Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

The Anchoress

Home
Catholic
The New School: Saving Education from Itself

The New School: Saving Education from Itself

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 12:27 am by Elizabeth Scalia

The New School: Saving Education from Itself 2015-03-13T00:27:03+00:00 Elizabeth Scalia

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

The Federal Reserve also found that those with student loan debt were less likely to purchase houses or cars than those without student loans. This isn’t surprising. [Such debt] doesn’t encourage people to live large. But with young people traditionally being a major source of demand in both the housing and auto markets, two areas deemed important to economic recovery and prosperity — buying first houses and first cars and then moving up to something fancier every few years — this burden is sure to be a drag on the economy as a whole.
— Glenn Reynolds, The New School.

A drag for some time, I should think. Our older son is almost 29, now. His car died last year, and while he is lucky enough to have a full-time job, he cannot afford to replace it. When an uncle offered to give him a very-used but quite respectable vehicle, he had to turn it down, too. His student loan payment is such that it precludes the additonal burdens of fuel, insurance, parking fees and maintenance; even a free car is currently too costly for him, and he’ll be an apartment dweller for decades. Some might call that excellent news: a smaller carbon footprint, no urban sprawl. Okay, if you like it. I’d say anything that narrows one’s options makes one less free. But that’s just me.

A college education is supposed to broaden one’s options, yes? That no longer seems to be the case, particularly if you were persuaded to invest time and money into an arts or humanities degree, and most especially if you took out student loans to boot.

My husband and I did a little traveling the weekend, and I brought along Glenn Reynold’s new book, The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself. In the course of our trip, I managed to read most of it aloud to my husband.

As a rule, he hates being read to, but as we are in the midst of paying off our end of student loans we agreed to “split” with our sons (and they’ll be paying off their parts for many years) The New School captured his attention, and held it for mile after mile.

Regular readers of Instapundit know that Reynolds, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee, has been talking and writing about the “higher education bubble” for quite a long time, and in this book he fleshes out his thinking while analyzing how government-loans-made-easy encouraged students to take on insurmountable debt — and colleges to spend outrageous amounts (often on unwise building and superfluous staff) — even as students and their parents were discovering that their educational “investments” were less likely to pay off in the future as they have in the past.

My husband and I are big believers in education and both of our sons are “certified geniuses” and autodidacts, which means that they are quite able and willing to educate themselves in most areas, and that they actually rather wilt within conventional classroom environments. Both of them detested college, and both begged us to let them quit about two years into it. We, of course, insisted they “get that degree” because it would be the key to their futures.

More fools, us. Our elder son managed to charm his way into a job that has nothing to do with his degree (although, in fairness, he wouldn’t even had gotten an interview without a degree in something) but our younger son, who is making his way as a musician while washing dishes on the side, loves to remind me that — had we allowed him to quit — he’d be further along with his music, and our debt load would be tens of thousands of dollars lighter.

Although increasingly we are champions of internet classes, apprenticeships, skills training, community colleges and the sort of competency testing and credentialing that could cut years and thousands of dollars from one’s degree experience, my husband and I still believe in higher education, and in education for its own sake — but it is galling to read that the debt we’ve incurred, which is currently keeping us from buying a needed pre-owned car, or updating our 40 year-old kitchen, helped to support this sort of dubious spending:

Even as the once-mighty University of California system slashes programs and raises tuition, it has created a new system-wide “vice chancellor for equity, diversity and inclusion.” This is on top of the already enormous UC diversity machine, which, as heather MacDonald notes, “includes the Chancellor’s Diversity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistant vice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diversity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate student diversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversity officer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office of Academic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, the Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, the Committee on the Status of Women, the Campus Council on Climate, Culture and Inclusion, the Diversity Council, and the directors of the Cross-Cultural Center, the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Resource Center, and the Women’s Center.”

While the UC system loses top cancer researchers to Rice University, it is creating new chaired professorships in, you guessed it, diversity studies. Likewise, in North Carolina, UNC-Wilmington is combining the physics and geology departments to save money, while diverting more funding to campus diversity offices.

Apparently we’ve taken physics, geology and cancer research as far as they can go, and we are left to ponder the precious and distant stars of ourselves and our grievances? This is all absolutely unnecessary to garnering an education but, as Reynolds notes, “If experience is any guide, administration — especially sacred cows like diversity programs — will be cut last; actual teaching will be cut first.”

After a good examination of what is ailing our colleges, and why, Reynolds offers up some solutions, and I like many of them, but this one in particular:

In ordinary credit transactions, creditors bear some risk . . . Perhaps if students can’t pay their loans by 10 years after graduation, they should be allowed to discharge them in bankruptcy with the institutions that got the loan money on the hook for, say, 20% of the loss. You fix a malfunctioning credit system by ensuring that the people who can control the risks are the ones who face a loss if things go wrong. our student-loan system as it exists today puts all the risk onto the students and taxpayers, who are the least-informed parties in the borrowing transaction. That should change.

I highly recommend this book, particularly if you have kids in middle or high school and you want to get a sense of what is happening right now, and how you might begin to seek alternatives to the status quo. But I think the release of Reynold’s book is a perfect time to consider how our kids are taught, where conventional practices are failing them and how we might re-imagine education, and so I suggest that when picking up The New School you also grab on to Sam Rocha’s A Primer for Philosophy and Education.

Sam Rocha is one of the “edu-punks” who Reynolds says “are exploring unconventional thinking about teaching and learning. In fact, the best way to master many subjects may be for students to find their own path, with the role of the education establishment being more to certify competence than to actually teach.”

That’s partly what Rocha’s book is about, but it is not what makes it, for some, “strange and startling”; rather it’s his passionate argument that education must supersede the utilitarian gathering of information, until it penetrates truth and finally love.

“Of course students who attend a school that assigns grades should want to get good grades. They should obviously not want to get bad ones. However, you should not confuse this institutionalized process of grade-getting, school-going, degree-worshipping, and job-seeking with what philosophy and education have to offer you. . . . Formal schooling does not have the monopoly on philosophy or education.”
[…]
“Read for the truth. Write and speak to show what seems true. Ask questions to get at what might be true. Attend classes to seek the truth. Do not settle for shallow, impoverished grades, and cheap, degrading awards. . . . Philosophy and education require courage.”

If it sounds like Rocha is suggesting that education is, finally, soul-food, yes. It’s what he’s saying. He is an unconventional fellow, and teacher. His ideas flow “outside the box” of established norms and at least one respected educator — Steve Perkins, Indiana’s Teach of the Year for 2014 — has found Rocha’s slim book so inspiring that he wrote a series on it, concluding, “For those wrestling with the educational challenges of our day, this should bring profound hope.”

So, yes…I recommend A Primer for Philosophy and Education, along with The New School. They seem to me to be essential reads as we grapple with necessary solutions to problems plaguing our education system and how we think about them.

Previous Post

January 22, 2014

Mike Rowe, Income Equality, Rerum Novarum, "the undeserving rich", and the Craft of Work

Next Post

January 23, 2014 "The Stuff Priests are Made Of": Orthodox Edition - UPDATED Phones IDing Protesters

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category "Remaking" Ourselves 'Remaking' America 9/10 Mindset 9/11 trials Abortion ACORN Adoration Advent Advent 2008 Advent 2009 Advent 2010 Alternative Energy Alternative Media America American Catholic Church American Church American Genius Ameridolatry ANCHORESS BOOKSHELF Anglican-Roman Reconciliation Answers & Questions Anti_Semitism Archbishop Hilarion Ayn Rand Bad Mass Barack Obama Baseball Benedict Benedict & Islam Benedict in UK Benedict XVI Benedictine Bill Whittle Birth Control Blogs and Blogging Blogs and Blogging Bloodless Coup Bobby Jindal Bookchat Breitbart Bride at every wedding... Bride at every wedding... Buckley Bullies Bush Bad? Bush Good Buster Capitalism Catholic Fiction Catholic Vocations Catholicism Celibacy Chaput Charitable Stuff Chesterton Chile Chris Christie Christians in Exile Christine O' Donnell Christmas Christmas Gift Ideas Church Hates Science? Church hates women Communion of Saints Compline Conclave 2013 Confession Constitutional Stuff Conversion Crisis & Opportunity Critical Thinking Crooks and Liars Crucible of Faith Cuba Culture of Life Culture of Life/Death Culture of Treason? Dancing Death Dialogue re Islam Dick Meyer Divorce and Remarriage DOJ Domestic Terrorism Dominican Order Don't try me too high Dowd Dumb Democrat moves Dumb GOP moves Economic woe Education Egregious Harry Reid Elder Son Elder Son's Sweet Girlfriend Elderly Election '10 Election '12 Election '16 Election 2004 Election 2006 Election 2008 Election 2010 Election 2016 Elena Kagan Elitism Embryonic Stem Cell Research End Times? English language Enhanced Interrogation Erosion of Rights Eucharist Euthanasia Exorcism Extraordinary Synod Facebook Faith Faith and Reason Faith Friday Faith Perspective Faithful Friday Fascism Again Fascism in America Fatima FCC Feminism Film First Things Forgiveness Fr. James Martin Francis and Islam Francis in America Frassati Fred Thompson Free Speech? Freedom of Worship FutureChurch Global Pandemic GOP Congress Haiti Head Covering Health Care Here and Queer Hermits Heroes Hitchens Holy Spirit Holy Week '09 Holy Week '10 Hoo-Hah & BS Hoo-Hah & BS Icons Illegal Immigration In The Arena Interviews Interwebz Iran Uprising Iraqi Christians ISIL ISIS Islamic State Islamification/Islamofascism Islamification/Islamofascism Isra-El It's all about me! Me! ME! James Burke Jerry Lewis Jesus Christ Joblessness John Boehner John McCain John Paul II John XXIII Juan Williams Just Words Katrina/Rita King is a Fink Latin Mass Leadership Lectio Divina Lent Lent '08 Lent '09 Lent 2010 Lent 2011 Limbaugh Listen to Lizzie Litigious Society Liturgy Liturgy of the Hours Mainstream Media Manliness Marriage Mary Media Excess Medical Merton Michelle Obama Mighty John O' Connor Misc. Miss Ella Missionaries Mitt Romney Monasticism My brother S My Irish Aunties Mystic Monks Nanny Statism Nature NEA Neri New Media Newman Noonan Notre Dame NPR Stuff Nun News Obama Bad? Obama Good? Obama White House Oil Spill Online Retreat '08 Online Retreat Days Oratory Orthodoxy Our Hillary! Parenting Passionists Patheos Patheos Book Club Patrons Paul Ryan Penance Penn Jillette Philosophy PJTV Podcasts Poetry Politics-free zone Pop Culture Pope Emeritus Pope Francis Prayer Predictions Priesthood Pro-Life Public Sector Unions Purgatory Questions about Catholicism Quotes of the Day Quoting the News Race in America rants Recipes Remarried Catholics Reposts by request Retreat thoughts Rome Rudy Giuliani Russia Saints Sarah Palin Scandal Scott Brown SCOTUS Scriptural stuff Secularism Send in the clowns Serving up hot links Sexuality Sherrod Shroud of Turin Sisters and Nuns Social Entrepreneurship Social Media Social Security Socialism doesn't work Sports and Faith Stem Cells Strange Gods Suffering Synod Tea Parties Tea Party Terri Schiavo The 9/11 Commission The Catholic Answer The Constitution The Desert The Fourth Estate The Pelosi The Perpetual Adolescents The Rosary Third Party? Timothy Dolan Touch of evil TSA Tsunami TV/Pop Culture/Music TV/Pop Culture/Music Twitter Uncategorized Unemployment Unintended Consequences US Military Vaginal Musings Vatican Vespers video faves Vile Joe Biden Voter Fraud War by Litigation War on Terror War, What it good for? Why can't weeee be ... World Youth Days Year of Faith Year of the Priest

Select a Month August 2016 July 2016 April 2016 March 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 February 2006 January 2006 December 2005 November 2005 September 2005 August 2005 July 2005 June 2005 May 2005 April 2005 March 2005 February 2005 January 2005 December 2004 November 2004 October 2004 August 2004

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

How many people did Jesus feed with five loaves of bread and two fish?

Select your answer to see how you score.

1,000 500 2,500 5,000