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July 27, 2005
No More John Adams
I finally finished John Adam's biography yesterday and am moving on to a tape series about Hegel. I did not know that one of the reasons Schopenhauer did not like Hegel was that while both were teaching at the University of Berlin Hegel’s classes were more popular.
I also finished No Excuses, which made a very common sense argument that while persuasive is also depressing in a lot of ways. Their basic argument is that for minority students to succeed they need to want to learn and be willing to do the many hours of work required to learn. The same also has to be true of their families and of their teachers and school administrators. But unfortunately as one of teacher quoted in the book said to a hard working colleague “What, are you trying to make us look bad?” I doubt enough students, parents, administrators, and teachers are willing to do the work required to fix the problems of our schools. The top down No Child Left Behind Approach of Bush has apparently helped close the gap at least in reading ability, but this is not the sort of problem that can be solved by massive government intervention. If it could be solved that way, it probably would not exist in the first place because of all the money we have spent on schools the psat forty years. There is an apparent inverse relationship between school spending and student performance in many cases. This may be a problem we have to live with until it solves itself.
Posted by Pete at July 27, 2005 10:50 AM
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