Welcome to the Layland Notes! Click here for my introductory post. You are encouraged to comment by clicking on Comments near the post title.
Millions of people applying to college this fall are grappling with how to write the first sentence of their essay and where to send the first application. Behind these worries, however, is a broader anxiety about not which college to attend, whether to attend at all. Is college worth it, any more?
College Conspiracy
College education is the largest scam in U.S. history! - National Inflation Association
“Although is it a man-made domain, cyberspace is now as relevant a domain for DoD activities as the naturally occurring domains of land, sea, air, and space.” - 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review
But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.
— NYT Opinion - Degrees and Dollars
Salman Khan: Let’s use video to reinvent education
We are more than our jobs, and education is more than a major. Education is more than college, more even than the totality of your formal schooling, from kindergarten through graduate school. By “What are you going to do,” I mean, what kind of life are you going to lead? And by “that,” I mean everything in your training, formal and informal, that has brought you to be sitting here today, and everything you’re going to be doing for the rest of the time that you’re in school.
“There is always an optimal value,” explained the philosopher Gregory Bateson, “beyond which anything is toxic, no matter what: oxygen, sleep, psychotherapy, philosophy.”
The same is true of personality traits. The Stoic philosophers referred to this paradox as “antakolouthia,” or the mutual entailment of the virtues. By this view, no virtue is a virtue by itself. They all include an opposite quality, and overusing a specific strength turns it into a liability.
Confidence untempered by humility, for example, turns into arrogance. Courage without prudence becomes recklessness. Tenacity unmediated by flexibility congeals into rigidity. Honesty in the absence of compassion is cruelty.
http://blogs.hbr.org/schwartz/2010/11/redefining-greatness-its-compl.html
George Leef, Director of Research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, deconstructs several common arguments that propose the need for increasing the number of college graduates in the U.S. Leef argues that the number of people with college degrees currently outweighs the number of jobs that require them, and suggests that graduating more people will only lead to “credential inflation.”
Changing Education Paradigms at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson
Psychologists have repeatedly shown that a single statistical factor—often called “general intelligence”—emergesfrom the correlations among people’s performance on a wide variety of cognitive tasks. But no one has systematically examined whether a similar kind of “collective intelligence” exists for groups of people. In two studies with 699 individuals, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.
