Education: November 2017 Archives
Alice's Oxford | Peter Hitchens | First Things
Peter Hitchens writes (beautifully)of the Oxford of the past, the Oxford of the imagination, and the Oxford of today.
"So as I walk along the riverside pathways, or slip into the college gardens at dusk, as autumn turns to winter, I am seldom free of the fictional Oxford, or of the small part of its immense, intricate past that I myself have seen. Here I watched England change from being one sort of country to another. That parking lot was a cattle market, fragrant with the smell of damp livestock, herded by suspicious, terse men in brown tweeds, with boiled red faces, for whom the market pubs stayed open all the day. That apartment block was a brewery, whose yeasty stink perfumed the whole city every Wednesday, as that week's mild and bitter, brown and pale ales were made by the methods of the middle ages. That tourist café was a used bookshop, room after room of tottering piles of aged volumes, its uneven staircase climbing upwards almost to the rafters, classics read, sold, reread, and resold over decades by forgotten students. That university building was a grammar school where girls from housing project estates were introduced to Shakespeare and the sciences. Now only money can buy you that, and the children of the poor know nothing of these things. That pretentious hotel was a prison, where men had been hanged for murder and buried in the precincts, within living memory. Now we have none of that sort of thing, but we have more murder, and if our trauma surgeons were not as brilliant as they are, we would have even more of it, for the knife is now a horribly common weapon.  And these colleges, now so modern, gender-fluid, multicultural and progressive, were stern all-male institutions, whose doors were barred at night against the opposite sex and whose walls were savagely spiked to stop adventurers climbing in (and out) on feline expeditions."
Against Princeton | R. R. Reno | First Things
R. R. Reno writes:
"Not only have Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and other elite universities become decadent, they have failed in their self-appointed task. The leaders they proffer our society are increasingly incapable of leading. Our academic leaders oversee a campus culture often riven by conflict. These schools have become hotbeds for identity politics, and administrators kowtow to student extremists. Meanwhile, graduates too often condescend to ordinary citizens, thinking them ignorant bigots or 'takers.'...
"The culture of our time is not overseen by old-fashioned Methodist matrons in the Midwest, nor do today's opinion-leaders emerge from ag schools. Charles Blow is the only regular columnist for the New York Times under sixty years old who did not go to an elite university. For the last half-century, graduates from places like Princeton have been in charge. They are making a wreck of things--not for themselves, of course, but for the rest of society.
"Over the same period of time, these institutions have become fully owned subsidiaries of the Democratic Party. This hyper-partisanship has contributed to the polarization of our politics. Instead of engaging the range of political and moral thinking that has shaped and continues to shape public life, our talented future leaders are fed a party line. Young people are not trained at these schools to be judicious, generous partisans in our political battles. The ideological homogeneity makes liberal students smug and insular--and conservative students radical and combative. There's no denying a simple fact: Elite universities, subsidized by gigantic endowments, have failed as civic institutions."
Something is wrong on the internet - James Bridle - Medium
"Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level. Much of what I am going to describe next has been covered elsewhere, although none of the mainstream coverage I've seen has really grasped the implications of what seems to be occurring.
"To begin: Kid's YouTube is definitely and markedly weird. I've been aware of its weirdness for some time. Last year, there were a number of articles posted about the Surprise Egg craze. Surprise Eggs videos depict, often at excruciating length, the process of unwrapping Kinder and other egg toys. That's it, but kids are captivated by them. There are thousands and thousands of these videos and thousands and thousands, if not millions, of children watching them....
"The above video is entitled Wrong Heads Disney Wrong Ears Wrong Legs Kids Learn Colors Finger Family 2017 Nursery Rhymes. The title alone confirms its automated provenance. I have no idea where the 'Wrong Heads' trope originates, but I can imagine, as with the Finger Family Song, that somewhere there is a totally original and harmless version that made enough kids laugh that it started to climb the algorithmic rankings until it made it onto the word salad lists, combining with Learn Colors, Finger Family, and Nursery Rhymes, and all of these tropes -- not merely as words but as images, processes, and actions -- to be mixed into what we see here."
Is Yale Elite If Its English Majors Don't Read Shakespeare? - The Federalist - Joy Pullman
"Yes, something is definitely wrong when students are so racist that they will not listen to the ideas of someone who had the misfortune to be born with a currently non-politically favored skin color. It's also prima facie preposterous to assert that someone can be considered well-educated if he has actively shunned reading Shakespeare. Instead of rebuking their students for this shocking display of ignorance, however, Yale administrators and faculty encouraged it and complied with their demands....
"The fact that a core curriculum of any real substance no longer exists at the United States' so-called prestige universities, and is neither desired by many so-called elite students nor professors, suggests it's time we stop venerating and sending our kids and tax dollars to these institutions whose main function seems to be rotting students' brains and American society from its leadership down."
