In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik attempts to answer the question: “Why Teach English?” The fate of the English major is, as Gopnik notes, all the rage, but defenses of it are surprisingly unconvincing. He rightly points out that the two most common ones””that English majors make for better people and better societies””are patently false. Nor is studying literary texts, I might add, always the most effective means of improving reading or writing skills (though it certainly helps). “So why have English majors?” Gopnik asks:

Well, because many people like books. Most of those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while they’re in the middle. Some people like to talk about them so much that they want to spend their lives talking about them to other people who like to listen. Some of us do this all summer on the beach, and others all winter in a classroom. One might call this a natural or inevitable consequence of literacy. And it’s this living, irresistible, permanent interest in reading that supports English departments, and makes sense of English majors.

This is both right and wrong. Gopnik is absolutely right that reading and discussing literary works is natural.

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I began my sabbatical by taking three online courses through a Johns Hopkins University distance-learning program for high school students: honors pre-calculus, honors chemistry and a writing class. It was amazing to learn on my laptop at my own pace. For example, in the math class, I would watch a seven-minute video on how to solve equations using logarithms, then tackle a few problems. After typing in each answer, I immediately found out whether it was correct. If it was wrong, I could try again or read how to solve the problem. If I was totally stumped, I could call or e-mail the instructor to get a more thorough explanation.

Instead of sitting in a specific seat at a specific time, listening to the same long lecture as everyone else, I could tailor the classes to my strengths and weaknesses. I could move through some material quickly but take as much time as I needed to absorb the difficult stuff. Not only did these courses free up time to shoot a movie, but their structure helped me learn the material as well as I would have in a classroom. In four months, I covered a year of math.

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Millions of students heading back to school are finding significant changes in the curriculum and battles over how teachers are evaluated, as the biggest revamps of U.S. public education in a decade work their way into classrooms.

Most states are implementing tougher math and reading standards known as Common Core, while teacher evaluations increasingly are linked to student test scores or other measures of achievement. Meantime, traditional public schools face unprecedented competition from charter and private schools.

Supporters say the overhauls will help make U.S. students more competitive with pupils abroad. But others worry that the sheer volume and far-reaching nature of the new policies is too much, too fast. Already, the changes have sparked pushback.

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All of our students are at-risk. For what, you might ask? Because of illiteracy or low literacy, many are at risk for dropping out of school, getting involved in gang life, substance abuse and addiction, jail, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, pregnancy, STDs, and death.

But our staff””missionaries, really””love the students with the love Jesus has poured into them. We feed the students breakfast and lunch, or some would have nothing. We teach them to read and do math. We study the Bible and sing worship songs. We play games with these children who haven’t really ever had a childhood….

We are St. Aidan’s Christian School. Our city? Not Khartoum, Sudan. Not El Salvador. No, it’s Winnipeg. In Canada.

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When Congress overwhelmingly approved a measure last month to relieve spiraling student debt, churches probably didn’t realize the problem hits closer to home than expected””many pastors are leaving seminary and divinity school with tens of thousands of dollars in loans.

“It’s becoming a huge issue,” said Bill Wilson, president of the Center for Congregational Health. “I’ve heard of totals approaching $60,000. I had one resident who showed up with $40,000 between school and credit cards.”

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Scott Pelley: What do you see when you look around the city?

Paul Tudor Jones: I see people in pain, people in need, people at times without hope, looking for something that will give them some compelling future. I see too many people in homeless shelters, on food stamps. I think a lot of us don’t like to focus on it, but it’s a significant part of this country that needs to be addressed….You cannot have significance in this life if it’s all about you. You get your significance, you find your joy in life through service and sacrifice. It’s pure and simple.

Read or watch it all (video highly recommended).

Beating the odds–a young man from California learning some tough lessons about life heading to a college education; a remarkable turn of events in the last week, as Nbc’s Miguel Almaguer reports.

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Check it out.

As school counselor Jennifer VonLintel gears up for the start of the school year at B.F. Kitchen Elementary School, there are new students to enroll, files to update and schedules to plan ”” including the schedule for Copper, her registered therapy dog and a popular presence in the hallways of the Loveland, Colo., school.

Three days a week, the 3-year-old golden retriever’s assignments can include mingling with kids during recess, being assigned to students who struggle with reading or math anxiety, and providing general companionship and support in the classroom, during counseling office visits, and during after-school programs. Any time a friendly, furry face can provide an extra measure of comfort and assurance, says VonLintel.

When there’s a death in a family or a child receives bad news, “with the parents’ permission, we’ll introduce Copper to the situation,” she says. “Kids find comfort in petting him, and sometimes the parents do, too. ”

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[MOHAMMED] TUNKARA: Two, three years ago, I was lost. I was lost in my own life. I mean I had family problems at home. So when I first started to like join buildOn and actually be a part of it, it was a life-changing event for me. It was the, like it was the biggest turning point in my whole life. Now I want, I want to change the world now.

[BOB] FAW: That audacious goal of “changing the world” is the mantra of buildOn’s founder, 47 year old Jim Ziolkowski, who stepped out of the fast lane in corporate finance to achieve something more than making money.

JIM ZIOLKOWSKI (Founder, buildOn): I believe strongly in the social justice aspect of my Catholic tradition. But I wasn’t living it, and I wanted to reconcile my faith with the way I was living, so I started up buildOn. Our mission is to break the cycle of poverty, illiteracy and low expectations through service and education. And the way we approach it is by organizing afterschool programs in very challenged communities, urban environments and urban high schools across the United States.

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The Internet is abuzz with conversation about the “T” in “LGBT” this week, after California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law legislation supporting “equal access” for students who believe themselves to be the opposite gender from their biological sex. As a conservative evangelical Christian, I believe the so-called transgender question will require a church with a strong theological grounding, and a winsome pastoral footing.

Here’s why.

Ultimately, the transgender question is about more than just sex. It’s about what it means to be human.

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Dartmouth College’s new president on Wednesday rescinded a job offer to an African bishop who was to have been dean of the institution’s Tucker Foundation, which promotes ethical leadership, spiritual development and social justice at the college. The appointment of James Tengatenga, a bishop of the Anglican church in Malawi, as dean set off a debate on campus and beyond because of his past anti-gay statements.

Philip J. Hanlon, the president, met with Tengatenga and announced that the college was taking back the job offer. In a statement, Hanlon said that there was much to praise in Tengatenga’s “inspiring life of service.”

Hanlon added: “However, following much reflection and consultation with senior leaders at Dartmouth, it has become clear to me that Dr. Tengatenga’s past comments about homosexuality and the uncertainty and controversy they created have compromised his ability to serve effectively as dean of Tucker. The foundation and Dartmouth’s commitment to inclusion are too important to be mired in discord over this appointment. Consequently, we have decided not to move forward with the appointment of Dr. Tengatenga as dean of the Tucker Foundation.”

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Jean was one of the indispensable voices of cultural and political sanity in the post-sixties. She cared deeply about the common good, and she recognized that faith, family, and patriotic solidarity ennobled the lives of ordinary people. So she found herself defending those loves, often setting herself against the academic establishment and its dissolving ideologies. It required determination and courage, both of which Jean had in large, very large, measures.

Read it all (and I recommend taking the time to peruse the comments as well).

If you young folks will take advice from anyone, after all, I don’t know if you’ve seen it ”” this week’s Time Magazine called you “lazy, entitled narcissists,” who are part of the “Me, Me, Me” generation. So self-obsessed – tweeting your Vines, hashtagging your Spotifys and Snapchatting your YOLOs – your generation needs everything to be about you. And that’s very upsetting to us baby boomers because self-absorption is kind of our thing. We’re the original “Me Generation,” we made the last 50 years all about us. We took all the money. We soaked up all the government services. And we’ve deep-fried nearly everything in the ocean. It may seem that all that’s left for you is unpaid internships, Monday to Tuesday mail delivery, and thanks to global warming, soon Semester at Sea will mean sailing the coast of Ohio.

Now, in our defense, in my generation’s defense ”“ how were we supposed to know that you were coming? We thought it went like this: every successive generation of mankind ”“ and then us! Ta-dah ”“ roll credits.

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Read it all (For those not following this, the original blog post may be found there).

In truth, the connection between SouthLake and Roosevelt very much fit into a plan. It was a plan devised by an especially odd couple ”” Sam Adams, the first openly gay mayor of Portland, and Kevin Palau, the scion of an evangelical association created by his father, Luis. And their plan has delivered thousands of evangelical volunteers not only to Roosevelt, but also to scores of other public schools in the area and to public agencies dealing with homelessness and foster care.

The Portland model, as it might be called, has brought its two founders inquiries from about 50 other cities and hundreds of churches across the country. While avoiding the tripwire of church-state separation, the program here has addressed two needs: that of urban mayors coping with static or falling budgets for public services, and that of a young generation of evangelical Christians drawn to the cause of social justice.

“Young evangelicals absolutely want their faith to be relevant,” said Mr. Palau, who is 50. “The world they grew up in and got tired of was the media portrait of evangelicals are against you, or evangelicals even hate you. Young evangelicals are saying, ”˜Surely we want to be known by what we’re for.’ ”

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The medical writing for which [Atul] Gawande is best known represents only a small fraction of his professional output. He is a surgeon, and a busy one at that, performing 250-plus operations a year. He is a professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). He heads a World Health Organization initiative on making surgery safer. And he is a husband and a father of three…..

Across his portfolio of pursuits, Gawande displays a willingness to be influenced by people he respects, and to recognize good ideas when he finds them. He says he would not have gotten a public-health degree had Zinner not suggested it. The policy concept perhaps most closely associated with his name, the surgical checklist, was not his to start with, as he readily admits (see “A Checklist for Life”).

Perhaps this is why he is reluctant to describe his own writing style, saying instead that he “steals” from such writers as Hemingway and Tolstoy. But there is what Finder calls a “Gawandean” style: “He understands how the small, colorful details can bring an argument to life. He’s always very attendant to rhythms and sonorities.”

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Higher education took a bit of a battering last year. The systems of fees and funding changed dramatically while the economy shuddered and the employment market shook, raising new concerns for both students and their parents. Twelve months on, the dust has settled ”” but do parents have any idea what student life looks like today?

“Many think back to when they were undergraduates. The situation today is unrecognisably different,” says Danny Byrne, editor of topuniversities.com. “In those days, 10 to 15 per cent of school-leavers went to university and tended to waltz into jobs at the end of it. Today, there’s a mass influx of graduates into the job market and it’s getting tougher to distinguish yourself, so parents feel they need to provide more hands-on direction.”

The university experience has changed too. Byrne says the focus has shifted from fun and study to employability and study, with students grabbing every possible opportunity to gain work experience and build networks.

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You can see her bio there and if you go to the main page here her photo will scroll through as one of the new people. What can I say like most clergy I married up–KSH.

Kim Ki-hoon earns $4 million a year in South Korea, where he is known as a rock-star teacher””a combination of words not typically heard in the rest of the world. Mr. Kim has been teaching for over 20 years, all of them in the country’s private, after-school tutoring academies, known as hagwons. Unlike most teachers across the globe, he is paid according to the demand for his skills””and he is in high demand.

Mr. Kim works about 60 hours a week teaching English, although he spends only three of those hours giving lectures. His classes are recorded on video, and the Internet has turned them into commodities, available for purchase online at the rate of $4 an hour. He spends most of his week responding to students’ online requests for help, developing lesson plans and writing accompanying textbooks and workbooks (some 200 to date).

“The harder I work, the more I make,” he says matter of factly. “I like that.”

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ome scholars with roots in more traditional churches caution against overstating the importance of liberal religion. The recent work on the subject is “a nice rebalancing of the historiographical ledgers,” said Mark Noll, a historian of religion at Notre Dame and a prominent evangelical intellectual. But for a tradition to have any continuing influence, he added, it needs committed bodies in the pews.

That point is seconded by Ms. Coffman, who worked as an editor at Christianity Today before entering academia. She currently teaches at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian institution where pastors in training, she said, are less likely to be savoring their broad cultural victories than debating which elements of evangelical worship they should adopt to attract a viable congregation.

“I teach at a mainline seminary, and we do not feel very triumphal,” Ms. Coffman said.

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When is ignorance bliss? For some it’s when the subject is religion.

How many times have you heard someone remark, almost proudly, they know virtually nothing about religion? As if the deep convictions of four out of five of the world’s inhabitants were beneath them. Resistance to inter-religious understanding remains strong, judging from continuing global conflicts – and the shortage of courses about religion in the vast majority of North American public schools.

And also judging by the rotten eggs some pundits and activists have tossed at Quebec’s five-year-old “ethics and religious culture” curriculum. It requires all students to take classes in religious and secular world views.

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“We spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot. 29. We went to get a sense of what it means to live in the midst of all this gun violence, how teens and adults navigate a world of funerals and Homecoming dances. We found so many incredible and surprising stories, this show is a two-parter….”

You can find the link to part one here and part two is there. I finally got to this during some recent driving–very hard to listen to, very important to try to ponder–KSH.

“These things always start with budget cuts, don’t they?” Baroness Diana Warwick said with a wry, not-quite-cynical smile over a cup of tea in the restaurant of an Ottawa hotel.

She was starting an explanation of how tuition fees of more than $15,000 a year became the poster child for change in higher education in a country once known as the birthplace of the welfare state, and still famously associated with the origins of the modern university.

But the former head of the umbrella group Universities UK might as easily have been talking about the reason she was in Ottawa this late June morning: a conference organized in part by the University of Alberta to discuss the forces sweeping post-secondary education around the world.

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Employed Americans of all ages with college degrees are less likely to be engaged at work than are their respective peers with a high school education or less, so their engagement is not related to being a recent graduate.

College-educated American workers’ lower engagement mainly stems from being less likely to strongly agree with the statement “at work I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.” Americans with some college education or a college degree were also less likely to use their strengths at work.

The engagement findings by education level are based on Americans’ assessments of workplace elements with proven linkages to performance outcomes, including productivity, customer service, quality, retention, safety, and profit.

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Ask her why she hasn’t had a relationship at Penn, and she won’t complain about the death of courtship or men who won’t commit. Instead, she’ll talk about “cost-benefit” analyses and the “low risk and low investment costs” of hooking up.

“I positioned myself in college in such a way that I can’t have a meaningful romantic relationship, because I’m always busy and the people that I am interested in are always busy, too,” she said.

“And I know everyone says, ”˜Make time, make time,’ ” said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity but agreed to be identified by her middle initial, which is A. “But there are so many other things going on in my life that I find so important that I just, like, can’t make time, and I don’t want to make time.”

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I will take comments on this submitted by email only to KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

You’ve probably heard the baleful reports. The number of college students majoring in the humanities is plummeting, according to a big study released last month by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The news has provoked a flood of high-minded essays deploring the development as a symptom and portent of American decline.

But there is another way to look at this supposed revelation (the number of humanities majors has actually been falling since the 1970s).

The bright side is this: The destruction of the humanities by the humanities is, finally, coming to a halt. No more will literature, as part of an academic curriculum, extinguish the incandescence of literature. No longer will the reading of, say, “King Lear” or D.H. Lawrence’s “Women in Love” result in the flattening of these transfiguring encounters into just two more elements in an undergraduate career””the onerous stuff of multiple-choice quizzes, exam essays and homework assignments.

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The belief that religious schools erode civic goals has a long history. In the mid-19th century, religious schools, Catholic schools in particular, were accused of reinforcing separate identities rather than shared American values. Much has changed in education since then, but a suspicion lingers in some quarters that church-operated schools breed intolerance.

Yet this view has been contradicted by a growing body of social-science evidence. In a review of the research, my colleague Patrick Wolf identified 21 studies of the effect that public and private schooling have on political tolerance. Tolerance is typically measured by asking students to name their least-liked group and then determining whether students would allow members of that group to engage in political activities, such as running for elected office or holding a rally. The more willing students are to let members of their least-liked group engage in these activities, the more tolerant they are judged to be.

I conducted two of those 21 studies, and others were produced by researchers at institutions including Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of Chicago. The studies varied in whether they looked at national or local samples of students and whether they examined secular, religious or all types of private schools. Of those studies, only one””focusing on the relatively small sector of non-Catholic religious schools””found that public-school students are more tolerant.

Read it all (another link if needed may be found there).

It is a fact little appreciated that the presidents of America’s early universities were pioneers of what we would now call mental health care, and bear some credit for central features of today’s therapeutic institutions. These teachers, like today’s, felt an obligation to provide their students with guidance on how to overcome life’s inevitable stresses and setbacks.

But this was before the days of psychiatry and psychotherapy, which did not come into existence until the early twentieth century. Rather, the approach of these early university presidents was to integrate moral education into liberal education in the arts and sciences. Although the most highly acclaimed American colleges and universities today enjoy a reputation as secular institutions, it is often forgotten that nearly all of these schools started in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as seminaries under the leadership of staunchly Christian presidents, and that the therapeutic guidance they provided was given within avowedly religious contexts.

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