Absolutely he should have behaved better. As far as I was concerned, he showed that he fits right in to the spoiled rich kid category who can get his way by stomping his foot and tossing his curls. I regret that he de-monetized Laura Loomer's account. He'll learn. Or he won't. But at least he backed off, while also trying to save face. B…
Absolutely he should have behaved better. As far as I was concerned, he showed that he fits right in to the spoiled rich kid category who can get his way by stomping his foot and tossing his curls. I regret that he de-monetized Laura Loomer's account. He'll learn. Or he won't. But at least he backed off, while also trying to save face. But I'm still gratified all this happened in public. We, of course, now know how to push back, put him into a corner, and make our will known. So, I'll take the victory even if it didn't play out as I would have hoped. If I could guess, I'd say that Musk will think twice before stepping in it again. My thoughts on Vivek's response are that he was spot on about American mediocrity. I taught U.S. history and political science at the college level for 34 years at one of the country's top 10 research universities. I watched as mediocrity took over more intellectual real estate every year as students arrived every fall who had never studied or learned anything of value. The literary canon was unknown to them; they couldn't find most states on a map; none of them could write a coherent sentence so I finally had to abandon blue book exams. And finally, the triggering in class began, helped along by the Chancellor's suggestion that we give over class time in Nov. 2016 for student grieving the day after Trump won the election, something I decided was a bad idea. We graduated students who never passed Algebra who wanted to go to pharmacy school. We graduated students who wanted to teach history because they really wanted to be the football coach and who never took a history course. Sorry for the rant, but the race to the bottom is still too close for me. 😩
Damn, that's depressing. What do you think (as an academic) was driving the trend though? Was it the No Child Left Behind Act? (Not joking.) Was it a state/school funding thing? How and when did we go from imparting knowledge to simply teaching-to-the-test?
On another note, I agree it's good that this little spat happened publicly and hope (but won't hold my breath) that Musk learned a lesson here.
Oh there were so many things that happened all about the same time. Here are the pieces parts as I understand it now looking back. I may have some of these not in the correct chronological order. First we had the first generation of faculty being hired who had more or less come out of the Frankfurt School and critical analysis of everything. In the humanities we saw the introduction of deconstruction which as far as I could see was just tearing up beautiful literature and poetry for the sake of destroying it and replacing it with stupid stuff that no one had ever read before. Writing classes became courses on describing your worst childhood memories rather than learning how to craft an essay based in logic and sources. At about the same time, the number of kids who should actually go to college began to dry up as the baby boomers were having fewer children. So what to do with all those empty seats that had formerly been used by all those boomers? The answer to the question of "getting asses in seats" (yes, that's how admissions directors talked about it) was to actually "leave no child behind" and open the doors to anyone and everyone irrespective of any standards. Failure rates surged among faculty who still thought standards mattered. Courses like Adolescent Literature and Detective Fiction and Women in Literature proliferated. Behavior in dormitories dropped to something close to cave man levels and administrators couldn't bring themselves to throw those kids out of school. And the number of administrators ballooned. They gave themselves huge salaries. At one point my dean asked me to serve on our "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee"; I resigned from it after the second meeting. Out of necessity, and to preserve my sanity, I not only gave up Blue Book exams, but ended up giving up even True and False quizzes. In the end, I moved to a seminar-based class, gave up lecturing, and graded students based on two things: 1) were you in class? and 2) did you contribute to class discussion in a meaningful way? Except for students who triggered and apparently needed space to grieve this worked for a while. Sort of. Anyway, I'm out of it now and there is not enough money in the world to entice me to return. Besides, I won't submit a statement expressing how privileged my being white has made me. In the end, I see some of what happened as the result of seeing students as "customers", also a term that our Admissions Director used. I'm sure I'm forgetting some aspects of the collapse of higher education. But I do applaud every time I hear of a college closing and I never advise anyone to enroll in college. Both of our grandsons have taken this advice: one wants to be a mechanic and the other wants to be a welder. We're very happy about their decisions.
It has been a while since my kids were in high school and college. But I had a sad moment of realization years ago when helping my daughter study for an exam and quizzing her on a topic she said to me, " Oh, I don't need to know that." The teacher had already spoon fed them the items to focus on for the test. There was no implicit need to know anything else about the subject or to think about it in an analytical way.
Teachers too are being graded on their test results. There might be some temptation to prep the results so that "everyone is, always, well, above-average" just to keep up with inflated averages of other cheating teachers.
I . too, was a teacher during the 60s and 70s when more and more mandates came down from upstairs into the curriculum.
Phonics went out and took grammar and spelling with it.
The new math replaced multiplication tables. Teachers had to be retrained to comply.
More and more kids learned less and less about history and geography. Social studies became empty conversations about nothing.
To anyone who had been educated prior to 1960 even magazine articles were full of errors after editing.
When the push came to add real job training in the vocational era,it appeared to separate the college bound from the worker bees who just wanted a job and money . That must have worked too well because the regular schools lost kids and funding … so I guess they tried to reverse that trend?
When government loans for college arrived it meant all the ill-prepared students could sign up for basket weaving classes and get degrees in woke culture?
By now I’m not surprised that young adults don’t know who’s buried in Grants tomb or can no longer write their name in cursive!
It was all preplanned and carried out in plain sight .
Absolutely agree. The Feds took over education in the 70’s, and then there was the whole union thing. So now we basically have a corrupt as hell union,dealing with a corrupt as hell government, controlling who and what gets discussed in schools, and it appears we’ve pretty much been forced to see the results of what happens when you get down down to teaching kids what a penis and vagina are for, at the fourth grade. And everyone gets a trophy because competition is so unfair! Democrats have pretty much ruined the country.
Absolutely he should have behaved better. As far as I was concerned, he showed that he fits right in to the spoiled rich kid category who can get his way by stomping his foot and tossing his curls. I regret that he de-monetized Laura Loomer's account. He'll learn. Or he won't. But at least he backed off, while also trying to save face. But I'm still gratified all this happened in public. We, of course, now know how to push back, put him into a corner, and make our will known. So, I'll take the victory even if it didn't play out as I would have hoped. If I could guess, I'd say that Musk will think twice before stepping in it again. My thoughts on Vivek's response are that he was spot on about American mediocrity. I taught U.S. history and political science at the college level for 34 years at one of the country's top 10 research universities. I watched as mediocrity took over more intellectual real estate every year as students arrived every fall who had never studied or learned anything of value. The literary canon was unknown to them; they couldn't find most states on a map; none of them could write a coherent sentence so I finally had to abandon blue book exams. And finally, the triggering in class began, helped along by the Chancellor's suggestion that we give over class time in Nov. 2016 for student grieving the day after Trump won the election, something I decided was a bad idea. We graduated students who never passed Algebra who wanted to go to pharmacy school. We graduated students who wanted to teach history because they really wanted to be the football coach and who never took a history course. Sorry for the rant, but the race to the bottom is still too close for me. 😩
Damn, that's depressing. What do you think (as an academic) was driving the trend though? Was it the No Child Left Behind Act? (Not joking.) Was it a state/school funding thing? How and when did we go from imparting knowledge to simply teaching-to-the-test?
On another note, I agree it's good that this little spat happened publicly and hope (but won't hold my breath) that Musk learned a lesson here.
Oh there were so many things that happened all about the same time. Here are the pieces parts as I understand it now looking back. I may have some of these not in the correct chronological order. First we had the first generation of faculty being hired who had more or less come out of the Frankfurt School and critical analysis of everything. In the humanities we saw the introduction of deconstruction which as far as I could see was just tearing up beautiful literature and poetry for the sake of destroying it and replacing it with stupid stuff that no one had ever read before. Writing classes became courses on describing your worst childhood memories rather than learning how to craft an essay based in logic and sources. At about the same time, the number of kids who should actually go to college began to dry up as the baby boomers were having fewer children. So what to do with all those empty seats that had formerly been used by all those boomers? The answer to the question of "getting asses in seats" (yes, that's how admissions directors talked about it) was to actually "leave no child behind" and open the doors to anyone and everyone irrespective of any standards. Failure rates surged among faculty who still thought standards mattered. Courses like Adolescent Literature and Detective Fiction and Women in Literature proliferated. Behavior in dormitories dropped to something close to cave man levels and administrators couldn't bring themselves to throw those kids out of school. And the number of administrators ballooned. They gave themselves huge salaries. At one point my dean asked me to serve on our "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee"; I resigned from it after the second meeting. Out of necessity, and to preserve my sanity, I not only gave up Blue Book exams, but ended up giving up even True and False quizzes. In the end, I moved to a seminar-based class, gave up lecturing, and graded students based on two things: 1) were you in class? and 2) did you contribute to class discussion in a meaningful way? Except for students who triggered and apparently needed space to grieve this worked for a while. Sort of. Anyway, I'm out of it now and there is not enough money in the world to entice me to return. Besides, I won't submit a statement expressing how privileged my being white has made me. In the end, I see some of what happened as the result of seeing students as "customers", also a term that our Admissions Director used. I'm sure I'm forgetting some aspects of the collapse of higher education. But I do applaud every time I hear of a college closing and I never advise anyone to enroll in college. Both of our grandsons have taken this advice: one wants to be a mechanic and the other wants to be a welder. We're very happy about their decisions.
It has been a while since my kids were in high school and college. But I had a sad moment of realization years ago when helping my daughter study for an exam and quizzing her on a topic she said to me, " Oh, I don't need to know that." The teacher had already spoon fed them the items to focus on for the test. There was no implicit need to know anything else about the subject or to think about it in an analytical way.
Teachers too are being graded on their test results. There might be some temptation to prep the results so that "everyone is, always, well, above-average" just to keep up with inflated averages of other cheating teachers.
I . too, was a teacher during the 60s and 70s when more and more mandates came down from upstairs into the curriculum.
Phonics went out and took grammar and spelling with it.
The new math replaced multiplication tables. Teachers had to be retrained to comply.
More and more kids learned less and less about history and geography. Social studies became empty conversations about nothing.
To anyone who had been educated prior to 1960 even magazine articles were full of errors after editing.
When the push came to add real job training in the vocational era,it appeared to separate the college bound from the worker bees who just wanted a job and money . That must have worked too well because the regular schools lost kids and funding … so I guess they tried to reverse that trend?
When government loans for college arrived it meant all the ill-prepared students could sign up for basket weaving classes and get degrees in woke culture?
By now I’m not surprised that young adults don’t know who’s buried in Grants tomb or can no longer write their name in cursive!
It was all preplanned and carried out in plain sight .
If the Department of education is
Dissolved, no one will even notice?
Wow. I hope you've sent this in as an 'op-ed' to the WSJ and NYT.
Absolutely agree. The Feds took over education in the 70’s, and then there was the whole union thing. So now we basically have a corrupt as hell union,dealing with a corrupt as hell government, controlling who and what gets discussed in schools, and it appears we’ve pretty much been forced to see the results of what happens when you get down down to teaching kids what a penis and vagina are for, at the fourth grade. And everyone gets a trophy because competition is so unfair! Democrats have pretty much ruined the country.