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Category: Education

School closures were a catastrophic error

School closures were a catastrophic error

Jonathan Chait writes: Recently, Nate Silver found himself in the unenviable role of main character of the day on Twitter because he proposed that school closures were a “disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision.” The comparison generated overwhelming anger and mockery, and it is not an easy one to defend: A fiasco that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and rearranged the regional power structure is a very high bar to clear. Weighing policy failures in such…

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How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

How is the pandemic affecting the brains of a generation of children?

Nature reports: Like many paediatricians, Dani Dumitriu braced herself for the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus when it first surged in her wards. She was relieved when most newborn babies at her hospital who had been exposed to COVID-19 seemed to do just fine. Knowledge of the effects of Zika and other viruses that can cause birth defects meant that doctors were looking out for problems. But hints of a more subtle and insidious trend followed close behind. Dumitriu and…

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One thing we can agree on is that we’re becoming a different country

One thing we can agree on is that we’re becoming a different country

Thomas B. Edsall writes: A highly charged ideological transition reflecting a “massive four-decade-long shift in political values and attitudes among more educated people — a shift from concern with traditional materialist issues like redistribution to a concern for public goods like the environment and diversity” is a driving force in the battle between left and right, according to Richard Florida, an urbanologist at the University of Toronto. This ideological transition has been accompanied by the concentration of liberal elites in…

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A generation of American men give up on college: ‘I just feel lost’

A generation of American men give up on college: ‘I just feel lost’

The Wall Street Journal reports: Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. This…

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New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

Science Alert reports: As a child grows and develops, the neurons in their brain are said to branch like trees. Being around this very type of foliage could actually help the process along. A long-term study among 3,568 students in London, between the ages of 9 and 15, has found those kids who spent more time near woodlands showed improved cognitive performance and mental health in adolescence. On the other hand, other natural environments, like grasslands or lakes and rivers,…

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What Arizona’s 2010 ban on ethnic studies could mean for the fight over critical race theory

What Arizona’s 2010 ban on ethnic studies could mean for the fight over critical race theory

Hank Stephenson writes: Despite a few pockets of wealth, Tucson Unified School District is a largely poor district that serves a majority-Latino population. White students make up only about 20 percent of the district, and the vast majority of students qualify for free and reduced-priced lunches. TUSD’s students fall behind their peers around the state in standardized testing, and students of color fall even further behind their white peers. [Augustine] Romero and other Mexican American studies founders hoped that by…

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Racism and reactionary politics kept Nikole Hannah-Jones from joining UNC

Racism and reactionary politics kept Nikole Hannah-Jones from joining UNC

UNC’s Hussman Faculty writes: Today, we learned that Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones has declined a tenured appointment as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media. While disappointed, we are not surprised. We support Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice. The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust. We will be frank: It was racist. Our school highly regards Ms. Hannah-Jones’s work, ability, and…

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Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American

Anti-critical race theory laws are un-American

Kmele Foster, David French, Jason Stanley and Thomas Chatterton Williams write: What is the purpose of a liberal education? This is the question at the heart of a bitter debate that has been roiling the nation for months. Schools, particularly at the kindergarten-to-12th-grade level, are responsible helping turn students into well-informed and discerning citizens. At their best, our nation’s schools equip young minds to grapple with complexity and navigate our differences. At their worst, they resemble indoctrination factories. In recent…

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Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Why conservatives want to cancel the 1619 Project

Adam Serwer writes: Nikole Hannah-Jones is an award-winning Black journalist. She is also one of the developers of the 1619 Project, a journalistic examination of slavery’s role in shaping the American present. Last year, that work won her a Pulitzer Prize. Now it appears to have cost her a tenured chair at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism. The news outlet NC Policy Watch reported on Monday that the university’s dean, chancellor, and faculty had backed Hannah-Jones’s…

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The race to curb the spread of Covid vaccine disinformation

The race to curb the spread of Covid vaccine disinformation

Nature reports: In March, Twitter put its foot down: users who repeatedly spread false information about COVID-19 vaccines will have their accounts suspended or shut down. It was a new front in a high-stakes battle over misinformation that could help to determine how many people get vaccinated, and how swiftly the pandemic ends. The battle is also being fought in computer-science and sociology labs across the United States, where scientists who track the spread of false information on social media…

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Disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice

Disdain for the less educated is the last acceptable prejudice

Michael J. Sandel writes: Joe Biden has a secret weapon in his bid for the presidency: He is the first Democratic nominee in 36 years without a degree from an Ivy League university. This is a potential strength. One of the sources of Donald Trump’s political appeal has been his ability to tap into resentment against meritocratic elites. By the time of Mr. Trump’s election, the Democratic Party had become a party of technocratic liberalism more congenial to the professional…

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Some academics fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies

Some academics fear for their career because they don’t believe progressive orthodoxies

John McWhorter writes: Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white…

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The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

The coronavirus pandemic shows us it’s time to rethink everything. Let’s start with education

George Monbiot writes: Imagine mentioning William Shakespeare to a university graduate and discovering they had never heard of him. You would be incredulous. But it’s common and acceptable not to know what an arthropod is, or a vertebrate, or to be unable to explain the difference between an insect and spider. No one is embarrassed when a “well-educated” person cannot provide even a rough explanation of the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle or the water cycle, or of how soils…

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Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

Coronavirus conspiracy theorists infecting academia

The Times reports: Prominent British academics have been sharing conspiracy theories about the coronavirus online, The Times can disclose. They included suggestions from other social media users that Bill Gates, the billionaire philanthropist, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) that meets in Davos may be involved in plots to exploit the illness and speculation that it was a biological weapon. The academics include Tim Hayward, a professor of environmental political theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Piers Robinson, co-founder…

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First Amendment rights prevent bigoted professor being fired, but university says no student need attend his classes

First Amendment rights prevent bigoted professor being fired, but university says no student need attend his classes

CNN reports: Indiana University has received hundreds of requests calling for a controversial professor to be fired, and a provost has called his views “racist, sexist and homophobic.” But the school says that, while the professor does not represent its values, he is protected by the First Amendment. Eric Rasmusen is a professor of business economics and public policy at Indiana University, where he’s been teaching since 1992. He recently came under fire after he tweeted an article from Unz.com…

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The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

The right’s latest attack on academic freedom might succeed

Mark Joseph Stern writes: The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw federal funding from the Duke-UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies because it does not portray Christianity or Judaism in a sufficiently “positive” light. A letter from the Department of Education—sent on Tuesday and reported by the New York Times on Thursday—directed the program to emphasize “positive aspects” of these and other non-Islamic religions in the Middle East. If it refuses, the department may strip the program of hundreds of…

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