I like fighters. There are people out there who are just not going to take the status quo. This is one of them.
I have complete confidence that many of you will be in disagreement with some or all of her stances and beliefs. But pause for a moment and think what our society would be like without motion, without change, without difference, and most of all think what the world would be like if everyone agreed not to be different.
James Pilant
via Vomits Her Mind
I talk about this a lot myself. My primary gripes are that teachers often teach unimportant things because they are easy to grade. Sometimes, I see meaningless questions asked because they lend themselves well to an easily gradable format. Here’s a disguised version of one I saw –
The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in ….
A. 1935
B. 1936
C. 1937
or D. 1928.
If your career and life depend on knowing the year that social security passed in the format of a Jeopardy question, that would be a good question. In every other way it is useless.
How should the questions be phrased? Like this –
The Social Security Act was passed by Congress in …
A. The first few years of the Roosevelt Administration.
B. The last years of the Hoover Administration.
C. As one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in the mid-sixties.
or D. With the founding of the Constitution.
This places the Social Security Act in historical perspective, and it allows reasoning to be used. You can use what you learned in a variety of venues to determine if the act would have been something that the founding fathers or Herbert Hoover would have done.
I believe in teaching difficult subjects. I believe my students can handle difficult material. And I believe that teaching is an art whose highest practitioners can rise to meet the challenges of complexity and ambiguity.
James Pilant
via jay.blog
This is from Australia. In that country, religious groups are given time to teach their views in school. Get a good read. This is what schools in the United States could look like if religion is allowed entry.
James Pilant
via grey lining
It is questionable morally to use money and influence to diminish or destroy the rights of Americans. It is questionable morality to subvert or buy the media to prevent unfavorable stories or to spread lies and misinformation. And it is questionable morality to buy influence at American universities so that your perverted economic doctrines can become mainstream, to use public institutions as private breeding grounds for followers, to pollute the social science with the continuous contributions of bought academics, not searching for the truth, but in opposition to it.
Shall large Christian denominations dispose of evolutionary biology using the same methods? Shall opponents of gay marriage dispose of social scientists using the same methods? Shall we give up the field of criminology, after high dollar contributors insist that crime is produced by demonic possession?
Think of the possibilities! These independent researchers, these tenured beasts, all brought to heel. Is global warming a problem? Buy enough academics and it disappears. Some damn nosy professor says dumping radioactive material can damage our genetic heritage, that can be fixed. We can buy as many professors as we want. History can become what we want. The very definition of reality can be changed, literature and painting cleansed of subversive influences.
Are public universities in need of money? Let them get money the old-fashioned way. Haven’t people justified their immoral actions by saying they did it because it was part of the job and they had to feed their families? Haven’t people said they had to do it, it was part of the job? Let’s put academics in that same boat. They shall have their jobs only if they give the proper respect to the contributors, only if their search for truth is predetermined, I promise you that every university in this nation will be rolling in money the moment they realize just like Florida State University that selling the “right” kind of education is more profitable than the pursuit of knowledge. Educating the young has never been very profitable.
We can double, triple administrative salaries. We can build new buildings and a first class physical plant. There will be stadiums and first class football teams at the smallest of institutions. No more begging to the state legislatures, the money will never stop. Donors will compete against each other for professors. If one gets five, then the other must have six.
We can price them. The more influential the professor, the more money they will be worth. It’s easy to measure, who’s on television more often. Who testifies before Congress the most. Whether or not they teach or get published is insignificant. Who wants to buy that?
We have sold so much in this country. Let’s follow free market economics to their logical conclusion.
The brave new world of green is out there waiting for us. Let us walk forward bravely, open palm extended, to sell our last possession, our integrity.
James Pilant
via Wake-up Call
And it’s raining hard. The decision made over time to place almost all the financing of education on the backs of the students is contrary to the practice in much of the world. It has had terrible consequences. College graduates are no longer able to make a wide variety of decisions as to what jobs to take, they must take the most profitable or profitable enough to stay even with their debts.
It forces students to choose the most profitable fields of endeavor and imposes horrifying penalties on those that make the wrong vocational choices. If you chose correctional officer as a career over the last two decades you scored, good job prospects, low but steady pay and a good package of benefits (if you avoided working for a private corrections company). But if you chose journalism you are probably eeking out a living as some minor paper shuffling prole. In that case, your debt load is crushing and is never going to go away.
You see, in a very real way, going for a higher education is gambling. There are no guaranteed professions or majors. History, economics and technology can shift winners and losers dramatically in a very few years. You can take many times more financial damage from a wrong choice in a college career than you can in a dozen gambling binge visits to Vegas.
But get this, when do people get to decide this critical decision? Usually when they have the least experience and knowledge – just out of high school.
I would be curious as to what the psychological effects of that kind of debt are over time. This is not just any kind of debt, creditors have power with this kind of debt they have with no other money owed.
They have counseling sessions to warn you about the consequences of student debt, that’s almost nothing compared to what’s needed. What is needed is an explanation of the risks being taken. Students should be told that double majors in different fields will significantly improve their chances of survival in a changing economy. They need to be told that income varies widely not by ability but by geography. It is much easier to pay off student loans with a salary earned on the coast. The more you move toward the center of the United States, the lower your income and the more a burden student loans will be. When I read the estimates of what college graduates will make based on national estimates, I just laugh. The job might have a starting salary of $44,000. Yeah, right. That’s about 65k to 70k in a state like New York and 24k in Kansas or Oklahoma.
We can do this better, but as usual the great intellects of the beltway will scream, “personal responsibility” over and over again. You see, the phrase, personal responsibility, means that no matter how deliberately misinformed, how unfair the deal, how distorted the situation, how manipulated a body of citizens are, it is irrelevant.
There is another word, we use in this country. It seems to have fallen out of favor. It’s called fairness. That means that we have to take into consideration the circumstances of the decision that led to the contract.
That means that when a college prints up thousands of pretty pamphlets selling their very expensive program in broadcast journalism so that you can become a television anchor, a job where there are only a few thousand jobs in the entire nation, we as a society get to ask some tough questions. Questions like “How much are you making selling this program?” “Were these students properly advised?” – that is, were they informed of the job prospects? Is there any data, any data at all, about successful employment out of the program?
Adherence to contracts is important, but so is fairness.
James Pilant
via iRok Fashion
Twenty-five years. Twenty five years to absorb the lessons of the last nuclear disaster and it just didn’t work out. The ad nauseum repeating of the mantra, “It’s different here.” Whether they meant more modern equipment, better management, more incentives, better regulation, it turned out to be nonsense.
Going back to Chernobyl after all these years is not a comforting journey. It is a trip into a ghostly irradiated land measuring 10,800 square miles, a facet of the aftermath of a nuclear disaster carefully unmentioned by the proponents of nuclear power. That’s about a third the size of Panama or five times the size of Rhode Island. Does that make you comfortable?
How much agricultural land can we afford to lose permanently? We need a thorough intelligent discussion of nuclear power in the United States, not back rooms and lobbyists, a public discussion.
This is a good article and has an attached video.
James Pilant
This is a student’s story of the end of the semester, the great amount of time and effort it took to get there and what other students get to do (and he doesn’t).
I have been there and strangely enough, I miss those times. However, I cannot do the old person’s routine of we were tougher, smarter and harder working than kids today. That’s nonsense.
I miss those times because I am in my mid fifties and the time when I was young is appealing in spite of the difficult situations and discouraging mistakes I had to get through.
And I am curious, as a college teacher, sometimes I think it would be good to see it from the other side in this new age of online classes and economic hard times.
I wish our writer all the best, recommend his writing to you, and hope he keeps posting.
James Pilant
What does the future hold?
This is a speculative article that tries to come with some answers as to what is important in the development of humanity.
I like speculation and I like thinking. Good article.
James Pilant
via Egostratum
I was very impressed by this article. It is a call for character formation as a priority for education. And a harsh criticism of a culture too often aimed only at monetary success. I find it eloquent and there is little in it that is not obvious from a moral or ethical view point. I wish the author well and hope he reaches a substantial audience.
James Pilant
via Daring to Change
Persuading my students that education is a lifetime process is a lot like nailing snow to the wall. It is generally unavailing and at best temporary.
The belief that a diploma indicates an education is pernicious. It is self defeating. A diploma is like a license to drive. Its possession is evidence that one knows how to learn. But if it is considered an end in itself, it is of little use. It is like getting a driver’s license, proudly carrying it with you and proudly showing it to everyone and then never driving a car.
We are confused between education as a finished product delivered at the end of the assembly line and education as a matter of capability. One is static becoming obsolete. The other is dynamic continually changing form and creating new dynamics and possibilities in endless chains.
As a society, treating education as a finite process limits and cheapens political discourse. It makes learning into a jobs game like going around the monopoly board.
To build a society, a civilized place for people to develop, education never ends. It continually creates and inspires.
A diploma without further learning is a static choice. It is easy. The other, lifetime learning, is dynamic and difficult.
We can do what is difficult. We have a responsibility to our posterity to do the difficult, to leave our descendants a lasting example and to call from us, our best efforts.
James Pilant
via LongWind
Pilant's Business Ethics Blog 
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