Education

As I read about the evolution of online college courses, and the debate about its efficacy, I'm drawn to recall my experiences as a young, 16-year-old college freshman. 

It was in the dark ages, 1950-54, a time when veterans on the GI Bill flowed into college classrooms. While we kids caroused and "found" ourselves in our new social setting, away from home for the first time, there was a stark difference between us and them. 

They were older, more serious, many already married and living in married student quarters. They were focused and dead serious in classes. They were there to be educated and get on with their lives. We were there to grow up and find ourselves.

The youth unemployment rate for newly minted college graduates in the 20- to 24-year-old age bracket is at an all-time high of 60.6 percent, according to the latest figures from the U.S. Department of Labor.

This raises the question of whether students can find meaningful employment after graduation with the degrees they currently have.

I have nothing against Chicago or Gates. I'm glad to see a Democrat "wake up and smell the failure" of public schools. For too long, Democrats have been the facilitators of teachers unions, to the detriment of children. The unions are doing their job: protecting the economic interests of their collective constituency, i.e., they favor the more senior teachers as they pay the most in union dues, and they favor a flat/time-serving rewards system over differentiation of performance and linkage of pay. Great. That's what they're “supposed” to do. However, Democrats have systematically privileged those interests above those of the taxpayers (ask the bankrupt municipalities in California) and children (ask the inner-city black and Hispanic kids in underperforming schools and their parents, who have no choices and no rights). 

The federal government should stay out of elementary and secondary education.

Education is best decided by students and their parents. Students should have a choice of schools. Parents and students are best able to determine what works best for them, not bureaucrats sitting in their Washington, D.C. ivory tower.

Why does the politically correct environment do their best to stifle free speech when it's not their own?

Could it be that the ultra-left have a most difficult time defending their positions with logic? Therefore, before placing themselves in that awkward position of challenging well-thought-out points of view, they attempt to demonize or outright dismiss opposing points of view.

In a recent controversy that arose over the commencement speaker (Johns Hopkins Hospital Director of  Pediatric Neurosurgery, Dr. Ben Carson) at Emory University in Atlanta, biology professors attempted to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the choice of an individual who was a creationist and went so far as to accuse the individual of saying that evolutionists were unethical. They came to this conclusion because the speaker feels that is very easy to explain the source of morality if one believes in biblical principles.

Political leaders, both black and white, have not been content merely to eliminate the obstacles to black success. They have sought to engineer their future — and just below all of that engineering lies the assumption that black people cannot handle this future without the help of government. It is this condescending "compassion" and enervating assistance, much more than overt hostility, that has sucked the marrow of black communities in America.

Through the curriculum of self-esteem we have made a policy of pretending that any accomplishment, no matter how trivial, is worthy of praise. In doing so we have undermined the value of real success. That same curriculum pretends that failure does not exist except in the most extreme cases.

Like Ilsa and Rick in “Casablanca,” the English Department will always have Paris, even when the rest of the world has moved on. Said here, it is fairly astonishing that committees of businessmen like the committee for the Eisenhower memorial will go every time for the Frank Gehry design: images of things blowing up, sinking and falling down.

But for the rest of us, history turned on that blissful and heroic moment in “Casablanca” when Victor Laszio walked into Rick’s Café Americain — in center of the world in 1943 — faced the darkness head on and demanded that the band play the Marseillaise.

With the economy on a shaky road to recovery, it has become clear that the Great Recession triggered a fundamental change in the way Americans are forced to operate in the globalized economy. Everyone is feeling the strains. The archetype of the “company man” is fast going extinct, schools and other public services are facing record budget cuts, our infrastructure is antiquated and deteriorating every day, and access to global labor markets has created a flat line in wage increases for the poorest Americans.
 
But it’s not all gloom and doom. America has long been the global destination for the planet’s most daring and innovative minds, and globalization has only fueled our ability to tap into the global intellectual fountain. Think of the recent slump as growing pains. With the sheer amount of change in the last generation, it is inevitable that there will need to be an adjustment period where we as a nation reinvent how we operate our economy and start to implement long-term solutions that will ensure a 21st century of unimaginable progress for all Americans.

President Madison once opined that if you educate a man without teaching him morals, you create a menace to society.

With education you give people the tools to have tremendous effects on their environment. If that power is not tempered by morality, the changes that are wrought are not likely to be beneficial.

The Hill’s A.B. Stoddard sits down with John Feehery and Peter Fenn to discuss the fate of the payroll tax cut and the 2012 election.