Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Maggie Fergusson, May 23rd 2012  read more »

~ Posted by Samantha Weinberg, February 16th 2012  read more »

"Are you excited about what we're going to do today?" a teacher brightly asks her elementary school class. "Yes," the class replies in unison.

The subject of "Waiting for 'Superman'", a new film by Davis Guggenheim (who won an Oscar for "An Inconvenient Truth"), is essentially those children—and how long it will take for America's public school system to extinguish their excitement for learning. The statistics are grim: education spending in America has increased to $9,000 per student today, versus $4,300 in 1971 (adjusted for inflation), yet math and reading scores in the country have both flatlined. America ranks a pitiful 25th in math and 21st in science among 30 developed countries, and the average rate of student proficiency in most states is between 20% and 30%.

To offset (yet entrench) the dreary effect of such facts, "Waiting for 'Superman'" (also mentioned in this week's Economist) is structured around five children of different ages and circumstances. What the youngsters have in common is an eagerness to learn that has yet to be dampened by overcrowded schools, poor teachers and administrative inattention. The film puts their stories in context by interviewing a handful of charismatic proponents of education reform, including Michelle Rhee, a controversial chancellor of the public school system in Washington, DC, and Geoffrey Canada, a visionary whose organisation, the Harlem Children’s Zone, has seen remarkable success in getting kids to strive for a college education.  read more »

Over here at More Intelligent Life, we've long been fascinated with the work Wendy Kopp has done with Teach For America (TFA), an organisation that convinces bright young college graduates to work as teachers in some of America's toughest classrooms. Some critics complain that the programme often scares away potential career teachers by throwing them into the deep end of the education pool—often with limited help and resources. But Kopp convincingly argues that TFA is not only meant to inject excited young teachers into struggling schools, but also to provide an opportunity for these often privileged and wide-eyed young adults to confront a public-school world that many have been spared. In this way, TFA also functions as an ongoing advocacy campaign, one that educates thousands of future leaders of the serious problems of America's schools every year. 

Our sage colleagues over at Democracy in America cornered Kopp and had her answer a few questions. We've cherry-picked some of our favourites, but the full interview can be seen here. Relatedly, anyone who hasn't yet read "Building a Better Teacher", an excellent story by Elizabeth Green that appeared in the New York Times Magazine last month, is sorely missing out.  read more »

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, a humanities professor has been on a crusade to reveal the many ways that graduate school is a bad idea. There are too few academic jobs for the training to be anything other than a crap-shoot. This is a problem, particularly because the hurdles to becoming a professor in America include slaving away for years on a PhD and submitting yourself to the low-wage exploitation of adjunct teaching.

Louis Menand addresses this in his new book, "The Marketplace of Ideas" (reviewed by The Economist here). He notes that whereas you can become a lawyer in three years and a medical doctor in four, the median time to a doctoral degree in the humanities is nine years. And then good luck finding a job.

Given all the bad news, I was initially heartened to see that the Chronicle has published a response to the original story, called "Neither a Trap Nor a Lie". Surely James Mulholland, an English professor at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, would offer evidence that secondary degrees in history and English aren't a fool's errand. Surely he would suggest that the economics of academia isn't so dire.  read more »

In a recent blog post, James McGirk wondered whether it was possible to rank writing programmes. What metric would we use? He considered the controversy over Seth Abramson's ranking of the top-50 post-graduate writing programmes for 2010 (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of Poets & Writers magazine), and came away suspecting that Abramson was perhaps "a better poet than statistician". Seth Abramson took issue with quite a few aspects of McGirk's post. Here is his response in full (which spam barriers prevented him from filing as a comment; where were those filters for all those folks trying to sell cheap Ugg boots?): James, Just to correct some things you wrote: U.S. News & World Report last gathered data on graduate creative writing programs in 1995 (and last published original findings in 1997); the sole data-point used by U.S. News for its ranking was a one-question "faculty survey" on the question of national reputation (not an independent assessment of "national reputation" and *also* a "faculty survey," as you wrote); the 1997 U.S.  read more »