University is Good

I get tired, angry, disappointed, and frustrated whenever I hear the tired old saw that a university education is a waste.

It goes like this: Forget science and the liberal arts (especially the liberal arts/humanities). Focus on practical, rather than intellectual, skills, forget knowledge, and train everyone to make and fix things. Take up a trade or become a health-care worker.

This mantra has been around for decades, is nonsense at best, and damaging/untrue at worst. The most recent article"Revalorizing the Trades"  is by Camille Paglia in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A disclaimer is in order here.

I am not disparaging the trades/health fields or those who train and work in them. Trades and health workers are absolutely necessary. In many places, they are or will be in short supply. It's honest, interesting work, exactly what many people want, and the pay is good. But these vocations aren't for everyone, couldn't employ everybody, and would leave gaping holes in many other areas where we need people with a university education.

The argument for trades, especially, is so often based on incorrect assumptions. Paglia's article is no exception; she argues that "jobs, jobs, jobs" should be the primary concern for educators, but that there "is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks" (alternative to the professions, in this case).

First, I would argue that a university education is training for a job, but not directly and narrowly as Paglia and others recommend. The proof is in the pudding; graduates get and keep a range of jobs for which they are uniquely suited. That proof puts the lie to the other assumption -  that a liberal arts education (and university education across the board) doesn't lead to jobs, jobs, jobs.

A university education equals jobs.  It leads to good jobs, portable jobs, interesting jobs, well-paying jobs, prestigious jobs, flexible jobs, famous jobs, creative jobs, secure jobs, necessary jobs - just about any kind of job many people could want - a Google search proves the point. Rice University (among many others)  has a document showing the myths and realities about jobs for liberal arts grads - it includes a list of fields in which grads find work (most are not in the professions).

So what exactly is the problem?

The economy is one reason. University is expensive. Job loss is a huge concern right now.

Also, nurses, electricians, carpenters who train specifically for their jobs and then find them are fairly easy to track. Politicians and administrators can point to their successes much more easily, and the concept is simpler to grasp: electrical training = electrical-field job. Easy.

People with university degrees are much harder to track in the job market, and their career paths don't translate easily to flip-chart simplicity. History major =President of the United States (Kennedy).

It's harder to track the psychology major who, ten years later, has become a tv hockey producer, or the religious studies major who is now the director of business and policy for a major tv network. The liberal arts major who works for the defence department, is CEO of a huge company, an astronaut, policy manual writer for the UN, international coordinator for a major annual charity event.

If every interesting, important, and lucrative job had a direct educational path and an accrediting body, life would be simpler. Train for job X; get job X. But it doesn't always work that way.

Plus, a university education is a value-added endeavour. Graduates are more than trained employees. Graduates form the educated citizenry that allows democracy to flourish, keeps zealots in check, and the arts, science, law, medicine flourishing. They are trained to analyze, criticize, theorize, and question.

University graduates are not only employable, they are necessary to the efficient and progressive functioning of society. The biggest expense would be not to have enough of them.

Raise a Reader

Tiddlywinks requires skill and teaches hand/eye coordination. Stamp collecting teaches history, geography, and classification skills, among other things. Both can be replaced by other hobbies with equal claims for offering the same knowledge and a similar skill set.

Reading is in its own category and can't so easily be replaced. Reading (writing, too) is intricately involved with critical thinking, communication, language skills, concentration, and knowledge acquisition. There isn't anything else that functions cognitively the same way that reading does.

Reading isn't replacable!

But reading - the long, slow, digesting, thinking, analyzing kind - is becoming increasingly unpopular, with more and more people admitting that a quick skim of almost anything printed is all they are able to manage. 

Many of the books that adults do read are written at a grade level for younger teens. Many newspapers in recent years have lowered the level of difficulty of the writing to try and cater to readers' diminishing skills.

Patrick Kingsley, in his article "The Art of Slow Reading" in The Guardian (Jul 15/10), writes about the problem, citing many experts who argue that the internet is responsible (and some who argue otherwise).The problem with the internet:

because...we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other.

Mark Bauerlein in The Dumbest Generation makes much the same point. He argues that while students (especially) are intelligent and can multi-task, while they have the whole world of information at their fingertips, they don't have either the background knowledge or the cognitive skills to make the connections that lead to real knowledge and real ability to negotiate with the world in many ways. What's missing? Reading ability.

A student once complained to me that the literature we were studying was too difficult and that he didn't like it! While I won't tell you exactly what I thought at the time,  I did wonder what purpose it would serve to have those as two criteria for a university literature course. Unfortunately, ease and fun are becoming two of the most important criteria. The result is exactly what Bauerlein predicts - the dumbest generation.

Bauerlein paraphrases Ronald Reagan - who said that freedom can be lost in a generation - saying that knowledge can be lost in a generation. Sometimes I wonder if it will take that long.

Tiddlywinks may be more fun and easier than reading, but what will kids do if they have to read the instructions?

The Answer in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article ("The freedom to say 'no'") - May 2008 - writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that a couple of years ago in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we had no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.

Electronic Clutter and the Mental Desktop

As a graduate student and beginning teacher of writing, I had the good fortune to work with Janet Giltrow, author of Academic Writing: Writing and Reading in the Disciplines. I have used her sound advice and techniques for many years now.

From Giltrow's book, I can picture the simple line drawings of someone at a desk - the mental "desktop" - dealing calmly and competently with a few desktop papers, and someone with little beads of sweat flying from the forehead, trying to deal with too much desktop clutter.

The desktop metaphor and simple visuals existed to help students learn to write with readers' limitations in mind - writers help readers manage clutter. Solid research shows that humans' processing abilities while reading require that help.

I was reminded of the drawings and their message while reading "Dividing Attention," by David Glenn in The Chronicle of Higher Education (1/31/10). The article addresses the growing problem of electronic distractions in classrooms, attitudes about multi-tasking "abilities," and scientific research on the issues.

Educators are rightly worried about students' attention in classes, as the students text, surf, and chat, while trying to learn the course material. Individual institutions and instructors deal with such distractions, successfully or otherwise, in a variety of ways, depending on their beliefs about "hyperattention" and the ability to multi-task - from outright bans on electronic gadgets to complete accommodation.

I have heard much nonsense about the generation of young people who have grown up "digital," much about their supposed super abilities and hyperattention - how they are so much better at working with all the digital bits on their mental desktops than their elders could possibly imagine.

Turns out that is just plain wrong!

The human brain hasn't changed in a generation. While people now work with many cognitive inputs at once - driving, texting, drinking coffee; and surfing, texting, listening to a lecture - they aren't processing any of it as well as when they focused on fewer things. 

The subjective feeling that one is accomplishing great things, being efficient and productive, acording to Glenn, incorrectly shores up the belief that one can do it all well.  I can't count the number of people I've met who insist that they can perfectly well text and drive (which is apparently worse for causing accidents than drinking and driving to a degree).

Brain research says otherwise.

After a certain point, we aren't processing at all, let alone efficiently. But in spite of conclusive and repeated scientific evidence, there will be those who will continue to think we should "get with the program" and respect the new processing powers of the young.  To too many in education, anecdotal evidence and the strength of their beliefs dictate practice.

There is probably no one solution to the problem. But doing nothing and believing the myths about super abilities accommodates our students right out of an education. And it does a great disservice to society.

We need ways to free our students' mental desktops from too much digital clutter and help them to regain focus on their studies. And we need to do it soon.


(cluttered desk photo credit)

The Answer is in the Question

Elaine McArdle in her Boston Globe article (May 2008) writes about research in economics and the social sciences which shows that smart and highly educated (in math and science) women choose jobs other than those in IT, physics, and engineering. They self-select jobs in which they deal more with organic substances and language, and less with tools and inorganic substances.

These data apparently surprise researchers who sought the reasons for such choices in physiology, education, or at the door or glass ceiling of the workplace. But they found that it’s not about brains, aptitude, ability, or out-and-out barriers; it’s mostly about choice, they say. Women choose freely.

Yet, McArdle reports that researchers don’t know why women choose as they do. They don’t know how experience and socialization work in shaping women and their choices.

But doesn’t the answer about selecting jobs lie exactly there, in the answer to the question of how culture shapes women and their choices from infancy?

We have a willful and collective blindness, in certain quarters at least, about the role of ideology in shaping people’s choices, especially when it has to do with the role and place of women in our society.

We are not so blind when it comes to subcultures, though. It’s interesting that last year in Texas, with the FLDS cult, we seem to have no such trouble understanding how constant exposure to certain ideas from infancy shapes women’s beliefs and makes them accept behavior that is harmful to themselves and to their children.

I am frankly pessimistic that researchers will even look to see the results of exposure to beliefs about what it means to be a woman in a dominant culture. If they did, they might have to admit that women actually have less choice than they “find” in the research McArdle reports.

Researchers will continue to look everywhere but where the truth lies. The real answer to the Freudian question about what women want is that it’s only a rhetorical question.

Elaine McArdle is a writer in Cambridge, Mass. She has co-authored a book with Dr. Carolyn Bernstein called The Migraine Brain.



I would like to invite Elaine McArdle to my soiree.

Mirror, Mirror on the Educator's Wall

Another Sane Voice Rises in Protest Against the Damaging and Absurd Practices of Progressive Educationalists.

It should be a headline in every newspaper in North America.

At the risk of boring my readers with yet another rant against bad pedagogy, I want to praise and promote the views of Sandra Stotsky, who refutes the self-serving blather that assaults students in classrooms every day.

In her article "Who Needs Mathmeticians for Math, Anyway?" in City Journal (Autumn 2009), Stotsky decisively rebuts the ridiculous practices and ideas about teaching math that have dominated for the last twenty or more years (and unfortunately continue to do so!).

American kids in eighth grade scored miserably in "the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which claims to assess application of the mathematical knowledge and skills needed in adult life through problem-solving test items."

For its future, America needs scientists, technologists, and engineers. Schools have to prepare students with the knowledge of mathematics that enables them to tackle the education required for these jobs.

But the...worthy aims won’t be reached so long as assessment experts, technology salesmen, and math educators—the professors, usually with education degrees, who teach prospective teachers of math from K–12—dominate the development of the content of school curricula and determine the pedagogy used, into which they’ve brought theories lacking any evidence of success and that emphasize political and social ends, not mastery of mathematics.

Progressive education has been around doing its dirty work since the seventies, trying to undo traditional curriculum and practices.

During the 1970s and 1980s, educators in reading, English, and history argued that the traditional curriculum needed to be more “engaging” and “relevant” to an increasingly alienated and unmotivated—or so it was claimed—student body. Some influential educators sought to dismiss the traditional curriculum altogether, viewing it as a white, Christian, heterosexual-male product that unjustly valorized rational, abstract, and categorical thinking over the associative, experience-based, and emotion-laden thinking supposedly more congenial to females and certain minorities.

Traditional math curriculum was in the gunsights as well, but was more difficult to dismiss "because of the sequential nature of its content through the grades and its relationship to high school chemistry and physics."

But "the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the chief professional organization for mathematics educators and education faculty" has found ways to make math more accessible by dumbing it down and allowing students to "construct" their own "deep conceptual understanding:"

The primary role of math teachers, constructivists say in turn, shouldn’t be to explain or otherwise try to “transfer” their mathematical knowledge to students; that would be ineffective. Instead, they must help the students construct their own understanding of mathematics and find their own math solutions.

To achieve these goals, classroom practices and curriculum with no evidence to support their effectiveness became the norm for about twenty years. In an attempt to undo this disgraceful state of affairs,

"the president [of the United States] issued an executive order in 2006 forming the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, ...composed of mathematicians, cognitive psychologists, mathematics educators, and education researchers ...[who] would examine how best to prepare students ...based on the “best evidence available...The panel found little if any credible evidence supporting the teaching philosophy and practices that math educators have promoted in their ed-school courses and embedded in textbooks for almost two decades."

The NCTM fought back,  one educator stating that

"the panel’s report offered nothing useful, since it had “restricted” itself to scientific research and ignored the “rich reflections” of educators, who, in his judgment, had produced the “deepest work in the field.”

HUH?

According to Stotsky,

These reflections, which progressive educators call “qualitative” or “practitioner” research, generally consist of educators studying their own classrooms and concluding that, yes, their methods work well.

The traditionally trained mathematicians and the others on their panel had taken too quantitive and narrowly scientific an approach; more qualitative solutions would be best, according tho the NCTM.  Or read differently, emotion should trump reason in American schools!

The movement to reform mathematics education still struggles:

even if a new Congress or Secretary of Education were to support the panel’s recommendations, it will be essentially business as usual in the public schools so long as math educators, joined by assessment experts and technology salesmen, continue to shape the curriculum.

The educationalists might do well to think through the qualitative, mirror-mirror-on-the-wall approach to teaching math (or anything else, for that matter!). When the old queen asked her mirror who was the fairest one of all, the mirror made a qualitative judgement that the new kid on the block was fairer by far.

Math education reform is the Snow White - the fairest one of all - on a tired old scene. Let's not let the self-serving educationalists put it to sleep.

Sandra Stotsky is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and holds the 21st Century Chair in Teacher Quality. She is the author of What's at Stake in the K-12 Standards Wars: A Primer for Educational Policy.

I would like to invite Sandra Stotsky to my soiree.

Unlearning Bad Pedagogy

There's no way to be diplomatic. Faculties of Education are the soft underbelly of the academe; their ideas and practices are outmoded; the hard sciences have disproven their theories; many of the faculty are old-fashioned and cling to what clearly does not work.

In Sol Stern's article E.D.Hirsch's Curriculum for Democracy in City Journal (Autumn 2009), he outlines Hirsch's work in education, work that disproves and seriously undermines the outdated ideas and practices of progressive educationalists.

E.D. Hirsch, beginning with his book Cultural Literacy, has worked for over twenty years, trying to get educators to see the light and listen to the facts:

More powerfully than any previous critic, Hirsch showed how destructive these instructional approaches were. The idea that schools could starve children of factual knowledge, yet somehow encourage them to be “critical thinkers” and teach them to “learn how to learn,” defied common sense. But Hirsch also summoned irrefutable evidence from the hard sciences to eviscerate progressive-ed doctrines. Hirsch had spent the better part of the decade since Cultural Literacy mastering the findings of neurobiology, cognitive psychology, and psycholinguistics on which teaching methods best promote student learning. The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.

So "the sage on the stage" - a practice that has been successful for hundreds of years - is  the best bet for students. And students' test scores in Massachusetts, where they follow this practice, have significantly improved beyond what all other states in the US have accomplished:

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards. And those standards, Massachusetts reformers have acknowledged, are Hirsch’s legacy.

We should be saying good-bye to outcomes, skills-based training, "guide on the side," and other dangerous educational practices. Stern sees a glimmer of hope for the American K-12 system.

Unfortunately, the nonsense has found its way into post-secondary education, probably because it serves corporate agendas and the agendas of those who see education as just another commodity.

We can learn how to learn until we drop, but we must eventually learn facts - especially the fact that outdated, disproven progressive educational methods just don't work!

Sol Stern is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.He is the suthor of Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice.






I would like to invite E.D.Hirsch Jr. and Sol Stern to my soiree.

Soiree's Past Week

At My Soiree - October 12 - 16/09

Enjoy the celebrities, elephants, and tomatoes from the week's posts!
 

October 12/09 - Elephants at a Soiree
October 13/09 - Autumn Ode to Tomatoes
October 14/09 - The Long and Winding Path
October 15/09 - Educating Millennials for Fun and Profit
October 16/09 - On Celebrities and Soirees

Educating Millennials for Fun and Profit

Are they the generation of dumb narcissists or the rising, altruistic change-makers? Opinion seems divided, yet the split is hardly even.

Eric Hoover, in his article "The Millennial Muddle" in The Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 2009), ponders the wealth of information, circulating since the 90s, about the millennial generation, particularly about the millennials as students.

One of the most influential books on the subject is Millennials Rising: The Next Generation by Neil Howe and William Strauss. According to Hoover, in their view millennials are "rule followers, who were engaged, optimistic, and downright pleasant." They will build new institutions with smiles and team spirit.

This rosy picture is the engine that drives marketing, consulting services, and, unfortunately, pedagogy and policies in contemporary colleges and universities. The millennials are consumers.

Selling this rosy picture and explaining what millennials want is good business. The problem is that it just doesn't fit with what professors and social scientists find in their research and sitting in front of them in class. Howe and the late Strauss "were not social scientists," neither were they in those classrooms.

Hoover devotes much of his article to Mark Bauerlein, Jean M. Twenge, and Fred A. Bonner II, professors and researchers who see quite a different picture. Interesting, also, that their primary focus is education, not business.

Bauerlein finds that the millennials are dangerously ignorant and illiterate. His book The Dumbest Generation outlines his research and experience.

   Generation Me, by Jean M. Twenge, a psychology professor who has studied generational differences, is about the rise in narcissim and entitlement she found in the millennials - the "everyone gets a trophy" generation.

Fred A. Bonner II approaches the issue of diversity in the millennial generation. The students he writes about in his forthcoming book Diverse Millennials in College don't match the upper middle-class white kids that Howe and Strauss based their work on.

 It is foolish nonsense to think that the youngest and least knowledgeable about what (and how) they need to learn should dictate. It is criminal for the adults who know better to allow it in order to turn a profit.

Approaching millennials as consumers of education denies them their right to a genuine education.

L'Art of Economics

In Karen Horn's article "The Serendipity of Genius" in Standpoint, she discusses the circumstances and situations of economists who became Nobel laureates.

The article is based on Horn's recent book Roads to Wisdom: Conversations with Ten Nobel Laureates in Economics (2009).

Horn sees several common influences on the intellect, choices, and future theoretical pursuits of fledgling economists: "they were attracted by its questions," but only identified the field as a choice when they "saw it in class;" family background; worldviews; events; the serendipity of the muse; and individual character.

The final influence strikes me especially - the value of a university/liberal arts education. Vernon Smith (Nobel prize for Economics 2002)

was fascinated to discover at college that the topics that had been debated at the dinner table were actually "things you could study, that it needn't be only a matter of opinion. You could actually base your opinions on analysis, on investigation, on some kind of understanding about how society and how the economy work."

The growing trend to de-value the humanities and a liberal arts education has and will have far-reaching negative consequences. In all areas of human endeavour, we need the understanding that comes from knowing about humanity, its traditions, and its history. Similarly, Horn sees the need for economics:

Economics must also again be understood as an encompassing social science, deeply ploughing the rich common ground with philosophy, sociology, politics and history.

Skills training just won't cut it!

I would like to invite Karen Horn to my soiree.

Challenging Subjects

 In her article "Formative Years: Not Boys in Dresses" in Intelligent Life magazine, Tracey Camilleri  writes about her teen school years at Bryanston school in England from 1976 - 1978.

She was one of the first girls to go completely through what had been a boys-only school, and she speaks fondly about the experience that she felt was inclusive and not about teaching  the girls as  "boys in dresses:"

For example, our English teacher’s passion was Jane Austen, so there was no sense that we were following a male canon, or of the attitude that you teach to the boys and the girls will look after themselves.

One lasting value of Bryanston for Camilleri is that it helped her form an independent identity because the girls were both challenged and valued.

I am fascinated by what holds women back from being ambitious for themselves and speaking up in the moment and making themselves heard. At school in the classroom, shy as I was and not that I made a great splash, I didn’t feel constrained, I felt enabled. We were known as individuals, we had a good tutorial system, we were given the opportunity and expected to speak and were valued. I think we felt equal to the boys. The challenge for girls, especially if they are in a minority at school, is how to remain the subjects of their own lives and not the objects of others’. I think we remained subjects, we were able to be ourselves.

North American public schools have generally always been co-ed, but could learn much about creating a strong sense of identity for their students of both genders. 

Since the 70s, there has been more of a focus on students' self-esteem than there has been on their achievements - a failure because achievement is the best route to self-esteem and cannot be separated from it.

The challenge for students is largely missing, and we instill a false sense of self-esteem that is detached from real achievement and deteriorites into self-absorption and an overweening sense of entitlement. We could well use the methods of a 1970s-style Bryanston.

Camilleri's education has stood her in good stead; she is an associate fellow at the Said Business School, Oxford.

I would like to invite Tracey Camilleri to my soiree.

Transmitting Education

 I first encountered  Frank Furedi's writing and ideas in his article "Flat-pack degrees" in The Guardian, April 2008  (see my post in Dixi). In this article, Furedi explains why students should be able to learn about selling furniture, just not at university.

For some time now, the government has sought to reorient the work of universities towards supplying the skills demanded by business and commerce.

This is happening here in British Columbia,Canada, and I greatly appreciate a clear articulation of the arguments against the practice:

Vocational courses have always had an honourable place in higher education. However, recent plans are not confined to the provision of high-quality vocational education, they are about accrediting employment training. The likely outcome will be to blur the distinction between education and training, and to lose sight of the purpose of what a university does

.
After reading a second article "Specialist pleading" in The Australian about the overreach of experts into the realm of moral authority, I decided to further explore Furedi's  work.

 In his forthcoming book (October 2009) Wasted: Why Education Isn't Educating, Furedi discusses that purpose of the university and education( as opposed to training) that he addresses in the Guardian article:  Education 

regards the transmission of cultural and intellectual achievements of humanity to children as its defining mission.

As an educator, I find comfort in the sane and rational defense of the purpose of education.

Frank Furedi is a sociologist at the University of Kent.

I would like to invite Frank Furedi to my soiree.

Pop(ping) Cultural Studies' Balloon

Michael Berube, in his article "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the history and effectiveness of cultural studies, mostly in the United States.

He takes on the role of devil's advocate, questioning the past successes and failures of cultural studies - and the possibilities and prognosis for the future.

Berube also discusses the misunderstanding of what cultural studies is and the frequent practice of "'doing'" cultural studies by critiquing pop culture:

The result is that cultural studies now means everything and nothing; it has effectively been conflated with "cultural criticism" in general, and associated with a cheery "Pop culture is fun! " approach. Anybody writing about The Bachelor or American Idol is generally understood to be "doing" cultural studies, especially by his or her colleagues elsewhere in the university. In a recent interview, Stuart Hall, a former director of the Birmingham Centre and still the most influential figure in cultural studies, gave a weary response to this development, one that speaks for itself: "I really cannot read another cultural-studies analysis of Madonna or The Sopranos."

Too many in English departments (the department most influenced by cultural studies, according to Berube) have abandoned more conventional pursuits in favor of studies of pop culture divorced from a literary context.

A thesis on TV depictions of King Arthur with historical comparison to slightly older movies, but with no knowledge of or reference to Tennyson or Mallory, galls me for its ignorance and arrogance (and worries me for the future of human knowledge).

Berube is hopeful for the future of cultural studies, believing it can improve from its present state and practice:

...cultural studies can do a better job of complicating the political-economy model in media theory, a better job of complicating our accounts of neoliberalism, and a better job of convincing people inside and outside the university that cultural studies' understanding of hegemony is a form of understanding with great explanatory power—that is to say, a form of understanding that actually works.

Let's hope he's right and, in English departments at least, we see less superficial "study" of tattoos and TV.

Two of Berube's books are Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities.

I would like to invite Michael Berube to my soiree.

Why Jerry Coyne is Right

Jerry Coyne's most recent book is Why Evolution is True.

Coyne is an evolutionary biologist and professor at the University of Chicago. Along with other scientists -notably Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker - Coyne takes on those who either deny the validity of scientific method or insist that science and revelation are just two equal, but different ways of viewing the world.

Coyne argues powerfully in his blog, and elsewhere, against the claim that religion and science are compatible in any other than a superficial way: "First of all, nobody doubts that science and religion are compatible in the trivial sense that someone can be a scientist and be religious at the same time. That only shows one’s ability to hold two dissimilar approaches to the world simultaneously in one’s own mind."

Recently in the LATimes, Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum argue for what they call the accommodationists - scientists who allow that religion and science may be compatible in more than the superficial way Coyne describes, and they see no need for a "holy war" on religion. According to the pair, the accommodationist way will be more successful in convincing more Americans that science, in general, and evolution, in particular, are reasonable.

I find the LATimes article misleading in a couple of places.

For instance, Mooney and Kirshenbaum use a quote from the National Academy of Sciences which basically says that some religious denominations accept evolutionary biology and that some more fundamentalist denominations believe more literally in the bible. They use the quote to support their claim that the National Academy of Sciences has "the stance that science and religion can be perfectly compatible."

I don't know whether that is true or not, but I do know that the quote used to support this claim simply doesn't. All it says is that some religious denominations find science and religion compatible (and that some don't).

Further on, Mooney and Kirshenbaum claim that the Faith Project of the National Center for Science Education "seeks to spread awareness that between creationism on the one hand and the new atheism on the other lie many more moderate positions." To me, this strongly implies that the Center promotes moderate positions between creationism ( the concept) and evolution (the new atheists' position). I don't think they suggest that at all.

Peter Hess (NCSE Faith Project Director) actually wrote: "...the dichotomous view represented by creationists and antireligious atheists leaves out a large range of more moderate views." Hess writes about the range of views, not about moderate positions between two competing ideas. Quite different.

While Mooney and Kirshenbaum's project is well intended, the slippery arguments make me suspicious. One hopes it's just sloppy writing. But considering their view about science and good communication in their recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, the less than precise language and arguments are unfortunate.

I agree that we don't need a holy war against religion, just some rigorous secular reasoning, like that provided by Jerry Coyne.

I would like to invite Jerry Coyne to my soiree.