History Readings

All three researchers concluded that one of the biggest factors in both a happy life and a long life was having strong and healthy social connections. Beyond that, the people who tended to have "happy-well" outcomes were conscientious, emotionally healthy individuals who set and actively pursued goals; who incorporated strong social networks, exercise and "healthy" eating/drinking habits organically into their everyday lives; who were optimistic but not to the point of being careless or reckless; social enough to form strong networks, but not so social as to pursue unhealthy habits for peer approval; and who felt engaged and satisfied in their careers, marriages, and friendships.

the happiness of children in a household (aged 10 to 21, living at home) is significantly affected by the happiness of their mother--or, at least her happiness in terms of her marriage. Only 55 percent of children whose mothers reported that they were unhappy in their marriages said they were completely happy at home, versus 73 percent of those whose mothers reported being very happy in their marriages. The happiness of the fathers was less significant. 

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Paradoxically, what I find more and more is that the Internet is a place for people to affirm and support each other. It's as if the understanding of the fundamental weakness of these electronic proxies to represent human connection causes people to push for it more and more. And this could be beautiful. But it can also be dangerous. Because of the depth of the loneliness, I blame no one for how they interact and connect with others online. I just worry. I worry about the urge towards conformity. I worry about Twitter. I worry that all of those retweets and all of those "right on"s contribute to a kind of coarse postmodernism, where what the truth becomes what is most agreed on. I worry that dissent is confused with a lack of etiquette. And I particularly worry about the echo chamber effect, and the way that small groups of people who are just like each other can come to think of themselves as representing the opinions of everyone. On the Internet, we all make the world in our own image.

The pressure, online, will always be to tack towards the crowd, and people will look endlessly towards their peers-- not intending to undermine the individual voice, but getting there, often, anyway. Don't get judgmental about it, but keep saying your piece. In the tenor of the single voice, you can find strength, and if you keep saying what you think is true, in spite of it all, you will find what is incorruptible in yourself.

A study of students enrolled in the Virtual High School, for example, found that 75 percent of the students passed their courses with a C or better while 25 percent got a D, F, or Incomplete or dropped it.

It seems to me online learning can actually be less distracting than being in a classroom of 30 students, provided the students have access to computers. Indeed, two of the predictors of success are home access to a computer and/or a school period given over to online work. Other predictors were age, grade point average, technology use, self-efficacy and achievement beliefs, organizational skills, and risk taking.

Hybrid or "blended" models that focus on serious content for deep learning, and bring together classroom interaction with tools like wikis, blogs, podcasts, social networks and discussion forums can engage students in ways that traditional environments do not. When students are given challenging material, asked to carry out authentic research and to create ways to share what they are learning with students from all over the world engagement goes up.

Assessment of student learning can be partially automated and designed to provide continuous feedback. When students need assistance, they can be directed to activities that will help them learn.

Information access represents the tiniest fraction of what it means to be educated. As long as education is viewed as the acquisition of information, most often transmitted by a teacher or pulled from the Web, then efforts to drive down costs, cut programs, layoff teachers and privatize schools seem viable.

My colleagues and I have demonstrated that online environments focused on collaboration and action, rather than reading and test-taking, can be more social, creative, substantial and personally meaningful than traditional classes. Learning is no longer bound by artificial schedules, random teacher assignments or age segregation. Students feel more connected than in “school” where talking is the No. 1 infraction and teacher access is severely curtailed. When work is public, peers learn from it and support reciprocal growth. Everyone is a teacher and learner all of the time. The quality of work benefits from the extra time, collaboration and expertise.

Done well, online learning could supplement classroom instruction, offer experiences otherwise impossible, support 24/7 learning and break down barriers of geography, wealth or culture.

It is possible to construct good, interactive online courses that would support mathematics learning with middle and high school students. However, courses would not look like most current online courses.

Not every American kid is cut out for college.

College — even community college — drives many young people into debt. Many others lack rudimentary study skills or any scholarly inclination. They want to get on with their lives, not be forced to analyze the meter in “King Lear” in night school in order to become a cop or a nurse’s aide.

“No one is thinking about the larger implications, or even the morality,” Professor X says, “of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass.”

there is no sound research showing that online courses at the K-12 level are comparable to face-to-face learning.

Nationwide, an estimated 1.03 million students at the K-12 level took an online course in 2007-8, up 47 percent from two years earlier, according to the Sloan Consortium, an advocacy group for online education. About 200,000 students attend online schools full time, often charter schools that appeal to home-schooling families, according to another report.

But even some proponents of online classes are dubious about makeup courses, also known as credit recovery — or, derisively, click-click credits — which high schools, especially those in high-poverty districts, use to increase graduation rates and avoid federal sanctions.

The single largest increase was among Hispanics, whose birthrates are far above those of non-Hispanic whites, largely because the white population is aging and proportionally has fewer women in their child-bearing years. The median age of whites is 41, compared with 27 for Hispanics, the report said.

The population of white children fell by 4.3 million, or about 10 percent, in the last decade, while the population of Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million, or about 38 percent, according to the report, which was based on 2010 Census numbers.

The number of African-American children also fell, down by 2 percent. Over all, minorities now make up 46.5 percent of the under-18 population.

with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

“the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.”

a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity

one thing we are not going to do is be strictly rule-bound in our approach to foreign affairs.

The United States is a huge country with a very large and conflicting array of interests and, being both a democracy and a country with a divided central government, limited ability to set policy at the government’s discretion. To most countries, we will inevitably be a relatively fickle friend.

Outside the United States, however, the digital book business is still in its infancy. During a news conference in Berlin, Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, predicted that Europe would catch up with the United States in two to five years. For that to happen, some big problems will have to be solved.

Imagine if you could keep a log of everything that you do on your mobile phone. The phone calls that you make (or receive), your emails and text messages, the various places that you visit, and even the music tracks that you listen to on your phone.

At first glance, I suspect many readers will be taken aback by how intrusive the software can be as it captures all smartphone activities in the background. It’s a valid concern. But the Internet, combined with smartphones and mobile broadband devices, is pushing us slowly in this direction. The way I see it, we can fight the change unsuccessfully or we can cautiously embrace it. You might not ever subscribe to providing a greater amount of information to the cloud, but within reason, I’m willing to bet your kids will. It’s just a matter of time before more of your personal data is more online than offline. It may take years or decades yet, but it will happen for most.

The Android app is clever, not only because it captures your smartphone and app usage profile, but makes it searchable and ties together events with the context of both location and time.

one tradition has remained firmly in place: China will not confront its own history. The museum is less the product of extensive research, discovery or creativity than the most prominent symbol of the Communist Party’s efforts to control the narrative of history and suppress alternative points of view, even those that exist within the governing elite

Officials rejected proposals for a permanent historical exhibition that would have discussed the disasters of early Communist rule — especially the Great Leap Forward, a political campaign and resulting famine that killed more than 20 million. Some organizers also wanted a candid appraisal of the Cultural Revolution, a decade-long attack on traditional culture and learning, but that effort was squashed.

Instead, the authorities decided that the exhibition on contemporary China should focus, as did the museum before its extensive makeover, on the party’s triumphs.

the professor is not just a disinterested pedagogue. As a dispenser of grades he is a gatekeeper to worldly success. And in that capacity professors face upward pressure from students ("I can't afford a B if I want to get into law school"); horizontal pressure from their colleagues, to which even Mansfield gave way; downward pressure from the administration ("If you want to fail someone, you have to be prepared for a very long, painful battle with the higher echelons," one professor told the Crimson); and perhaps pressure from within, from the part of them that sympathizes with students' careerism.

Not every class was so easy. Those that were tended to be in history and English, classics and foreign languages, art and philosophy—in other words, in those departments that provide what used to be considered the meat of a liberal arts education. Humanities students generally did the least work, got the highest grades, and cruised academically

the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick once hypothesized that most professors oppose capitalism because they consider themselves far smarter than boobish businessmen, and therefore resent the economic system that rewards practical intelligence over their own gifts. I'm inclined to think that such resentment—at least in money-drunk America—increasingly coexists with a deep inferiority complex regarding modern capitalism, and a need, however unconscious, to justify academic life in the face of the fantastic accumulation of wealth that takes place outside the ivory tower.

Like everything else, there are cultural differences in what is considered worthwhile in the public sphere. Japan, for example, has a high tolerance for pushing virtue. You can see it in the small details.

In India, virtues come up in discussions of spirituality. Newspapers with broad readership have daily columns dedicated to it [for example, at right], and the writers, regardless of their faith, draw from a variety of traditions to make their point: Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Sikh, or secular humanist.

Don't we want goodness in human beings? Yet, something about the sheer earnestness collides with what must be an entrenched cynicism.

Byzantium used to call to mind a sterile, bureaucratic and yet violent society, corrupted by fatuous complexities. The worst failings in our own societies would be described as "Byzantine."

a new generation of scholars has emerged, re-evaluating the very idea of Roman decline or Dark Ages and arguing that the barbarian forces that occupied the empire's western provinces adopted, adapted and thus perpetuated many of the Roman methods of administration. The term "Late Antiquity" embodies this long period of transition, which transformed the Roman world while integrating aspects of Latin culture with the Christian hierarchy of bishops and monks, who were themselves often recruited from the senatorial classes. At the same time, the recent emergence of an Islamic challenge to the West has urged our engagement with the Christian power that first withstood Muslim attacks and defended Europe's eastern frontier for centuries.

The excellence of Byzantine administration—hardly Byzantine at all by our usage—is nowhere clearer than in the power of the Byzantine standard gold coin, the solidus (known as the bezant in medieval Europe). First issued by Constantine I in the early fourth century, it retained its 24-carat value and was the coin of choice in international trade for more than 700 years. It took a self-conscious and creative government to manage this extraordinary achievement: one that puts to shame our present devalued currencies and monetary instability.

The Republican party's resilient love of all things military and its elites' love of waging war at will anywhere in the world seem to me to be at odds with a core conservative insight. The critique of open-ended welfare was always that it perpetuated dependency and, in the long run, deepened poverty rather than alleviated it. But that logic never seems to be applied to the wars and nation-building effort

the "surge" in 2006 - 2007. It did not and could not achieve sectarian peace, which alone can be forged by the parties themselves. And any peace we did achieve remains premised on an American presence. Until that presence is removed, we will never know what has actually occurred beneath. And when that presence is removed, a different pattern will have to emerge, based on the actual facts on the ground, rather than those distorted by US intervention. Or else we have to stay for ever

When you see nation-building as a very expensive and usually counterproductive form of international welfare - you can see why its logic never ends. Intervention creates dependency which prevents departure.