the monster and you be the monster catcher…”….

University of Michigan researchers did some checking, and concluded that kids ages 6-17 spent twice as much time playing outdoors in the 1980s as they do now.

Here’s an unforgettable memory of my childhood: my mother routinely said to my brother and me, “You boys go outside and play.” It was up to us to decide what to do.

Let’s nail this part down: “playing outside” does not mean suiting up for the traveling soccer team’s semi-championship game two states away after putting in 35 hours of “mandatory” practice every week, especially if you’re 9 years old.

In her new book Beyond Measure, education reformer Vicki Abeles says “…in these unstructured moments [of free playtime]…children develop essential capacities for reflective thought, creativity, social skills, and self-control.”

Amen to that.

Source:

Vicki Abeles, Beyond Measure, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015, 47-48.

Soul talking....

Full circle....

The few have spoken again....

The wisdom of William Cronon

The boob tube....

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Maybe your kid shouldn't go to college

Don’t assume that the college track is the only life path that makes sense for your high school senior.

I'm talking about what we all think of as the four-year college experience.

Try asking your child if she wants to go to college. Try asking your child what kind of career training he’d like to have.

Maybe the answers will surprise you.

Two recent commentaries are worth your time:

Michael Petrilli on Slate.com   lays it on the line:

“Kid, I’m sorry, but you’re just not college material.”

Valerie Strauss on WashingtonPost.com asks this policy question:

“Who should decide who is college material and who isn’t?

   

Obviously, parents and their almost-high-school-graduate kids are the folks who need to do the heavy lifting on this issue.

For starters, parents need to stop insisting that their kids must go to college.

Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post takes the trouble to point out that about 70% of real life jobs don’t require a college degree….  see College isn't for everyone part I

and yet, way more than half of high school graduates go to college (of course, not all of them actually get a degree).

In general, college costs way too much for what you get. If you want some amplification on this point, talk to a recent graduate who’s still looking for a job.

And here’s the thing: not everybody is qualified to be successful in college. Notice, I’m not arguing against the “right” of every kid to go to college, I’m just saying that a lot of college freshmen don’t have the skills and mental horsepower to get passing grades and graduate. For example, last year only 43% of the high school students who took the SATs scored high enough to be successful in the college classroom.  See College isn't for everyone part II

Too many college students end their college careers with no degree and lots of student debt, and too many college graduates leave the campus with lots of student debt.

The whole mantra about “every child should go to college” is based on wishful thinking and ignorance or indifference about the real-life certainty that a lot of kids couldn’t possibly succeed on the college campus. Neither their parents nor you and I (i.e., taxpayers) should spend a pile of money to pay for ultimate failure.

As a matter of national policy, let’s decide that every high school graduate should have the opportunity to go on to get suitable training for a job/career that’s compatible with the student’s capabilities and interests.

So somebody can write a column with this headline:

“Hey kid, good news, you’re gonna get education/training that’s right for you.”

>>>>>  UPDATE  <<<<<

Here's a current comment on college expenses from Mary Bromley at Cornerstone University:

What it doesn't say....

Preschool school: is it the right thing?

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

Stop promoting the kids who aren't ready

Student debt: the wrong solution

Good news and bad news about Stanford University

College: transformation or transaction?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

Fat city, the wrong kind....

Almost 30% of American kids, ages 2-19, are overweight or obese.

That means they’re a lot more likely to have big health problems.

If you have a loving or concerned role with children—as a parent, grandparent, aunt/uncle, brother/sister, you know who you are—you can do something about this.

If you’re not going to do something about it,

you’re not going to do anything about it.

The boob tube....

Up for the count

Papillon redux

Reading in the rubble

Your great-grandmother didn't have a teddy bear

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

I didn’t bother on Thursday night

About 225 million grownups in America didn’t watch the Republican debate or He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named last Thursday night. I was one of them.

The audience for the GOP debate on Fox was 12.5 million, about 5% of adults in the U.S. Roughly 2.7 million—about 1%--tuned in to the DJT event benefitting military veterans.

The rest of us were doing other things: hoping the next president will use the full powers of the Oval Office to do good things for America, like improving education, boosting infrastructure investment and creating jobs, reducing carbon emissions to tackle the global climate change horror, increasing taxes on the very wealthy, taking steps to fight the greedy power of corporations and Wall Street….

You fill in the hopes I forgot to mention….

Ring the bell

Stones and bones

The wisdom of Mark Twain (part 7)

Worse than Fahrenheit 451

Donkey and elephant enter politics

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.

What it doesn’t say….

I’m pretty sure that a lot of folks thought teaching was a proper job for women in 1915 in Sacramento.

Of course, there weren’t a lot of other career paths open to women who wanted to work, or needed to work.

I wonder what women thought about applying for a teaching job, and, of course, complying with the rules and regulations. At least, judging by this example, teachers had a more or less free rein in deciding what and how they should teach.

Wait a minute. I just noticed it doesn’t say anything about romping naked with wild animals in public. Does that mean….?

The 3 Rs....a little history

Kids don't learn from people they don't trust

A different fix for education

Teach "on a rock" ?

Educators: what do they know and how long have they known it?

Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016 All rights reserved.