I'm catching up, finally, with some posts that sat too long on hold. I hope you findd them as useful as I have for sharpening my thinking about learning, science, and schooling.

John Staddon offers an interesting critique that I missed about Mary Borgan's book What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education.

Burgan ... thinks that the faculty in American universities are too passive and exert too small a voice in university governance. She argues her point, somewhat digressively, in nine chapters, covering a wide variety of higher education topics. ...(

she) takes a few gentle pot-shots at the lowing herds of educational theorists grazing the aca-demic plains -- people who say things like “We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers” (“design-ers of learning experiences”?!). She deplores the flight from teaching ... She cites favorably Steven Pinker, another Harvard psychologist, noted pub-lic intellectual and critic of the fad of “constructivist” education.

I find Stoddon's contrasting points about (higher, and therefore lower levels of education, if you accept the trickle down view of information transmission through schools) education refreshingly consistent with many, if not most, top drawer scholars and scientists.

Professor Burgan writes as if all universities and colleges in the U.S. are much the same, have similar problems, and need to be governed in much the same way. They are not and can not. There are light-years of difference between elite research universities like Harvard, Duke, MIT and UNC-CH, and urban part-time-ed institutions like Adelphi and the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as the numerous small and often sectarian colleges like Wofford, Sweet Briar, and Hollins. The “HBCUs” (historically black colleges and universities) represent another category with its own unique characteristics.

While such points contrast with now popular schooling practices, he elaborates what he considers an incomplete analysis of education by Burgan, a highly respected educator.

Hmm. I may come back to this later. Happy reading!

Tablet PC Education Blog