Threat to new era of social mobility

The UK government’s adviser on social mobility will warn in a major report that the country risks squandering the chance to recreate the golden era of the 1950s, when workers from all parts of society had the chance to join the professional classes.

Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary, will tell ministers that despite a huge growth in white-collar work, there is evidence that people from poorer backgrounds and those living outside the south-east of England are being left behind.

Making schools work

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

In Singapore, liberals arts enters uncharted territory

Two staff reporters for the News, Ava Kofman and Tapley Stephenson, traveled to Singapore over spring break, interviewing more than 80 sources on the founding of Yale-NUS College — how Singaporeans view the project, how the liberal arts function in Singapore and how the country’s values differ from those on Yale’s campus. This is part two of the three-part series. (Read part 1 and part 3.)

The value of teachers

Suppose your child is about to enter the fourth grade and has been assigned to an excellent teacher. Then the teacher decides to quit. What should you do? The correct answer? Panic!

Rise of the new Groupthink

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

The education lottery: 4 criticisms of the education gospel

Education is as close to a secular religion as we have in the United States. In a time when Americans have lost faith in their government and economic institutions, millions of us still believe in its saving grace. National leaders, from Benjamin Rush on, oversaw plans for extending its benefits more broadly. In the 19th century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie famously conceived of schools as ladders on which the industrious poor would ascend to a better life, and he spent a good bit of his fortune laying the foundations for such an education society. After World War II, policy makers who believed in the education gospel grew numerous enough to fill stadiums. One by one, the G.I. Bill, the Truman Commission report, and the War on Poverty singled out education as the way of national and personal advance. “The answer to all of our national problems,” as Lyndon Johnson put it in 1965, “comes down to one single word: education.”

John Wood’s 12000 libraries have changed lives

ONE of the legendary triumphs of philanthropy was Andrew Carnegie’s construction of more than 2,500 libraries around the world. It’s renowned as a stimulus to learning that can never be matched — except that, numerically, it has already been surpassed several times over by an American man you’ve probably never heard of.

Are teachers in the US overpaid?

A new study says public school teachers earn way too much. Another found that teachers earn way too little for their skills. Can both be true?

Too many graduates in South Korea

AMERICANS who deem South Korea’s education system a model (President Barack Obama, among others) might be surprised at one message leaders here are delivering to their youth: Drop out, please.

Well, that may be a slight exaggeration. But South Korea’s government has decided that too many people are going to college. It is working to restore the lustre of a high school diploma as a stopping point for some and to establish a vocational track for others.

‘Modern technology has not made us wiser.’ What is your view?

Context / Issues

• The promises of technology do not seem to be fulfilled as technology increasingly dominates modern life and influences developing nations.
• Everything that we do is inherently technological, from academic instruction (Voila! This very blog is evidence of that!) to cooking to global financial markets.
• The ‘reliance’ argument recalls the Arthur C Clarke (2001 A Space Odyssey) thesis: as our tools become more complex, Man gradually relinquishes control and allows himself to be subject to these tools.
• On a separate note, the large amounts poured into research and development of technology, whether into consumer products or solving larger scientific quandaries (cure for cancer, quest to uncover the secret of the universe, quantum mechanics etc) may or may not have enlightened us, depending on how you see it. We do not see the latter having an immediate effect on our daily lives, so we can consider the difference between the layman and Mankind as a whole.