Posts Tagged ‘education’
Peter Thiel owes some of his billions to being one of the first investors in Facebook. This insanely profitable hook-up with Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg must have turned him on to the potential of the bright and disgruntled. In May, 2011, Thiel doled out a cool $2.4M to 24 kids so they can ditch higher [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility Today’s bulletin from the department of the obvious: a poll shows that “only 55% [of young people from households where neither parent works] are prepared to pay fees of £5,000, and just 35% would pay £7,000.” The proposed tuition hike is nothing in the social realm of Cameron, et al — they [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility ‘Girls Prevail in New York City Programs for Gifted’ trumpets a recent New York Times headline. The feature highlights a gender imbalance in education, reporting: “Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergartners… is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008-9 year, 55 percent were girls.” The article further notes that [...]
Posted by Irresponsibility “Higher education is becoming feminised,” a dinner companion said last week. A professor of sociology, he was discussing the preponderance of women students in his courses and his remark was, presumably, meant as a neutral statement of fact. But to at least two of the women at the table it didn’t sound [...]
People who think kids should allowed to rot in (presumably blissful) semi-literate ignorance are far more dangerous than word-pushers. Their faux-egalitarianism actually reinforces existing social hierarchies because, like it or not, language equals power.
Posted by Irresponsibility Nice to see fascism alive and well in Iowa, where Storm Lake High School school is persecuting an American-born student of Laotian descent, who happens to have a 3.9GPA and $86K worth of college scholarships, for refusing to lie down beneath the jackboots. Lori Phanachone is a member of the National Honor [...]
Ms Bell’s argument that English itself is to blame for children’s failure to properly master it is infuriating mostly because it wilfully dispenses with common sense. However, my sense of outrage at her spurious conclusions runs deeper. It’s personal. My passion for written English is probably even less fashionable than my puritanical irritation at the [...]
I had to double check both date (not 1 April) and website (the Observer, lord help us, not The Onion) before suspending my incredulity at the headline: “English is too hard to read for children.” This is according to former teacher and would-be-linguistic-avenger Masha Bell who contends an “absolutely, unspeakably awful spelling system” is the [...]
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