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two disconcerting articles crossed my computer screen, both highlighting the increasingly sorry state of higher education, though from very different perspectives. The first is “Ed Dante’s” (actually a pseudonym) piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled The Shadow Scholar. The second is Gregory Petsko’s A Faustian Bargain, published of all places in Genome Biology.

There is much to be learned by educators in the Shadow Scholar piece, except the moral that “Dante” would like us to take from it. The anonymous author writes:“Pointing the finger at me is too easy. Why does my business thrive? Why do so many students prefer to cheat rather than do their own work? Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.

The point is that plagiarism and cheating happen for a variety of reasons, one of which is the existence of people like Mr. Dante and his company, who set up a business that is clearly unethical and should be illegal. So, pointing fingers at him and his ilk is perfectly reasonable. Yes, there obviously is a “market” for cheating in higher education, and there are complex reasons for it, but he is in a position similar to that of the drug dealer who insists that he is simply providing the commodity to satisfy society’s demand. Much too easy of a way out, and one that doesn’t fly in the case of drug dealers, and shouldn’t fly in the case of ghost cheaters.

from the earliest years, education should be based primarily on exploration, understanding in depth, and the development of logical, critical thinking. Such an emphasis, she says, not only produces a citizenry capable of recognizing and rooting out political jingoism and intolerance. It also produces people capable of questioning authority and perceived wisdom in ways that enhance innovation and economic competitiveness. Nussbaum warns against a narrow educational focus on technical competence.

a successful, long-term democracy depends on a citizenry with certain qualities that can be fostered by education.

The first is the capacity we associate in the Western tradition with Socrates, but it certainly appears in all traditions -- that is, the ability to think critically about proposals that are brought your way, to analyze an argument, to distinguish a good argument from a bad argument. And just in general, to lead what Socrates called “the examined life.” Now that’s, of course, important because we know that people are very prone to go along with authority, with fashion, with peer pressure. And this kind of critical enlivened citizenry is the only thing that can keep democracy vital.

the incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies into Primary Education brought with it positive changes in the role of the teacher and the student. Teachers and students stopped being mere transmitters and receptors, respectively. The first became mediators of information and the second opted for learning through investigating, discovering and presenting ideas to classmates and teachers. In this way they have, at the same time, the opportunity of getting to know the work of other students, too. Thus, the use of Internet and ICTs reinforce participation and collaboration in the school. According to Dr Altuna, it also helps to boost learning models that are more constructivist, socio-constructivist and even connectivist.

Despite its educational possibilities the researcher warns that there are numerous factors that limit the incorporation of Internet into the teaching of the curricular subject in question. These involve aspects such as the time dedicated weekly, technological and computer facilities, accessibility and connection to Internet, the school curriculum and, above all, the knowledge, training and involvement of the teaching staff.

the thesis observed a tendency to delegate responsibility for ICT in the school to those teachers who were considered to be “computer experts”. Dr Altuna warns of the risks that this practice runs, as thereby the rest of the staff continues to be untrained and unable to apply ICT and Internet in activities undertaken within their curricular subject. It has to be stressed, therefore, that all should be responsible for the educational measures to be taken so that students acquire digital skills. Also observed was the need for a pedagogic approach to ICT which advises the teaching staff on knowledge about and putting into practice activities in educational innovation.

In the United States, nearly a half century of research, application of new technologies and development of new methods and policies has failed to translate into improved reading abilities for the nation’s children1.

the reasons why progress has been so uneven point to three simple rules for anticipating when more research and development (R&D) could help to yield rapid social progress. In a world of limited resources, the trick is distinguishing problems amenable to technological fixes from those that are not. Our rules provide guidance\ in making this distinction . . .

unlike vaccines, the textbooks and software used in education do not embody the essence of what needs to be done. That is, they don’t provide the basic ‘go’ of teaching and learning. That depends on the skills of teachers and on the attributes of classrooms and students. Most importantly, the effectiveness of a vaccine is largely independent of who gives or receives it, and of the setting in which it is given.

it’s odd that a narrative of crisis, of a systemic failure, in American education is currently so persuasive. This back-to-school season, we have Davis Guggenheim’s documentary about the charter-school movement, “Waiting for ‘Superman’ ”; two short, dyspeptic books about colleges and universities, “Higher Education?,” by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, and “Crisis on Campus,” by Mark C. Taylor; and a lot of positive attention to the school-reform movement in the national press. From any of these sources, it would be difficult to reach the conclusion that, over all, the American education system works quite well.

In higher education, the reform story isn’t so fully baked yet, but its main elements are emerging. The system is vast: hundreds of small liberal-arts colleges; a new and highly leveraged for-profit sector that offers degrees online; community colleges; state universities whose budgets are being cut because of the recession; and the big-name private universities, which get the most attention. You wouldn’t design a system this way—it’s filled with overlaps and competitive excess. Much of it strives toward an ideal that took shape in nineteenth-century Germany: the university as a small, élite center of pure scholarly research. Research is the rationale for low teaching loads, publication requirements, tenure, tight-knit academic disciplines, and other practices that take it on the chin from Taylor, Hacker, and Dreifus for being of little benefit to students or society.

Yet for a system that—according to Taylor, especially—is deeply in crisis, American higher education is not doing badly. The lines of people wanting to get into institutions that the authors say are just waiting to cheat them by overcharging and underteaching grow ever longer and more international, and the people waiting in those lines don’t seem deterred by price increases, even in a terrible recession.

One set of polls, conducted by the University of New Hampshire, focused on a set of rural areas, including Alaska, the Gulf Coast, and Appalachia. These probably don't reflect the US as a whole, but the pollsters had about 9,500 respondents. The second, published in the The Sociological Quarterly, took advantage of a decade's worth of Earth Day polls conducted by Gallup.

Both surveys asked similar questions, however, including whether climate change has occurred and whether humans were likely to be the primary cause. The scientific community, including all the major scientific organizations that have issued statements on the matter, has said yes to both of these questions, and the authors interpret their findings in light of that.

The UNH poll shows that a strong majority—in the 80-90 percent range—accepts that climate change is happening. The Gallup polls explicitly asked about global warming and got lower percentages, although it still found that a majority of the US thinks the climate is changing. Those who label themselves conservatives, however, are notably less likely to even accept that basic point; less than half of them do, while the majority of liberals and independents do.

On paper, Singaporean education is great. Our universities are in the Top 200 in the Times Higher Education list. We win Olympiads all the time. When it comes to knowing a basic inventory of facts, Singaporean education is just about the best you can get. And that is a fact.

So what’s missing?

Singapore is a true melting pot. In the past, as is today, and as will be tomorrow, many cultures came together into one. It has been lauded as one of Singapore’s big selling points – an eclectic fusion of Orient and Occident, a quaint East-meets-West mixture which happens to work. But have we taken this metaphor and looked at it from another perspective? Many cultures came together under the band of meritocracy – may the best rule, and may they rule with wisdom. And since they are the best, they are paid the best money one can get too. This is the fire which managed to melt, or should i say meld East and West into a functioning whole. And since we are such fans of meritocracy, society has been geared in that direction too. This melting pot which is Singapore has had certain repercussions, which the post I have linked to above shows. It seems that in developing the concept of meritocracy, what “The Best” is was artificially defined. And in artificially defining something, you create an artificial standard to compare everything against. In doing so, everything else becomes irrelevant. It creates a strong tendency towards conformity, which is the negative result of the melting pot. The individual loses his/her uniqueness and becomes part of this stew of uniformity. In school, you are told to study hard, you are told what you have to study, without any care as to what you actually think.

Letter sent by by my good friend Samuel C. Wee to ST on the 8th of March, quoting statistics from their Page One infographic: (Read this closely!) I read with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (“School system still ‘best way to move up’”; Monday). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that only 90% of children from one-to-three-room flats do not make it to university. I firmly agree with our Education Minister Dr Ng Eng Hen, who declared that “education remains the great social leveller in Singaporean society”. His statement is backed up with the statistic that 50% of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic ladder score in the bottom third of the Primary School Leaving Examination. In recent years, there has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was greatly reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s great faith in our “unique, meritocratic Singapore system”, which ensures that good, able students from the middle-and-high income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students. I would like to commend Ms Rachel Chang on her outstanding article. On behalf of the financially disadvantaged students of Singapore, I thank the fine journalists of the Straits Times for their tireless work in bringing to Singaporeans accurate and objective reporting.

What was actually published last Friday, March 18th 2011 A reassuring experience of meritocratic system I READ with keen interest the news that social mobility in Singapore’s education system is still alive and well (‘School system still ‘best way to move up”; March 8). It is indeed heartwarming to learn that almost 50 per cent of children from one- to three-room flats make it to university and polytechnics. I firmly agree with Education Minister Ng Eng Hen, who said that education remains the great social leveller in Singapore society. His statement is backed by the statistic that about 50 per cent of children from the bottom third of the socio-economic bracket score within the top two-thirds of their Primary School Leaving Examination cohort. There has been much debate about elitism and the impact that a family’s financial background has on a child’s educational prospects. Therefore, it was reassuring to read about Dr Ng’s own experience of the ‘unique, meritocratic Singapore system’: he grew up in a three-room flat with five other siblings, and his medical studies at the National University of Singapore were heavily subsidised; later, he trained as a cancer surgeon in the United States using a government scholarship. The system also ensures that good, able students from the middle- and high-income groups are not circumscribed or restricted in any way in the name of helping financially disadvantaged students.

To give me the byline would be an outrageous flattery and a gross injustice to the forum editors of ST, who took the liberty of taking my observations about the statistics and subtly replacing them with more politically correct (but significantly and essentially different) statistics.

MIDDLE SCHOOL students are champion time-wasters. And the personal computer may be the ultimate time-wasting appliance.

there is an automatic inclination to think of the machine in its most idealized form, as the Great Equalizer. In developing countries, computers are outfitted with grand educational hopes, like those that animate the One Laptop Per Child initiative, which was examined in this space in April.

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

What do educators in Singapore and China do? By their own internal accounts, they do a great deal of rote learning and "teaching to the test." Even if our sole goal was to produce students who would contribute maximally to national economic growth — the primary, avowed goal of education in Singapore and China — we should reject their strategies, just as they themselves have rejected them.

both nations have conducted major educational reforms, concluding that a successful economy requires nourishing analytical abilities, active problem-solving, and the imagination required for innovation.

Observers of current practices in both Singapore and China conclude that the reforms have not really been implemented. Teacher pay is still linked to test scores, and thus the incentive structure to effectuate real change is lacking. In general, it's a lot easier to move toward rote learning than to move away from it

Of course, not everything in the mainstream media is always true. Mistakes are made. News organizations have political biases, sometimes reflecting the views and interests of their owners. But high-quality journalism has always relied on its reputation for probity. Editors, as well as reporters, at least tried to get the facts right. That is why people read Le Monde, The New York Times, or, indeed, the Washington Post. Filtering nonsense was one of their duties – and their main selling point.

It is unlikely that Rick Santorum, or many of his followers, have read any post-modern theorists. Santorum, after all, recently called Obama a “snob” for claiming that all Americans should be entitled to a college education. So he must surely loath writers who represent everything that the Tea Party and other radical right-wingers abhor: the highly educated, intellectual, urban, secular, and not always white. These writers are the left-wing elite, at least in academia.

But, as so often happens, ideas have a way of migrating in unexpected ways. The blogger who dismissed The Washington Post’s corrections of Santorum’s fictional portrayal of the Netherlands expressed himself like a perfect post-modernist. The most faithful followers of obscure leftist thinkers in Paris, New York, or Berkeley are the most reactionary elements in the American heartland. Of course, if this were pointed out to them, they would no doubt dismiss it as elitist propaganda.

Over 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees (over 8,000 of them have doctoral or professional degrees), along with over 80,000 bartenders, and over 18,000 parking lot attendants. All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.

Charles Murray’s thesis that an increasing number of people attending college do not have the cognitive abilities or other attributes usually necessary for success at higher levels of learning. As more and more try to attend colleges, either college degrees will be watered down (something already happening I suspect) or drop-out rates will rise.

interesting new study was posted on the Web site of America’s most prestigious economic-research organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three highly regarded economists (one of whom has won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science) have produced “Estimating Marginal Returns to Education,” Working Paper 16474 of the NBER. After very sophisticated and elaborate analysis, the authors conclude “In general, marginal and average returns to college are not the same.” (p. 28)

There is a great divide in business schools, one that few outsiders are aware of. It is the divide between research and teaching. There is little relation between them. What is being taught in management books and classrooms is usually not based on rigorous research and vice-versa; the research published in prestigious academic journals seldom finds its way into the MBA classroom.

none of this research is really intended to be used in the classroom, or to be communicated to managers in some other form, it is not suited to serve that purpose. The goal is publication in a prestigious academic journal, but that does not make it useful or even offer a guarantee that the research findings provide much insight into the workings of business reality.

is not a new problem. In 1994, Don Hambrick, then the president of the Academy of Management, said: “We read each others’ papers in our journals and write our own papers so that we may, in turn, have an audience . . . an incestuous, closed loop”. Management research is not required to be relevant. Consequently much of it is not.

The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education.

Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.

The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. Hacker is a longtime contributor to The New York Review of Books and the author of the acclaimed study “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal,”

a very natural way for atheists to react to religious claims: to ask for evidence, and reject these claims in the absence of it. Many of the several hundred comments that followed two earlier Stone posts “Philosophy and Faith” and “On Dawkins’s Atheism: A Response,” both by Gary Gutting, took this stance. Certainly this is the way that today’s “new atheists”  tend to approach religion. According to their view, religions — by this they mean basically Christianity, Judaism and Islam and I will follow them in this — are largely in the business of making claims about the universe that are a bit like scientific hypotheses. In other words, they are claims — like the claim that God created the world — that are supported by evidence, that are proved by arguments and tested against our experience of the world. And against the evidence, these hypotheses do not seem to fare well.

But is this the right way to think about religion? Here I want to suggest that it is not, and to try and locate what seem to me some significant differences between science and religion

To begin with, scientific explanation is a very specific and technical kind of knowledge. It requires patience, pedantry, a narrowing of focus and (in the case of the most profound scientific theories) considerable mathematical knowledge and ability. No-one can understand quantum theory — by any account, the most successful physical theory there has ever been — unless they grasp the underlying mathematics. Anyone who says otherwise is fooling themselves.

There are more universities operating in other countries, recruiting students from overseas, setting up partnerships, providing online degrees and teaching in other languages than ever before. Capturing the moment: South Korea has turned itself into a global player in higher education Chinese students are taking degrees taught in English in Finnish universities; the Sorbonne is awarding French degrees in Abu Dhabi; US universities are opening in China and South Korean universities are switching teaching to English so they can compete with everyone else. It's like one of those board games where all the players are trying to move on to everyone else's squares. It's not simply a case of western universities looking for new markets. Many countries in the Middle East and Asia are deliberately seeking overseas universities, as a way of fast-forwarding a research base.

"There's a world view that universities, and the most talented people in universities, will operate beyond sovereignty. "Much like in the renaissance in Europe, when the talent class and the creative class travelled among the great idea capitals, so in the 21st century, the people who carry the ideas that will shape the future will travel among the capitals.

"But instead of old European names it will be names like Shanghai and Abu Dhabi and London and New York. Those universities will be populated by those high-talent people." New York University, one of the biggest private universities in the US, has campuses in New York and Abu Dhabi, with plans for another in Shanghai. It also has a further 16 academic centres around the world. Mr Sexton sets out a different kind of map of the world, in which universities, with bases in several cities, become the hubs for the economies of the future, "magnetising talent" and providing the ideas and energy to drive economic innovation.