Tag: education
-
What are the ruling ideas today? Is “College For All” among them? (Doubts-that-don’t-change-our-practices edition)
I’ve just finished an article on higher education and the liberal arts, and it’s full of hope and comes to some definite conclusions about particular ways that an education in the liberal arts is valuable. It’s out for peer review right now, which means that if the reviewer is googling phrases maybe she’ll find this,…
-
In-Groups Defend Their Turf? Philosophy versus Psychology in the New York Times
A showdown of sorts with Jonathan Haidt is brewing on The Stone. Michael P. Lynch gives us “A Vote for Reason.” The judgment that reasons play no role in judgment is itself a judgment. And Haidt has defended it with reasons. So if those reasons convince me that his theory is true, then reasons can play a…
-
Public-sector unions as Public Work: The Case for Teachers
(This post is a continuation of Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Strike.) Another way of thinking about public sector unionization is as an effort to force democratic public institutions to remain accountable to the professional standards and know-how of those who work within them. Citizens want better, more accountable teachers, yet they don’t know how…
-
Arendt, Antisemitism, and the Chicago Teachers’ Union Strike
I am one of those ideologically-impure liberals that worries a lot about public sector unions. On the one hand, I favor workplace democracy and collaboration; on the other hand, I worry about the fact that as union membership has declined, the majority of remaining union members haved tended to be at the top of the…
-
There is no college bubble
Megan McArdle’s Newsweek cover story, “Is college a lousy investment?” is an odd beast. Parts of it are really great, and there are some very important observations throughout to which my colleagues and fellow progressives should pay attention. But the title, framing, graphics, and many of the arguments are just silly, which makes it a…
-
Where are the start-ups in the Liberal Arts?
Yesterday, George Mason University economists Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen announced MRU, a modular course design platform that they’ll be using to offer free and potentially paid courses in economics, online. I’ve learned a lot from their blog since I started reading during the run-up to the financial crisis, and I plan to at least…
-
Foucault on Education and Human Capital
From Foucault’s Collège de France lecture on March 14th, 1979 (in what the publisher has misnamed The Birth of Biopolitics despite the fact that that year’s lectures basically spelled the end of Foucault’s work on biopolitics and focused on the limitation of state control over the market): What does it mean to form human capital, and so…
-
The Teleological Paradox in Utilitarianism and Education
In my brief response to Community College Dean a few weeks back, I said something that I think is pretty obvious, but that is often ignored: humanities advocates spend so much time fighting the instrumental approach to education [because] you’ve got to pretend like time doesn’t matter, or else the education won’t work. Consider the classic…
-
Administrative Bloat?
Confessions of a Community College Dean takes on one of my cherished beliefs, that “Administrative Bloat” drives skyrocketing tuition: Never mind that this assertion has been empirically discredited, or that the “supervisory” ranks in colleges have shrunk even faster than the full-time faculty ranks. The only actual growth has been in IT, services for students with…
-
Academically Adrift’s Methodological Shipwreck
On Tuesday we had a university-wide faculty meeting on revising the general education requirements at Morgan State, and predictably President Wilson held up a copy of Arum and Roksa’s Academically Adrift and made some comments about how we had to do better while horribly mangling the actual findings of the book. Though there’s a lot going…