Putting the Corrupt University System Out of Our Misery

US college students can end up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at the end of their university experience, with very little to show for it. Even middle and lower tier universities are growing exorbitantly priced, without providing students, parents, or society, value for their financial sacrifice.

In fifty years, if not much sooner, half of the roughly 4,500 colleges and universities now operating in the United States will have ceased to exist. The technology driving this change is already at work, and nothing can stop it. The future looks like this: Access to college-level education will be free for everyone; the residential college campus will become largely obsolete; tens of thousands of professors will lose their jobs; the bachelor’s degree will become increasingly irrelevant; and ten years from now Harvard will enroll ten million students.

... universities that have spent the past few decades spending tens or even hundreds of millions to offer students the Disneyland for Geeks experience are going to find themselves in real trouble. Along with luxury dorms and dining halls, vast athletic facilities, state of the art game rooms, theaters and student centers have come layers of staff and non-teaching administrators, all of which drives up the cost of the college degree without enhancing student learning. The biggest mistake a non-ultra-elite university could make today is to spend lavishly to expand its physical space. Buying large swaths of land and erecting vast new buildings is an investment in the past, not the future.

...The biggest obstacle to the rapid adoption of low-cost, open-source education in America is that many of the stakeholders make a very handsome living off the system as is. In 2009, 36 college presidents made more than $1 million. That’s in the middle of a recession, when most campuses were facing severe budget cuts. This makes them rather conservative when it comes to the politics of higher education, in sharp contrast to their usual leftwing political bias in other areas. Reforming themselves out of business by rushing to provide low- and middle-income students credentials for free via open-source courses must be the last thing on those presidents’ minds.

Nevertheless, competitive online offerings from other schools will eventually force these “non-profit” institutions to embrace the online model, even if the public interest alone won’t. And state governments will put pressure on public institutions to adopt the new open-source model, once politicians become aware of the comparable quality, broad access and low cost it offers. _The End of University as We Know It

Modern universities are memorials to mediocre education, corrupt excess, and academic intolerance. The $1 trillion in student loans which hobble young people at the start of their adult lives is being revealed as a dangerous financial bubble. The university system now occupies a central part of the ongoing US financial misery -- and heaven help the US taxpayer if Obama includes universities in his next round of multi- $trillion bailouts.

The system is corrupt and rotting to the core, and cannot last. It is time to build an affordable, trimmed down replacement system that returns value for money spent. It is time to put the rotten and corrupt university system out of our misery.

Sex for Tuition in the UK: Is University Worth the Price?

Universities are charging more and more for a product that offers less and less benefit to students and graduates. An out of control expansion of university staff -- a bureaucratic bloat -- is forcing young people to use their bodies as trade goods, just to pay college expenses and pay off ruinous college loan debt.

[College coeds] are taking up pole dancing, escort work and prostitution to help fund their studies as the cost of higher education soars.

The work has been fuelled by an expansion of the lap dancing industry as well as increasing opportunities for anonymous sex work through the internet.

In some cases students are thought to be signing up to a website that connects students with businessmen seeking “discreet adventures” and prepared to pay them for varying levels of sexual intimacy.

Young women can reportedly earn up to £15,000 a year through this work to help fund their studies. _Telegraph

The four year recession (and counting) has closed off opportunites across much of the economy, but the sex industry is doing well. Some opportunites are available in this growing industry for young male students, but most of the available work is for young women.

Research by Teela Sanders and Kate Hardy, of the University of Leeds, found that a quarter of lap dancers had a degree whilst a third of the women they interviewed were using the job to fund new forms of training.

Much of the expansion over the decade was to do with the proliferation of lap dancing clubs. But the internet also threw up a new range of opportunities for anonymous sex work. _Independent

Universities have been allowed to expand staff, salaries, and benefits to the point that the cost to students seems rarely considered in planning sessions. It is as if the point of the university is to provide comfortable lifetime salary and benefits to staff, with affordable education being too far down on the list of university purposes to consider.

And when these students graduate, what will they find? A private sector that is so stricken by bureaucratic bloat and mission bloat of governments, that fewer and fewer productive opportunities in the private sector will be available. Fewer opportunity for jobs and for starting lucrative new businesses that create new jobs. All of this due to the explosion of government, government regulations, taxes, prohibitions, mandates, and more to come.

These bloated bureaucracies create a sense of entitlement, dependency, and a loss of competence in everyone and everything they touch. The destructive expansion of both universities and governments ought to be brought under control before such bureaucratic and often parasitic institutions destroy their host societies.

The only other viable alternative is to build a "shadow society" and a "shadow government." A society based upon communities of dangerous (mature, competent, skilled, independent) children.

And while prostitution would be entirely legal in such a society, no one would be forced to choose that occupation unless she truly wanted to. And while university would be available either free of charge, or at competitive rates, individuals would be judged for their competence -- not for the tonnage of letters after their names.

Universities: A New Class of "Robber Barons"

Universities Steal from the Poor and Give to the Sinecured and Connected

MJ Perry

Modern universities are bloated monstrosities, monuments to bureaucratic greed and self-interest, at the expense of lower and lower-middle class students and families.

“I have no idea what these people do,” said Robinson, waving his hand across a row of offices, his voice rising. The 59-year-old professor of biomedical engineering is leading a faculty revolt against bureaucratic bloat at the public university in Indiana. In the past decade, the number of administrative employees jumped 54 percent, almost eight times the growth of tenured and tenure-track faculty.

...Administrative costs on college campuses are soaring, crowding out instruction at a time of skyrocketing tuition and $1 trillion in outstanding student loans... U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty, those with permanent positions and job security, according to U.S. Education Department data.

Spending on administration has been rising faster than funds for instruction and research... _Fat Cat University Staff

While the fat cat administrative staff are living very well, more and more members of the lower and lower middle classes are being caught in the debt trap -- sometimes for life. When poor students are forced to drop out of school with high tuition debts, their parents and grandparents can be sued to pay the debt -- which cannot be discharged by bankruptcy. The same thing can also happen when students actually graduate -- but with what are essentially worthless degrees.

It was not always this way. Tuition was once relatively affordable, and not so hard to pay off.

The total cost of my tuition over four years was less than $5,000. Measured another way, the payback period was about nine months’ gross salary at my first job. Viewed as an investment in equipment, getting an MIT education was, as they say, a no-brainer. If tuition costs had risen in line with inflation, that original $1,000 for a year’s tuition would now be $7,972, according to the CPI calculator on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website.

Today the actual tuition is $40,732 (not including room and board), so it’s pretty safe to say that everyday inflation hasn’t been the driving force behind the increase in college tuition. _DallasNews

Universities have grown to be a new class of robber barons, stealing from the poor and giving to the well off sinecured and connected bureaucrat. The degree to which university disbursements have become corrupt payoffs and set-asides is carefully papered over by vested interests. If students, parents, and grandparents had a better understanding of what their lives and finances were being ruined to pay for, the outrage would be difficult to contain.

The first thing that young people and their families need to understand is that not everyone should go to college. In general, only those with IQs of at least 110 points should get a 4 year degree. And for the rigorous degrees, an IQ of at least 115 is probably needed. The popular attempt to push everyone through college -- at all costs -- is a most significant part of this problem.

Even so, there is no reason for most degrees to be so ruinously expensive -- or for most degrees to be so absurdly worthless on the jobs market. But don't expect any good solutions from the US federal government, which is controlled by the Chicago Outfit. The Chicago Outfit is not known for its dedication to giving high value for payments received. The answers will have to come from other directions -- to the extent that the Chicago Outfit allows.

Salman Khan, founder of the free online Khan Academy, thinks that a quality education should be free. He believes that the only cost incurred by graduates should be the cost of certifying the retention and utility of the student's new knowledge and skills.

Online courses aim to change the educational landscape. In the US, more than one state governor has expressed a desire to see his state's university system devise a "$10,000 degree program" -- a no-frills way for students to get a 4 year degree without becoming indebted for life.

The devastation that has been caused by the university : government : financial complex is immense and in many ways, immeasurable. In this arena -- as in the 2007 / 2008 housing bubble and collapse -- the government is a central part of a problem that is causing much ongoing human hardship for its own people.

Fortunately, this is a problem which Dangerous Children do not have to suffer. By the time a Dangerous Child reaches the age of 18, he or she will have the skills to support themselves economically at least three different ways. At that point, they can either take college or leave it -- but if they take it, they will take it on their own terms.

If you have young children or are planning to have some, the gift of a dangerous childhood may be the most valuable gift you can give them. As for yourself: It is never too late to have a dangerous childhood. You may have to improvise a bit, but that will be good for your character. ;-)

Obama Takes His Wrecking Ball to US Science & Technology

Since its founding, the US has been a fertile ground for scientific and technological innovation. Increasingly over the past century and a half, the US economy has been driven by scientific and technological discoveries and advances. Still, it would be quite easy for bad government policies to change all of that.

Science and technology are male-dominated areas in the US and in virtually any other nation in the world. There is a good reason for the male preponderance in math, the hard sciences, and the technological occupations. But US feminists are unhappy about this "gender imbalance," and they want President Obama to do something about it.

Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes.

Obama hinted that Title IX quotas would soon come to engineering and techology, saying that “Title IX isn’t just about sports,” but also about “inequality in math and science education” and “a much broader range of fields, including engineering and technology. _OpenMarket

In American universities, science, math, and technology departments are relatively free of the leftist indoctrination which pervades most other departments and divisions of modern universities. If feminists can get their man Obama to bring those recalcitrant and untamed departments under control, they will have a virtual lock on all areas of the university -- faculty, staff, and students.

The fact that fewer women than men major in science and engineering is the result of their own voluntary choices, not sexism or sex discrimination by schools, notes researcher John Rosenberg, the proud father of a daughter who got a Ph.D. from CalTech. My daughter is bright, and I’d be happy if she got a graduate degree in engineering (or became a physicist, like her grandfather), but I can’t force her to do that if she doesn’t want to, and a college shouldn’t be deemed liable for sex discrimination against women if women like her don’t want to study engineering.

Gender disparities in a major are not the product of sexism, but rather the differing preferences of men and women. The fact that engineering departments are filled mostly with men does not mean they discriminate against women anymore than the fact that English departments are filled mostly with women proves that English departments discriminate against men. The arts and humanities have well over 60 percent female students, yet no one seems to view that gender disparity as a sign of sexism against men. Deep down, the Obama administration knows this, since it is planning to impose its gender-proportionality rules only on the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), not other fields that have similarly large gender disparities in the opposite direction. _OpenMarket

Such an overwhelming difference in interests between the sexes, statistically, hints at deeper differences within the biology. Social engineers would be wise to show caution when tinkering with deep biological differences which have evolved over many millions of years.

As Susan Pinker notes, “A mountain of published research stretching back a hundred years shows that women are far more likely than men to be deeply interested in organic subjects—people, plants and animals—than they are to be interested in things and inanimate systems, such as electrical engineering, or computer systems.”

Women are well-represented in scientific fields that involve lots of interaction with people. As The New York Times’ John Tierney noted, “Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors, and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences.” By contrast, “They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering,” which deal more with inanimate objects rather than people.

These gender-based differences are not the product of discrimination, and manifest themselves at a very early age. As a book on the biology of male-female differences notes, “Girl babies in their cribs are especially inclined to stare at images of human faces, whereas infant boys are likely to find inanimate objects every bit as attractive”; “this difference persists into adulthood: when shown images of people as well as things, men tend to remember the things, and women tend to remember the people.” _OpenMarket

Obama intends to enlarge upon his already catastrophic program of experimental social engineering, using US citizens, businesses, and institutions as his experimental mice.

It would be nice if these experimental mice were well informed about Obama's intentions prior to the November US elections.

Why Is "The Real Meaning of MPH" Video Popular in the US?

This is a video of a young woman caught in her own confusion when trying to answer an excessively simple and straightforward question. The video is depressing in what it says about modern education in the US, and about the thinking styles that many young people may have adopted from marinating in popular culture for an excessive proportion of their time.

But the video opens an interesting window on different modes of human brain function. The young woman is stuck in a "derivational mode" of thinking in a situation where a "definitional mode" of thinking is more appropriate. In the case of the video, it appears that the woman cannot shift gear into a definitional mode of thinking. The definition of "miles per hour" involves the concept of "rate," which is difficult for some people to master. A lot of people have the same kind of problem understanding "per cent."

Perhaps she is tired, preoccupied with something else, or perhaps she has never learned to understand the concept of "rate." That is too bad, since one cannot understand the world very deeply without mental mastery of at least a few types of rates.

In attempting to answer the question, she begins to confabulate in a circular manner of thinking which is more than a little disturbing, considering that she is likely to be well above the IQ mean of likely voters in the November US elections.

Many people derive a sense of pleasure in feeling superior to another person, and such a person may enjoy watching the video -- assuming that he himself thinks he understands the rudimentary rate of miles per hour. Feeling superior because one knows the answer to a question that someone else may not know, is very often a tenuous and fleeting kind of superiority.

Thinking clearly is a skill that is not generally taught or learned in US schools. It is likely that a developmental window exists for many thinking skills, beyond which the skills become very difficult to teach.

Affordable Education for All: Who Are the Problem - Solvers?

In the real world, we have problem solvers and we have wankers. There are far more wankers than problem - solvers, and that is particularly true in politics, academia, the media, and wherever 3 or more people assemble. Here is one look at the higher education bubble and how the problem might be mitigated.

Via: Online College Resource
While thousands of young and not-so-young wankers around the world camp out in protest of something or other, others have rolled up their sleeves and attempted to devise real world solutions to real world problems. Who is trying to solve the education bubble problem? Not US President Obama. A perennial campaigner and community organiser, Mr. Obama is too busy working out how to raise money for his next election. Let the army of wankers camp out in the snow, protesting their birth out of the womb of college into the real world of responsibility. Mr. Obama is above all of that.

An Overpriced Educational Establishment Becomes Public Enemy 1

More: If you want to know how the educational establishment could drift so far out of touch with reality, the words of Alexis de Toqueville may provide a clue:

"Should members of the lettered class," wrote the Frenchman, "fall into the habit of frequenting only themselves and writing only for one another, they may lose sight of the rest of the world entirely and thereby lapse into affectation and falsity, gradually alienating themselves from common sense...." _DeToqueville_quoted by Fred Siegel

Educational expenses in the US have been rising exponentially, while educational attainment has not even pretended to keep pace. Public sector educators are on the verge of rioting in US state capitols, and universities are cutting vital departments to balance budgets -- while continuing a costly and counter-productive administrative bloat.

In a budgetary situation being played out in other cash-strapped states and municipalities, the legislation requires workers to cover more of their health care premiums and pension contributions, although supporters say local governments will ultimately decide on health care contributions for their employees.

The Wisconsin legislation also requires collective bargaining units to conduct annual votes to maintain certification. Unions would lose the right to have dues deducted from worker paychecks and collective bargaining can only cover wages. _CNN

This type of reform is under-stated in the extreme, and long past due. If public sector unions are prepared to riot in the face of such desperately needed budgetary and policy reforms, imagine what they will do in the face of a genuine collapse -- which they seem to be working so hard to bring about?

At the higher education level, many forces are working together to bring about significant -- perhaps revolutionary change.

Nationally the price of college tuition increased more than 274 percent from 1990 to 2009 -- roughly four times the rate of inflation. That's even more than the brutal rise in health costs that has touched off a near-crisis in that field.

...Technology will change, perhaps cataclysmically, almost all colleges. That's according to Clayton Christensen, a BYU grad turned Harvard professor who is now an acclaimed expert on innovation. He is the lead author of a new paper, "Disrupting College," on what lies ahead, and soon, for higher education.

He has studied how new technologies have disrupted and transformed industry after industry. And often established companies were upended or destroyed in the process.

The same fate could happen to established universities, as technology brings the biggest changes in information dispersal since the invention of the printing press.

Christensen and his co-authors write: "Roughly 10 percent of students in 2003 took at least one online course. That fraction grew to 25 percent in 2008, was nearly 30 percent in the fall of 2009, and we project it will be 50 percent in 2014."

The shocks don't end with technology. "Disrupting College" suggests that "the business model of many traditional colleges and universities is broken." Moreover, this model's collapse is "so fundamental that it cannot be stanched by improving the financial performance of endowment investments, tapping wealthy alumni donors more effectively, or collecting more tax dollars from the public. There needs to be a new model." _DailyHerald

From "Disrupting College:"

America is in crisis. Employers say paradoxically they cannot find the right people to fill jobs even though the country is facing its highest unemployment rates in a generation. Competition with a rising China and India and their vast populations lend urgency to the need for the country as a whole to do a better job of educating its citizens. _DisruptingCollege

As science better understands how students learn, and as educational technologies offer revolutionary possibilities for new teaching paradigns, the mass production assembly line factory-style methods of education will find themselves squeezed from all directions. Those which are unable to change due to fossilised unions or other forms of paralysing groupthinks of entitlement, will ultimately be crushed.

Educators and establishment insiders from K-12 to University are demanding that a recession-plagued US society mortgage its future, in order to provide them tenure and generous benefits. The halo over the head of the educational establishment is slipping badly, as teachers and professors are starting to be seen more as extorting thugs than as wise, honest, and impartial learning coaches and advisors. At the state and local levels, the problem is clearly the public sector unions and a climate of entitlement among public educational workers. At the higher education levels, it is more a problem of administrative bloat and an insane groupthink crisis of a badly decayed leftism which dominates the humanities and administration on most campuses.

A Bright Clear Knowledge Threatens the Established Order

No one comprehends the world in which he is immersed. Consider it a given starting point. There are ways to bring up a child capable of a far better understanding of his surroundings, but the established order has a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.

In Australia, scientists are working on a "thinking cap" which boosts creativity. They are at a very primitive stage, as of yet. But Allan Snyder, director of the University of Sydney's Centre for the Mind, thinks he is making progress.

Another interesting Australian innovation which may lead to improved thinking and brain development, is "Mathletics." Mathletics gives learning power to families and students themselves, leaving massive and extortionate educational systems with fewer justifications for their existence.

Scientists are learning more about how the brain is connected in networks. We are learning how young brains develop and prune themselves to become more efficient over time.

We are also becoming more interventionist when things go wrong. Brain implants are becoming smaller, more sophisticated, and more biocompatible. We are seeing a cyborg future, for many.

As we learn to grow more powerful, more imaginative, and clearer thinking brains, the massive infrastructure of inter-locking institutions grows at risk. Justification for the ruinously expensive system of institutions underlying modern societies is already vanishingly weak. As humans grow smarter and less tolerant of institutional bullshit from the power structure, a revolution will be brewing.

Traditional "Passive Learning" Education is Hogwash

SD
Confining children in a classroom with no one but their peers for several hours a day, week after week, year after year, is thought to be the proper way to bestow an education on the child. Somehow, this passive absorption of knowledge from a "learned" teacher is supposed to prepare the child for the time when he will take on the cloak of adulthood and make his own way in the world.

Of course most of us suspect that it is garbage, and that it has always been garbage. But educational research is rather tied up with and obligated to the current system, and has been quite slow to present tangible objections to the way things are. Still, occasionally some light shines through:

New research confirms that having some authority over how one takes in new information significantly enhances one's ability to remember it. The study, in the journal Nature Neuroscience, also offers a first look at the network of brain structures that contribute to this phenomenon.

"Having active control over a learning situation is very powerful and we're beginning to understand why," said University of Illinois psychology and Beckman Institute professor Neal Cohen, who led the study with postdoctoral researcher Joel Voss. "Whole swaths of the brain not only turn on, but also get functionally connected when you're actively exploring the world."

The study focused on activity in several brain regions, including the hippocampus, located in the brain's medial temporal lobes, near the ears. Researchers have known for decades that the hippocampus is vital to memory, in part because those who lose hippocampal function as a result of illness or injury also lose their ability to fully form and retain new memories.

But the hippocampus doesn't act alone. Robust neural connections tie it to other important brain structures, and traffic on these data highways flows in both directions. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, which track blood flow in the brain, show that the hippocampus is functionally connected to several brain networks – distinct regions of the brain that work in tandem to accomplish critical tasks.

To better understand how these brain regions influence active versus passive learning, Voss designed an experiment that required participants to memorize an array of objects and their exact locations in a grid on a computer monitor. A gray screen with a window in it revealed only one object at a time. The "active" study subjects used a computer mouse to guide the window to view the objects.

"They could inspect whatever they wanted, however they wanted, in whatever order for however much time they wanted, and they were just told to memorize everything on the screen," Voss said. The "passive" learners viewed a replay of the window movements recorded in a previous trial by an active subject.

Then participants were asked to select the items they had seen and place them in their correct positions on the screen. After a trial, the active and passive subjects switched roles and repeated the task with a new array of objects.

The study found significant differences in brain activity in the active and passive learners. Those who had active control over the viewing window were significantly better than their peers at identifying the original objects and their locations, the researchers found. Further experiments, in which the passive subjects used a mouse that moved but did not control the viewing window, established that this effect was independent of the act of moving the mouse.

To identify the brain mechanisms that enhanced learning in the active subjects, the researchers repeated the trials, this time testing individuals who had amnesia – a disease characterized by impairment in learning new information – as a result of hippocampal damage. To the surprise of the researchers, these participants failed to benefit from actively controlling the viewing window.

"These data suggest that the hippocampus has a role not just in the formation of new memory but possibly also in the beneficial effects of volitional control on memory," the researchers wrote.

Brain imaging (by means of fMRI) of healthy young subjects engaged in the same active and passive learning tests revealed that hippocampal activity was highest in the active subjects' brains during these tests. Several other brain structures were also more engaged when the subject controlled the viewing window, and activity in these brain regions was more synchronized with that of the hippocampus than in the passive trials.

Activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the cerebellum and the hippocampus (see cartoon) was higher, and more highly coordinated, in participants who did well on spatial recall, the researchers found. Increased activity in the inferior parietal lobe, the parahippocampal cortex and the hippocampus (see cartoon) corresponded to better performance on item recognition.

"Lo and behold," Cohen said, "our friend the hippocampus makes a very conspicuous appearance in active learning."

The new findings challenge previous ideas about the role of the hippocampus in learning, Voss said. It is a surprise, he said, that other brain regions that are known to be involved in planning and strategizing, for instance, "can't do very much unless they can interact with the hippocampus."

Rather than being a passive player in learning, the hippocampus "is more like an integral part of an airplane guidance system," Voss said. "You have all this velocity information, you have a destination target and every millisecond it's taking in information about where you're headed, comparing it to where you need to go, and correcting and updating it." _Eurekalert_via_SD

I quoted more extensively than normal from the news release, in case readers might want as more detail than a snippet. The findings are important, although I fail to understand why the researchers should be surprised about any of these findings.

The key finding in regard to education is that active learners who take an active role in acquiring knowledge, seem to form stronger brain connections and achieve better recall. Sitting in a classroom or lecture hall, listening to a lecture, may be the worst possible form of teaching/learning imaginable.

But will the schools of education -- so deeply in thrall to the powers that be -- begin to rock the boat just a bit, try to change things? Not likely, at least not on a grand scale. The corrupt and failed school system is too attached to the powerful and moneyed interest in the educational - industrial - political complex.

If you haven't read John Taylor Gatto's free online book on American education, or explored the significant number of alternative curricula for homeschools, unschools, and private schools, you owe it to yourself to make up the deficit -- particularly if you have children needing to be educated, or even if you pay taxes to support the current system, or vote on school bonds etc.

Is it Time for Online Education for Every Child?

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn't taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions -- which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members -- are aligned against it. _WaPo

North American schools have been failing students for decades now -- losing focus on core educational needs and spending too much of limited time and resources on politically trendy quasi-indoctrination and social engineering. Meanwhile, increasingly incompetent graduates of the system feed into a growing societal incompetence and dysfunction. The society is rotten to the core, and the core institutions just keep producing a rotten product, unfit for modern times. What is the answer?

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses -- 39 percent of whom are minority students -- score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students.

In his book on online education, "Disrupting Class," Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen estimates that half of all high school courses in the United States will be consumed over the Internet by 2019. But we have a long way to go to reach 50 percent. Seventeen percent of high school students nationwide took an online course for school last year; another 12 percent took a class for self-study. Many of these students, along with younger kids taking online classes, might be considered homeschooled, though that very concept is changing as they sign up with virtual schools connected to state systems.

...While many remain skeptical, online educators say parents are more open to the idea than they used to be. Baltimore-based Connections Academy has an enrollment of 20,000 students in 14 states, providing a full educational package primarily outside a physical school. Chief executive Barbara Dreyer says that "questions like 'does this even work?' have died down."

But though the families of students enrolled in online programs rave about them, cultural resistance has been slow to fade. And winning hearts and minds isn't the only hurdle to widespread adoption: Virtual education remains essentially illegal in many states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Seat-time requirements -- which mandate that students' butts be in classroom chairs, often within the sightline of a qualified teacher, for a certain number of hours -- are a major barrier.

...Unions are right that virtual schools are competition. Oregon teachers unions, alarmed about declining enrollment in traditional schools, made fighting a Connections Academy charter school their top legislative priority last year, eventually forcing the legislature to cap enrollment in online schools and mandate face time with teachers, killing prospects for growth at one of the top-rated schools in the state. _WaPo

Contemporary government education in North America is so bad that millions of parents have taken their children out of the system altogether. Millions of other parents have moved their children to religious or secular private schools, in an attempt to escape the perpetual government dysfunction.

Bruce Hall's university model for high schools is one of the better ideas for reforming secondary schools on a bricks and mortar campus.

Charter schools are certainly better than the status quo, as well, on average. Teacher's unions are guilty of much of the destruction of the human capital of North America's last 2 generations, at least. The economic devastation felt in most US states and soon to be felt in some Canadian provinces is, at least partially, a direct result of the dumbing down of these generations in order to make them more politically correct and compliant with the dictates of governments. Charter schools that are able to slip out of the noose of teacher's union control at least have a chance to provide a real education.

If parents are able, it is probably best for children to be homeschooled for the first few years, at least. For some parents, online education may well facilitate quality homeschooling.

Learning To Remember, Remembering to Learn

There is something of a conflict between learning something new, and remembering something old. Different parts of the brain are involved, and they tend to inhibit each other's activity (seen on fMRI) when the brain tries to engage both functions (learning and remembering) simultaneously. Researchers in the Netherlands and the US recently published an fMRI based study in PLOS Biology demonstrating this conflict, and the part of the frontal lobe that appears to mediate the conflict and maximise functionality of both learning and remembering.

Despite the encoding/retrieval competition, on several trials, all participants were actually able to both remember and learn. Follow-up fMRI analyses showed that these trials were accompanied by selective activity in the left mid-VLPFC (Figure 3C). A subsequent correlation analysis indicated a negative relationship showing that more activity in left mid-VLPFC was coupled with less encoding suppression. Together, these findings suggest a role for the left mid-VLPFC in resolving the competition between learning and remembering. Given that encoding and retrieval were forced to occur within a brief period of time, we propose that the role of left mid-VLPFC involves the facilitation of rapid switching between the encoding and retrieval processes.

A role of left mid-VLPFC in rapid memory switching fits well with evidence implicating this region in flexible behavior and cognitive control. Outside the domain of memory, several studies have linked left mid-VLPFC activity to situations requiring flexible switching between different task sets or rules. For example, a recent fMRI study showed that activity in left mid-VLPFC is linked to task-switching [20]. _PLOSBiology _ via _SD

It is often necessary to remember and learn virtually simultaneously.

Virtually all social interactions require the rapid exchange of new and old information. For instance, normal conversation requires that while listening to the new information another person is providing, we are already retrieving information in preparation of an appropriate reply.

....Future research should reveal the extent and practical implications of impairments in switching between learning and remembering in patients and older adults, and whether we can improve our switchboard through training. _SD

You would expect any lesion to the left ventral lateral pre-frontal cortex (VLPFC) to interfere with a person's ability to rapidly switch between learning and remembering modes. Since any type of active learning involves both new encoding of information and recall of previously encoded information, the left VLPFC appears to be critical to the knowledge acquisition -- as well as retrieval -- process. (the right VLPFC is involved in vigilance and implicated in anxiety disorders)

Cognitive control mechanisms permit memory to be accessed strategically, and so aid in bringing knowledge to mind that is relevant to current goals and actions. In this review, we consider the contribution of left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) to the cognitive control of memory. Reviewed evidence supports a two-process model of mnemonic control, supported by a double dissociation among rostral regions of left VLPFC. Specifically, anterior VLPFC (approximately BA 47; inferior frontal gyrus pars orbitalis) supports controlled access to stored conceptual representations, whereas mid-VLPFC (approximately BA 45; inferior frontal gyrus pars triangularis) supports a domain-general selection process that operates post-retrieval to resolve competition among active representations. We discuss the contribution of these control mechanisms across a range of mnemonic domains, including semantic retrieval, recollection of contextual details about past events, resolution of proactive interference in working memory, and task switching. _Neuropsychologia (review) 1,Oct2007

The authors of the recent PLOS article quoted at top admit that fMRI lacks the spatial resolution needed to achieve fine definition of brain activity involved in information encoding and retrieval. The rough outline achieved by the study will likely be useful in further experiments, nonetheless.

We need to know how to optimise learning materials for individual students, but we also need to know how to optimise information encoding for individuals, given the learning materials at hand. Maximising the use of a person's intelligence may involve special exercises for the VLPFC, even deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the VLPFC or associated regions of the brain.

Given the wide variety of brain exercise systems on the market currently, it will probably take time and experimentation to determine which systems most optimally train the parts of the frontal lobe that are most operative in learning.

The educational establishment is bogged down in labour union politics and other forms of inertial resistance to adaptating to the neuroscience of learning. A certain amount of conservatism is fine, if the current theories of pedagogy were based upon sound principles. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. This means that enlightened educators will need to work to improve teaching and learning methods in spite of and in opposition to the full weight of the government-supported and financed education establishment.

On Stupidity 1 and 2

The excerpts below from On Stupidity 1, and On Stupidity 2, from successive issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education, illustrate some of the points concerning education that have been made here at Al Fin over the past few years.

It is my job, as I see it, to combat ignorance and foster the skills and knowledge needed to produce intelligent, ethical, and productive citizens. I see too many students who are:

*Primarily focused on their own emotions — on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by evidence.

*Uncertain what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tending to use the most easily found sources uncritically.

*Convinced that no opinion is worth more than another: All views are equal.

*Uncertain about academic honesty and what constitutes plagiarism. (I recently had a student defend herself by claiming that her paper was more than 50 percent original, so she should receive that much credit, at least.)

*Unable to follow or make a sustained argument.

*Uncertain about spelling and punctuation (and skeptical that such skills matter).

*Hostile to anything that is not directly relevant to their career goals, which are vaguely understood.

*Increasingly interested in the social and athletic above the academic, while "needing" to receive very high grades.

*Not really embarrassed at their lack of knowledge and skills.

*Certain that any academic failure is the fault of the professor rather than the student.
_OS1

An interesting list of common and sometimes surprising deficits of modern students, faced by concerned professors today. In "On Stupidity 2" the author goes on:

...today's students must also learn — just as we all did — how to adapt to generations that came before them, since, except in school, there are usually more people outside of one's generation than in it. Age differences may be the most underrated form of diversity in education.

One of the consequences of K-12 schooling (and of college, to a lesser extent) is the creation of a narrow peer group. That segregation by age impairs the ability of young people to relate to anyone outside their cohort, as anyone with teenage children or first-year college students knows all too well. _OS2

The author of the two essays is concerned about the possible adverse effects of converging computing/communications technologies on the ability of students to reason and learn. Given the unprecedented nature of many of these technologies, that is not surprising. No one knows what to expect, long term.

But it is clear that today's fossilised institutions of education are innately ill-prepared to adjust to changing technologies. The author of the 2 pieces above is a tenured professor and thus entrenched in the institutional structure which itself is part of the problem. On would not expect him to see beyond the limitations of his training, just as one does not expect an ocean dwelling fish to be familiar with navigating city streets.

Education is supposed to be preparing students for the future they will have to live in. How is it doing?

Is It the Teachers Stupid?

Image Source

The problems with government education in the US are almost too numerous to mention. Donna Foote spent time observing the efforts of Teach For America teachers in a Los Angeles inner city school. She thinks that improving the teacher corps will fix the schools:

It's the teachers, stupid! The single most important factor in student achievement is the quality of the teacher. And yet, we have no effective system to attract, train, retain and promote high-caliber candidates for our schools. Today's teachers score in the lowest quartile of college grads and too many of the schools that train them are diploma mills. By making its program highly selective and attaching status to the job, Teach For America has proved that it is possible to get the best and the brightest into our classrooms. But no one—not TFA, not the districts, not the unions—has figured out how to keep them there. TFA's most recent alumni survey indicates that one third of former corps members are still teaching K–12. Critics charge that the recruits' short forays into the classroom exacerbate the critical issue of staff churning in our neediest schools and gibe that TFA really stands for Teach For Awhile. But the truth is, up to half of all the country's 3.5 million teachers bail within five years. Low pay, low status and low satisfaction undoubtedly drive many out. The transformation of teaching into a financially rewarding profession with high standards of admission—and accountability—would go a long way toward establishing staff stability.

.....In Washington, D.C., the reforming schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, is a 1992 TFA alum. The founders of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the wildly successful chain of 57 charter schools, are 1992 TFA alums, too. Nationwide, there are now 360 school leaders and 16 elected officials who got their start in public service with Teach For America. By 2010, the ranks of America's next generation of leaders will be seeded with 20,000 high-achieving alums who will have seen the crisis in our classrooms firsthand. _ Newsweek_via_JoanneJacobs

As long as schools of education are dominated by ideologues rather than educators, and as long as teachers' unions protect teachers who cannot teach, and as long as teachers' unions apply political pressure to restrict school choice, the problems with most government schools will remain intractable.

Teachers' unions and their enablers among the US Democratic Party, think that throwing money at the problem will do the trick. Just pay teachers a professional wage and give them a professional's respect, and things will be fine. Certainly unions would collect more dues that way. Bad teachers would be paid more just like good teachers. The unions and their enablers in the US Democratic Party would simply ratchet expenditures on schools into the stratosphere, without requiring better outcomes. Government education: an oxymoron? No, the education is there. An education in drugs, delinquency, drinking, lifelong psychological neoteny. It's the system, stupid!

Your Tax Dollars at Work: Spending More Money for Worse SAT Scores

Image Source

Government education costs are growing two times the rate that the cost for gasoline is rising, over the past twenty years. The results of all these spiraling tax expenditures is disheartening.

Bad results from government education are simply a microcosm of the downside of big government approaches to ordinary problems. The best thing you can say about big government is that it gives a lot of otherwise unemployable people decent jobs, with much earlier retirement and better pension benefits than most real working people will get.

Jumping the Curb: Educating at Warp Speed

It is very difficult to believe in a "singularity" when government school systems are so dysfunctional and counter-productive. Jack Uldrich suggests ways to change all that--ways to jump the educational curb.

For example, innovative teachers are now using Curriki—an open source curriculum development tool—to continually modify their curriculum with the latest information.

Other cash-strapped school districts are considering following the example of Insight Schools in Oregon which educated 600 students last year with an all-digital curriculum—and they did it for a cost of $4,500 per student. The program now has a waiting list of 3000 students.

...educators in Japan are now using video technology to both engage students and help them learn better. In early studies, schools using DS Nintendo to teach writing and vocabulary have noted that 80 percent of the students using the technology have mastered junior-high-level competence in English. This compared with only 15 percent under the standard method....programs such as LanguageLab.com are exploring how virtual reality sites such as SecondLife can help students learn languages better by creating more realistic situations in which they can interact with native speakers.

...The field of education is ripe with opportunity and technology offers the educational community an exciting opportunity to do its job better and more effectively.___Source_via_futureblogger

Check out Uldrich's links to learn a bit more about the future of education. If the obstructionists in the government education departments, the teachers' unions, the school boards, and the university schools of education would step back, relinquish a bit of control, and get the *^&% out of the way(!), the future of education just might be enabled by innovative minds working in the creative marketplace of ideas.

Stratospheric Dreams, Harsh Realities

Thanks to Michael Anissimov and Brian Wang for emailing information about the Strato Cruiser luxury dirigible seen above. The conceptual art at dezeen.com is magnificent.

The human imagination has limits, but we are nowhere close to reaching those limits. As human knowledge and technology expand, the human imagination will expand its own range. We will also learn how to become more intelligent, so as to be able to develop the many wonders that our imaginations and dreams reveal to us.

What are the harsh realities?

Our intelligence--our IQ combined with executive function and emotional/social intelligence--and our physical talents, need to be trained. Think of our intelligence as a mineral ore that needs refining. We need the best education--free of indoctrination--that is available. We need to be sure to provide a diversity of ideas--the only type of diversity that means anything in an educational context--to all of our children.

Sadly, our higher educactional system (and lower government educational systems) are failing us badly--even while educational costs are skyrocketing.

If our universities were providing a quality product, we might excuse their economic ineptness and tendency to pamper sinecured faculty and staff at the expense of parents and taxpayers. Unfortunately, universities have become indoctrination centers--particularly in the liberal arts and social sciences.

One of most perverse results of the massive indoctrination into a "monocultured multiculture" of focused entitlement, is the decade-long wave of "fake hate crimes" that have swept university campuses from George Washington University to Gonzaga to Boise State to Claremont to "Ole Miss" to too many campuses to list.

As law professor Glenn Reynolds stated: If hate crimes did not exist, it would be necessary to invent them.

And so they have--by the gross. Why? Consider the phenomenom of "Women's Studies Departments", "Ethnic Studies Departments", "Sexual Orientation Studies Departments" etc. What are students taught in these superfluous departments that prepare students for nothing except teaching in similar departments, or other forms of professional indoctrination? These backwater (but well-compensated) departments teach their students strong feelings of grievance, entitlement, and perpetual hostility toward "the man" that keeps them down.

In the absence of the hate crimes they are taught to expect, what can these fantasy-rich, deluded minds do but to re-create the atmosphere of hostility, hatred, and abuse that their professors immerse them in each day?

It is a matter of cause and effect. For those who continue to associate Al Sharpton with Tawana Brawley, this is not a new phenomenon. But it has become an endemic phenomenon, thanks to the near ubiquitous phenomenon of "gender, racial, sexual "grievances departments" on campuses. The Duke U. faculty group of 88 response to the lacrosse team rape allegations, and the media circus that followed every rumour and inuendo of the case until it finally collapsed in its own emptiness, is a peripheral example of what the "grievance philosophy" has wrought on campus and within society in general. Fake crimes against "the man", and overlooking/excusing real crimes by the "aggrieved."

Universities spend huge amounts of money on ideological indoctrination--a type of "holy crusade" felt by many sinecured monkeys of academia to be the raison d'etre of university education.

This is not what Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle had in mind.

It is an absurd and disgraceful joke by academia upon academia. It is stunting the growth of a better society, and subverting the stratospheric dreams of our imaginations.

Psychological Neoteny and Leaving Adolescence

Adolescence in modern societies is largely an artifact of current childraising and educational techniques. Adolescents are protected from most real world responsibilities, sequestered in schools with others of their age group until their early twenties, and receive minimal supervision and guidance in the acquisition of practical real world skills from "adults" who may or may not have gained a level of wisdom and judgment from their own encounters with the adult world of responsibility.

Current baby-boomers are the first generation to have been raised under the new, pampered, age-isolated and work-restricted regime of child-raising. Baby-boomers have raised their own children under a similar-but-more-so regime of age isolation and sheltering from responsibility. A third generation is currently being raised into this regime.

Besides poor child-raising and a counter-productive educational system, in their quest to become responsible adults, modern youth must also battle against a "youth culture" that encourages binge drinking, psychoactive drug use, and other acts of "rebellion" which may have long-term consequences for their ability to function optimally in a world of personal responsibility.

In earlier America, youth were not treated as adolescents. This online book, The Underground History of American Education, provides an extensive look at earlier educational practises in America. Joseph Kett's Rites of Passage likewise provides an illuminating look at what the education and life of American youths was like prior to the wars of the 20th century. Adolescence as we know it was largely unknown in those times. It is an artifact of modern practises.

Dr. Robert Epstein has looked at this issue extensively, and has written the book The Case Against Adolescence. Epstein has come to the conclusion that adolescents are able to learn most if not all adult competencies and responsibilities--if society would give them a chance. But that is not likely, given current attitudes, educational methods and laws, and childraising techniques--combined with a destructive and corporate controlled "youth culture."

A final complication and confusion for many, is the fact that parts of the human brain do not fully develop, myelinate, and neurologically prune until the mid-twenties. What does this mean? It means that the brains of youth are still "plastic" up until their twenties--still developing. They will lack some forebrain function as youth, which may serve them in good stead at a later age, if they are given the proper training and guidance in the meantime--and do not damage their own neural development through unwise excesses of psychoactive drugs and alcohol.

Then what is "psychological neoteny?" It is merely the end result, in adulthood, of not having learned the lessons of judgment and responsibility in youth that are necessary to live a responsible life of personal competence. A psychological neotenate is a victim of combined dysfunctionalities of society, parents, educational systems, and age-segregation with sheltering from responsiblity.

I refer to psychological neotenates as "lifelong incompetents." The reason for the "lifelong" descriptor is that these "adults" are beyond the age of maximal plasticity of the brain. They have largely lost their chance to grow into responsiblity and competence. Is that an absolute barrier to growth? No. The human brain retains some ability to modify itself, retains stem cells and glial function, well into maturity and beyond. But the youthful brain, with its ongoing myelination and active pruning, remains significantly more plastic until the mid-twenties.

Never has western culture needed competence from its youth more than at this time. The west is being challenged on several fronts--ideologically, demographically, spiritually (recall that I am an atheist, so the concept of "spirituality" will be a broad one), and on current and near-future battlefields.

In North American cultures, and in the UK, there is a general failure of competence-formation among a large proportion of youth. That is the report from large employers, it is the complaint of industries wanting to establish plants inside the US, it is the tale of credit statistics and bankruptcy courts, it is the story of youth and young adults staying with their parents into their twenties and thirties. One must look for the threads of this particular tapestry, because of the rapidity of its flux.

Children are not a Blank Slate. Yet many of the potential abilities and competencies of children and youth, are latent. They must be developed within the proper time windows. If child-rearing and educational practises are not geared toward encouraging development of these latent competencies within the proper time windows, the child will suffer in later life from a lack of these competencies. Of all the educational systems of the world, only the Montessori and similar approaches, acknowledge this critical developmental sequence.

Later youth and early adulthood, with the late development of the forebrain, absolutely requires exposure to multiple philosophies, spiritual approaches, political ideologies, and professional/vocational styles. A failure to expose youth and young adults to a diversity of ideas is the equivalent of an academic lobotomy--an indoctrination or brainwashing rather than an education. We see this academic lobotomy practise commonly at modern universities, in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Fortunately, there are alternative paths through life, apart from the dysfunctional educational systems and universities of many western societies. Paths where children are allowed to develop competencies and responsibilities commensurate with their growing abilities.

I will develop this idea more later.

Bonus: Epstein's essay "Let's Abolish High School."

Good Money After Bad: Stupid! In America

Of course they want more money! Everybody wants more money! Especially people who don't know what the focque they are doing. People such as government school teachers, administrators, and union officials.

This video was made over a year ago, but it could have been made ten or twenty years ago. It was true back then, and it is even more true with every passing year.

Government schooling is a huge, corrupt enterprise. Any parent who sends his children to government schools, without providing extracurricular training to make up for the educational deficit, is guilty of parental malpractice. You cannot trust the government system to educate your children--not if you are competent and you want your children to be competent.

The future will be more challenging for your children than your life has been for you. Yet children in government schools are being cheated out of the competence they will need for the future's challenges.

There are very few things the government does reasonably well. That is why the founding fathers wanted government to stay out of people's lives as much as possible. Sadly, today's governments are dedicated to doing the opposite.

That is because today's citizens are dependent wimps and incompetent fools, when it comes to interacting with government. How could they not be--if they were educated by government schools?

Teachers' Unions At Work! Mind the Slaughter

No matter how many millions of young brains are destroyed by teachers' unions, they have ironclad protection. Legislators have been bought and paid for by the teachers' unions, which makes the unions untouchable--they have the license to kill brains. The brains of your children.

Steve Jobs was quite correct when he blamed the teachers' unions for the abysmal state of K-12 education in the US.

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

Source

It is the truth that all intelligent people know, but few are courageous enough to state out loud: every generation of students that is destroyed by the teachers' union cabal is a generation that cannot solve the old problems--much less the new problems. So the problems accumulate and collect interest. The more money that is thrown to the education machine, the worse the performance.

When school board representatives sit down with union officials to negotiate a labor contract, neither party is under pressure to pay attention to worker productivity or the system's overall competitiveness: if the contract allows some teachers to be paid for hardly working at all, and others to perform incompetently without penalty, there is no real economic danger for either side. After all, most of the monopoly's customers, the schoolchildren, have nowhere else to go. Historically, tax revenues have continued to flow into the schools no matter how poorly they perform. Newark's public schools, for instance, have performed worse and worse in recent years, but per-pupil annual expenditure there is now almost $10,000, 50 percent above the U.S. average.

Source

Some may think that vouchers, charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling combined with visas for overseas professional workers, provide enough of a bypass relief system to allow North American culture to survive. Every means of avoiding the brain-killing educational/political machine helps a little.

But what is needed is a massive re-construction of the North American educational system--in such a way that the corrupt and destructive teachers' unions are left out of the loop. They have destroyed many millions of young minds, and continue their mind-rape and murder virtually unhindered--thanks to their friends in elected offices and in government agencies.

What is needed is a new system of learning, such as that described in this Da Vinci Institute report.

There is enough time. Barely enough time.

A Harvard "Designer Education"--Will it Go With Your Suit and Shoes?

Harvard has a reputation as the world's best university. I wonder why? Certainly a Harvard education isn't what most people think it is. But as long as "they" think it's worth something--it's worth something.

You might wonder: how Harvard can risk its reputation by dumping a social scientist for telling the truth and appointing a self-serving feminist apparatchik in his place?

Don't be silly. Colleges are among the least competitive institutions in this country. Their reputations are almost foolproof.

If you want to understand status and power in modern America, you need to grasp how the college prestige game works.

....An Atlantic Monthly study of admissions selectivity found that

"one good predictor of a school's selectivity rank is nothing more complicated than the date of its founding. The average founding years of the top five, ten, twenty-five, fifty, and 100 most selective schools in the nation are 1767, 1785, 1822, 1839, and 1850, respectively." [The Selectivity Illusion, by Don Peck, November 2003]

And practically no private college has fallen sharply in status since 1975. In other words, incompetent administrators can't do much damage to a college's reputation in less than a couple of generations.

....A friend who started at homely Cal State Northridge, then transferred to UC San Diego and on to UC Berkeley in pursuit of a more glamorous degree, told me the quality of instruction fell with each step up the ladder of cachet.

Yet, Stanford's and Berkeley's renown have only increased.

The Harvard alumnus who interviewed me in 1975 mentioned that he had taken courses from Henry Kissinger, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and David Riesman.

"Wow," I burbled. "You must have learned a lot!"

"Oh, no," he replied. "They were mostly terrible teachers."

He explained that Harvard's policy of luring away the most celebrated middle-aged professors at lesser colleges meant that undergraduates were systematically shortchanged. Harvard's superstars devoted their best efforts to overseeing grad students, advising the President, and other duties more pleasant than correcting undergraduates' essays.

Novelist Scott Turow's 1977 memoir One-L of his first year at Harvard Law School depicts an equally dysfunctional system of teaching.

But, who really cares how much you might (or might not) learn at Harvard? The point of getting into Harvard is to be able to say you got into Harvard. (And to make friends with other ambitious hotshots who also got into Harvard.)

Source.

The article quoted above has a lot more fascinating material about Harvard, and its current predicament. Of course, Harvard's predicament is the same as most other elite colleges and universities. When balancing the education of students against the "business of education", and maintaining just the right level of political correctness in the faculty, staff, and curriculum--it's no surprise that the students' education gets the short end of the stick.