“Will computers replace teachers? Dear god I hope so,” says Katherine Mangu-Ward, managing editor of Reason magazine. At Reason Weekend 2013, Mangu-Ward discusses the future of education, how technology can change the classroom for the better and why she loves computers more than people.
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Student loans are difficult to repay in a sluggish economy, and many recent graduates are struggling under considerable debt. One proposal is forgiving student loans, but Prof. Daniel Lin from American University in Washington DC argues that debt forgiveness does not resolve the underlying causes of rising student debt, and therefore cannot prevent future debt problems.
Instead of debt forgiveness, Prof. Lin suggests making student loans like other types of loans: dischargeable in bankruptcy. This places the burden on lenders to ensure that students are not taking more debt than they can handle. While it would lead to a reduction in the amount of loan dollars awarded and increase interest rates, these are natural incentives that encourage borrowers to be more careful right now, and in the future, which puts pressure on colleges and universities to control their costs. H/T Learn Liberty
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Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
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PolitiChick Ann-Marie Murrell talks to David Horowitz about the trend in Washington to ignore the threat of Islam, the education system that has been “taken over by the Communist Left” and the Obama administration’s stunning mishandling of the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. Horowitz, a leading conservative thinker, is founder and president of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also edits FrontPage Magazine.
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In 2008, Uwe and Hannelore Romeike left Germany with their five children and came to the United States asking for refugee status as an oppressed minority. The Roemikes, you see, insist on homeschooling their children, which is illegal under German law.
“The German Constitutional court has said it’s alright for Germany to ban home education because the public has an interest in counteracting, or stamping out, parallel societies,” explains Mike Donnelly, a lawyer for the Home School Legal Defense Association and a representative for the Romeike family. Donnelly tells Reason’s Nick Gillespie that such laws have a long history in Germany.
The family currently resides in the U.S. and is awaiting a verdict from the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, hoping to be granted refugee status. If deported back to Germany, they could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and the possible loss of custody of their children.
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We are spending more money on elementary and high school education than ever before. The number of teachers has risen substantially in recent decades. The number of school administrators has climbed even more rapidly. Yet student dropout rates have not declined, nor have test scores increased. Now parents are losing faith in public schools, new alternatives are appearing, and change is on the way. Bill Whittle and Glenn Reynolds offer a “whiteboard” review of the situation. H/T Encounter Books
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Most Americans strongly support Israel, but ironically, some of our college campuses have become hotbeds of anti-Semitism, occasionally drummed up by Leftist professors. Allen West interviews investigative journalist and Israeli activist Lee Kaplan about this disturbing trend at American universities. Why is it happening? What can be done about it? And is the political left uniting with the Islamists on campus? H/T PJTV
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Intended to help students get a higher education, federal subsidies to colleges and universities have instead triggered continually rising costs. Professor Daniel Lin notes that many college students face repaying a mountain of debt upon graduating. Some end up working jobs that don’t require a degree. Even worse, 40 percent of college students drop out without earning a degree, but that does not free them from the debt they have accumulated. A policy that worsens the problem it is supposed to fix should be eliminated, Lin argues. H/T LearnLiberty
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Everyone wants to improve our public schools. So what’s standing in the way? Stanford Political Science Professor Terry Moe identifies teachers’ unions as one of the biggest obstacles to reform. H/T Prager University
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Remember Art Linkletter’s long-running TV segment “Kids Say the Darndest Things?” Now, academics have supplanted children as America’s most juvenile demographic pool. It’s not knowledge or wisdom that gets imparted on college campuses, but the most vile forms of propaganda and disinformation directed against the United States.
On the one hand, our freedoms provide a cloak of protection for these pedagogues to spew nonsense. But they deserve to be called out and exposed as charlatans when so many of them jump on the same tired bandwagon, spouting like-minded extremist rhetoric. Take Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor emeritus in linguistics, better known for his endless radical pronouncements. His latest: Colin Powell should be hanged for committing acts of immorality akin to Hitler’s right-hand man, Joachim von Ribbentrop, sentenced to death in 1946 following the Nuremberg Trials.
Hey, Noam? What’s wrong? No one paying any attention these days so you’ve got to amp up the craziness? There’s a Yiddish term for Chomsky’s specialty: Meshugaas, meaning pure, unadulterated lunacy.
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