"The Overselling of Higher Education"

Parents Forum
36

<p>This strikes me a good companion piece to the theme of this thread:</p>

<p><a href=“http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2NjMWYzNDI0ODhhZDAzNWNhMjMxMmVhOGZhYjcwOGM=[/url]”>http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=M2NjMWYzNDI0ODhhZDAzNWNhMjMxMmVhOGZhYjcwOGM=&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>An excerpt:
"I assigned the first half of Allan Bloom’s new surprise best-seller The Closing of the American Mind. When the time came to discuss the Bloom book, I asked them what they thought of it.</p>

<p>They hated it.</p>

<p>Oh, yes, they understood perfectly well what Bloom was saying: that they were ignorant, that they believed in cliches, that their education so far had been dangerous piffle and that what they were about to receive was not likely to be any better.</p>

<p>No wonder they hated it. After all, they were the best and the brightest., Ivy Leaguers with stratospheric SAT scores, the Masters of the Universe. Who is Bloom? What is the University of Chicago, anyway?</p>

<p>So I launched into an impromptu oral quiz.</p>

<p>Could anyone (in that class of 25 students) say anything about the Mayflower Compact?</p>

<p>Complete silence.</p>

<p>John Locke?</p>

<p>Nope.</p>

<p>James Madison?</p>

<p>Silentia.</p>

<p>Magna Carta? The Spanish Armada? The Battle of Yorktown? The Bull Moose party? Don Giovanni ? William James? The Tenth Amendment?</p>

<p>Zero. Zilch. Forget it.</p>

<p>The embarrassment was acute, but some good came of it. The better students, ashamed that their first 12 years of schooling had mostly been wasted (even if they had gone to Choate or Exeter), asked me to recommend some books."</p>