Feb 022009
- CNN Money had a nice write-up of BB&T Bank Chairman John Allison’s talk at the Ayn Rand Center in Washington last week.
- John Stossel recently published a good op-ed on the college scam. He makes a good point, but the problem is not just that college is a waste of time and money: the whole educational system is seriously dysfunctional. Students should get a liberal arts education sufficient for a thoughtful and productive life via primary and secondary education. (That’s possible now, for all students — as the example of Colorado’s own Ridgeview Classical Schools shows.) Instead, particularly in government schools, students are physically warehoused, intellectually stunted, and psychologically crushed. After 12 years of schooling, students have not been equipped for life.
I see the results in my own teaching at CU Boulder. Semester after semester, only about three students in a class of thirty can write competently. The rest are not stupid: CU Boulder is the best university in the state. Rather, they just haven’t been taught the basics of reading, writing, or thinking. It’s enormously frustrating for me: I want to teach philosophy, not remedial writing. The situation should be inexcusable to parents — but most willingly accept it.
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Inside the Belly of the Beast: Do Policymakers Listen to Pundits? by C. August of Titanic Deck Chairs. It’s a fascinating — and frightening — look at the way modus operandi of the policy makers federal government, namely frantic, range-of-the-moment pragmatism.
