Clipping blog

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Clearing the Browser Tabs – Mid-Way to the Weekend Edition Posted: 19 Jan 2011 03:10 AM PST If it’s a Wednesday in January, it means I’ll be away from the computer pretty much all day. Blogging will be light, but as soon as I can, I’ll post a link to the latest episode of The Delivery (which was good!) and a couple other stories that have been percolating in my head. In the meantime, enjoy Hump Day. And now, links! If you live to be a hundred, you will not find a more inane “explanation” of what is and isn’t Constitutional than this blather from Super-Genius Sheila Jackson-Lee. The administration must be more worried about the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare than they’re letting on, else they would never have released this scare-report from HHS. Perhaps they realize that we’re no longer buying their flim-flammery. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) held a meeting on Martin Luther King, Jr. day and they had a couple unusual guests of honor. At least they were unusual if you buy the conventional wisdom that conservatives are all racists. This video of Herman Cain debating then-President Bill Clinton on the President’s national health care plan has been making the rounds the past couple days. It’s worth watching, especially now that Cain is making serious noise about a 2012 campaign run. Rand Simberg wrote a good piece on what a conservative space policy might look like (via Jonah Goldberg). CSI: Tuscon. <thewho>YEEEEEEAAAAAAAH!</thewho> Mark Hemingway: Labor’s Last Stand. It can’t come soon enough for me. In a better world, the guys who do Trifecta would get paid tons of cash and it’d get aired on Fox News.

Why Can’t College Students Argue? Don’t Ask Me, I Don’t Control Academia. Posted: 18 Jan 2011 01:05 PM PST For many years, our society has accepted that the fundamental qualification for any sort of decent career must begin with a college education. Tens of thousands of families spend millions of dollars, often times incurring five- or six-figure debts, to send their beloved children to institutes of higher learning, confident they will graduate with a solid educational skill set. Boy have we been gulled. An unprecedented study that followed several thousand undergraduates through four years of college found that large numbers didn’t learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education. Many of the students graduated without knowing how to sift fact from opinion, make a clear written argument or objectively review conflicting reports of a situation or event, according to New York University sociologist Richard Arum, lead author of the study. The students, for example, couldn’t determine the cause of an increase in neighborhood crime or how best to respond without being swayed by emotional testimony and political spin. The numbers are stunning. Almost half of the students in the study showed no real improvement in their critical thinking in their first two years of college and almost 40 percent showed little to no improvement after four. What’s to blame for this? Well, most of the educators quoted in the article assigned a small amount of blame on colleges for not demanding more of students or for not stressing academics over socialization. What none of them mentioned is the more obvious answer: college students don’t learn critical thinking skills because their professors do not give them opportunities to think critically. For that, I blame the progressive establishment, which has controlled academia for longer than I’ve been alive. Critical thinking is not something you can teach like you can teach English or Mathematics (see Ace’s post here for more on that). You can only present a few opening rules: the difference between fact and opinion, how to verify a fact, basic logical fallacies. Beyond that you must have experience. Students have to hear both sides of an argument in order to learn to decide which side has a more valid argument. This is where progressive academics have failed their students utterly. Universities are full of progressives who argue from emotion (think: universal health care, nutritional laws, gun control) or dismiss one side of the argument on spurious grounds (think: tax policy, welfare, climate change). Our colleges waste vast amounts time teaching diversity based on physical appearance rather than exposing students to intellectual diversity, so they never have the raw materials they need to develop the skill. If college students never have to make an argument and never hear their professors make an argument, how in the world are they supposed to learn to argue? Well, as this study demonstrates, they won’t. They’ll enter the world with the same skill set their professors have — one that sets them up perfectly as Democratic voters, but not so well as functional and responsible citizens of a free society. (via memeorandum)

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