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EDUCATION

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see "KNOWLEDGE" for related links


It is really mortifying, sir, when a woman possessed of a common
share of understanding considers the difference of education between
the male and female sex, even in those families where education is
attended to .... Nay, why should your sex wish for such a disparity
in those whom they one day intend for companions and associates?
--Abigail Adams (1744—1818)
American first lady [1797—1801], the wife of
John Adams, second president of the United
States, and the mother of John Quincy Adams,
the sixth president of the United States.
Letter to John Thaxter [15 Februarry 1778].
-

Suppose there were a college or university in which the faculty was
thus composed: Herodotus and Thucydides taught the history of Greece,
and Gibbon lectured on the fall of Rome. Plato and St. Thomas gave a
course in metaphysics together; Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill
discussed the logic of science; Aristotle, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant
shared the platform on moral problems; Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes,
and John Locke talked about politics.

You could take a series of courses in mathematics from Euclid,
Descartes, Riemann, and Cantor, with Bertrand Russell and A.N.
Whitehead added at the end. You could listen to St. Augustine,
Aquinas and William James talk about the nature of man and the human
mind, with perhaps Jacques Maritain to comment on the lectures.

In economics, the lectures were by Adam Smith, Ricardo, Karl Marx,
and Marshall. Boas discussed the human race and its races, Thorstein
Veblen and John Dewey the economic and political problems of American
democracy, and Lenin lectured on communism.

There might even be lectures on art by Leonardo da Vinci, and a
lecture on Leonardo by Freud. A much larger faculty than this is
imaginable, but this will suffice.

Would anyone want to go to any other university, if he could get into
this one? There need be no limitation of numbers. The price of
admission — the only entrance requirement — is the ability and
willingness to read and discuss. This school exists for everybody who
is willing and able to learn from first-rate teachers.

--Mortimer J. Adler (1902—2001)
American philosopher, educator, and editor.

-

Fielding: Are you a student?
Nancy: Yeah. City College.
Fielding: Oh, it's a great school...I ate in their
cafeteria once.
Nancy: Oh, really?
Fielding: Yeah, I got trichinosis.
Nancy: Oh! I'm a philosophy major.
Fielding: It's a wonderful thing...what is the
meaning of life and death and why we
are here and everything...
Nancy: Right, yeah.
Fielding: Do you like Chinese food?
--Woody Allen [Allen Stewart Konigsberg] (1935— )
American actor, screenwriter, and director.


His lack of education is more than compensated
for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy.
--Woody Allen [Allen Stewart Konigsberg] (1935— )
American actor, screenwriter, and director.

-

It was a saying of his ... that those parents who gave their
children a good education deserved more honor than those
who merely beget them; for that the latter only enabled their
children to live, but the former gave them the power of
living well.
--Aristotle (384—322 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.
In Diogenes Laertius
_Lives of the Eminent Philosophers_, bk V, sec. 11.

-

The ignorant classes are the dangerous classes.
Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
--Henry Ward Beecher (1813—1887)
American Congregational minister;
[brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher.]
_Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit_ [1870]


We know that the gifts which men have do not come
from the schools. If a man is a plain, literal, factual man,
you can make a great deal more of him in his own line
by education than without education, just as you can
make a great deal more of a potato if you cultivate it
than if you do not; but no cultivation in this world
will ever make an apple out of a potato.
--Henry Ward Beecher (1813—1887)
American Congregational minister;
[brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, son of Lyman Beecher.]

-

The trouble with people is not that they don't
know but that they know so much that ain't so.
--Josh Billings [Henry Wheeler Shaw] (1818—1885)
American humorist.
Josh Billings' _Encyclopedia of Wit and Wisdom_ [1974]

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist
the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate
but because he knows others worthy of consideration.
--Allan Bloom (1930—1992)
American writer and educator.
_The Closing of the American Mind_ [1987]

Education is learning what you didn't even know you didn't know.
--Daniel J. Boorstin (1914—2004)
American historian.
"A Case of Hypochondria",
_Newsweek_ [6 July 1970]

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to
eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been
loosened or fertilised by education; they grow there,
firm as weeds among stones.
--Charlotte Brontλ (1816—1855)
British author.
_Jane Eyre_ [1847]

Education makes a people easy to lead,
but difficult to drive; easy to govern,
but impossible to enslave.
--attributed to Lord [Henry Peter] Brougham (1778—1868)
Scottish lawyer and politician.

Education is the cheap defense of nations.
--Edmund Burke (1729—1797)
Irish-born Whig politician and man of letters.

-

"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?"
said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
"Ten hours the first day," said the Mock Turtle:
"nine the next, and so on."

"What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice. "That's
the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon
remarked: "because they lessen from day to day."

This was quite a new idea to Alice, and she thought
it over a little before she made her next remark.
"Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?"
"Of course it was," said the Mock Turtle.

"And how did you manage on the twelfth?" Alice
went on eagerly. "That's enough about lessons,"
the Gryphon interrupted in a very decided tone.

--Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832—1898)
English writer and logician.
_Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ [1865],
"The Mock Turtle's Story"

-

People are, in general, what they are made, by education
and company, from fifteen to five-and-twenty; consider
well, therefore, the importance of your next eight or nine
years; your whole depends upon them.
--Lord Chesterfield [Philip Dormer Stanhope] (1694—1773)
Letter to his son [1 April 1748].

I add this also, that natural ability without education has
oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education
without natural ability.
[Latin: Etiam illud adjungo, saepius ad laudem atque
virtutem naturam sine doctrina, quam sine natura
valisse doctrinam.]
--Marcus Tullius Cicero (106—43 BC)
Roman orator and statesman.
_Oratio Pro Licinio Archia_, VII

Great books are not in everybody's reach; and though
it is better to know them thoroughly, than to know them
only here and there; yet it is a good work to give a little
to those who have neither the time nor means to get
more. Let every book-worm, when, in any fragrant
scarce old tome, he discovers a sentence, a story,
an illustration that does his heart good, hasten to
give it.
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834)
English poet, critic, and philosopher.

Better build schoolrooms for 'the boy',
Than cells and gibbets for 'the man'.
--Eliza Cook (1818—1889)
English poet.
"A Song for the Ragged Schools" [1853]

The one real object of education is to have a man
in the condition of continually asking questions.
--Bishop Mandell Creighton (1843—1901)
English historian and ecclesiastic.

He that undertakes the education of a child
undertakes the most important duty of
society.
--Thomas Day (1748—1789)
English author.
In James Kerr (ed.)
_An Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Day_ [1791].

Education is not preparation for life;
education is life itself.
--attributed to John Dewey (1859—1952)
American philosopher and educator.

The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.
--Diogenes (404—323 B.C.)
Greek Cynic philosopher.

There is no education like adversity.
--Benjamin Disraeli (1804—1881)
British Tory statesman, novelist, and
Prime Minister [1868, 1874—1880].
_Endymion_ [1880]

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know
nothing; education is a progressive discovery
of our own ignorance.
--Will Durant (1885—1981)
American philosopher and writer.

-

The things taught in schools and colleges are not
an education, but the means of an education.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882)
American philosopher and poet.


If the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the
best university that can be recommended to
a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mob.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882)
American philosopher and poet.
_Society and Solitude_ [1870], "Eloquence"


We are students of words; we are shut up in
schools, and colleges, and recitation rooms,
for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last
with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and
do not know a thing.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882)
American philosopher and poet.

-

Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind
with an open one.
--Malcolm S. Forbes (1917—1990)
Publisher of "Forbes" magazine founded by his father B.C. Forbes.

An education isn't how much you have committed
to memory, or even how much you know. It's being
able to differentiate between what you do know
and what you don't.
--Anatole France [Jacques Anatole Thibault] (1844—1924)
French novelist, man of letters, and winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1921.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything
without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
--Robert Frost (1874—1963)
American poet.
In "Reader's Digest" [April 1960].

One month in the school of affliction will teach thee more
than the great precepts of Aristotle in seven years; for thou
canst never judge rightly of human affairs, unless thou hast
first felt the blows, and found out the deceits of fortune.
--Thomas Fuller (1654—1734)
English writer and physician.

Next in importance to freedom and justice is popular
education, without which neither justice nor freedom
can be permanently maintained.
--James A. Garfield (1831—1881)
20th President of the United States [1881].

As far as I can see, the greater amount of education
which a part of the working class has enjoyed for
some years past is an evil. It is dangerous, because
it makes them independent.
--J. Geddes (1865)
British glassworks owner,
quoted in Karl Marx "The Structure of Society."

There is no effectual way of improving the
institutions of any people but by enlightening
their understandings.
--William Godwin (1756—1836)
English social philosopher and political journalist.
_An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its
Influence on General Virtue and Happiness_ [1793]

If you feel you have both feet planted on level
ground, then the university has failed you.
--Robert F. Goheen
Classical scholar and educator who was Predisent
of Princeton University for fifteen years.

Education would be much more effective if its
purpose were to ensure that by the time they
leave school every boy and girl should know
how much they don't know, and be imbued
with a lifelong desire to know it.
--Sir William Haley (1901—1987)
Director of the BBC [1944—1952].

Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and
emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing
light to bear on the dark corners where troubles
fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn
mirrors into windows.
--Sydney J. Harris (1917—1986)
American journalist.

Of a good beginning cometh a good end.
--John Heywood (1497—1580)
English playwright.
_Proverbs_ [1546], Part I, Chapter 10

Knowledge and timber shouldn't be much
used till they are seasoned.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809—1894)
American physician, poet, and essayist.
_The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ [1858]

The object of education is to prepare the young
to educate themselves throughout their lives.
--Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899—1977)
American philosopher.

-

If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the
man who has so much as to be out of danger?
--T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley (1825—1895)
English biologist {grandfather of Aldous Huxley}.


Perhaps the most valuable result of all education
is the ability to make yourself do the thing you
have to do, when it ought to be done, whether
you like it or not.
--T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley (1825—1895)
English biologist {grandfather of Aldous Huxley}.

-

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free,
in a state of civilization, it expects what
never was and never will be.
--Thomas Jefferson (1743—1826)
American statesman and president [1801—1809].
Letter to Charles Yancey [6 January 1816].

At the desk where I sit, I have learned one
great truth. The answer for all our national
problems — the answer for all the problems
of the world — comes to a single word. That
word is "education".
--Lyndon B. Johnson (1908—1973)
American Democratic statesman, President [1963—1969].

The highest result of education is tolerance.
--Helen Keller (1880—1968)
American author and educator who was blind and deaf.

If you are truly serious about preparing your child
for the future, don't teach him how to subtract —
teach him to deduct.
--Fran Lebowitz (1946— )
American humorist.
_Social Studies_ [1981]

The rod, which is the only instrument of government
that tutors generally know, or ever think of, is the
most unfit of any to be used in education.
--John Locke (1632—1704)
English political and educational philosopher.
_Some Thoughts Concerning Education_ [1693]

The better part of every man's education
is that which he gives himself.
--James Russell Lowell (1819—1891)
American poet, critic, essayist, and diplomat.
_My Study Windows_ [1871] "Abraham Lincoln"

Should Women Learn the Alphabet?
--Silvain Marechal,
French writer [title of 1801 book]

My grandmother wanted me to have an
education, so she kept me out of school.
--Margaret Mead (1901—1978)
American anthropologist.
In Barb Lundgren, comp.,
_Mindfull Quotations_ [1997].

If, at my death, my executors, or more properly my
creditors, find any precious MSS. in my desk, then
here I prospectively ascribe all the honor and the
glory to whaling; for a whaling ship was my Yale
College and my Harvard.
--Herman Melville (1819—1891)
American novelist and poet.
_Moby Dick_ [1851]

The aim of public education is not to spread
enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce
as many individuals as possible to the same
safe level, to breed a standard citizenry,
to put down dissent and originality.
--H.L. (Henry Louis) Mencken (1880—1956)
American journalist and literary critic.

Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.
--Nigerian Proverb

One only passes from the darkness of ignorance to the
enlightenment of science if one re-reads with ever
increasing love the works of the ancients. Let the dogs
bark, let the pigs grunt! I will nonetheless be a disciple
of the ancients. All my care will be for them and each
day the dawn will see me studying them.
--Peter of Blois (c.1135—c.1203)
French poet and diplomat.
In M.J. Cohan and John Major {eds.}
_History in Quotations_ [2004] p. 198.

I'm sure the reason such young nitwits are produced
in our schools is because they have no contact with
anything of any use in everyday life.
--Gaius Petronius Arbiter (?—AD 66)
Roman writer and senator.
_The Satyricon_

If a man neglects education, he walks
lame to the end of his life.
--Plato (427?—347 B.C.)
Greek philosopher.

If you live with a cripple, you will learn to limp.
--Plutarch (A.D. 46?—119?)
Greek philosopher and biographer.
_Moralia_ [c. 100], "The Education of Children"

'Tis education forms the common mind:
Just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.
--Alexander Pope (1688—1744)
English poet.
_Moral Essays_ [1731-1735]
Epistle I

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for
he was born in another time.
--Rabbinic saying

Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning,
why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting
anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the
Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the
smartest race of people on earth.
--Will Rogers [William Penn Adair Rogers] (1879—1935)
American humorist and actor.

To educate a person in mind and not in morals is to
educate a menace to society.
--Theodore Roosevelt (1858—1919)
American Republican statesman and President [1901—1909].
In Stephen Bates, "A Textbook of Virtues",
_New York Times_ [8 Januarary 1995].

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that
education has become one of the chief
obstacles to intelligence and freedom of
thought.
--Bertrand Russell (1872—1970)
British philosopher, mathematician, and Nobel laureate.
_Sceptical Essays_ [1928]

Learned women are ridiculed because they
put to shame unlearned men.
--George Sand [pseudonym of Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin] (1804—1876)
French author.

-

So quick was I at picking up the language [Chinese]
that I was soon able to prompt my brother whenever
he got stuck. At this my father used to sigh and
say to me: "If only you were a boy, how proud and
happy I should be."

But it was not long before I repented of having thus
distinguished myself; for person after person assured
me that even boys generally become very unpopular if
it is discovered that they are fond of their books.
For a girl, of course, it would be even worse.

--Murasaki Shikibu (974—1031)
Japanese novelist and poet.
_The Diary of Murasaki Shikibu_ [c. 994—1010]

-

Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies
will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life —
save only this — that if you work hard and intelligently
you should be able to detect *when a man is talking
rot,* and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole,
purpose of education.
--John Alexander Smith (1863—1939)
English philosopher.
In Harold Macmillan "Oxford Remembered"
_The Times_ [18 October 1975].

The rivers of America will run with blood filled to
their banks before we will submit to them taking
the Bible out of our schools.
--Billy Sunday [William Ashley Sunday] (1862—1935)
American evangelist.

The most influential of all educational factors
is the conversation in a child's home.
--William Temple (1881—1944)
English theologian and Archbishop.

-

"Don't you give me none o' your lip," says he.
"You've put on considerable many frills since I been
away. I'll take you down a peg before I get done
with you. You're educated, too, they say; can read
and write. You think you're better'n your father,
now, don't you, because he can't? I'll take it out
of you. Who told you you might meddle with such
hifalut'n foolishness, hey? — who told you you could?"

"The widow. She told me." "The widow, hey? — and
who told the widow she could put in her shovel about
a thing that ain't none of her business?" "Nobody
never told her."

"Well, I'll learn her how to meddle. And looky
here — you drop that school, you hear? I'll learn
people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own
father and let on to be bettern' what he is. You
lemme catch you fooling around that school again,
you hear? Your mother couldn't read, and she
couldn't write, nuther, before she died. None of
the family couldn't, before they died. I can't; and
here you're a-swelling yourself up like this. I
ain't the man to stand it — you hear? Say — lemme
hear you read."

I took up a book and begun something about General
Washington and the wars. When I'd read about a half
a minute, he fetched the book a whack with his hand
and knocked it across the house.

He says: "It's so. You can do it. I had my doubts
when you told me. Now looky here; you stop that
putting on frills. I won't have it. I'll lay for
you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school
I'll tan you good. First you know you'll get
religion, too. I never see such a son."

--Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835—1910)
American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot.
_The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ [1885], Chapter 5


Don't let school interfere with your education.
--Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835—1910)
American humorist, novelist, journalist, and river pilot.
Attributed, in _Everyone's Mark Twain_, p. 553, ed.
Caroline Thomas Harnsberger [1948].

-

To separate [black children] from others of similar
age and qualifications solely because of their race
generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status
in the community that may affect their hearts and
minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone. . . .In
the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate
but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities
are inherently unequal.
--Earl Warren (1891—1974)
American jurist, the 14th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court [1953—1969].
Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education [1954]

A mother once asked a clergyman when she should begin
the education of her child, which she told him was then four
years old. 'Madam,' was the reply, 'you have lost three
years already.'
--Richard Whately (1787—1863)
English philosopher and theologian.

The best thing for being sad. . . is to learn something.
--T. H. [Terence Hanbury] White (1906—1964)
English novelist.
_The Sword in the Stone_ [1938]

Education is not filling a
bucket, but lighting a fire.
--attributed to William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Irish poet and dramatist who received the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.


TOPICAL

-

$19,915 - Average annual income for a person age 18 and older
holding less than a high school diploma.

$29,448 - Average annual income for a person age 18 and older
holding a high school diploma.

$54,689 - Average annual income for a person age 18 and older
holding a bachelor's degree.

$79,946 - Average annual income for a person age 18 and older
possessing a master's, professional or doctoral degree.

--U.S. Census Bureau [2000]

-

In the presence of NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and other
African-American leaders, comedian Bill Cosby took aim at
blacks who don't take responsibility for their economic
status, blame police for incarcerations and teach their
kids poor speaking habits.

[...]

Cosby said, according to Leiby: "Ladies and gentlemen,
the lower economic people are not holding up their end
in this deal. These people are not parenting. They are
buying things for kids - $500 sneakers for what? And
won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics.'

He added: "They're standing on the corner and they can't
speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk:
'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... And I blamed the kid
until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father
talk. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English
except these knuckleheads. ... You can't be a doctor with
that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

--Blacks can't speak English NAACP leaders stunned by remarks of prominent comedian

-

....The historians who wrote the [National History
Standards] may with the best of intentions be
imposing their own interpretations and values to
the point that students will not be able to do what
they are purportedly called upon to do. Students
are asked to exercise 'independent judgment,'
yet it has already been decided that they should
not spend an excessive amount of time studying
'great civilizations.' They are told to 'detect
bias,' yet any detection — for example, questioning
a text for emphasizing the achievements of one
culture over another — runs the risk of being dubbed
racist. They are to 'weigh evidence and to evaluate
arguments,' yet they dare not pronounce the
Federalist Papers superior in political wisdom lest
they commit the elitist mistakes of the past. They
are advised to 'sniff out spurious appeals to history,'
yet they should beware of studying the 'great men,'
the very thinkers who were in the vanguard of inquiry.
Some standards.
--John Patrick Diggins
Professor of history at CUNY; in 1995

-

[The] American Council of Trustees and Alumni commissioned the
Roper organization — The Center for Survey Research and Analysis
at the University of Connecticut — to survey college seniors from the
nation’s best colleges and universities as identified by the U.S. News
& World Report’s annual college rankings. The top 55 liberal arts
colleges and research universities were sampled during December
1999.

The questions were drawn from a basic high school curriculum. In fact,
many of the questions had been used in the National Assessment of
Educational Progress (NAEP) tests given to high school students.

How did seniors from our nation’s top colleges and universities do?
They flunked. Four out of five — 81% — of seniors from the top 55
colleges and universities in the United States received a grade of D
or F. They could not identify Valley Forge, or words from the Gettysburg
Address, or even the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution.

• Scarcely more than half knew general information about American
democracy and the Constitution.

• Only 34% of the students surveyed could identify George Washington
as an American general at the battle of Yorktown, the culminating battle
of the American Revolution.

• Only 42% were able to identify George Washington as “First in war,
first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen.”

• Less than one quarter (23%) correctly identified James Madison as
the “father of the Constitution.”

• Even fewer — 22% of the college seniors — were able to identify
“Government of the people, by the people, for the people” as a line
from the Gettysburg Address — arguably one of the three most
important documents underlying the American system of
government.

• Over one-third were unable to identify the U.S. Constitution as
establishing the division of power in American government.

• Little more than half (52%) knew George Washington’s Farewell
Address warned against permanent alliances with foreign governments.

What do they know? They get an A+ in contemporary popular culture.

• 99% know who the cartoon characters Beavis and Butthead are.

• 98% can identify the rap singer Snoop Doggy Dogg.

Beavis and Butthead instead of Washington and Madison;
Snoop Doggy Dogg instead of Lincoln? How did it come
to this? Students and parents are paying $30,000 a year
at elite institutions. For what?

http://www.4truth.net/atf/cf/%7B0AA41589-FF9B-4057-8DD8-4C34D14E6387%7D/acta_american_memory[1].pdf

^

^

It's a golden age of scientific discovery, David Goodstein,
distinguished physicist and assistant provost at Caltech, home
of so many Nobel Prize winners, was telling me in Pasadena,
California. "Week by week we learn things that are astonishing
and exciting. But the profession of science, which is quite different
from the discovery of science, is going through a very long,
extended, and difficult period. We haven't figured out how to
rearrange that. Something's gone awry with the country, too.
We've allowed this to happen. They are symptoms of the fact
that having won the Cold War and being left without any of the
traditional problems, we don't know what to do with ourselves
now. We're trying to figure out what our national goal is."

Then Goodstein expressed a theme that applies perfectly to the
promise - and problems - of Technotimes. "This is the era of Pax
Americana," he said. "We have it all in our lap. We can do anything
we want, but we're not doing it."

Those were private remarks, made on the West Coast at the
end of the Nineties. About the same time, on the East Coast,
another national leader in science and technology made similar
remarks in a public address.

The setting for them was Capitol Hill; the occasion, the National
Summit on High Technology and the testimony of the president
of MIT, Charles M. Vest, the only university representative
to appear. Vest came to Washington to deliver an urgent message
and a blunt warning - to the senators gathered to hear him.

In words that sounded eerily like those that Vannevar Bush
addressed to Truman so long ago, MIT's president reminded the
senators that America's future prosperity rests upon developing
new knowledge and then educating and training people to apply
that knowledge practically and use it for further innovation. "The
knowledge driving today's industries," he said, "has been accumulated
during the last forty years of federal and industrial support of
long-term research." Economists generally agree, he told them,
"that more than half of our economic growth since World War II
is due to technological innovation, largely through federally sponsored
research in our universities."

Then he got to the heart of his message: Are we doing the
right things to generate the knowledge that will drive future economic
success? he asked, then quickly answered his own question.
"No. We are reducing our investments. We are going in the wrong
direction. "

For more than a decade, he said, federal expenditure for research
and development had been decreasing by about 2.6 percent
per year. More troubling, between 1993 and 1997, peak years
of the boom, funding for basic and applied research dropped
precipitously, falling 12 percent as a share of the nation's gross
economic product.

The MIT president was scathing in describing other national
failings. The nation's public education system from kindergarten
through twelfth grade was "a disgrace." American eighth-grade
students ranked behind fifteen other countries in having access to
computers in their homes. The nation was failing to attract sufficient
numbers of bright young men and women into science, engineering,
and mathematics.* A joint study by Harvard and MIT showed the
United States falling behind other countries in producing
technological innovation. While the United States still ranked near
the top, "the gap with other nations is becoming increasingly small"
and within six years America's position will likely "drop below several
other countries."

Nor was the steady reduction in federal support for research
the only problem. At the same time, major U.S. corporations were
also cutting back "very substantially on fundamental long-term research.
Why? Because it is not clear that the benefits of such research
will likely accrue directly to the performing company."

In other words, they would not generate immediate profits.

None of this bodes well for future American innovation, Vest
warned. As America enters the new millennium, it may be "living
off historical assets that are not being renewed."

The strong message he hoped to deliver was: "What is missing
is a sense of urgency."

If Vest succeeded in conveying that sense of urgency to the
senators, it was not passed on to the public. Not a line about his
testimony appeared in next morning's New York Times or
Washington Post.

But why should that be surprising? During the boom, Americans
and their media had many other diversions to claim their
attention.

*He could have made his case even stronger by citing other findings, such as
that U.S. students rank eighteenth worldwide in math and physics. In a major
international study comparing the knowledge of high school seniors in math
and science in twenty-one countries, only two nations ranked lower than the
United States - Cyprus and South Africa. In 1998, U.S. colleges and universities
awarded only 12,500 bachelor of science degrees in electrical engineering-
less than half those awarded a decade before. Congress contributed
greatly to the severe shortage of U.S. physicists by cutting the budget for
basic research in physics every year since the 1970s and compounded that
situation by accelerating those cuts in the 1990s. This contributed to the sharp
decline in the number of students-cut in half-in graduate programs from
the peaks of the 1960s. Increasingly, those students are foreign-born. Now,
half the entering graduate students are foreign compared to 20 percent in the
1960s.

--Haynes Johnson (1931— )
American journalist; winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize
for National Reporting.
_The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years_ [2001]

^

Veneer of high GPAs masking students'
deficiency in English
August 22, 2006
by Michael Skube

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The Da Vinci Code" was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a 3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher. They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they did read, they've given it up. And it shows — in their writing and even in their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that "impetus" was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either. I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary, and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked me.)

You may be surprised — and dismayed — by some of the words on my list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear to students who had graduated from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.
"Satire," as in a literary form.
"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.
"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College students nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one of the country's better state universities wrote a paper in which she referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's novel."

As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will have a new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it won't be long before one professor whispers to another: Did no one teach these kids basic English? The unhappy truth is that many students are hard-pressed to string together coherent sentences, to tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to distinguish between "then" and "than."

Yet they got A's.

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or write at even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as much to the culture as to the schools, is that kids don't read for pleasure. And because they don't read, they are less able to navigate the language. If words are the coin of their thought, they're working with little more than pocket change.

Say this — but no more — for the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind Act: It at least recognizes the problem. What we're graduating from our high schools isn't college material. Sometimes it isn't even good high school material.

When students with A averages can't write simple English, it shouldn't be surprising that people ask what a high school diploma is really worth. In California this year, hundreds of high school students, many with good grades, faced the prospect of not graduating because they could not pass a state-mandated exit exam. Although a judge overturned the effort, legislators (not always so literate themselves) in other states have also called for exit exams. It's hardly unreasonable to ask that students demonstrate a minimum competency in basic subjects, especially English.

Exit exams have become almost necessary because the GPA is not to be trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable than a high GPA — more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more reflective of familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions specialists disagree and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

I'll take that student any day. I've known such students. They may have been bored in high school but they read widely and without prodding from a parent. And they could have nominated a few favorite writers besides Dan Brown — even if they thoroughly enjoyed "The Da Vinci Code."

I suspect they would have understood the point I tried unsuccessfully to make once when I quoted Joseph Pulitzer to my students. It is journalism's job, he said, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Too obvious, you think? I might have thought so myself — if the words "afflicted" and "afflict" hadn't stumped the whole class.

Mr. Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in Elon, N.C.
He wrote this article for the Washington Post.

^

15 -- Percentage of Americans who say parents are
putting too much pressure on students, according
to the Pew Global Attitudes Project

59 -- Percentage of Japanese who say parents ...

61 -- Percentage of Indians ...

63 -- Percentage of Chinese ...

--"Figuratively Speaking" in
_Las Vegas Business Press_ [11 September 2006]

-

FOR KIDS:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/?survey
EDUCATIONAL GAMES:
http://www.funbrain.com/
THE PRESIDENTS OF THE UNITED STATES:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents/
WEATHER:
http://weathereye.kgan.com/
STORIES:
http://www.the-office.com/bedtime-story/
EUROPEAN GEOGRAPHY:
http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/European_Geography.htm
AMERICAN HISTORY:
http://www.americaslibrary.gov/cgi-bin/page.cgi


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