The children’s conservative revolution

September 28, 2012 By 206 Comments

First lady Michelle Obama has joined with food activists to push through changes in  school lunch menus as a way to combat childhood obesity and promote better nutrition.  But children are rising up in revolution.  A new generation of anti-big government, anti-nanny state meddling, is born!  The Tea Party is passing its generational torch to the School Lunch Party.

A new product has popped up on the city’s black market and it’s selling in an unexpected place: Greater New Bedford Vocational-Technical High School, which has become ground zero for a new underground economy based on trade in chocolate syrup.

Students said some of their peers are buying the contraband liquid for 50 cents and squeezing it into cartons of white milk to give it flavor. It’s their way of coping with a ban on flavored milk — and a long list of other items — that took effect Aug. 1.

“Of course they got rid of dessert, (but) flavored milk … I don’t understand why we can’t have that,” said Paige Lame , 17, of New Bedford. She added that she thought the nutritional difference between white milk and chocolate, strawberry or coffee flavored milk was too minimal to have an important impact on health.

The changes reflect stricter nutrition standards imposed in January by the federal Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which was championed by Michelle Obama and her “Let’s Move” initiative.

They are also part of a law passed by the state Legislature in 2010 as a step toward combating childhood obesity. That law states that milk with more sugar than nonfat or 1 percent white milk may not be served a la carte starting in August 2013.

The rules, which apply to schools across the state, also reduce the amount of protein served to high schoolers, and increase servings of fruit and vegetables — going so far as to specify how many servings of green vegetables, legumes, and red/orange vegetables should be consumed each week. . . .

The changes are especially hard at the elementary school level, where hummus and black bean salad have been a tough sell, said Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for the New Bedford Public Schools, adding that bowls of chili served Wednesday to comply with the legume specifications were “not a very good decision.” . . .

At Voc-Tech, the changes have produced complaints from some students that portions are too small — particularly since the price of lunch has increased 10 cents to $1.95, again due to a federal mandate.”How do they expect us to go through the day and work hard when they give us smaller portions and we’re hungry?” said Ashley Chaneco, 13, of New Bedford.

“You’re paying more for less,” said Erik Cortez, 16, of New Bedford. “I get it, but why should they have the right to tell you what you can and can’t eat?”

via Healthy food policy at school jumpstarts chocolate syrup trade | SouthCoastToday.com.

Imagine trying to get elementary school-aged kids to eat humuus!

Hungry school children are now bringing their lunches and eating more snacks.  See this report.

And this new rising generation of radicalized students, newly opposed to big government and nanny-state meddling, are battling the oppression with the tools that they have.  Not only setting up black markets for chocolate syrup and other newly-controlled substances, but using the new information technology to promote the cause.   Consider this very creative video they made, which has now, of course, gone viral:

Filed Under: Education, Food Tagged With: 206 Comments

Chicago teachers’ strike

September 12, 2012 By 54 Comments

Chicago teachers are on strike, even though they are among the highest paid in the country and they were offered a 16% raise.  But they don’t want to be held accountable for their effectiveness:

For the first time in a quarter century, Chicago teachers walked out of the classroom Monday, taking a bitter contract dispute over evaluations and job security to the streets of the nation’s third-largest city — and to a national audience — less than a week after most schools opened for fall.

The walkout forced hundreds of thousands of parents to scramble for a place to send idle children and created an unwelcome political distraction for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In a year when labor unions have been losing ground nationwide, the implications were sure to extend far beyond Chicago, particularly for districts engaged in similar debates.

The two sides resumed negotiations Monday but failed to reach a settlement, meaning the strike will extend into at least a second day.

Chicago School Board President David Vitale said board and union negotiators did not even get around to bargaining on the two biggest issues, performance evaluations or recall rights for laid-off teachers. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said that was because the district did not change its proposals.

“This is a long-term battle that everyone’s going to watch,” said Eric Hanuskek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. “Other teachers unions in the United States are wondering if they should follow suit.”

The union had vowed to strike Monday if there was no agreement on a new contract, even though the district had offered a 16 percent raise over four years and the two sides had essentially agreed on a longer school day. With an average annual salary of $76,000, Chicago teachers are among the highest-paid in the nation, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.

But negotiators were still divided on job security measures and a system for evaluating teachers that hinged in part on students’ standardized test scores.

via The Associated Press: Chicago teachers strike in bitter contract dispute.

What is at stake, if other teachers’ unions follow suit, is educational reform.  The politics here are interesting:  Unions and teachers’ unions in particular are key activists in the Democratic party.  And yet, these teachers have risen up against educational reforms pushed by Democrats.  The mayor of Chicago, who has taken on these teachers, is Rahm Emanuel, formerly President Obama’s chief of staff and a key fundraiser in his re-election campaign.  Could improving education, even against the opposition of incompetent teachers and their enablers, become a bi-partisan cause?  Or will political pressure from the unions derail educational reform?

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , 54 Comments

Why they cheat at Harvard

September 10, 2012 By 176 Comments

Harvard University is currently being torn by a cheating scandal.  It was discovered that nearly half of the 250 undergraduates in a course called “Introduction to Congress” cheated on a final exam.  Why would so many of the nation’s ostensible best and brightest at American’s most elite university do that?  Harvard professor Howard Gardner has been studying his students and offers some explanations:

Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted — ardently — to be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so, they told us in effect, “Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.” A classic case of the ends justify the means.

We were so concerned by the results that, for the past six years, we have conducted reflection sessions at elite colleges, including Harvard. Again, we have found the students to be articulate, thoughtful, even lovable. Yet over and over again, we have also found hollowness at the core.

Two examples: In discussing the firing of a dean who lied about her academic qualifications, no student supported the firing. The most common responses were “She’s doing a good job, what’s the problem?” and “Everyone lies on their résumé.” In a discussion of the documentary “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” students were asked what they thought of the company traders who manipulated the price of energy. No student condemned the traders; responses varied from caveat emptor to saying it’s the job of the governor or the state assembly to monitor the situation.

One clue to the troubling state of affairs came from a Harvard classmate who asked me: “Howard, don’t you realize that Harvard has always been primarily about one thing — success?” The students admitted to Harvard these days have watched their every step, lest they fail in their goal of admission to an elite school. But once admitted, they begin to look for new goals, and being a successful scholar is usually not high on the list. What is admired is success on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood — a lavish lifestyle that, among other things, allows you to support your alma mater and get the recognition that follows.

As for those students who do have the scholarly bent, all too often they see professors cut corners — in their class attendance, their attention to student work and, most flagrantly, their use of others to do research. Most embarrassingly, when professors are caught — whether in financial misdealings or even plagiarizing others’ work — there are frequently no clear punishments. If punishments ensue, they are kept quiet, and no one learns the lessons that need to be learned.

Whatever happens to those guilty of cheating, many admirable people are likely to be tarred by their association with Harvard.

via When ambition trumps ethics – The Washington Post.

In other words, the students, while bright, have no sense of vocation, don’t believe in objective morality, believe the end justifies the means, and are fanatically ambitious in a materialistic, self-aggrandizing kind of way.

Filed Under: Education, Ethics Tagged With: , , 176 Comments

Progressivism and college football

September 10, 2012 By 14 Comments

George Will reviews The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big-Time Football by Brian M. Ingrassia, in which we learn that big-time intercollegiate football grew out of progressivism and its vision for higher education:

Higher education embraced athletics in the first half of the 19th century, when most colleges were denominational and most instruction was considered mental and moral preparation for a small minority — clergy and other professionals. Physical education had nothing to do with spectator sports entertaining people from outside the campus community. Rather, it was individual fitness — especially gymnastics — for the moral and pedagogic purposes of muscular Christianity — mens sana in corpore sano, a sound mind in a sound body.

The collective activity of team sports came after a great collective exertion, the Civil War, and two great social changes, urbanization and industrialization. . . . .

Intercollegiate football began when Rutgers played Princeton in 1869, four years after Appomattox. In 1878, one of Princeton’s two undergraduate student managers was Thomas — he was called Tommy — Woodrow Wilson. For the rest of the 19th century, football appealed as a venue for valor for collegians whose fathers’ venues had been battlefields. Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel “The Red Badge of Courage” (1895) — the badge was a wound — said: “Of course, I have never been in a battle, but I believe that I got my sense of the rage of conflict on the football field.”

Harvard philosopher William James then spoke of society finding new sources of discipline and inspiration in “the moral equivalent of war.” Society found football, which like war required the subordination of the individual, and which would relieve the supposed monotony of workers enmeshed in mass production.

College football became a national phenomenon because it supposedly served the values of progressivism, in two ways. It exemplified specialization, expertise and scientific management. And it would reconcile the public to the transformation of universities, especially public universities, into something progressivism desired but the public found alien. Replicating industrialism’s division of labor, universities introduced the fragmentation of the old curriculum of moral instruction into increasingly specialized and arcane disciplines. These included the recently founded social sciences — economics, sociology, political science — that were supposed to supply progressive governments with the expertise to manage the complexities of the modern economy and the simplicities of the uninstructed masses. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Education, Football, History Tagged With: , , 14 Comments

“Together and unequal” educational standards

August 28, 2012 By 28 Comments

Many public schools are chafing under the “No Child Left Behind” requirements passed by the Bush administration, which mandate that schools meet learning standards, an effort to ensure that all students are taught how to read, write, and calculate.  Because so many schools are failing at this, the Obama administration is allowing states to opt out by proposing and meeting their own performance standards.  Here is what Virginia is going to do:

Under the new rules, schools are expected to have 78 percent of white students and 89 percent of Asian students passing Virginia’s Standards of Learning math tests but just 57 percent of black students, 65 percent of Hispanic students and 59 percent of low-income students.

via Virginia’s ‘together and unequal’ school standards – The Washington Post.

Different standards for different races!  89% of Asians (who we all know are good at math) must pass the test, but the schools will think they are successful if only 57% of black students do.  Isn’t this racist?

The old segregated schools were said to be “separate but equal.”  The columnist Andrew Rotherham, linked above, calls this approach “together but unequal.”

HT:  Jackie

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , 28 Comments

More Classical Lutheran Education online

August 13, 2012 By 8 Comments
I told you about Wittenberg Academy, offering an entire classical Lutheran high school curriculum online.  Those are asynchronous courses, which means they are self-contained and may be taken whenever the student wants to fire up the computer, though there is personal interaction with the teacher and other students built in.   Now Faith Lutheran Church in Plano, Texas, which has an excellent classical Lutheran high school, is making some of its courses available to homeschoolers live.  Pastor Woelmer of Faith, Plano, sent me this notice:

Faith Lutheran High School is a classical high school in Plano, Texas. Faith will now offer classes live using two-way HD-Video streaming through the Internet. The student will see the teacher on their home computer or lap-top, see the notes the teacher puts on the e-board, listen to the lecture, participate in live discussions with other students, and the teacher will be able to see the student as well.

Faith will offer the Omnibus 1 and Omnibus 3 classes taught from a Lutheran perspective. The Omnibus class consists of English, Theology, and History (3 credits) and is taught by a professional Lutheran school teacher with many years of classroom experience. Classes will start August 22, 2012.For more information, including cost and other details, call 972-423-7448 or send an email to: school@faithplanoschool.org.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , 8 Comments

A summer reading project

July 31, 2012 By 10 Comments

About one of my students:

Evan Johnson boarded the Washington, D.C. metro train at 5:15 a.m., surrounded by sleepy, somber commuters. One girl on his left read The Hunger Games on her Kindle, while the girl in front of him read the same novel in paperback.

Ear buds in, rocking with the speeding metro, they were oblivious to the fact that “they were both entering the same fantasy world, while only a few feet apart,” Johnson said. “I often wondered what might happen if people simply looked around at other readers and discussed what they were reading.”

Anyone discussing books with Johnson might feel a little inadequate. When he stepped on that commuter train last year, Johnson, 20, was speeding his way through his 40th book of the summer.

Between May 16 and August 12, 2011, Johnson read one book a day – 94 books and 19,276 pages, an average of 217 pages per day. On some days he finished two books.

As a sophomore at Patrick Henry College, Johnson’s professors constantly gave him reading suggestions. His classmates often rolled their eyes and ignored similar suggestions, too busy with homework and essays to imagine recreational reading. But Johnson began to compile a reading list, jotting down dozens of titles during the semester. He vowed he would read them when he had an opportunity.

That summer, Johnson accepted an internship in Washington and moved to a new apartment in Falls Church, Va. Away from the distractions and requirements of school, he had the time he needed to start working through his list.

After counting the number of books he wanted to read, Johnson realized he would have to finish a book a day in order to make a good dent in the list. He set a goal, and committed his summer to reaching it.

Throughout the summer, the local library provided Johnson with 20 books via inter-library loan. The librarian’s eyes widened with surprise when he returned an 800-page, two-volume set of The Count of Monte Cristo after only three days. Johnson’s titles were rather eclectic, with authors ranging from Chinese Christian Watchman Nee to U.S. Marine David J. Danelo.

Every day, Johnson woke at 4 a.m. He ate a ham and cheese omelet, walked two miles to the metro, and caught the 5:15 a.m. train. He would set his laptop bag across his knees, pull out a book and read.

People at the bus stop often asked Johnson how he had time to read. He wondered how they could spend their commute doing nothing or playing “Angry Birds.”

“Reading taught me just how much time is often wasted everyday,” Johnson said. “People talk about how wasteful Americans are with stuff, water, money, et cetera. I also would add that we are incredibly wasteful with time.”

via The summer of books | World on Campus: news for college students from a Christian perspective..

The full article at the link (free registration required) gives his book list, an eclectic–that is to say, a liberal arts–assortment of titles on all kinds of topics.  (He even included one by me!)

Filed Under: Education, Literature Tagged With: 10 Comments

Penn State’s punishment

July 23, 2012 By 94 Comments

The NCAA did not kill off completely Penn State’s football program, as was widely expected, but the sanctions for the child sexual abuse scandal and its coverup were pretty harsh:

NCAA President Mark Emmert made the announcement Monday morning that the program would be hit with a four-year postseason ban and a $60 million fine. He called the case “unprecedented.”

In addition, the school will be forced to cut 10 scholarships for this season and 20 scholarships for the following four years.

The move essentially bumps Penn State down to the scholarship levels of schools at the lower Football Championship Subdivision.

The school will be forced to vacate all wins from 1998-2011, a total of 112 victories, and serve five years of probation.

The loss of victories means Joe Paterno is no longer college football’s winningest coach. He was fired in November during the scandal after 409 wins at the school.

Because of the length of the punishment, all current Penn State players and incoming freshman will be free to transfer to another school without penalty.

Is this an example of completely justified outrage taking the place of justice?  Normally, guilty individuals are punished, and surely those who knew about Coach Jerry Sandusky’s sex with little boys and did nothing about it need to be called to account.  But the Penn State players, students, and alumni didn’t know what was going on.  Why are they being punished?  Or is there corporate guilt, in which every member of an institution has a share in its transgressions?

If part of the problem in the cover up was the cultural climate of football uber alles, the corporate guilt would extend far beyond Penn State, to big time football universities as a whole and to the NCAA itself.

Also, is the NCAA acting beyond its jurisdiction?  Penn State did not violate any of the rules that the NCAA is supposed to enforce (such as recruiting violations, paying players, and the like).   Isn’t child abuse a matter for the criminal justice system and civil courts to take care of, rather than a sports organization?

And what kind of punishment is it to forfeit 13 years worth of games that have already been played?  It isn’t as if an ineligible player contributed to illicit victories that might otherwise be losses if it were not for the infraction.  How does that punishment have to do with the crime?

Don’t get me wrong:  I am repulsed by what happened at Penn State and want it addressed in the strongest possible way.  I just don’t understand the  NCAA action.  What would be better?

Filed Under: Education, Ethics, Football Tagged With: , , , 94 Comments

Conservatives won at the University of Virginia

July 16, 2012 By 52 Comments

You have perhaps heard about how the University of Virginia board fired the university president Teresa Sullivan, whereupon a huge uproar ensued, and she was hired back.

I’ve heard conservatives lament the re-hiring, saying that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, that this just re-enforces the corruption in higher education, that this is another example of  academic elites stifling reform, etc., etc.

But in this case a conservative philosophy of education was victorious over more progressive attempts to make higher education, which is admittedly frought with problems today, even worse.

First, the board members who led the charge against President Sullivan were liberals and Democratic appointees.  But more importantly, the issues she was fired over had to do with her championing traditional education over and against the changes that are already damaging many colleges.

She resisted the proposal to have UVA go in the direction of online programs.  (I’m not saying online courses are necessarily bad, but the example of for-profit online colleges is not a good one to follow.)  Most telling was this complaint from the board, her resistance to shutting down “obscure academic departments in classics and German.”

Classics an obscure program?  In Mr. Jefferson’s day, classics (the study of Latin and Greek, as well as the history and literature of those ancient societies) was about the only program there was!   Since classics exists to preserve and pass down the heritage of our civilization, it’s often a haven for conservative faculty and students.  German is obscure?  The eclipse of  foreign language is one of the weaknesses of American education.

What is at issue here is preservation of the liberal arts tradition in higher education over against contemporary academic  trendiness.

The problems in higher education are thoroughly documented in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.  It isn’t the conflict between “impractical” and “practical” education or humanities vs. science.  (Science and math are also part of the liberal arts tradition.)  As that book, written by mainstream scholars and not conservative culture warriors, shows, students are graduating without knowing or being able to do very much, due to the collapse of academic standards, bad teaching, a hedonistic student culture, the bad effects of federal funding, and all kinds of other dysfunctions.  As a result, graduates are learning less than they did under old school colleges (when the values of the liberal arts ruled).

At any rate, this time conservatives–in the sense of conservative educators and conservative higher education theory–won at the University of Virginia.

via U-Va. board leaders wanted President Teresa Sullivan to make cuts – The Washington Post.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , 52 Comments

Classical Lutheran education conference

June 8, 2012 By 12 Comments

Come to  The Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education conference, July 17-19, 2012, at Memorial Lutheran Church & School in Houston, Texas.    I’ll be there!   Here is a summary of what’s on tap:

Plenary Speakers
Rev. Todd Wilken of Issues, Etc., for discussions on essential matters of Lutheran education
Dr. Gene Edward Veith for insights and commentary on classical education

Session Leaders include…

Dr. E. Christian Kopff with a discussion of Milton’s essay, “On Education”

Rev. Dr. Steven Hein on matters of apologetics and Lutheran theology

Rev. Mark Preus on teaching Latin

Tim Merritt on teaching the Great Books

Dr. James Tallmon on the Trivium

Mrs. Jackie Veith on the Quadrivium

Dr. Gene Edward Veith in a session on the Family and Vocation from his new book

Janet Muth on Teaching Music Classically

Cheryl Swope on Classical and Lutheran Education with the Special-Needs Child

Rev. Stephen Kieser on Teaching History and Literature in the Home School

Kelly Rottmann on Efficiency in the Home School

Rev. Mark Grunst, Praying the Catechism with Children

Rev. Dan Praeuner with a cost-effective homeschool/school hybrid approach to
classical and Lutheran education

Jocelyn Benson from Wittenberg Academy

and more….

Registration covers sessions from noon 7/17 – noon 7/19, as well as membership
in CCLE, the Consortium for Classical and Lutheran Education.

For more information, please visit www.ccle.org,

 

HT:  Cheryl Swope

Filed Under: Church, Education Tagged With: 12 Comments