Plato wouldn’t have be surprised if he had read last Wednesday’s  New York Times and found this report om K-12 learning:
“  For the first time since 1990, the mathematical skills of American students have dropped, according to results of a nationwide test released by the Education Department on Wednesday.  The decline appeared in both Grades 4 and 8 in an exam administered every two years as the National Assessment of Educational Progress and sometimes called “the nation’s report card.” a rebellion against them. … Progress in reading, which has been generally more muted than in math for decades, also stalled this year …“
This report on “educational progress”  is appalling, especially after so much time, money and attention have been paid to the STEM disciplines in recent years. But in fact the gains have been very modest even in the best of years, and now the very title of the  project – “educational progress” – looks like a bad joke.
 
Clearly we have not figured out what’s keeping students from making genuine progress.   
 
Maybe it’s time to start thinking out of the ox – the box that requires focus on math and reading to the near exclusion of everything else.  One way to climb out of that box is to open up Plato’s Republic and engage with his  ideas about music.  Here’s one example:
“  … education in music is most crucial because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost part of the psyche  and take strongest hold upon it … “ Plato Republic III 401 d
And it’s not just Plato.  Greek literature is full of the recognition that in education music, shall we say, calls the tune.
We have thrown music out of the K-12 curriculum and signed it over to the entertainment industry. They know how to use it -- to make money.  There should be no surprise about the effects: GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out.
And so the beat goes on, and the resulting distraction should be no surprise.
Back to the cithara, lads and lasses! There’s educational progress to be made!
 
 
 
 

 

 
The University of North Carolina is going through an agonizing search for a new president of the state university system.  The Republican controlled Board of Governors forced the early  retirement of Tom Ross, and then disintegrated into bickering over his successor.
 
The leading candidate is rumored to be Margaret Spelings. Remember her as a George W. Bush political adviser, then secretary  of Education with “No Child Left Behind” as her major  legacy, for better or  for  worse, and then the “Spellings Commission.”  Her ties to  G. W. Bush (and Karl Rove) make many North Carolinians nervous that she will prove to be a partisan choice.
 
But here’s another side to the story. That Commission (See Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_the_Future_of_Higher_Education ) was co-chaired by Jim Hunt, a former Democratic governor of NC. That’s right, a Democrat. They seemed to find common ground on a very tough view of "accountability," a.k.a. as demanding hard evidence that colleges were preparing their students for entry level jobs.  
Her past collaboration with Jim Hunt raises the hope that she will be a less partisan appointment than many people fear. Maybe she is a centrist Republican with enough backbone to stand up against the hard liners. But, again, there’s another side to it:   Many academics think the Commission had an excessively narrow view of "accountability," and shudder to think what she (with Jim Hunt at her side?) might mean for liberal education at UNC.

 
If you were wondering what Marco Rubio would do as president, here’s one clue, his op ed piece in the Des Moines Register.    He seems to be swept into the quick-cheap-and-easy rhetoric, for example, “ First, I will reform our accreditation system to welcome low-cost, innovative higher education providers, which are currently being blocked by the existing institutions that control accreditation. This will transform higher education by exposing it to the market forces … “.
Who, exactly, are these “low-cost, innovative providers “? And what is it they are providing? And what will he substitute for the existing accreditation system? Rubio doesn’t say.  But, after all, it’s election season. If it sounds good, say it. Pick up the pieces later.
 
 
 

MORE DESTRUCTION IN PALMYRA: NO LONGER IDEOLOGICAL?
 
" ... their acts …  are no longer ideologically driven because they are now blowing up buildings with no religious meaning,"   Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syrian antiquities chief  on Isis’ blowing up of the  Arch of Triumph  in Palmyra.
But do we understand ISIS’s ideology? It comprises, surely, the destruction of places of worship, even Islamic ones.  But it does not stop there.  Their enemy, I believe, is the past, or more precisely anything that might remind people that there are alternatives to the emptiness they offer.  So the grander, the more beautiful, the more powerful a structure is, the greater the need to destroy it.