By connecting academics to students' lives, she has managed to get them engaged.

What strikes us about these passages is not their antiquity, but their wisdom. Today, many Americans have lost pride in their government. At a time when universities trumpet their place in the world—and within Facebook—but say little about their place in the Republic, these calls to educate citizens who will sustain the nation have new and vital meaning. It is time to reimagine higher education’s civic mission.

They are positioned not only to foster innovation, which is essential to national prosperity, but also to teach the public responsibilities associated with invention and entrepreneurship.

American democracy depend

“And if the official school licence is once again denied, maybe we’ll have better luck in a couple of years’ time”

The school, which has operated independently without state ratification since the autumn of 2010, applied for the official school licence again last year.      The licence would give the school the right to issue school certificates and receive state aid.      Currently the school perseveres with the help of the EUR 250-300 student fees and voluntary contributions.      In the autumn, 15 year-round pupils started with the school. In addition, there are a certain number of “seasonal students”.

The government can grant private communities or foundations the right to organise basic education, if it can be established that there is a need for it.      The curricula of the school and the finances of the organiser also have to be in order. The granting of the licence is discretionary.

The facts of the case are supported by an extensive electronic record, including text messages and Twitter feeds and a record of the exact moments of computer activity in the dormitory where the events occurred in September 2010.

Mr. Clementi had checked Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed dozens of times after discovering that he had been viewed

In an acknowledgment of the realities of the digital age — and of competition from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus primarily on its online encyclopedias and educational curriculum for schools. The last print version is the 32-volume 2010 edition, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warming and the Human Genome Project.

Since it was started 11 years ago, Wikipedia has moved a long way toward replacing the authority of experts with the wisdom of the crowds. The site is now written and edited by tens of thousands of contributors around the world, and it has been gradually accepted as a largely accurate and comprehensive source, even by many scholars and academics.

The Britannica, the oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag

T.S.U. had been one of the state’s last open-enrollment public universities. Now prospective students must have at least a 2.5 grade point average and either a combined reading and math score of 820 on the SAT or a 17 on the ACT.

“We thought access should be free and open.”

To meet that goal, students in the academic village are pushed to take at least 15 credit hours each semester and are encouraged not to hold jobs. Mr. Rudley said graduation rates are unlikely to rise without applying pressure. “If you just let them do things on their own, they’ll start out with 15 hours and drop down to 12 hours, then drop down to 9 hours,” he said.

used to joke that education was one of the few things people were willing to pay for and not get.

Over three decades, for-profit schools added students at more than six times the rate of traditional colleges and universities. However, that growth also sparked controversy over their marketing techniques to attract students and led recently to tougher regulations. The new rules require for-profit education companies to offer programs that prepare students for “gainful employment” so they can pay down their school loans and reduce their ratio of debt to income. Those changes have slowed new enrollments significantly, so it is unclear whether for-profit schools will continue to outpace more traditional institutions of higher education in the future.

For all institutions — public, non-profit and for-profit — better measurement is essential to increasing graduation rates and success in the workplace. I am in radical agreement with Rosen that data can and should be used to motivate schools to improve, and that greater transparency and accountability will encourage students and government funders to support the institutions that demonstrate the best outcomes.

We are very fortunate to work in a school district which places a high value on the use of educational technologies, so many valuable sites are not blocked including YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, del.icio.us, and other social networking sites. Of course, we have strong filters protecting students from inappropriate material, but generally speaking, we believe that our responsibility as educators in the 21st Century is to teach students how to use the Internet responsibility as opposed to automatically shutting them out of everything which is done in too many schools through the world and across our country.

That learning is important and that education should be fun, interesting and challenging.” Can you talk a little bit about how you as an administrator can foster a climate where “education is fun, interesting and challenging?”

. The power of the Internet! I also have used YouTube and TeacherTube videos in faculty meetings to introduce a topic or reinforce a point, and I try to incorporate an activity that engages teachers with technology such as a digital camera scavenger hunt in the building for our staff.

High-quality education is the result of a system, not just of the work of individual teachers. If you put a high-quality teacher recruit into a dysfunctional school environment, the "system wins every time."