Political discourse and news media have been consumed of late by talk of debt, spending, and recession, but meanwhile the educational freedom movement has been making real progress. State legislatures across the country are giving a green light to vouchers and tax incentives that will in the future pay impressive dividends in the form of better educated students and more efficient schools.
Read more on Acton Commentary: School Choice Gains Traction…
My friend Joe Knippenberg notes some of my musings on the field of “philosophical counseling,” and in fact articulates some of the concerns I share about the content of such practice. I certainly didn’t mean to uncritically praise the new field as it might be currently practiced (I did say, “The actual value of philosophical counseling (or perhaps better yet, philosophical tutoring) might be debatable.”).
Read more on Commerce and Counseling…
Even philosophers can be entrepreneurial when economic reality comes crashing in, creating an existential crisis. That’s one lesson from this intriguing Washington Post story (HT: Sarah Pulliam Bailey), “Philosophical counselors rely on eternal wisdom of great thinkers.”
Read more on Philosopreneurs and ‘Creative’ Destruction of Higher Ed…
There were several comments and comments on comments following my recent “Comfy Faculty Lounges” contribution. In the Wall Street Journal, the author of the book I was reviewing makes her own case regarding tenure and teaching versus research.
In the opening scenes of the classic movie version of Thorton Wilder’s play “Our Town” the narrator tells us that the newspaper boy we are watching toss papers onto the porches nearby will go on to college — an ivy league college I recall — but is sent to Europe during WWI and dies. “All that education for nothing,” he laments.
Imagine this: a teacher tells her high school students that they are going to enjoy a chocolate cake, while learning about food distribution and economics. (As a former high school teacher, I assure you, most of the students heard nothing past the word, “cake”.)
Michigan’s State Board of Education is now calling for expanded funding to pay for universal preschool for 3- and 4-year olds.
One could hope that this news story slipped through a worm hole from a parallel universe in which Michigan has a budget surplus, where businesses are flocking to the state to take advantage of a business-friendly tax structure, and where government-funded preschool strongly correlates with future educational performance.
I’ve long argued that school choice is the quintessential bipartisan cause, with boundless potential to transform American primary and secondary education. Yet, for various reasons (all of them bad), it has failed to live up to that potential—its significant successes in various places notwithstanding.
There have been many published articles lately about school curriculum, school performance, school choice, and the Obama dictates that are aimed at pumping more money and asserting more control of an already mediocre performing public school industry. In The Wall Street Journal, University of Dallas professor David Upham comments on a revised Texas school’s U.S. History curriculum that has been proposed and awaits approval. It’s caused a stir among the educrates but that’s partly due to a longtime feud between academic types and the parent types that are found on school boards when things are working as they were meant to.
In many urban areas, maintaining Catholic schools and maintaining some semblance of educational choice are synonymous: the old Catholic schools represent the only alternatives to a big, clumsy, and often unsatisfactory public school district. The issue is especially poignant because the student populations served by these schools are frequently the most educationally challenging populations in the nation. Thus, proponents of school choice are dismayed at the continued shuttering of dozens of major-city Catholic schools across the country. The search for solutions—such as conversion to charter schools, highlighted in this recent story from Baltimore—continues.
