Home School Online

I’ve posted before on my view that higher education is largely ready for a major redo. Whereas the elite academic school and the community colleges seem to work, I’ve argued that the large volume of schools in the middle are badly off track. They devastate many state and family budgets as well as the lives of some of the kids who go through serious alcoholic and other ‘badness” when there. here’s a relevant study. And I quote from: Academically Adrift, Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

In spite of soaring tuition costs, more and more students go to college every year. A bachelor’s degree is now required for entry into a growing number of professions. And some parents begin planning for the expense of sending their kids to college when they’re born. Almost everyone strives to go, but almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?

For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no. Their extensive research draws on survey responses, transcript data, and, for the first time, the state-of-the-art Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester and then again at the end of their second year. According to their analysis of more than 2,300 undergraduates at twenty-four institutions, 45 percent of these students demonstrate no significant improvement in a range of skills—including critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing—during their first two years of college. As troubling as their findings are, Arum and Roksa argue that for many faculty and administrators they will come as no surprise—instead, they are the expected result of a student body distracted by socializing or working and an institutional culture that puts undergraduate learning close to the bottom of the priority list.

Academically Adrift holds sobering lessons for students, faculty, administrators, policy makers, and parents—all of whom are implicated in promoting or at least ignoring contemporary campus culture. Higher education faces crises on a number of fronts, but Arum and Roksa’s report that colleges are failing at their most basic mission will demand the attention of us all.

With all the excitement about the growth of China and the outsourcing to India, there is little US press and public attention to other areas. I’d suggest that Brazil is a country definitely worth paying attention to and studying. I clued into this through a set of programs on NPR.

Today for instance, on their travel program, they explained that Brazil is now one of the ten largest economies in the world and is growing rapidly. And with so many new natural resources (oil for instance), there’s every reason to think that it’s fastest growth is ahead of us.

The story that really caught my interest was the NPR story on how four friends in grad school tricked the entire country of Brazil into adopting a stable currency.

Here’s the background. Brazil from the 80s on has suffered from ongoing extreme inflation. Extreme inflation means 80% inflation per month. What this means is that on a daily basis, a sticker man would walk around each store repricing everything and so people tried spend their money immediately before the prices went up.

Governments would come in promising to free prices and stop printing money. But this always failed and government after government fell. Soon people became convinced that the government was helpless to stop inflation and the inflation was in place for apparently forever.

I won’t try to paraphrase the whole broadcast but I would strongly urge everyone with an interest in economics and a high school student ready to learn such things, to learn to this story.

On a related note, a family might study why such an interesting story was not covered in the mainstream US press at all. We hear a lot about natural disasters. And we hear about the Chinese economy a lot. The country seems fascinated and terrified by the idea that the Chinese economy is about to become bigger than ours. Guess what, the European Common Market is already a bigger economy than the American one and it’s made no particular difference to our way of life. When the Chinese one surpasses ours, it won’t make much difference either. But to return to the initial point, how does one, who wants to be well-informed about the world, get the news and analysis. I listen to the BBC and NPR. What do you do?

I found this video on Chris Lehman’s blog.  It left me in tears. Both types.  Much as I care about homeschooling, I think our future remains with the more mainstream educational systems.