Here is the new flyer [pdf] for my Philosophy of Education course. The flyer was designed by Christopher Vaughan and has embedded links that take you directly to each of the fifteen video lectures in the series.
We all know that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to … well … uhhh … something or other.
But I digress.
Last weekend we went to a school-sponsored Santa Shop. The idea of the Santa Shop is that while the parents eat cookies and sip punch and listen to carols, volunteers help the kids do their Christmas shopping and wrapping so that the parents and siblings won’t know what they’re getting until the big day.
As we dropped our son off, we noticed that a large number of the volunteers seemed to be high-school aged, and shortly after that I ran into a former student who is now a history teacher at a well-regarded high school in the area. During the ensuing conversation, I remarked on the many high-school volunteers helping out, and the history teacher told me that most were students from his class.
It turns out, he explained, that he thought many of his students seemed stressed about their end-of-term history essays. So he decided to give them an option: Either (a) do the paper or (b) volunteer for a day at the Santa Shop.
Hmmm …. I found myself thinking: Equivalent academic credit for writing a history essay and helping kids buy and wrap gifts. (Insert sarcastic remark here.)
Which naturally raises the question of how much such teaching explains the dismal results from surveys of students’ historical knowledge such as this, this, and this.
And I can’t help but wonder, as I work my way through grading a stack of essays and exams this week, whether part of the teacher’s calculation was to avoid having to read and evaluate those papers. Mutual accommodation reached by teacher and students, and the downward spiral continues.
Rant finished, let me now get back to grading that essay on Aristotle, the great German philosopher.
Here is my theme: “The liberal case for free speech won out in the modern world, but it has been under strong attack in the past generation. The attacks have come not only from traditional conservatives but increasingly from the postmodern left. In this essay, Stephen Hicks presents and dissects the philosophical arguments made by the postmoderns for speech restrictions and responds with a vigorous and updated liberal case for free speech.”
I have fond memories of my undergraduate institution, the University of Guelph in Canada. It’s a beautiful campus, I got a wide-ranging liberal arts education, and the Philosophy Department was intellectually diverse and (mostly) competent. (Another alumni, John Kenneth Galbraith, was apparently not so impressed with his time there.)
Check out pages 48-52 of this Toronto Globe and Mail report with its annual ranking for Canadian universities. In the “medium-size university” category, Guelph gets consistently top and near-top rankings along all dimensions. The tradition continues …
Posted 1 year, 6 months ago at 3:20 pm. Add a comment
A stimulating, 11:40-minute animated talk by Ken Robinson.
I have a few qualms about some of Robinson’s intellectual-history-of-education claims, but his portrait of mainstream contemporary education (especially the repulsive cop-out that is the ADHD “epidemic”) and his prescriptions for reform are bang-on accurate.
[Which reminds me of my extended series on the philosophy and history of education.]
Recently I gave an extra-credit assignment in one of my courses. The course has twenty students, eleven men and nine women. Six students chose to do the assignment — and then I noticed something in my grade book: all of them were women. Getting all statistic-y about it: 66.7% of the females were willing to do the extra work, while 0% if the men were.
Check out Liberty Studies, an initiative headed by Professor William Kline of the University of Illinois, Springfield. From the center’s statement of purpose:
“The Center’s mission is to advance and develop Liberty Studies in the undergraduate curriculum. To meet this challenge, the Center:
* Provides resources to help teachers and students integrate liberty studies into their classroom.
* Holds academic conference sessions to advance this field of inquiry
* Publishes the first refereed journal in this area, The Journal of Liberty Studies”
[Dr. Kline visited Rockford College in the Spring 2010 semester and gave two talks. My follow-up interviews with him about his talks are available at YouTube and the CEE site.]
Posted 1 year, 7 months ago at 7:48 am. Add a comment
Wisdom about the challenge of learning from a great genius and then finding one’s own path. Here is Zarathustra:
“Now I go alone, my disciples, You too, go now, alone. Thus I want it. Go away from me and resist Zarathustra! And even better: be ashamed of him! Perhaps he deceived you. The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must be able to hate his friends. One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a student. And why do you not want to pluck at my wreath? You revere me; but what if your reverence tumbles one day? Beware lest a statue slay you. You say that you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers—but what matter all believers? You have not yet sought yourselves; and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little. Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The image is Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog” [circa 1818].)
Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 8:42 am. 3 comments
Here is the new flyer [pdf] for my Philosophy of Education course. The flyer was designed by Christopher Vaughan and has embedded links that take you directly to each of the fifteen video lectures in the series. 
I have fond memories of my undergraduate institution, the 
Part of the explanation for why 
