Half of Charleston County’s high schools face a daunting challenge in educating the new crop of freshmen they will welcome this fall.

Twenty percent of their ninth-graders won’t be able to read better than a fourth-grader, but those students will be expected to learn and perform at a high-school level. Many of these teenagers likely will struggle to simply read the words on their teachers’ SmartBoards, much less understand and analyze the information being conveyed.

The Charleston County School Board recognized the severity of this problem last year by declaring literacy its top priority. Their decision followed a series of Post and Courier stories that revealed nearly 20 percent of the county’s ninth-graders read on a fourth-grade level or worse.

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The eldest of Pamela Fettes’ three sons only recently celebrated his 15th birthday, but she is already worrying about the cost of their college education.

Ms Fettes, a 46-year-old single mother, lives in Belvidere, a blue-collar town 70 miles north-west of Chicago. She earns $50,000 a year as a regional healthcare co-ordinator, putting her right at the US’s median household income ”“ although she also works two nights a week as a hospital clerk and decorates cakes on the side. She took on the extra work after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 and getting divorced last year, both of which involved considerable expense.

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…what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics ”” anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people ”” people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day ”” more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer?

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A guide to the intellectual trends that, for better or worse, are shaping America right now. (Plus a bunch of other ideas, insights, hypotheses, and provocations.)

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Online Education has created this hand-drawn infographic below to illustrate the state of our current educational system and how it compares to the rest of the world. Brace yourself — some of these rankings may come as a shock.

Read it all (Hat tip: Minyanville).

Doctors save lives, but they can sometimes be insufferable know-it-alls who bully nurses and do not listen to patients. Medical schools have traditionally done little to screen out such flawed applicants or to train them to behave better, but that is changing.

At Virginia Tech Carilion, the nation’s newest medical school, administrators decided against relying solely on grades, test scores and hourlong interviews to determine who got in. Instead, the school invited candidates to the admissions equivalent of speed-dating: nine brief interviews that forced candidates to show they had the social skills to navigate a health care system in which good communication has become critical.

The new process has enormous consequences not only for the lives of the applicants but, its backers hope, also for the entire health care system. It is called the multiple mini interview, or M.M.I., and its use is spreading. At least eight medical schools in the United States ”” including those at Stanford, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Cincinnati ”” and 13 in Canada are using it.

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[Bishop Idowu Fearon of Kaduna]… lauded the establishment of federal universities, noted that the development of any nation was hinged on the level of education of its people.

He urged the president to sustain the leverage given Nigerians to be educated from primary to tertiary levels with less stress.

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The legitimate place of religion in NSW government schools might be put at risk by the misuse of the National School Chaplaincy Program, the head of Sydney’s Anglican Education Commission has warned.

Bryan Cowling, the executive director of the peak body for the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, said well-established special religious education preserved the secularism of NSW schools while providing weekly faith instruction for those who wanted it.

But he told the Herald that chaplains – with the term’s religious connotations – might blur the distinction between faith and welfare, increasing the chance of misuse by proselytising, which might call into question access granted to schools for special religious education, also known as scripture.

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When Pooja Nath was an undergraduate at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, an elite engineering school in India, she felt isolated. She was one of the few women on campus. While her male classmates collaborated on problem sets, Ms. Nath toiled in the computer lab alone.

“Back then, no one owned a laptop, there was no Internet in the dorm rooms. So everyone in my class would be working in the computer lab together,” she said. “But all the guys would be communicating with each other, getting help so fast, and I would be on the sidelines just watching.”

The experience as a young woman in that culture formed the foundation of her start-up in Silicon Valley, Piazza….

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Governors who draw up ad­missions policies for the 2111 Church of England voluntary aided schools are to be told that where there are quotas for children from church families, places should be allocated only on attendance at church.

Giving extra points to parents who undertake extra duties, such as church-cleaning or bell-ringing, could discriminate against families where both parents work outside the home, new advice on admissions from the Board of Education says.

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The South Carolina baseball program permanently etched its name into the College World Series history book Tuesday night.

With a 5-2 victory over Florida behind the stellar pitching of junior left-hander Michael Roth, the Gamecocks won their second consecutive NCAA championship, becoming the sixth program to repeat as national title holders along with Texas, Southern Cal, Stanford, LSU and Oregon State.

“Like the (CWS) motto says, ”˜History happens here,’ and that’s what we did. We made some history,” Roth said.

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South Carolina’s incredible baseball season continued Monday with a game so unlikely that it made the Disney movie “Angels in the Outfield” seem plausible.

The Gamecocks won 2-1 in 11 innings over SEC rival Florida in Game 1 of the CWS championship series at TD Ameritrade Park to put themselves one victory from a second consecutive NCAA championship.

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“People can feel like girls, they can feel like boys, they can feel like both, and they can even feel like neither,” Joel Baum, director of the activist group Gender Spectrum, tells the students at Redwood Heights Elementary School in California in the accompanying video. “Gender identity is about what’s in here (Baum says pointing to his chest). It’s about what’s up here (pointing to his head) and in here (again pointing to his chest).”

It’s all part of the Oakland Unified School District’s efforts to create “gender sensitive environments for kids.”

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I’ve been writing in this blog about living out our faith in the context of our work and academics. [Lesslie] Newbigin calls us to learn to do this from the starting point of God’s new creation in Christ which means we will view the world differently than from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment project. That was about objectivity, efficiency, calculations, technology, and cost benefit assessments that all too often has had the effect of marginalizing or oppressing actual people. As Christians, we know that pursuing those values alone can’t be the best way to operate.

Evelyn Lai, a May 2011 alumna from the Yale School of Nursing, gave the student commencement address to her class. In it, I think she models at least one dimension of what pursuing that profession from the perspective of God’s new creation is like. In so doing, she also sets an example that others of us can follow in our disciplines as well….

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The South Carolina baseball team keeps finding improbable ways to win games in the College World Series.

Thanks to two throwing errors by Virginia pitcher Cody Winiarski on consecutive bunts in the 13th inning, the Gamecocks won a dramatic 3-2 victory over top seed Virginia Friday night at TD Ameritrade Park to advance to the national championship series.

One season after defeating UCLA to win the NCAA title, the Gamecocks (53-14) will attempt to repeat against SEC rival Florida (53-17) in a best-of-three series that begins Monday at 8 p.m.

I went to bed after the bottom of the 11th–ugh. Read it all.

ZENIT: What was addressed in this last meeting in Rome?

Mottini: In today’s round table we wished to talk about a world that is increasingly present in the reality of the African continent.

Because at this time Africa continues to be “terra incognita” in many ways — a new America where everyone is going.

The market’s economic or commercial interest in Africa must not be demonized or criminalized. However, we wish to make a contribution that will reinforce especially the dimension of humanization, which is necessary in the market. Hence, to make it understood that the first capital is the human one.

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Twenty years into the Web, academic publishing has retained pretty much the same structures it had in the 19th century.

That’s the argument made by Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Most journals, he notes, will not allow comments on articles. Pieces can’t be revised after publication. They’re locked up behind digital gates, so no one can link to them. And multimedia work? Forget it.

But much scholarship thrives outside that system, Mr. Cohen says, in formats like lengthy blog posts and the “gray literature” of conference papers. On Wednesday, the professor announced a new publishing platform to showcase the best of that online work….

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JAKARTA, Indonesia ”” The bang of a ceremonial gong opens festivities in a cavernous downtown office building here, where representatives from 56 U.S. colleges stand ready to peddle their wares.

The University of Cincinnati passes out pennants. At a booth for Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, three young Indonesians talk up their alma mater. And U.S. Embassy officials tout the 95% approval rate in Indonesia for student visas.

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How About that University of South Carolina Baseball Team?

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A leading bishop has warned that the Church of England must “act now” to secure its role in education amid swift policy change.

Rt Rev John Pritchard, who chairs the Church’s education board, said “very short notice” changes were “not the best way to build for the future”.

He expressed concern about support for Church-run academies and the exclusion of RE from the English baccalaureate.

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Some church members believe the number of members who leave ultimately will be much higher. The official membership at Trinity sits at about 1,500, and Jensen said the average Sunday attendance was about 350.

“I think history will tell whether it was a good decision or a bad decision,” [Bishop Larry] Benfield said. “We’ll have to look to the future to see.”

Benfield did acknowledge his surprise upon hearing of the vestry’s vote.

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Goshen College will no longer play The Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events, school leaders announced, reversing last year’s decision to allow the use of the national anthem for the first time in the Mennonite college’s history.

Some Mennonites had criticized the anthem’s lyrics as glorifying war and offensive to the school’s pacifist traditions. Goshen’s Board of Directors said many felt the school’s “allegiance should be to Christ rather than to country.”

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More than $470 million in new money poured into major-college athletics programs last year, boosting spending on sports even as many of the parent universities struggled with budget reductions during tough economic times, a USA TODAY analysis has found.

Much of the rise in athletics revenue came from an escalation in money generated through multimedia rights deals, donations and ticket receipts, but schools also continued increasing their subsidies from student fees and institutional funds.

Altogether in 2010, about $2 billion in subsidies went to athletics at the 218 public schools that have been in the NCAA’s Division I over the past five years. Those subsidies grew by an inflation-adjusted 3% in 2010. They have grown by 28% since 2006 and account for $1 of every $3 spent on athletics.

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You probably missed the recent special issue of China Newsweek, so let me bring you up to date. Who do you think was on the cover ”” named the “most influential foreign figure” of the year in China? Barack Obama? No. Bill Gates? No. Warren Buffett? No. O.K., I’ll give you a hint: He’s a rock star in Asia, and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him. Give up?

It was Michael J. Sandel, the Harvard University political philosopher.

This news will not come as a surprise to Harvard students, some 15,000 of whom have taken Sandel’s legendary “Justice” class….

(It also will not come as a surprise to close readers of this blog, since we featured this amazing resource last September–KSH).

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Ridgewood High School in New Jersey introduced a homework-free winter break in December. Schools in Tampa, Fla., and Bleckley County, Ga., have instituted “no homework nights” throughout the year. The two-year-old Brooklyn School of Inquiry, a program for gifted and talented elementary students, has made homework optional: it is neither graded nor counted toward progress reports.

“I think people confuse homework with rigor,” said Donna Taylor, the Brooklyn School’s principal, who views homework for children under 11 as primarily benefiting parents by helping them feel connected to the classroom.

The homework revolution has also spread north to Toronto, which in 2008 banned homework for kindergartners and for older children on school holidays, and to the Philippines, where the education department issued a memorandum in September calling on teachers to refrain from giving weekend assignments “for pupils to enjoy their childhood.”

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Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday….

Only 20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were “proficient” or “advanced,” unchanged since the test was last administered in 2006. Proficient means students have a solid understanding of the material.

The news was even more dire in high school, where 12% of 12th-graders were proficient, unchanged since 2006.

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…I believe that intellect and virtue are connected. They influence one another. Some say the intellect is primary. If we know what is good, we will pursue it. Aristotle suggests in the “Nicomachean Ethics” that the influence runs the other way. He says that if you want to listen intelligently to lectures on ethics you “must have been brought up in good habits.” The goals we set for ourselves are brought into focus by our moral vision.

“Virtue,” Aristotle concludes, “makes us aim at the right mark, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.” If he is right, then colleges and universities should concern themselves with virtue as well as intellect.

I want to mention two places where schools might direct that concern, and a slightly old-fashioned remedy that will improve the practice of virtue. The two most serious ethical challenges college students face are binge drinking and the culture of hooking up.

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Promoting harmony between the scientific and Christian communities is a focal point of the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University taking place June 16 to 18 on the Malibu, California campus. Current issues in the debate over the coexistence of science and faith such as stem cell research, conservation science, and finding the common thread between science and theology are among the many topics to be explored at the conference….

This year’s Keynoters are:

Francis S. Collins: “Reflections on the Current Tensions between Science and Faith”

John Polkinghorne: “The Quest for Truth in Science and Theology”

Simran Sethi: “Our Daily Bread: Food, Faith and Conservation”

Ted Peters: “Stem Cells: Who’s Fighting With Whom About What?”

You can check out the website here.

The problem, however, is not a lack of Americans who want to be nurses. It’s finding the schools that can teach them.

“There’s definitely a lot of people interested in nursing,” said Robert Rosseter, spokesman for the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

“The number of students who met all the requirements but weren’t admitted was over 67,000 students last year [in U.S. nursing programs],” he said. “People do want in, but there just aren’t enough seats.”

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Learning to read by learning the Bible may seem a bit odd to 21st-century readers. But the fact is that one of the great incentives was the need to learn what really mattered for your dignity on earth and your salvation in heaven. We may not put it like that these days but literacy is still about dignity and freedom. When we forget this, we are in real trouble.

That’s why it was so shocking to learn that rates of improvement in young people’s literacy have slowed down disturbingly since 2006 and that a quarter of children and young people do not see any connection between reading and success or stability in their lives. Yet the figures clearly show the correlations between inadequate literacy and a variety of social ills – unemployment, lack of a stable family life, and, significantly, apathy about voting. The percentage of functionally illiterate people in our prisons (nearly 50 per cent) tells its own story.

More worrying still are the figures for young people in London. One in three children does not own a book. One in four leaves primary school with a substandard level of literacy.

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