Category: Education: “Higher” Ed

The Harvard Classics

Let’s face it. What is taught in schools — K-12 through college — is not education. It’s job training. And not very good job training at that!

Do it yourself:

The Harvard Classics is a 51-volume Great Books list, compiled and edited by Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot in 1909. All volumes are now in the public domain. Free pdf versions (and other formats) are available at archive.org. A complete list of volumes and links is supplied below.

Of interest is Dr. Eliot’s suggestion that a superior education can be gained by reading from this list for only 15 minutes a day.

Source: The Harvard Classics

Surgery students ‘losing dexterity to sew’

Prof Kneebone says he has seen a decline in the manual dexterity of students over the past decade – which he says is a problem for surgeons, who need craftsmanship as well as academic knowledge.

“An obvious example is of a surgeon needing some dexterity and skill in sewing or stitching,” he says.

“A lot of things are reduced to swiping on a two-dimensional flat screen,” he says, which he argues takes away the experience of handling materials and developing physical skills.

Such skills might once have been gained at school or at home, whether in cutting textiles, measuring ingredients, repairing something that’s broken, learning woodwork or holding an instrument.

Students have become “less competent and less confident” in using their hands, he says.

“We have students who have very high exam grades but lack tactile general knowledge,” says the professor.

Can’t these kids do anything?

Source: Surgery students ‘losing dexterity to sew’

College Students Not Mailing Absentee Ballots Because They Don’t Know Where to Buy Stamps

“One thing that came up, which I had heard from my own kids but I thought they were just nerdy, was that the students will go through the process of applying for a mail-in absentee ballot, they will fill out the ballot, and then, they don’t know where to get stamps,” Lisa Connors with the Fairfax County Office of Public Affairs said.

We really don’t need people this stupid voting. Raise the voting age. To 30. Hopefully they will be adult enough to have moved out of their parents’ basements.

Source: College Students Not Mailing Absentee Ballots Because They Don’t Know Where to Buy Stamps

Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

As for actual learning, our intellectual patrimony will be further eroded. Culturally illiterate students who could not name a single artist or philosopher from Periclean Athens, the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment will announce that Western civilization is racist and patriarchal. Being forced to study the West’s monumental accomplishments of imagination and reason, whether by Plato, Aeschylus, Mozart or Hume, jeopardizes their very survival, they will whine.

I’ve read Plato, Aeschylus, and Hume and my survival was never threatened. Well maybe I was in danger of laughing myself to death after reading the idiocy that is Hume.

 

Source: Duped by diversity: Colleges corrupt their curriculum to satisfy modern progressive sensibilities – NY Daily News

Is There a Cure for the Modern University?

The reasons for the precipitous decline in academic rigor, standards, and outcomes are many and have been thoroughly canvassed.  It may be worth bulleting some of them here to suggest the scope of the problem: …

  • the transformation of a reading culture into a visual and digital culture, rendering students progressively incapable of mastering the nuances, complexities, and semantic rules of written language as well as the habit of, like, coherent, like, conversation.  Like, I kid you not, dude!

Source: Is There a Cure for the Modern University?

Campus Leftists Attack Free Speech

“Do we believe in objective reality?” she replied. “These students … are among the most privileged human beings in human history. To be at an American college with educational resources available to them that the Renaissance humanists would have killed for. (Yet they) think of themselves as victims. That, to me, is a very sad state of delusion.”

It’s not just on campus anymore. Elected Democrat leaders are advocating violence and oppression everywhere.

Source: Campus Leftists Attack Free Speech

Professor: Learning Math Can Cause ‘Collateral Damage’ to Society | National Review

“Money and thus mathematics is the tool for the distribution of wealth,” he writes. “It can therefore be argued that as the key underpinning conceptual tool mathematics is implicated in the global disparities in wealth.”

This is what’s wrong with our educational system, K-12 on up: idiot SJW (but I repeat myself) injecting their personal ideologies and beliefs into what were perfectly fine, useful, and rational subjects. This professor should be removed from his position and banned from teaching ever again. He is a menace.

Source: Professor: Learning Math Can Cause ‘Collateral Damage’ to Society | National Review

Temple Professor: The American Home Is an Oppressive Cisgender Space | Breitbart

A recently published academic journal article from a professor at Temple University makes the case that the typical American household reinforces oppressive cisgender normalities.

Max J. Andrucki, a professor of geography and urban studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, penned a recent academic journal article on the oppressive nature of the American household. The article, which was recently highlighted by the popular New Real Peer Review Twitter account, is entitled “Trans objects: materializing queer time in US transmasculine homes,” was published last week in the academic journal Gender, Place and Culture. The article, at its core, argues that traditional American homes fail to embrace “trans objects.”

Why is this guy not locked up? He’s deranged and needs to be put away for the safety of himself and his students. There is no such thing as a ‘transmasculine’ home. He’s fighting a war against reality here and doubtless he is spreading this perverted thinking to his students at taxpayer expense.

Source: Temple Professor: The American Home Is an Oppressive Cisgender Space | Breitbart

The Overthrow of the Great Books

The professors act this way because they are suffused with ressentiment. Ressentiment is, of course, Nietzsche’s term for a certain state of mind, or rather, a condition of being. He liked the French word because it signified a deeper psychology than the German (and English) equivalent does. Ressentiment is the attitude of slave morality, Nietzsche wrote, the moral formation of one who feels rage and envy but hasn’t the strength or courage to act upon them. A man of ressentiment knows and resents his own weakness and mediocrity, and he hates the sight of greatness, which only reminds the lesser party of his own inferiority. And so he fashions a new moral system whereby victimhood becomes a high badge, suspicion signifies a sensitive eye for justice, and group denunciation of lone dissenters is the surest path to virtue.

I grew up with a set of the Great Books in my home. I was the only one who used them, and I still have them. With a set of these books I don’t need to deal with, or pay exhorbitant sums to, mediocre professors (but I repeat myself).

Source: The Overthrow of the Great Books

 

‘Uneducated’: The Left’s Favorite Pejorative

The left wants to keep up the great lie that you need a college education to be happy and successful, and moreover as a prerequisite for holding any sort of an opinion.  Leftists mock the idea of an autodidact and any form of self-education.  In their minds, “real” knowledge can only be spoon-fed to you within the great halls of an institution.

As an autodidact myself, I’ve run into old acquaintances who do indeed mock the idea that one can educate oneself. Even worse is the disdain they exhibit for ‘real world’ experience. These are credentialed academics teaching at eastern universities.

I’ve found them to be shallow, ill-informed, and, from my perspective, uneducated in anything but, maybe, the narrow area of study their degree is in. Yet for some reason they think they are ‘experts’ on everything else also.

Source: ‘Uneducated’: The Left’s Favorite Pejorative