Category: Education

A public-school faculty came up with the following at an Imagineering [sic] session recently. My mother-in-law pointed out that “most of these goals, even the more stupidly expressed ones, would be accomplished by closing down the government schools and getting parents to homeshool.”
Somebody’s tax money is paying for this, you people!
________________________________________________
I want my school to be a place where …
-Students exhibit shared responsibility to grow academically, emotionally, and
socially.
-We are safe.
-Classes are small (no more than 20).
-Learning is exciting and challenging.
-Testing does not take priority over learning.
-Everyone looks forward to coming every day.

A student in my philosophy class argued yesterday that we can’t know if invertebrates think deep thoughts just because they haven’t built up any civilizations, written books, or discussed philosophy.
Maybe, he said, they are communicating telepathically and have decided that a life in the mud at the bottom of the ocean is better than our wars, poverty, &c.
This would be less of a problem if I thought the student were arguing for the sake of annoying me, but he seemed to be earnest in his beliefs.
We’re starting the Summa tomorrow.

The other issue in higher education is that the liberal arts curriculum is dead. I managed two music degrees at a Virginia university without ever taking a foreign language, philosophy, logic, or a good natural science course. Instead, I had to take a bogus course in Sociology (a bogus subject in the first place) and my only foray into maths at university was called MATH 106: Concepts of Math. We studied percentages and voting and other issues appropriate to a seventh-grade curriculum.
I knew at the time that this was not a classical education and doubled up on my literature coursework and seminars to compensate, but most of my confreres did not. Granted, we were all spending the majority of our days in rehearsals and in the practice rooms (some actually practicing), but most of the other music students looked at “gen ed” requirements as something to get out of the way as quickly as possible. No one cared if we learned anything, and none of our advisors seemed to care if we did or not.
The bottom line is that every university student should be taught a core set of liberal arts courses, and, if my experience is indicative, few are.
I will stop, as I feel an E.D. Hirsh rant coming on.

Check out this article in the Washington Times about the increasing popularity of orthodox Catholic higher education.
When I was a reporter for the diocesan paper of Arlington, I covered many events that Christendom held, and I was always impressed at how they strove for sanctity without being priggish. I would be pleased if my children went to any of the institutions mentioned in the article, provided they don’t get screwed up in the next 15-17 years.
A dissenting note to the article: I don’t think things are so bad at Catholic universities in general. Yes, they are too enamored of secularism, but mostly that’s out of weakness. Universities selected their staffs from the Herd of Independent Minds, and they tailor their views accordingly. When deans and presidents talk about “academic freedom” trumping an authentic Catholic identity, they’re really saying, “We’re afraid we won’t get any respect from other people who work at universities, because they spit on our backwards papist religion.”
For instance, I happen to know that Notre Dame, which is singled out as an example of a Catholic university gone wild, has quite a lot of Catholic character. I know many people who went there, by way of my friend Andy, and when I visited there I knew I was in a place where Jesus was alive and well. They have Masses in the basement chapels of every dormitory, and the architecture and statues remind you that you’re not on a secular campus. Sure, there are some questionable faculty working there, and they could certainly stand for some improvement. But they’re not lost, and neither, I suspect, are most Catholic universities.