Tag: students

Open Letter to TBP: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

I’ve lurked around this site for years, and, on occasion, put forth an article or two. Mostly I just read and listen in on the commentary. Some of it is humorous, some of it is vile, and much of it is informative, but the little bubble of free speech this site represents is a virtual “city on the hill” from Matthew (5:14). The spirit of freedom is what connects us, and even if most of us talk a bigger game than we walk, we are at least willing to talk which is where the intention to walk is born.

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47% of high school grads aren’t prepared for college

Guest Post by

Students meander toward graduation, taking courses that expose them to a little of everything and not much of anything

Getty Images

Once upon a time, when postwar industrial America was in full steam, a young person could leave school with basic skills and get a job that would support a family. That America is no more.

To succeed in today’s fast-changing, knowledge-based economy, young people need more skills than ever before. And the jobs that used to require work boots, a good set of tools, and a steady hand now require advanced math, science, and reading — and, typically, also a certificate or degree beyond a high school diploma.

Business leaders have long known this. But ample evidence suggests that many high schools have yet to fully grasp the reality of these new demands.

Despite widespread rhetoric around college and career-readiness for all students, just 8% of graduates from public high schools complete a full college- and career-preparatory course of study. Rates of college- and career-ready course-taking are consistently low across all student groups, according to The Education Trust’s new report, “Meandering Toward Graduation: Transcript Outcomes of High School Graduates.”

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Depressing Survey Results Show How Extremely Stupid America Has Become

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

Ten years ago, a major Hollywood film entitled “Idiocracy” was released, and it was an excellent metaphor for what would happen to America over the course of the next decade.  In the movie, an “average American” wakes up 500 years in the future only to discover that he is the most intelligent person by far in the “dumbed down” society that he suddenly finds himself in.

Sadly, I truly believe that if people of average intellect from the 1950s and 1960s were transported to 2016, they would likely be considered mental giants compared to the rest of us.  We have a country where criminals are being paid $1000 a month not to shoot people, and the highest paid public employee in more than half the states is a football coach.  Hardly anyone takes time to read a book anymore, and yet the average American spends 302 minutes a day watching television.  75 percent of our young adults cannot find Israel on a map of the Middle East, but they sure know how to find smut on the Internet.

What in the world has happened to us?  How is it possible that we have become so stupid?  According to a brand new report that was recently released, almost 10 percent of our college graduates believe that Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court…

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Fascism at Yale

Guest Post by Bill Barlow

Usually, we at Harvard are more than happy to see Yale students make fools of themselves on camera. The video that emerged this week of Yale students screaming down one of their professors might make for a good laugh, if its implications were not quite so serious. It’s a scene we’ve seen played out far too often at college campuses in recent years, and it deserves to be called by what it is: a nascent form of fascism.

In case you haven’t heard, Yale has recently endured a firestorm of protest after a lecturer that presides over one of the undergraduate colleges questioned whether concerns about the offensiveness of Halloween costumes had gone too far in impinging on free speech.

In response, hundreds of protesters gathered on the quad, calling for Nicholas and Erika Christakis to be removed from their roles. Nicholas voluntarily came to discuss the matter with them, and soon, a crowd of students enveloped him.

The video is chilling.

One student is heard saying, “Walk away. He doesn’t deserve to be listened to.” When Nicholas started to explain himself, a student yells, “Be quiet!” and then proceeds to lecture him. When Nicholas calmly and politely says “I disagree,” the protestor explodes, screaming, “Why the fuck did you accept the position?! Who the fuck hired you?! You should step down!” Then, finally, “You’re disgusting!”

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A Professor Speaks Out: How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads Are Ruining College Learning

Submitted by Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg

A Professor Speaks Out: How Coddled, Hyper Sensitive Undergrads Are Ruining College Learning

Things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me — particularly the liberal ones.

 

I once saw an adjunct not get his contract renewed after students complained that he exposed them to “offensive” texts written by Edward Said and Mark Twain. His response, that the texts were meant to be a little upsetting, only fueled the students’ ire and sealed his fate.  That was enough to get me to comb through my syllabi and cut out anything I could see upsetting a coddled undergrad, texts ranging from Upton Sinclair to Maureen Tkacik — and I wasn’t the only one who made adjustments, either.

 

The current student-teacher dynamic has been shaped by a large confluence of factors, and perhaps the most important of these is the manner in which cultural studies and social justice writers have comported themselves in popular media. I have a great deal of respect for both of these fields, but their manifestations online, their desire to democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom, has led to adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed’s current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience.

– From the Vox article: I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me

The article at the center of today’s piece is truly excellent and demands much thought and introspection. One of the main themes here at Liberty Blitzkrieg since inception, has been the contention that the American population has turned into a nation of coddled, fearful serfs.

It’s not quite clear to me when this transformation actually happened, but the first undeniable evidence within my lifetime was the public’s reaction to the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. I’ve written about this before, most specifically in the post, How I Remember September 11, 2001. Here’s an excerpt:

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