Inside American education
Our educational establishment -- a vast tax-supported empire existing quasi-independently within American society -- is morally and intellectually bankrupt, charges distinguished economist and social critic Thomas Sowell. And in this top-to-bottom tour of the mismanaged institutions, cynical leadership, and tendentious programs of American education, Sowell exposes the numerous "deceptions and dogmas" that have concealed or sought to justify the steep and very dangerous decline in our educational standards and practices across the board. Among the more serious ills of American education are the technically sophisticated brainwashing techniques now being applied to children and teenagers in so-called "affective education" programs; the special "peace" and "nuclear" education programs that actively promote "politically correct" attitudes; the "values clarification" and sex education curricula that portray parental and religious authority figures as agents of a repressive and unjust social and political orthodoxy; and the racial "mini-establishments" created on college campuses by minority demagogues and complaisant administrators that enshrine a self-serving ideological double standard, thus betraying the real interests of minority students.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
4people
2009–2022years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- He's right about the importance of education and the poor state of it in the US, but I'm not convinced that the private sector can't handle it. Inside American Education (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-American-Education-Thomas-Sowel...) is a really interesting book on what our current system is like (although a bit dated, it's from 1992).
- > Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
Thomas Sowell, in Inside American Education, argues that promoting students to more difficult colleges while ignoring SATs is not doing those students any favor. A firehose-pedagogy accepted by those with SAT scores 200-300 points higher can completely demoralize someone who could have done perfectly well at a moderately-paced school. However, the competition to practice AA leads, he argues, those more advanced schools to ignore SAT scores in admission for the schools' benefits, but not the benefit of the students so admitted.
- American universities spend much more on buildings and resources. The kind of gym and pool we bad in our tiny liberal arts college was way better than any college resources of europe. Even public universities here spend tons on non academic costs. Way more than other countries. Sowell covers this in 'inside American education'.
Alleviating debt and making it easier to pay more expensive loans incentivizes colleges to compete to attract students who can now affors higher price points
- "The futility of attempting to upgrade the teaching profession by paying higher salaries is obvious, so long as legal barriers keep out all those who refuse to take education courses. Theses courses are negative barriers, in the sense that they keep out the competent. It is Darwinism stood on its head, with the unfittest being most likely to survive as public school teachers."
Thomas Sowell, Inside American Education, p.25-6
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