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ways of working are critical in mathematical work and when they are taught and valued, many more students contribute, leading to higher achievement

mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists. 

harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass.

online platform explaining research evidence on ability and the brain and on good mathematics teaching, for teachers and parents. The course had a transformative effect. It was taken by 40,000 people, and 95 percent said they would change their teaching or parenting as a result.

does not simply test a mathematical definition, as the first does. It requires that students visualize a triangle, use transformational geometry, consider whether different cases satisfy the mathematical definition, and then justify their thinking.

There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.

The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them.

American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development

The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant

gives more time for depth and exploration than the curricula it has replaced by removing some of the redundant methods students will never need or use.

He contends in “Coming Apart” that there was far greater social cohesion across class lines 50 years ago because “the powerful norms of social and economic behavior in 1960 swept virtually everyone into their embrace,” adding in a Jan. 21 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal thatOver the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.According to Murray, higher education has now become a proxy for higher IQ, as elite colleges become sorting mechanisms for finding, training and introducing to each other the most intellectually gifted young people. Fifty years into the education revolution, members of this elite are likely to be themselves the offspring of cognitively gifted parents, and to ultimately bear cognitively gifted children.

“Industriousness: The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men are supposed to work. In practice, though, that norm has eroded everywhere.”

Murray makes the case that cognitive ability is worth ever more in modern advanced, technologically complex hypercompetitive market economies. As an example, Murray quotes Bill Gates: “Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war or we won’t have a future.”

Murray alleges that those with higher IQs now exhibit personal and social behavioral choices in areas like marriage, industriousness, honesty and religiosity that allow them to enjoy secure and privileged lives. Whites in the lower social-economic strata are less cognitively able – in Murray’s view – and thus less well-equipped to resist the lure of the sexual revolution and doctrines of self-actualization so they succumb to higher rates of family dissolution, non-marital births, worklessness and criminality. This interaction between IQ and behavioral choice, in Murray’s framework, is what has led to the widening income and cultural gap.

Despised by the left, Murray has arguably done liberals a service by requiring them to deal with those whose values may seem alien, to examine the unintended consequences of their policies and to grapple with the political impact of assertions made by the right. He has also amassed substantial evidence to bolster his claims and at the same time elicited a formidable academic counter-attack.

To Murray, the overarching problem is that liberal elites, while themselves living lives of probity, have refused to proselytize for the bourgeois virtues to which they subscribe, thus leaving their less discerning fellow-citizens to flounder in the anti-bourgeois legacy of the counter-cultural 1960s.

“Great Civic Awakening” among the new upper class – an awakening that will lead to the kind of “moral rearmament” and paternalism characteristic of anti-poverty drives in the 19th century. To achieve this, Murray believes, the “new upper class must once again fall in love with what makes America different.”

The cognitive elites Murray cites are deeply committed to liberal norms of cultural tolerance and permissiveness. The antipathy to the moralism of the religious right has, in fact, been a major force driving these upscale, secular voters into the Democratic party.

changes in the world economy may be destructive in terms of the old social model, but they are profoundly liberating and benign in and of themselves. The family farm wasn’t dying because capitalism had failed or a Malthusian crisis was driving the world to starvation. The family farm died of abundance; it died of the rapidly rising productivity that meant that fewer and fewer people had to work to produce the food on which humanity depended.Mead continues:Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.The 21st century, Mead adds,must reinvent the American Dream. It must recast our economic, social, familial, educational and political systems for new challenges and new opportunities. Some hallowed practices and institutions will have to go under the bus. But in the end, the changes will make us richer, more free and more secure than we are now.Mead’s predictions may or may not prove prescient, but it his thinking, more than Murray’s, that reflects the underlying optimism that has sustained the United States for more than two centuries — a refusal to believe that anything about human nature is essentially “intractable.” Mead’s way of looking at things is not only more inviting than Murray’s, it is also more on target.

Is it really possible to improve grade school and high school teaching to the level I’m suggesting? Yes, provided we employ the same sort of selection criteria for pre-college teachers as we do for other professionals such as doctors, lawyers and college professors. In contrast to other professions, teaching is not now the domain of the most successful students — quite the contrary. I’ve known many very bright students who had an initial interest in such teaching but soon realized that there is no comparison in terms of salary, prestige and working conditions.

Given this transformation in pre-college education, we could expect it to provide basic job-training for most students. At that point, we would still face a fundamental choice regarding higher education. We could see it as a highly restricted enterprise, educating only professionals who require advanced specialized skills. Correspondingly, only such professionals would have access to higher education as a locus of intellectual culture.

On the other hand, we could — as I would urge — see college as the entrée to intellectual culture for everyone who is capable of and interested in working at that level of intellectual engagement

Raising high school to the level I am proposing and opening college to everyone who will profit from it would be an expensive enterprise. We would need significant government support to ensure that all students receive an education commensurate with their abilities and aspirations, regardless of family resources. But the intellectual culture of our citizens should be a primary part of our national well-being, not just the predilection of an eccentric elite. As such, it should be among our highest priorities.

They view learning as the process of delivering learning objects for the individual consumption of students, and they have great faith that this delivery process can be optimized by algorithms and data mining. It is incredibly important for them that we have quantifiable outcomes of learning (standardized tests), since they can only optimize on quantitative metrics.

the biggest players in the Open movement generally believe that learning is a process of algorthmically delivering learning objects to consumers, and they frequently use "supply and demand" models to conceptualize their efforts

The difference between Open and Market is that Open folks believe that learning objects are not commodities to be bought and sold, but the public infrastructure of our culture

They'd like learning objects and the algorithms distributing those objects to be openly licensed and free for teachers to reuse, remix, and re-publish.

The "Dewey" people reject the notion of learning as "delivery" and the free market as the best platform for learning.

Dewey is a complex figure, but when most people invoke him, they mean that learning occurs through people's experiences and not through content delivery

Learning occurs when teachers and students work together to create or make something with meaning to to people in the real world

They tend to believe that the nuanced, contextual, social experiences that lead to the best learning experiences are easiest to facilitate when the curriculum is not overly prescriptive.

“Educational investment will not be attractive to those without unique skills,” she said. Graduates, she noted, need to earn a return on their investment in training: “But instead they will lose jobs, replaced by information simulation. They will stay uneducated.” In such a scenario, high-salary jobs would remain for those equipped with problem-solving skills, she predicted. But many common tasks now done by college graduates might vanish.

Over the next 10 to 20 years, “10 percent to 20 percent pushed out of work by A.I. will be a catastrophe,” she says. “I can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean — way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if A.I. performs well in the future.”

A recent study published by the Program on the Impacts of Future Technology, at Oxford University’s Oxford Martin School, predicted that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be replaced by computers over the next two decades.

Smart machines will give companies “the opportunity to automate many tasks, redesign jobs, and do things never before possible even with the best human work forces,” according to a report this year by the business consulting firm McKinsey.

Advances in speech recognition, translation and pattern recognition threaten employment in the service sectors — call centers, marketing and sales — precisely the sectors that provide most jobs in developed economies.

Gartner’s 2013 chief executive survey, published in April, found that 60 percent of executives surveyed dismissed as “‘futurist fantasy” the possibility that smart machines could displace many white-collar employees within 15 years.

Kenneth Brant, research director at Gartner, told a conference in October: “Job destruction will happen at a faster pace, with machine-driven job elimination overwhelming the market’s ability to create valuable new ones.”

Optimists say this could lead to the ultimate elimination of work — an “Athens without the slaves” — and a possible boom for less vocational-style education. Mr. Brant’s hope is that such disruption might lead to a system where individuals are paid a citizen stipend and be free for education and self-realization. “This optimistic scenario I call Homo Ludens, or ‘Man, the Player,’ because maybe we will not be the smartest thing on the planet after all,” he said. “Maybe our destiny is to create the smartest thing on the planet and use it to follow a course of self-actualization.”

"Plans to scrap the requirement for academy sponsors to consult with school communities, including parents, could result in a faith based education being imposed on parents and young people against their wishes.

"Given England's religiously diverse population – around half of which self-identify as non-religious, any increase in the proportion of religiously designated or faith ethos schools is likely to impede parents' ability to secure an education that doesn't run counter to their beliefs.

"Forcing a religious ethos on young people through their education would in many cases disrespect their parents' wishes and be at odds with principles of fairness and equality.

the academisation of local authority controlled schools would increase the risk of faith-based organisations gaining greater control over school curriculums, admissions arrangements and employment practices – leading to even greater discrimination in our education system than already exists.

Jewish educators often shy away from teaching subjects that they deem too political, arguing that politics do not belong in the classroom. They believe that their role is solely to teach about Israel and to impress upon young Jews that Israel is core to their Jewish identities. Yet educators have a responsibility to teach not only about the vision or dream of Israel but also the reality of Israel — and it’s impossible to do this without political discussions.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to Jewish life. It’s as important to Jewish identity as prayer and the weekly Torah portion. While American Jews can certainly live rich Jewish lives without ever thinking about Israel, it’s the epicenter of Jewish politics. Involving middle- and high-school students in the debates around the conflict allows them to grapple with Jewish history, explore the many variations of Zionism and understand religious and political differences within the Jewish community.

In an effort to counter the Common Core push for detextualized skill-based instruction and assessment that has further marginalized social studies education, the NCSS is promoting what it calls “College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework,”

through its choice of partners, its rigid adherence to Common Core lesson guidelines, and the sample material it is promoting, the NCSS has virtually abandoned not just meaningful social studies education, but education for democracy and citizenship as well.

My biggest problem with the C3 Framework as presented in this new document on instruction is its attempt to adopt a fundamentally flawed Common Core approach to social studies and history based on the close reading of text without exploring historical context

how Common Core as it is being implemented will mean the end of history.

In the C3 Framework inquiry approach, students start in Dimension 1 by “developing questions and planning inquiries,” however the inquiry is really already “planned” because material they use is pre-selected. It is also not clear what their questions will be based on since they do not necessarily have any background on the subject. In Dimension 3 students evaluate sources using evidence, but again, devoid of historical context. Dimension 4 is supposed to be C3’s chief addition to Common Core. In Dimension 4 students are supposed to plan activities and become involved in civic life, although of course their options have again already been pre-prescribed.

In Dimension 2, as they read the text, which sixth graders and many eighth graders will find difficult, students discuss “How was citizenship revolutionary in 1776?” The question requires them to assume that colonists had already formulated a concept of citizenship, which I do not believe they had, a concept of nation, which they definitely did not, and an understanding that somehow what they were doing was “revolutionary,” which was still being debated.

Some of the organizations involved in writing the C3 Frameworks have positions so politically skewed to the right that NCSS should be embarrassed about including them in the project. In this category I include Gilder Lehrman, The Bill of Rights Institute, and The Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship (CEEE).

Conspicuously missing from the group of contributors is the Zinn Education Project which would have provided a radically different point of view.

What we have in the C3 Framework is standard teaching at best but a lot of poor teaching and propaganda as well.

Instead of challenging Common Core, the NCSS begs to be included. Instead of presenting multiple perspectives, it sells advertising in the form of lessons to its corporate and foundation sponsors. But worst in their own terms, in a time of mass protest against police brutality by high school and college students across the United States, active citizenship in a democratic society is stripped of meaning and becomes little more than idle discussion and telling student to vote when they are eighteen.

But the narrative is insufficient. The real problem with the modern meritocracy can be found in the ideology of meritocracy itself. Meritocracy is a system built on the maximization of individual talent, and that system unwittingly encourages several ruinous beliefs:

Exaggerated faith in intelligence.

Many of the great failures of the last 50 years, from Vietnam to Watergate to the financial crisis, were caused by extremely intelligent people who didn’t care about the civic consequences of their actions.

Misplaced faith in autonomy

The meritocracy is based on the metaphor that life is a journey. On graduation days, members for the educated class give their young Dr. Seuss’ “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” which shows a main character, “you,” who goes on a solitary, unencumbered journey through life toward success. If you build a society upon this metaphor you will wind up with a society high in narcissism and low in social connection

Life is not really an individual journey. Life is more like settling a sequence of villages. You help build a community at home, at work, in your town and then you go off and settle more villages.

Instead of seeing the self as the seat of the soul, the meritocracy sees the self as a vessel of human capital, a series of talents to be cultivated and accomplishments to be celebrated.

Misplaced notion of the self

If you base a society on a conception of self that is about achievement, not character, you will wind up with a society that is demoralized; that puts little emphasis on the sorts of moral systems that create harmony within people, harmony between people and harmony between people and their ultimate purpose.

Inability to think institutionally.

Previous elites poured themselves into institutions and were pretty good at maintaining existing institutions, like the U.S. Congress, and building new ones, like the postwar global order.

The current generation sees institutions as things they pass through on the way to individual success. Some institutions, like Congress and the political parties, have decayed to the point of uselessness, while others, like corporations, lose their generational consciousness

Misplaced idolization of diversity

But diversity is a midpoint, not an endpoint. Just as a mind has to be opened so that it can close on something, an organization has to be diverse so that different perspectives can serve some end.

Diversity for its own sake, without a common telos, is infinitely centrifugal, and leads to social fragmentation.

The essential point is this: Those dimwitted, stuck up blue bloods in the old establishment had something we meritocrats lack — a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community and nation and that the essence of the admirable life is community before self.

The meritocracy is here to stay, thank goodness, but we probably need a new ethos to reconfigure it — to redefine how people are seen, how applicants are selected, how social roles are understood and how we narrate a common national purpose

This failing in the West’s economies is also a failing of economics

many people have long felt the desire to do something with their lives besides consuming goods and having leisure. They desire to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop.

Our prevailing political economy is blind to the very concept of inclusion; it does not map out any remedy for the deficiency

injustice of another sort. Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder

“Money is like blood. You need it to live but it isn’t the point of life.”4

justice is not everything that people need from their economy. They need an economy that is good as well as just. And for some decades, the Western economies have fallen short of any conception of a “good economy”—an economy offering a “good life,” or a life of “richness,” as some humanists call it

The good life as it is popularly conceived typically involves acquiring mastery in one’s work, thus gaining for oneself better terms—or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial—an experience we may call “prospering.”

As humanists and philosophers have conceived it, the good life involves using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world—an experience I call “flourishing.”

prospering and flourishing became prevalent in the nineteenth century when, in Europe and America, economies emerged with the dynamism to generate their own innovation.

What is the mechanism of the slowdown in productivity

prospering

In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period.

What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up.

High-enough wages, low-enough unemployment, and wide-enough access to engaging work are necessary for a “good-enough” economy—though far from sufficient. The material possibilities of the economy must be adequate for the nonmaterial possibilities to be widespread—the satisfactions of prospering and of flourishing through adventurous, creative, and even imaginative work.

today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.”

ince around 1970, or earlier in some cases, most of the continental Western European economies have come to resemble more completely the mechanical model of standard economics. Most companies are highly efficient. Households, apart from the very low-paid or unemployed, have gone on saving

In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent

The bleak levels of both unemployment and job satisfaction in Europe are testimony to its dreary economies.

a recent survey of household attitudes found that, in “happiness,” the median scores in Spain (54), France (51), Italy (48), and Greece (37) are all below those in the upper half of the nations labeled “emerging”—Mexico (79), Venezuela (74), Brazil (73), Argentina (66), Vietnam (64), Colombia (64), China (59), Indonesia (58), Chile (58), and Malaysia (56)

The US economy is not much better. Two economists, Stanley Fischer and Assar Lindbeck, wrote of a “Great Productivity Slowdown,” which they saw as beginning in the late 1960s.11 The slowdown in the growth of capital and labor combined—what is called “total factor productivity”—is star

though the injustices in the West’s economies are egregious, they ought not to be seen as a major cause of the productivity slowdowns and globalization. (For one thing, a slowdown of productivity started in the US in the mid-1960s and the sharp loss of manufacturing jobs to poorer countries occurred much later—from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.) Deeper causes must be at work.

The plausible explanation of the syndrome in America—the productivity slowdown and the decline of job satisfaction, among other things—is a critical loss of indigenous innovation in the established industries like traditional manufacturing and services that was not nearly offset by the innovation that flowered in a few new industries

hat then caused this narrowing of innovation? No single explanation is persuasive. Yet two classes of explanations have the ring of truth. One points to suppression of innovation by vested interests

some professions, such as those in education and medicine, have instituted regulation and licensing to curb experimentation and change, thus dampening innovation

established corporations—their owners and stakeholders—and entire industries, using their lobbyists, have obtained regulations and patents that make it harder for new firms to gain entry into the market and to compete with incumbents.

The second explanation points to a new repression of potential innovators by families and schools. As the corporatist values of control, solidarity, and protection are invoked to prohibit innovation, traditional values of conservatism and materialism are often invoked to inhibit a young person from undertaking an innovation.

ow might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency.

Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.

a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand

The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations

This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.

Washington, D.C., and 39 states – including California, Iowa and South Carolina – have a civics class requirement. These same places also have lower percentages of youth volunteer rates – 22.7%

But I was dismayed to find that states without such a requirement had higher rates of volunteerism among younger people – an average of 24.4% – than among those states with a community service mandate – 21.3%.

States with lower levels of youth volunteering, youth voting and youth civics test scores are also more likely to have QAnon sympathizers active in politics, or politicians who oppose criticism of QAnon.

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer.

The class eased into the vow of silence, first restricting speech to 100 words a day. Other rules began on Day 1: no jewelry or makeup in class. Men and women sat separately and wore different “habits”: white shirts for the men, women in black. (Nonbinary and transgender students sat with the gender of their choice.)

Dr. McDaniel discouraged them from sharing personal information; they should get to know one another only through ideas. “He gave us new names, based on our birth time and day, using a Thai birth chart,”

“We were practicing living a monastic life. We had to wake up at 5 a.m. and journal every 30 minutes.”

If you tried to cruise to a C, you missed the point: “I realized the only way for me to get the most out of this class was to experience it all,” she said. (She got Dr. McDaniel’s permission to break her vow of silence in order to talk to patients during her clinical rotation.)

Dr. McDaniel also teaches a course called Existential Despair. Students meet once a week from 5 p.m. to midnight in a building with comfy couches, turn over their phones and curl up to read an assigned novel (cover to cover) in one sitting — books like James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room” and José Saramago’s “Blindness.” Then they stay up late discussing it.

The course is not about hope, overcoming things, heroic stories,” Dr. McDaniel said. Many of the books “start sad. In the middle they’re sad. They stay sad. I’m not concerned with their 20-year-old self. I’m worried about them at my age, dealing with breast cancer, their dad dying, their child being an addict, a career that never worked out — so when they’re dealing with the bigger things in life, they know they’re not alone.”

Both courses have long wait lists. Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience —

Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance.

Yet the most visible higher ed trends are moving in the other direction

Rather than ban phones and laptops from class, some professors are brainstorming ways to embrace students’ tech addictions with class Facebook and Instagram accounts, audience response apps — and perhaps even including the friends and relatives whom students text during class as virtual participants in class discussion.

Then there’s that other unwelcome classroom visitor: artificial intelligence.

stop worrying and love the bot by designing assignments that “help students develop their prompting skills” or “use ChatGPT to generate a first draft,” according to a tip sheet produced by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington University in St. Louis.

It’s not at all clear that we want a future dominated by A.I.’s amoral, Cheez Whiz version of human thought

It is abundantly clear that texting, tagging and chatbotting are making students miserable right now.

One recent national survey found that 60 percent of American college students reported the symptoms of at least one mental health problem and that 15 percent said they were considering suicide

A recent meta-analysis of 36 studies of college students’ mental health found a significant correlation between longer screen time and higher risk of anxiety and depression

And while social media can sometimes help suffering students connect with peers, research on teenagers and college students suggests that overall, the support of a virtual community cannot compensate for the vortex of gossip, bullying and Instagram posturing that is bound to rot any normal person’s self-esteem.

We need an intervention: maybe not a vow of silence but a bold move to put the screens, the pinging notifications and creepy humanoid A.I. chatbots in their proper place

it does mean selectively returning to the university’s roots in the monastic schools of medieval Europe and rekindling the old-fashioned quest for meaning.

Colleges should offer a radically low-tech first-year program for students who want to apply: a secular monastery within the modern university, with a curated set of courses that ban glowing rectangles of any kind from the classroom

Students could opt to live in dorms that restrict technology, too

I prophesy that universities that do this will be surprised by how much demand there is. I frequently talk to students who resent the distracting laptops all around them during class. They feel the tug of the “imaginary string attaching me to my phone, where I have to constantly check it,”

Many, if not most, students want the elusive experience of uninterrupted thought, the kind where a hash of half-baked notions slowly becomes an idea about the world.

Even if your goal is effective use of the latest chatbot, it behooves you to read books in hard copies and read enough of them to learn what an elegant paragraph sounds like. How else will students recognize when ChatGPT churns out decent prose instead of bureaucratic drivel?

Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values.

His course offers a chance to temporarily exchange those unconscious structures for a set of deliberate, countercultural ones.

here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.

Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for

When students finish, they can move right into their area of specialization and wire up their skulls with all the technology they want, armed with the habits and perspective to do so responsibly

it’s worth learning from the radicals. Dr. McDaniel, the religious studies professor at Penn, has a long history with different monastic traditions. He grew up in Philadelphia, educated by Hungarian Catholic monks. After college, he volunteered in Thailand and Laos and lived as a Buddhist monk.

e found that no amount of academic reading could help undergraduates truly understand why “people voluntarily take on celibacy, give up drinking and put themselves under authorities they don’t need to,” he told me. So for 20 years, he has helped students try it out — and question some of their assumptions about what it means to find themselves.

“On college campuses, these students think they’re all being individuals, going out and being wild,” he said. “But they’re in a playpen. I tell them, ‘You know you’ll be protected by campus police and lawyers. You have this entire apparatus set up for you. You think you’re being an individual, but look at your four friends: They all look exactly like you and sound like you. We exist in these very strict structures we like to pretend don’t exist.’”

Colleges could do all this in classes integrated with general education requirements: ideally, a sequence of great books seminars focused on classic texts from across different civilizations.

“For the last 1,500 years, Benedictines have had to deal with technology,” Placid Solari, the abbot there, told me. “For us, the question is: How do you use the tool so it supports and enhances your purpose or mission and you don’t get owned by it?”

for novices at his monastery, “part of the formation is discipline to learn how to control technology use.” After this initial time of limited phone and TV “to wean them away from overdependence on technology and its stimulation,” they get more access and mostly make their own choices.

Evan Lutz graduated this May from Belmont Abbey with a major in theology. He stressed the special Catholic context of Belmont’s resident monks; if you experiment with monastic practices without investigating the whole worldview, it can become a shallow kind of mindfulness tourism.

The monks at Belmont Abbey do more than model contemplation and focus. Their presence compels even non-Christians on campus to think seriously about vocation and the meaning of life. “Either what the monks are doing is valuable and based on something true, or it’s completely ridiculous,” Mr. Lutz said. “In both cases, there’s something striking there, and it asks people a question.”

Pondering ultimate questions and cultivating cognitive endurance should not be luxury goods.

David Peña-Guzmán, who teaches philosophy at San Francisco State University, read about Dr. McDaniel’s Existential Despair course and decided he wanted to create a similar one. He called it the Reading Experiment. A small group of humanities majors gathered once every two weeks for five and a half hours in a seminar room equipped with couches and a big round table. They read authors ranging from Jean-Paul Sartre to Frantz Fanon

“At the beginning of every class I’d ask students to turn off their phones and put them in ‘the Basket of Despair,’ which was a plastic bag,” he told me. “I had an extended chat with them about accessibility. The point is not to take away the phone for its own sake but to take away our primary sources of distraction. Students could keep the phone if they needed it. But all of them chose to part with their phones.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán’s students are mostly working-class, first-generation college students. He encouraged them to be honest about their anxieties by sharing his own: “I said, ‘I’m a very slow reader, and it’s likely some or most of you will get further in the text than me because I’m E.S.L. and read quite slowly in English.’

For his students, the struggle to read long texts is “tied up with the assumption that reading can happen while multitasking and constantly interacting with technologies that are making demands on their attention, even at the level of a second,”

“These draw you out of the flow of reading. You get back to the reading, but you have to restart the sentence or even the paragraph. Often, because of these technological interventions into the reading experience, students almost experience reading backward — as constant regress, without any sense of progress. The more time they spend, the less progress they make.”

Dr. Peña-Guzmán dismissed the idea that a course like his is suitable only for students who don’t have to worry about holding down jobs or paying off student debt. “I’m worried by this assumption that certain experiences that are important for the development of personality, for a certain kind of humanistic and spiritual growth, should be reserved for the elite, especially when we know those experiences are also sources of cultural capital,

Courses like the Reading Experiment are practical, too, he added. “I can’t imagine a field that wouldn’t require some version of the skill of focused attention.”

The point is not to reject new technology but to help students retain the upper hand in their relationship with i

Ms. Rodriguez said that before she took Living Deliberately and Existential Despair, she didn’t distinguish technology from education. “I didn’t think education ever went without technology. I think that’s really weird now. You don’t need to adapt every piece of technology to be able to learn better or more,” she said. “It can form this dependency.”

The point of college is to help students become independent humans who can choose the gods they serve and the rules they follow rather than allow someone else to choose for them

The first step is dethroning the small silicon idol in their pocket — and making space for the uncomfortable silence and questions that follow

Are we feeding our children a bunch of dangerous illusions about fairness and hard work and level playing fields? Are ideals a luxury only the rich can afford?

I’m reminded of the quote by John Adams: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history [and] naval architecture . . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry and porcelain.” For all intents and purposes, I guess I studied porcelain. The funny thing is that my parents came from a country (Peru) with a middle class so small that parents had to study business so that their children could study business. If I didn’t follow suit, it’s at least in part because I spent my childhood in the 1970s absorbing the nurturing message of a progressive pop culture that told me I could be anything I wanted, because this is America.

“When we see the contrast between the values we share and the realities we live in, that is the fundamental foundation for social change.”

Why is fact-checking so popular? The traditional American view of democracy has a ready answer: The people know that, to be responsible voters, they must know the facts.

There’s a complex myth of democracy packed into that little story. There’s a basic premise: Democracy can work because we humans are rational animals. We are built to be fact-checkers; we all have the capacity to separate true facts from lies. And once we have true facts, we know how to analyze them logically to come to reasonable conclusions. If that weren’t true, democracy would be a foolish experiment, indeed.

But, the myth goes on to say, a capacity is useless unless it is developed through training. That’s why democracy demands universal access to education

Only educated people can be responsible citizens because only the educated have actualized their potential for fact-checking and rational thinking.

When the final book is written on this campaign, one-sided deception will still have played a central role. As it stands, the very notions of fact and truth are employed in American politics as much to distort as to reveal. And until the voting public demands something else, not just from the politicians they oppose but also from the ones they support, there is little reason to suspect that will change.

they must have honesty from their leaders and transparency from their government.

Hence, the need for fact-checkers at every step on the campaign trail. It’s only logical.Except that there’s no evidence all the fact-checking has any measurable impact on the voters’ choices.

ideas hardly mattered any more than facts in the outcome of the first debate. Romney won on style points alone.

The “theater state” is a performance art. Every candidate is judged, above all, on their performance. Good theatrical performers know how to create satisfying illusory images of truth. It’s one of their highest skills. Mitt Romney proved that in the first debate.

The myth of democracy says that citizens must educated enough to know which policies are best for their community. But good citizens must also bring their rationality into the polling booth.

The fact-checkers, too, are seasoned performers skilled in the art of creating satisfying illusory images of truth.

Above all, they create the illusion that American democracy is alive and well because the public is apparently being informed of the facts and the veracity of each candidate is apparently being carefully evaluated and widely reported. Fact-checking, then, is the ritual enactment of our myth of democracy. As long as the myth keeps getting acted out, we can trust that it is alive and well.

Mr. Murray and other conservatives often seem to assume that the decline of the traditional family has terrible implications for society as a whole. This is, of course, a longstanding position. Reading Mr. Murray, I found myself thinking about an earlier diatribe, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s 1996 book, “The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values,” which covered much of the same ground, claimed that our society was unraveling and predicted further unraveling as the Victorian virtues continued to erode.

some indicators of social dysfunction have improved dramatically even as traditional families continue to lose ground. As far as I can tell, Mr. Murray never mentions either the plunge in teenage pregnancies among all racial groups since 1990 or the 60 percent decline in violent crime since the mid-90s. Could it be that traditional families aren’t as crucial to social cohesion as advertised?

Still, something is clearly happening to the traditional working-class family. The question is what. And it is, frankly, amazing how quickly and blithely conservatives dismiss the seemingly obvious answer: A drastic reduction in the work opportunities available to less-educated men.

For lower-education working men, however, it has been all negative. Adjusted for inflation, entry-level wages of male high school graduates have fallen 23 percent since 1973. Meanwhile, employment benefits have collapsed. In 1980, 65 percent of recent high-school graduates working in the private sector had health benefits, but, by 2009, that was down to 29 percent.

So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals.

What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."

There is an information explosion going on, by which I mean a rapid increase of data, words, and paper. But this explosion should not be taken for an increase in knowledge and wisdom, which cannot so easily by measured. What can be said truthfully is that some knowledge is increasing while other kinds of knowledge are being lost. David Ehrenfeld has pointed out that biology departments no longer hire faculty in such areas as systematics, taxonomy, or ornithology. In other words, important knowledge is being lost because of the recent overemphasis on molecular biology and genetic engineering, which are more lucrative, but not more important, areas of inquiry.

In the modern curriculum we have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines and subdisciplines. As a result, after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad integrated sense of the unity of things. The consequences for their personhood and for the planet are large. For example, we routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary knowledge of ecology. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in the air or water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to GNP while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost in its production.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more "successful" people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every shape and form. It needs people who live well in their places.

The goal of education is not mastery of subject matter, but of one’s person. Subject matter is simply the tool. Much as one would use a hammer and chisel to carve a block of marble, one uses ideas and knowledge to forge one’s own personhood.

knowledge carries with it the responsibility to see that it is well used in the world.

we cannot say that we know something until we understand the effects of this knowledge on real people and their communities

Indoor classes create the illusion that learning only occurs inside four walls isolated from what students call without apparent irony the "real world."

The National Research Council framework for K-12 science education recommends that by the end of Grade 5, students should appreciate that rising average global temperatures will affect the lives of all humans and other organisms on the planet. By Grade 8, students should understand that the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels is a major factor in global warming. And by Grade 12, students should know that global climate models are very effective in modeling, predicting and managing the current and future impact of climate change.

Relying on a climate-change curriculum and teaching materials largely sourced from federal agencies—particularly those of the current ideologically driven administration—raises a number of issues. Along with the undue authoritative weight that such government-produced documents carry in the classroom, most of the work is one-sided and presented in categorical terms, leaving no room for a balanced discussion. Moreover, too much blind trust is placed in the predictive power of long-range computer simulations, despite the weak forecasting track record of most climate models to date.

Employing such a Socratic approach to teaching climate change would likely lead to a rational and thought-provoking classroom debate on the merits of the case. However, that is not the point of this academic exercise—which seems to be to indoctrinate young people by using K-12 educators to establish the same positive political feedback loop around global warming that has existed between the federal government and the nation’s colleges and universities for the past two decades.