In 1987 Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind was published. It represented a penetrating critique of higher education in America. Almost thirty years later, his criticisms—including the following eight—are still very much relevant: 1) “Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is
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One year from today, news cameras across the county will be focused on the steps of the U.S. Capitol as the 45th president of the United States is sworn into office. Whomever the next president is, we doubt you’ll see comments like these: “[T]he foundation of our national policy will be laid in the pure and
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Thomas Jefferson was one of the most famous critics of the news media. He went so far as to write, “The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.” Was Jefferson’s scorn unfair, or did he have a point? Should people read less news if they wish to
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The other night I testified (via telephone) before the Alaska state legislature, on the standards their public schools are adopting for classes in English. I’d read the standards but didn’t have them in front of me, so I was taken aback when one of the representatives plucked a directive out of all the verbiage and asked
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In Forbes today, columnist Erik Sherman addresses a common mistake that politicians and the public make about education. All too often, writes Sherman, “we move from ‘education is good’ to ‘education will fix income inequality’ or otherwise charge the economy.” Because the public has believed such taglines, the push to send every student to college
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In 1638, a man named John Harvard died and bequeathed half of his estate and his library of over 400 books to a fledgling college in Massachusetts. Today, we know that college as Harvard University. To the modern ear, many of the titles John Harvard left to the college are unfamiliar and likely known to
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