[There are typos in the essay I’m responding to. I think they are probably due to the site’s archiving since the Scientific American website is generally well-edited. I’ve kept the typos and avoided using the “(sic)” notation—the reader can make the corrections in his or her head.] In this essay posted several years back, Look … [Read more…]
I’ve written before of the modern tendency to use glossy pictures and even fast-moving images to teach, even to teach subjects requiring some concentration and some use of abstract reasoning. This is absurd. It’s been known since at least the work of the English psychologist, Richard Gregory, that the human brain—like the brains of monkeys … [Read more…]
Military men, even the warriors or “rough boys”, hold a variety of opinions on political issues, including how to use the military. My readings in history and in the news and blogging sites of the Web have led me to believe their opinions tend to be better founded and better reasoned, in terms of basic … [Read more…]
In a typically intelligent way, Steve Sailor discusses the latest results from PISA, the educational tests which basically cover the `rich’ (OECD) countries. The article is here, PISA, Piece by Piece, and is worth reading. They say the proof is in the pudding and I’d claim the pudding for education is the resulting culture. As … [Read more…]
In a short article, What Does Memorization Have To Do with Learning?, Marina Olson addresses what I consider one of the greatest failings of the American educational system and, more generally, of American attitudes toward human culture and, indeed, all of Creation. Ms Olson’s article deals with one educator who seemed to attack memorization (Orlin) … [Read more…]
I’ll be publishing this essay in three parts. This first part will deal with an essay by Donald Kagan, Ave atque vale, which provides a highly summarized history of liberal arts education in the West along with a few hints toward a profound understanding of human knowledge and education and, finally, an assessment of the … [Read more…]
A Non-dummy’s Guide to Understanding God’s Creation I’ve written before of Ortega y Gasset’s prophecies of the collapse of modern Western man into a condition of barbarian childhood. See Civilization for Dummies for a fairly recent essay on the subject. In that essay, I spoke about the importance of books to Western Civilization in particular … [Read more…]
Readers interested in our dysfunctional higher education system might be interested in an essay from one of the websites of Liberty Fund. I’m certainly not implying that the lower levels are functioning at even a minimal level of competence, but the issues are somewhat different though overlapping. In any case, I can’t add anything of … [Read more…]
The economist William Baumol warned us about one of the problems which human beings create under conditions of prosperity, Baumol’s cost disease: Baumol’s cost disease (also known as the Baumol Effect) is a phenomenon described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s. It involves a rise of salaries in jobs that … [Read more…]
Math is hard, Barbie, and that goes for you too, Ken. It’s hard like tennis or basketball or baseball, requiring hours of hard work on basic skills when you really have little clue how those skills will really be used. When you have the basic skills of arithmetic or of fielding and throwing the ball, … [Read more…]