Archive for education
what we’re reading
Newsweek released their 2008 rankings of the best high schools in America. Huntingtown slipped to 568th, 144 positions below last year’s rank of 424th (which was a marked improvement on 2006’s 891st ranking). Jay Mathews explains the methodology behind the rankings here.
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We’re also following the Washington Post’s weeklong series on chidlhood obesity: poor diets and sedentary lifestyles have pushed more than one third of all children into the ranks of the overweight or obese, triple what they had been a generation ago. Elementary school children, the Post writes, are now subject to high blood pressure, cholesterol, and Type 2 diabetes – creating the very real possibility that our generation will live far shorter than our parents. Read the reports on PE classes, school lunches, and a ‘fat school‘ where tuition costs upwards of $6000 per month to help students lose weight.
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And, TechCrunch reports on Facebook’s upcoming changes to profile designs. The company, TechCrunch writes, wishes to make profiles more refined and easier to manage.
both ends of the education spectrum
The New York Times reports that the elite, Ivy-league schools have admitted a fewer percentage of applicants than ever before. Harvard accepted 7.1% of the 27,462 applicants – letting in about 7 students in a 100! This notwithstanding, admissions rates are expected to climb higher in the coming years after hitting all time lows this year – just in time for when I mail out my applications.
The Times also documents 3rd graders’ poor performance on the writing section of a national standardized test. About one-third of America’s eighth-grade students, and about one in four high school seniors, are proficient writers according to the test. Students have lamented the emergence of the SAT writing section, replete with a short essay, and perhaps this explains their chagrin — they are truly woeful writers!
what we’re reading
Time | Carolyn Sayre
The beard brigade
Time reports on the renewed popularity of the beard – that, Huntingtown students knew. What is news is the existence of international facial-hair-growing competitions: Beard Team USA finished first in five out of seventeen competitions last year, including freestyle mustache.
US News & World Report | Eddy Ramirez
Before that diploma, one more requirement
High schools are increasingly requiring their students to complete capstone projects – in the case of Maine, all students are required to complete a college application to graduate. Elsewhere, schools like Denver’s Arrupe Jesuit High School require students to work in a professional setting all four years of high school, working “one day a week in banks, alw firms, veterinarians’ offices, and other businesses.”
“My School’s Endowment is Bigger than Yours…”
The New York Times. Age of Riches: At Elite Prep Schools, College-Size Endowments
My own Philips Academy experience.
Today’s most popular New York Times article reveals the astronomical endowments of prep schools like Philips Academy Andover and Exeter. The schools, mostly concentrated in the northeast, boast endowments in the hundreds of millions and billions, exceeding most national universities.
Having attended Andover for the summer prior to my freshman year (the pictures are from my 1 month stay there), I can attest to the things a large endowment can afford. State of the art theatre, art galleries, and museums are located on the expansive campus swathed by quads and atmosphere more analogous to Harvard than your ordinary high school.
Houses of vacuous ability
An excerpt from Kansas, crossposted from Change Agency-
To venture into the heap of quotations that education has amassed over the years offers little hope for those who think kindly of the accelerating progress of thought and mind. It is by far not a tragedy – the ends sought have remained remarkably constant: to enlighten Plutarch’s “internal dank gloom” of a mind that has neither “dispelled nor dispersed” in the world’s symposium. What is unfortunate is that the means of achieving this enlightenment – schooling, as Mark Twain put it, has managed only to “interfere with my education.” It is the predicament of this gap between education and schooling with which the reformer is faced with today – its forms capable of manifesting only too easily with the advancement of time.
Schooling, where education enables, at its essence manages to best bring out the natural aversion to the disabling dogma of fact without purpose. It is an all too necessary aversion – the essence of innovation is dependent not on contentment with improving within the bounds of one’s current lot, but extending beyond it entirely to further collective progress. Neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins implores us that is an all too natural one as well – the framework of thought and creativity is brought about through the mind’s ability to establish analogies between otherwise unrelated aspects of life.
Shaj Mathew
kahutzler
