E.D. Hirsch, Jr., now retired, was until recently Professor of English and of Education and Humanities at the University of Virginia. He is the author of several widely read books on the subjects of cultural literacy and education reform, including Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Houghton Mifflin, 1987), The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking [...]
Browsing Posts in Aims of Education
E.D. Hirsch on Education Reform
September 20, 2011
Steve Jobs’s Greatest Speech
September 18, 2011
Many of you will already know about the eloquent and deeply moving commencement address that Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005. For those of you who may not have encountered this great speech before, we wanted to draw it to your attention. Steve Jobs, we need scarcely say, is the college drop-out who, [...]
Some Thoughts on Grade Inflation
September 6, 2011
A recent article in the Chicago Tribune (here) recounted the difficulty that many seemingly excellent high school students (judging by their GPAs) encounter when they get to college. The upshot of the piece is that grade inflation, especially at lower-performing schools as measured by standardized tests, is leading large numbers of high school graduates from [...]
Thoughts on “Super Teachers”
August 18, 2011
Anyone who has read a newspaper or looked at a television news program in the last few years is well aware that the American public education system is considered to be in crisis. How to describe the crisis, how to understand the reasons for the crisis, and above all what to do about it are [...]
Is Academia Still Relevant?
August 16, 2011
A brief article by journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley appeared recently in the July 20 edition of The Wall Street Journal under the provocative title of “Academia’s Crisis of Irrelevance.” In this delightfully acerbic piece, Ms. Riley basically notes the disconnect between the fact that the financial foundation of most institutions of higher education is undergraduate [...]
Education or Credentialing?
August 15, 2011
In a previous post, we discussed Professor Allen Guelzo’s very interesting article in connection with “The Aims of Evangelical Education.” Here, we would like to highlight a particular issue raised by Professor Guelzo in that article. He points out that the de facto purpose of America’s system of colleges and universities has become that of [...]
The Aims of Evangelical Education
August 15, 2011
We here at TBS are in the business of rating colleges and universities. Rating a thing means determining how well it fulfills its function in relation to other things with a similar function. With respect to higher education, this means that one of the main questions that we must return to again and again is [...]
What to Cut?
August 15, 2011
The hard economic times are forcing governments to slash their budgets both in the U.S. and abroad. Since much of higher education has traditionally been supported by government spending, retrenchment in government subsidies to colleges and universities is inevitable. This raises an interesting and little-discussed question. Should government cutbacks to educational institutions be across the [...]
Trouble in Academia: Some Distinctions
August 13, 2011
Yesterday, we wrote about alleged abuses in the online education industry (see here). It seems only fair, in order to put that article into perspective, and to avoid any appearance of bias against web-based colleges and universities, for us to point out that a spate of abuses has been revealed recently in some brick-and-mortar institutions, [...]
Educational Management Corporation Lawsuit
August 11, 2011
The ship of online education is navigating some high seas these days. Or, to flirt with mixed metaphors, perhaps it would be more accurate to describe the baby of online education as experiencing growing pains, seeing that the long-term future of this important new educational trend is hardly in doubt. Internet colleges and universities are [...]
RSS
