Sapere Aude
Tag: education
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its “rubber rooms” — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
i wonder where we would be today if the republicans had spent the last 8 years doing something useful like union bashing instead of chasing gays and starting wars.
Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn’t turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.
- skim journals and textbooks that you only half understand
- Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity
- Accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.
- Revisit topics
- Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.
The Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968 by a community of people in Framingham, Massachusetts, United States. The model has 3 basic tenets: educational freedom, democratic governance and personal responsibility.
Academic Earth was launched on the premise that everyone deserves access to a world-class education. In 2009, we built the first collection of free online college courses from the world’s top universities. The world of open education has exploded since then, so today our curated lists of online courses are hand selected by our staff to show you the very best offerings by subject area.
this looks very promising. they don’t have too many lectures up yet though.
a “christian home schooling” catalog. interesting how the number of materials peaks in 7th grade. are they saying anything after that is optional?
But universities are stuck, like auto plants – like newspapers – like TV Studios – like the US Armed Forces – with infrastructure and unionized workforces that cost a bomb. Like the newspapers or auto makers, they will soon be faced with a dilemma. They cannot get their revenues up to cover their costs. Like papers they will have to cut “content”. At some point like the newspapers they will be left with being expensive and poor value. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.
Too many people going to “college” learning too little.
Big sport has come out against Google’s WiFi 2.0 plan by arguing that use of white space spectrum will cripple sporting events by interfering with wireless headphones.
big sport can fuck themselves.
2009-01-26:
“What’s been surprising is that the damage is so extensive. It’s throughout the brain, not just on the superficial aspects of the brain, but it’s deep inside.”
unsurprisingly, playing these kinds of sports makes you stupid. just like watching them does, too. There is hope that we can end the football epidemic soon, by making it too expensive to play. better uses for all that land now wasted for stadiums, time wasted in front of tvs, and schools will have to compete on actual merit, not the exploits of a bunch of guys in spandex.
the NFL conducted a 20 year campaign to deny a growing body of scientific research that showed a link between playing football and brain damage what’s worse, there is huge brain damage just from watching.
76 of 79 Deceased NFL Players Found to Have Brain Disease
96% of players and 100% of viewers suffer from brain disease.
Long overdue:
How did a sport that causes brain damage become the leading signifier of our institutions of higher learning? no idea
Does our addiction to football foster a tolerance for violence, greed, racism, and homophobia? yes
More encouraging developments:
The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future
It is after all, worse than cigarettes:
4 years ago I wrote a column saying that football was dead in this country, as dead as the Marlboro Man, though it didn’t know it yet. Putting your kids in football would be akin to giving them cigarettes, and leave you to face the withering judgment of your friends and neighbors.
There’s also massive corruption around stadiums:
20 NFL stadiums have opened since 1997, at a cost of $5b in taxpayer funds. Taxpayers have actually spent $10b more on professional sports stadiums and arenas than is typically acknowledged after various hidden costs are taken into account. Using public funds to subsidize wealthy sports franchises makes 0 economic sense and is a giant waste of taxpayer money. Professional teams add virtually no income to local economies. Large subsidies actually have a negative effect, taking money out of the local economy. Aside from the jobs generated by actually building the stadium, most jobs inside the stadium—selling food and beer or working at team concessions—are low-paying temp jobs. It’s even worse for football stadiums, which are used for games at most 10 times a year, and maybe a few more times for concerts or large events. Public economic development dollars can be put to much better use on things besides subsidizing sports teams and their wealthy owners.
Football shares a lot of attributes with religion: Pointless rituals, homophobia, misogyny, tax exempt status, indoctrination of the young, large public subsidies, changes to the brain in practitioners, tribalism, glorification of violence, uneasy alliances with commercial interests, elaborate costumes, a long and confusing rule book, practiced on weekends, involves singing, held in big and expensive buildings and a rabid fan base that forces themselves onto uninterested parties.
This is why US universities produce garbage.
I’d be thrilled to see the insane football culture at many American universities—the culture that Spanier and Paterno epitomized—brought down entirely, and some good might yet come of the Penn State tragedy if it helps that happen. Football should be one of many fine extracurricular activities that are available to interested students, rather than a primary reason for a university’s existence.
The article makes great points about how the NFL in particular has nothing to do with sports, and is actively harmful. but then, every thinking person already knows this.
The ING New York City Marathon was cancelled, but the football game of the New York Giants against the Pittsburgh Steelers went ahead. Why? The nation places a higher value on sedentary spectators popping Advil and Viagra, than on lean and wiry runners.
2011-07-15: “news” for stupid people, aka sports news can now be generated automatically. why not replace the spandex guys with simulations too?
“WISCONSIN appears to be in the driver’s seat en route to a win, as it leads 51-10 after the third quarter. Wisconsin added to its lead when Russell Wilson found Jacob Pedersen for an 8m touchdown to make the score 44-3 … . ” Those words began a news brief written within 60 seconds of the end of the third quarter of the Wisconsin-U.N.L.V. football game earlier this month. They may not seem like much — but they were written by a computer.
2012-01-23:
Many are skeptical that reining in college sports is even possible; the $ are simply too attractive, the pressures from outside too great. It is naïve “to think we will ever put the toothpaste back in the tube. There is an oversized, insatiable interest in sports, and college sports is part of that.”
2013-03-17:
2012-06-09:
ideally the class action suit takes the NFL down. what i don’t understand is why the action wasn’t extended to viewers, as that causes brain damage too.
2013-05-14: Misplaced priorities lead to a dumb, uncompetitive nation
2013-09-24:
nonprofit status for one of the biggest timewasters ever.
Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn’t apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30M a year. It’s time to stop the public giveaways to America’s richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams.
2014-01-03:
My name is Chris Kluwe, and for 8 years I was the punter for the Minnesota Vikings. In May 2013, the Vikings released me from the team. At the time, quite a few people asked me if I thought it was because of my recent activism for same-sex marriage rights, and I was very careful in how I answered the question. My answer, verbatim, was always, “I honestly don’t know, because I’m not in those meetings with the coaches and administrative people.”
you’re living in a decaying, backwards society when bigoted idiots who contribute nothing to society get both big bucks for running around, (or even worse, telling others to run around) and a huge platform to spew their nonsense.
2014-04-07:
Spending more on spandex doesn’t make the US more competitive. 25% more on athletics, combined with the student loan bubble? it seems these institutions are doing everything they can do fail as soon and as hard as possible. good riddance.
2014-06-29:
Plan to Replace American Football With Soccer On Track. The EU could take no credit for the legalization of gay marriage in the United States, but called it “a very welcome development. Once a country has socialism, national health care, and gay marriage, soccer is usually next.” The spokesman offered no timetable for eliminating baseball, but indicated that it was “in the works.”
2015-01-20:
yes please.
what would happen if we eliminated the institution of sport—from the high school level to the pros? Every league, every team. All of it. Gone. What would America look like then?
2015-04-06: step 4 is crucial.
2015-11-07:
The Department of Defense doled out as much as $6.8M in taxpayer money to professional sports teams to honor the military at games and events over the past 4 years
that’s actually pretty well targeted. a particularly dumb audience is much more likely to eat up nonsense like patriotism.
This is a building where our deeply-troubled public school system once stored its supplies, and then one day apparently walked away from it all, allowing everything to go to waste. The interior has been ravaged by fires and the supplies that haven’t burned have been subjected to 20 years of Michigan weather. To walk around this building transcends the sort of typical ruin-fetishism and “sadness” some get from a beautiful abandoned building. This city’s school district is so impoverished that students are not allowed to take their textbooks home to do homework, and many of its administrators are so corrupt that every few months the newspapers have a field day with their scandals, sweetheart-deals, and expensive trips made at the expense of a population of children who can no longer rely on a public education to help lift them from the cycle of violence and poverty that has made Detroit the most dangerous city in America. To walk through this ruin, more than any other, I think, is to obliquely experience the real tragedy of this city; not some sentimental tragedy of brick and plaster, but one of people.
Pallet after pallet of mid-1980s Houghton-Mifflin textbooks, still unwrapped in their original packaging, seem more telling of our failures than any vacant edifice. The floor is littered with flash cards, workbooks, art paper, pencils, scissors, maps, deflated footballs and frozen tennis balls, reel-to-reel tapes. Almost anything you can think of used in the education of a child during the 1980s is there, much of it charred or rotted beyond recognition. Mushrooms thrive in the damp ashes of workbooks. Ailanthus altissima, the “ghetto palm” grows in a soil made by 1000s of books that have burned, and in the pulp of rotted English Textbooks. Everything of any real value has been looted. All that’s left is an overwhelming sense of knowledge unlearned and untapped potential.
that picture captures the state of american high school education perfectly
Yet sometimes I was haunted. Would I have been happier, more emotionally adjusted, had I not skipped 3 grades? Did skipping rob me of 3 years of growing up? I thought back to Hong Kong International School, where I’d sat in a room full of administrators and told them why I wanted to leave 8th grade. I told them about social studies class, where we read the front-page articles from USA Today aloud, pausing to define such troublesome words as ‘distinct’ and ‘priority.’ And about science class, where we learned that Genesis, Native American creation myths, and the Big Bang theory were all equally true in their unique ways. And about my homeroom teacher, who wishing me to socialize, had banned me from reading books during free period and specifically from bringing math-related books to school. I told the administrators that I wanted to skip to 9th grade, in the more academically focused high school, and this I did. After the intoxication of my first skip, I didn’t ruminate about the 2nd or the 3rd. When my family returned to Pennsylvania the following year, I enrolled in 11th grade at Council Rock, sneakily counting my 9th-grade credits from Hong Kong as 10th-grade credits. The following year I absconded to a program for high school seniors at Clarkson University in upstate New York, and the following year, armed with college credits and a G.E.D., I came to Cornell.
This essay made me understand why american kids need college to get the education they should have gotten in high school, something that had always puzzled me.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 