Posted on 06/02/2012 6:35:42 AM PDT by wintertime
When I receive my college alumnae magazine in the mail, I scan it more than actually read it. The professors I knew are long retired; I have lost touch with many of my friends; the only large amounts of money I ever gave were in the form of tuition payments, so I will never see my name highlighted as a major donor. I follow major-league baseball; the articles on the field hockey and soccer teams don't interest me.
( Snip)
The spring issue included coverage of a series of one-day symposia as part of "Student Engagement Week." To tell you the truth, just the word "Engagement" gives me the creeps. As part of the Activism Symposium, two members of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) had been invited to speak. Coverage of their presentation provided glowing reviews of the effectiveness of OWS, including the imaginative communication style of the General Assemblies; other speakers encouraged members of the audience to find their "political voice" through the Occupy Movement. Of course, there was no mention of the lawlessness, destruction of property, and violence perpetrated at many of OWS encampments. That would have shattered the illusion that OWS is a "feel-good" movement and that its representatives legitimately deserved to be in attendance at such an academic endeavor.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
1) Keep as many children **OUT** of college as possible. In this regard, Charles Murray is completely correct. Abolish all but a handful of bachelors degrees. We as a nation should move toward certifiable qualifying exams. The exams in individual subjects could start as early as first grade. Courses could be available on the Internet. The course content and certifiable testing could even be free to the student if the developers accepted advertising.
2) Conservatives should encourage employers to use SAT or ACT scores, instead of a college degree, as a measure of an applicant's potential worth to the business. Most of the work done in the United States does NOT require a college education, and most employees learn their job while on the job. Employers demand college level education mostly as means of assuring that the new employee is literate, reasonably numerate in basic arithmetic, and sufficiently self-disciplined. High SAT or ACT scores could prove this to an employer.
3)Conservatives must work to see that every government K-12 school in this nation is shut down. Conservatives must work to see that every child in this nation has access to a **private** K-12 education that fully upholds their family's specific Judeo Christian faith and our nation's founding principles. Instead of donating money to university endowments, wealthy conservatives should organize and donate to **private** educational foundations that would award grants and vouchers to private schools.
Instead of Prussian-model schools, brick and mortar, and prison-like schools, conservatives should encourage, through their donations and endowments, the development of one-room schools, home-based dame schools, homeschool cooperatives, and Internet learning. Perhaps, instead of issuing a voucher to the student, a grant could be given to individual conservative teachers who would prepare students for the certifiable qualifying exams recommended by Charles Murray.
The students who now matriculate in university are already well marinated in liberalism. Like fish who can not see the water in which they are swimming, the university students are incapable of recognizing the Marxist propaganda that surrounds them. Not only are they incapable of challenging their professors, they are unwilling. The few who can call out Marxism for what it is are overwhelmed by the number of sheeple sitting in their classrooms.
If our college classrooms were filled to the brim with privately educated K-12 graduates who were fully prepared to defend their faith and our nation's founding principles, their Marxist professor would wither before their righteousness. Instead of OWS rallies their would be faith based fraternities, sororities, and service/political clubs.
Please remember that government owned and run K-12 schools are a single-payer, compulsory, and godless socialist entitlement. In many ways they resemble prisons. The children who attend risk learning to be comfortable with government compulsion, socialism. Children who attend these schools risk learning to be compliant prisoners of the state. These children **will** learn to think godlessly. They must think godlessly just to cooperate in the classroom.
The current state of our universities is **proof** that the bulk of graduates of our nation's government K-12 schools are intellectually and spiritually powerless in the face of university Marxist and godless domination.
To the others: I don't have a formal ping list. Your names came to my mind as I read this article and I thought you might be interested.
I came to those conclusions decades ago
Many of us have much better things to do on a beautiful Saturday morning than to take your bait and open ourselves to your insulting manners.
Have a pleasant day. I am spending the morning in the garden taking advantage of rain softened soil and then will head for the beach to see what goodies the storm last night stirred up.
Or you can send them to a University in the Conservative part of the Midwest where they won’t encounter much nonsense. My kid is attending the University of Oklahoma. He said that “Occupy Norman” maybe had half a dozen members ;-) It was pitiful!
The other part is - the tuition is WAY below what CA charges, which is ALSO a big plus. It’s relatively affordable.
I think homeschooling parents should either encourage their children to study subjects such as engineering and medicine which don’t leave much time for liberal crap, or ask them whether they really need to attend college for what they want. I expect my daughter to attend college. I also expect that she won’t be studying for a worthless liberal degree.
Unfortunately the legal climate has made it almost impossible for employers to hire based on things like achievement tests. That’s racist, don’t you know...
Thanks for the ping!
It was a worthwhile read!
My college magazine was full of what they are doing to fight global warming, and achieve sustainability on campus. It sure seems that colleges and universities are liberal in whatever they do.
Yeah no sense in teaching them to appreciate the beauty of a Degas painting so they can appreciate the interplay of light and movement. And Architects don't need to understand anything about form. And God forbid that anyone should be exposed to Shakespeare, none of that cr@p he wrote is relevant today. And we definitely don't want lawyers exposed to reading a variety of sources so they can learn critical thinking skills.
Well I am back to building a Grandfather clock for a friend of mines daughter, and I will make sure not to use anything I learned about the Golden mean/ ratio. Because it would be a shame if this actually came out looking nice or pleasing to the eye. I really hope I don't have to use the /SARC tag but I will.
I hope I get to see a picture of the finished clock.
Lunch is over, time to hit the beach. Have a great rest of the day!
If our education system didn’t suck that’s the sort of thing high school graduates should know. I certainly did. College should be in depth education for careers that need advanced knowledge, not kindergarten with beer parties.
Why don't you and the rest of your little band of thought police get together and make a list of all those things you think are important and let the rest of us know, or better yet start your own school and show us. Oh wait that actually requires you to get off your butt and do something. You are much easier and more pleasant to talk to when you don't regurgitate the palaver of your leader
I am using cherry and maple and have made the stiles thinner to give it a lighter more airy feel.
Once this is done I am going to build a cheval mirror as a shower gift for my nephews fiancee. It is my own design but I have incorporated elements of Krenov that give it a "whimsical" feel.
As an FYI, medical schools do not require a specific degree for entrance - just specific courses. My daughter found out in the process of her applying that med schools PREFER admitting students with degrees outside of the field of science. She herself added a Classics major to balance out her Bio-Chem and to make herself a more interesting candidate.
She said that if she had it to do over again, she would have majored in what she loved, taken the pre-requisites for medical school, then just really enjoyed her college experiences more.
FWIW
Well...that is exactly what homeschoolers by the **millions** ( including Jen B and me) are doing and have done.
Except for ( possibly) architecture, where a license is required, in all of the areas of study that you mentioned the information is available on the Internet, at your local library, or through inter-library loan. Also.....The average cost of tuition ( even at a state college in my state) could buy a **lot** of one on one tutoring in any of the subjects you listed.
get off your butt and do something.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Homeschooling is doing something.
“Oh wait that actually requires you to get off your butt and do something.”
I'm sure you realize that homeschoolers generally get off their butts and do something regarding the educations of their own children in significantly greater amounts than folks who send their kids to traditional schools.
But some of your points are well-taken. I get a little daunted to see posters denigrate the liberal arts on this forum. I actually saw a couple of posters ask when has the study of classics ever been important?
My, my. What ignorance and stupidity. The first western universities were established to teach what we now call the classics, along with philosophy and “natural philosophy” (natural sciences).
But, unfortunately, many public schools no longer do much of a job actually teaching folks much of anything. Unfortunately, the largest school systems, the ones with the most kids, often educate the least, not that there aren't exceptions even within otherwise-poor systems.
JenB is right to say that at least an introduction to many of the topics you mention should have been well-covered by the end of high school. I know that both my sons have at least a passing knowledge of what you mentioned, and in some cases, a good deal more.
Nonetheless, I don't agree that college should just be about learning a trade. For folks who want to be plumbers or electricians (or lawyers or accountants), a trade school would suffice. There is value in a broader education, and not all (or perhaps even most) of that value is economic.
As for this thread, I'm inclined to agree with Gabz. Just ignore the bait.
sitetest
I don’t think college should be for learning a trade. I agree that trade schools are for that. I value liberal arts, just not enough to want to pay for them for my kid or someone else’s kid, when the liberals make student loans all magically go away and I end up footing the bill.
There were a lot of subjects I really liked. History, classics, literature, writing. I enjoyed my out of major classes in those subjects. They tended to be easy As next to my math and computer science courses. I chose to major in a field that had a reasonable chance of a high paying job. Other people make different choices but it’s telling that most Occupy idiots are studying “Something Studies” at a local college.
Colleges need to be cleaned up - in the sense of Jesus cleaning the temple. They aren’t unredeemable like the government schools are, but probably 60% of majors and 70% of professors should be out in the garbage next week.
Like many things in life, there's good and bad in colleges.
“I value liberal arts, just not enough to want to pay for them for my kid or someone else’s kid, when the liberals make student loans all magically go away and I end up footing the bill.”
From my perspective, liberal arts are integral to a college education. College really isn't worthwhile without liberal arts, without those core subjects that comprise the traditional “classics.”
There are a lot of problems globally with higher education. Many students make bad choices. Many schools allow students to make bad choices without ever encouraging them to think about the consequences. Taking out tens of thousands of dollars in loans to get a degree in a field with poor job prospects probably isn't the brightest thing to do. Lots of schools offer degree programs in fields that are entirely lacking in academic rigor. Many professors allow their liberal politics to seep into the classroom.
And the biggie:
Probably half or more of the kids in college don't belong there. That's the single biggest problem with higher education - the whole idea of “every student should go to college.” Not every student is capable of earning a high school diploma from a school with decent standards!
All that being said, a bright student with a decent secondary education, with parents who care, who get involved, and who add their wisdom to the mix of information available, can make out a path for college that is sensible, as you did.
sitetest
So?...Who is using personal insult here? Gabz, perhaps you should examine your own heart.
Wintertime
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