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A conservative take on the world
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I've gotten a lot of comments by email and "other locations" on the web about my recent post on Tom Friedman's expert certification of the reality of MOOCs. One comment is, of course: Why the heck are you so obsessed with MOOCs? Well, I'm not. But saying MOOC (almost rhymes with puke) out loud ...
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The BIG educational news today is that the mainstream expert journalist Thomas Friedman has certified that MOOCs are real. And a quick bit of GOOGLING reveals that all the marketers of MOOCs are thrilled. Here’s the evidence: Michael Sandel’s highly entertaining and instructive MOOCed lectures ...
Here's the third part of my celebration of Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos. I know I'm annoying many BIG THINK readers. I may even be bad for their health; one wrote that my previous post gave him or her cancer. But this is a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT, and you're perfectly free to disagree with it ...
The title Lost in the Cosmos is meant to be a correction to Carl Sagan’s “splendid picture book” Cosmos, which Percy understands as a failed self-help book. Sagan aims to get our minds off our insignificant selves by getting it on the magnificence of the stars and planets. Every moment in ...
So lots of readers (about six) have written ME asking for advice on what book they should read to turn their lives around. Here's my recommendation: Lost in the Cosmos by the philosopher-physician-novelist Walker Percy. It was published in 1983, and I'm one of the very few Americans ...
“How to Make the Most of Your College Education” has become a popular blogging theme. Megan McArdle got things started this time, but the most sensible contribution has come from the professor writing under the name Cattle King. All I’m going to do is comment one portion of King’s “two cents ...
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One of our country's most able and prolific bloggers, Walter Russell Mead, reports that the idea of being able to sit for the bar after just two years of law school is starting to catch on. Law school has, over the years, been quite the opposite of an educational bargain. Universities have ...
So anyone who's ever really thought about love knows that our techno-liberated world is pretty weak on talking about love and death. We're either too vulgar or too vague. It's not that relational life has disappeared, but we just don't have the words that correspond to the longings that sustain ...
So Paul LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, graciously and thoughtfully responded in the thread to my post complaining about his disruptive understanding of education that reduced to the “traditional” college to some mixture of medievalism and animal-house decadence. He ...
So I’ve gotten several emails this morning asking me what I think about this article by Paul J. LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University. It’s a plea for accrediting agencies to take seriously competency-based, as opposed to credit-based, higher education. Southern New ...
E.D. Hirsch (the cultural literacy guy) has, I think, written the most important article on educational "outcomes" in a long time. The great benefit of education, "the key to increasingly upward mobility," is expanding the vocabulary of students. Why is that? 1. Hirsch observes that ...
So Joe Carter, a particularly able blogger, mocks the indignation of the North Carolina legislators who want to keep people on welfare from being able to play the state-run lottery. There is, first of all, the problem of enforcement. How can the convenience store clerk really know who's on ...
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1. Today is Lee-Jackson day. It reminds us that Virginia was forced into a war it didn’t want by events initiated by the states of the deep South and President Lincoln. Other states started the war by seceding in response to the agitation by hotheaded aristocrats (masters) without anywhere near ...
So what will you be doing Sunday night? My advice: Watch more TV! Now you innovative and disruptive BIG THINK readers might think you don't have the time. But that's only because you've forgotten about "multitasking." Professors, for example, can be watching while grading papers and filling ...
BIG THINKER Steven Mazie does well to criticize the complacency of Stephen Asma. Asma, citing obvious facts of evolutionary psychology, observes that our natural powers of knowing and loving are limited. So "universal love" is impossible. Our "empathy" extends with any significant force only to ...