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 […]
Steve Jobs’s Greatest Speech
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
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”
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?
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 […]
