Still in debt [after his first start-up company failed], Mr. Gerber considered his career options. His mother kept encouraging him to get a “real” job, the kind that comes with an office and a boss. But, using the last $700 in his bank account, he decided to start another company instead.

With the new company, called Sizzle It, Mr. Gerber vowed to find a niche, reduce overhead and generally be more frugal. The company, which specializes in short promotional videos, was profitable the first year, he says.

Mr. Gerber, now 27, isn’t a millionaire, but he’s paid off his loans and doesn’t have to live with his parents (he rents an apartment in Hoboken, N.J.). And he thinks his experience can help other young people who face a daunting unemployment rate.

In October, Mr. Gerber started the Young Entrepreneur Council “to create a shift from a résumé-driven society to one where people create their own jobs,” he says. “The jobs are going to come from the entrepreneurial level.”

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The father of the Academic Magnet High School student who set himself on fire near the school’s front entrance this week said his son “was struck with a despair so dark that he could not see beyond it, in spite of the love, support and counseling he received.”

Trace Williams appeared briefly before news media Friday to explain his son Aaron’s death. Reading from a prepared statement, and citing a letter written by the 16-year-old before his death, Williams said the self- immolation was an attempt “to reach out to as many hearts as possible and to emphasize the importance of living lives of love and compassion.”

He said his son’s lifelong ambition was to be a doctor and help others….

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With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.

American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai ”” an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country ”” are by no means representative of all of China.

About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.

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Ninth grade was supposed to be a fresh start for Marie’s son: new school, new children. Yet by last October, he had become withdrawn. Marie prodded. And prodded again. Finally, he told her.

“The kids say I’m saying all these nasty things about them on Facebook,” he said. “They don’t believe me when I tell them I’m not on Facebook.”

But apparently, he was.

Marie, a medical technologist and single mother who lives in Newburyport, Mass., searched Facebook. There she found what seemed to be her son’s page: his name, a photo of him grinning while running ”” and, on his public wall, sneering comments about teenagers he scarcely knew.

Someone had forged his identity online and was bullying others in his name….

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Maybe money can’t buy happiness. But can it buy friendliness?

Columbia University is hoping it can. The Office of Residential Programs at the university, sensing that its campus had grown too introverted, this week has tried to encourage casual interactions among students with a game, called “The Social Experiment,” aimed at getting campus strangers to talk to each other. The winner gets $500.

Here’s how it works: Each day of the week all students on campus are given a random word as a prompt. A subset of students is assigned to keep one of several passwords, which they disclose to any student who addresses them with the prompt word. At the end of the week, the person who has collected the most passwords wins the cash. The idea is that in the process of foraging for passwords, seekers will be forced to interact with fellow students whom they do not know.

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“He was a heavily built man who looked about forty, with a fleshy oval face and a ruddy complexion. His black hair had retreated from his forehead, which made him especially imposing. I knew nothing about him, except that he was the college English tutor. I did not know that he was the best lecturer in the department, nor had I read the only book that he had published under his own name (hardly anyone had). Even after I had been taught by him for three years, it never entered my mind that he could one day become an author whose books would sell at the rate of about two million copies a year. Since he never spoke of religion while I was his pupil, or until we had become friends 15 years later, it would have seemed incredible that he would become the means of bringing many back to the Christian faith.”

–George Sayer, Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times (Macmillan, 1998)

On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?

By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.

He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

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A Duke University cancer scientist resigned Friday amid concerns about his research that arose after the university started probing whether he’d lied on a grant application.

School spokeswoman Debbe Geiger also said another researcher at the school is asking the journal Nature Medicine to retract a paper he published with Anil Potti, the scientist who’s stepping down. Potti’s collaborator Joseph Nevins said some of the tests in the research they produced for that paper can not be duplicated.

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I haven’t been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don’t know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there’s Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I’ve taken hundreds of crash courses this way.

After I’ve gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I’ve refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I’ll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph.

I’ve also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: “A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come.” Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment’s instructions.

How good is the product created by this process? That depends””on the day, my mood, how many other assignments I am working on.

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(We first posted on Sister Rose Ann Fleming back in March–KSH).

I’ve written much on these pages about the often problematic nexus of collegiate academics and athletics. Over the years, I’ve pilloried Kentucky and Memphis and their 30% graduation rates. By contrast, I’ve held up Catholic colleges like Notre Dame””one of the few schools where athletes have a higher graduation rate than the general student body””as examples of schools that refuse to accept academically unqualified students simply because they have good jump shots.

My faith was shaken earlier this year when the New York Times interviewed Sister Rose Ann Fleming. She’s the feisty 5- foot-4-inch, 78-year-old nun who makes sure that the basketball players at Xavier University, a Jesuit Catholic college in Cincinnati, spend as much time in class as they do in the gym. Terrell Holloway, a sophomore guard at Xavier, praised Sister Rose in the Times article for keeping on him when he fell behind in a reading class during summer school.

Reading? Summer school?

It forced me to ask myself: Are the Catholic schools, after all, the same as Michigan or Temple when it comes to what kind of athletes they admit? The short answer seems to be yes. The critical difference is that schools like Xavier are making sure that their players receive diplomas.

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In the 1960s, when a young Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz embarked on the mammoth task of translating the ancient Jewish texts of the Talmud into modern Hebrew and, even more daringly, providing his own commentary alongside those of the classical sages, the state of Israel was still in its teens, there were no home computers, and man had not yet landed on the moon.

The monumental work took 45 years. But this month in his hometown, Jerusalem, Rabbi Steinsaltz, now 73, marked the end of the endeavor, as the last of the 45 volumes of his edition of the Babylonian Talmud, originally completed 1,500 years ago, rolled off the press.

“When I began it I did not think it would be so difficult or so long,” the rabbi said in a meandering interview that went late into the night at his Steinsaltz Center for religious studies in the city’s historic Nahlaot neighborhood. “I thought it would take maybe half the time.”

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Kathy DeGrego’s T-shirt lets you know right away she isn’t an old-school librarian.

“Shhh,” it says, “is a four-letter word.”

That spirit of bookish defiance has guided the makeover of the suburban Denver library system where DeGrego works. Reference desks and study carrels have been replaced by rooms where kids can play Guitar Hero. Overdue book fines have been eliminated, and the arcane Dewey Decimal System has been scrapped in favor of bookstore-like sections organized by topic.

“It’s very common for people to say, ‘Why do I need a library when I’ve got a computer?’ ” said Pam Sandlian-Smith, director of the seven-branch Rangeview, Colo., Library District. “We have to reframe what the library means to the community.”

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The spirit of Socrates will be evoked tonight in the IQ2 debate at City Recital Hall, where speakers will argue over the teaching of ethics in NSW primary schools.

Parents who believed their children would benefit from the state government’s ethics program at the expense of attending Special Religious Education were the victims of a populist and uninformed debate, the Anglican Bishop of North Sydney, Glenn Davies, told the Herald yesterday. He will speak in the negative to the proposal that special ethics education should be allowed for children not attending scripture classes.
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Simon Longstaff, the executive director of the St James Ethics Centre that devised the now completed pilot program, will step down from his usual position as IQ2 chairman of the debate to argue for the affirmative.

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POTTER: Washington Jesuit Academy [WJA] is an independent Catholic school. All of its students are African American or Latino. Most are not Catholic. Tuition is $18,000 a year, but families pay nothing. The money comes mainly from private donations and foundation grants.

SHANA HAIRE (WJA Parent): I just love my kids, you know, and I want the best for them. If you have your education you can go anywhere. Anything that you want to do in life, you can do it.

POTTER: Shana Haire’s son, Domonic, is in seventh grade at WJA and willingly gets up before dawn to begin a rigorous 12-hour day at school, 11 months a year.

DOMONIC HAIRE: It’s fun to do because you learn more every day, you know, you get to interact more with the students, so it’s like it’s another part of your family.

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Dr. Cleveland L. Sellers Jr., president of Voorhees College, was recently elected chairman of the Association of Episcopal Colleges, the U.S. chapter of the Colleges and Universities of the Anglican Communion.

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A huge demonstration against tuition fees by tens of thousands of students and lecturers descended into violence today when a group of protesters smashed their way into the headquarters of the Conservative party.

A number of police officers were injured after they came under attack from youths, some wearing scarves to hide their faces, amid scenes of chaos. Eight people were taken to hospital with injuries after the violence flared at Millbank Tower, next to the River Thames in central London.

The demonstration, organised by the National Union of Students and the University and College Union, started peacefully, with up to 50,000 students, lecturers and supporters, marching from Whitehall past Downing Street and Parliament.

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From organizing workers to preventing war to making the economy more green, journalist Chris Hedges argues that, for decades, liberals have surrendered the good fights to corporations and ruling powers.

In his new book, Death of the Liberal Class, Hedges slams five specific groups and institutions ”” the Democratic Party, churches, unions, the media and academia ”” for failing Americans and allowing for the creation of a “permanent underclass.”

Hedges says that, for motives ranging from self-preservation to careerism, the “liberal establishment” purged radicals from its own ranks and, as a result, lost its checks on capitalism and corporate power.

“For millions of Americans, including the 15 million unemployed Americans,” Hedges tells NPR’S Neal Conan, “the suffering is becoming acute.”

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While China’s students have long filled American graduate schools, its undergraduates now represent the fastest-growing group of international students. In 2008-9, more than 26,000 were studying in the United States, up from about 8,000 eight years earlier, according to the Institute of International Education.

Students are ending up not just at nationally known universities, but also at regional colleges, state schools and even community colleges that recruit overseas. Most of these students pay full freight (international students are not eligible for government financial aid) ”” a benefit for campuses where the economic downturn has gutted endowments or state financing.

The boom parallels China’s emergence as the world’s largest economy after the United States. China is home to a growing number of middle-class parents who have saved for years to get their only child into a top school, hoping for an advantage in a competitive job market made more so by a surge in college graduates. Since the 1990s, China has doubled its number of higher education institutions. More than 60 percent of high school graduates now attend a university, up from 20 percent in the 1980s. But this surge has left millions of diploma-wielding young people unable to find white-collar work in a country still heavily reliant on low-paying manufacturing.

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Like most other undergraduates, Anish Patel likes to sleep in. Even though his Principles of Microeconomics class at 9:35 a.m. is just a five-minute stroll from his dorm, he would rather flip open his laptop in his room to watch the lecture, streamed live over the campus network.

On a recent morning, as Mr. Patel’s two roommates slept with covers pulled tightly over their heads, he sat at his desk taking notes on Prof. Mark Rush’s explanation of the term “perfect competition.” A camera zoomed in for a close-up of the blackboard, where Dr. Rush scribbled in chalk, “lots of firms and lots of buyers.”

The curtains were drawn in the dorm room. The floor was awash in the flotsam of three freshmen ”” clothes, backpacks, homework, packages of Chips Ahoy and Cap’n Crunch’s Crunch Berries.

The University of Florida broadcasts and archives Dr. Rush’s lectures less for the convenience of sleepy students like Mr. Patel than for a simple principle of economics: 1,500 undergraduates are enrolled and no lecture hall could possibly hold them.

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Is a state law that allows tax credits for donations to scholarship programs unconstitutional if most of the recipients attend religious schools?

That’s the question the U.S. Supreme Court wrestled with Wednesday (Nov. 3), centered around an Arizona program where two of the largest scholarship groups require recipients to attend Catholic or evangelical schools.

Lawyers representing Arizona and the U.S. Department of Justice argued that the decision on where to use the scholarships is made by parents and students, not the government, and does not violate the First Amendment.

“Arizona’s tuition tax credit does not violate the Establishment Clause because it’s a neutral law that results in scholarship programs of private choice,” said Paula Bickett, Arizona’s chief counsel for civil appeals.

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Bishop Kevin Farrell of the Catholic Diocese of Dallas has taken issue publicly with a Southern Methodist University professor’s upcoming lecture on U.S. Catholic bishops and abortion law.

The Rev. Charles Curran is a Catholic priest and ethicist who has long taught at SMU, and who also has a history of tangling with the Vatican over social issues.

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A Charleston County mother and her 14-year-old daughter were spending some quality time together one Sunday evening when the conversation turned to sex.

She asked her daughter whether she was sexually active, and the Burke High School freshman surprised her with the news that she had sex once. After a few minutes of silence, the mother told her daughter that she wanted to call the family doctor and arrange for her to go on birth control.

This time, her daughter’s response came as an even bigger surprise: a woman at school had taken her to a clinic for a shot that would provide birth control for three months.

The mother, whose name is being withheld to protect her daughter’s identity, said she hadn’t been informed.

Read it all from the front page of today’s local paper.

It is both rare and welcome to hear an educating and educated speech by the Secretary of State for Education at his party conference. Michael Gove’s at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, particularly the section on the curriculum in our schools, repays careful study. He is generally right in his emphasis on the rigorous study of traditional subjects rather than wasting time on what he calls “pseudo-subjects”. We would expect him, as a student of English, to focus on the teaching of language and literature ”” as he does. His choice, though, of the “greats” ”” Dryden, Pope, Swift, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Austen, Dickens and Hardy ”” could have been expanded to include Herbert, Donne, Newman, Hopkins, Eliot, Chesterton, Greene and Belloc.

It is, however, his comments about the teaching of history that are the most telling. He reminds us of that sundering of our society from its past which I have called “national amnesia”, and asserts that until we understand the struggles of the past we will not be able to value our hard-won freedoms. All of this, and more, is music to my ears, but the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

We must ensure that the teaching of history is not just about a number of significant events and personalities and that there should be a connected narrative. But how is this to be achieved and what is the “golden chain of harmony” that can provide the connection? Surely, this has to do with a world-view that underlies the emergence of characteristically British institutions and values: the Constitution itself (“the Queen in Parliament under God”); a concern for the poor; a social security net, based on the parish church, which goes back to the 16th century; and personal liberties as enshrined in the Magna Carta.

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October has been a bad month for college towns.

On Oct. 2, a raid by New Haven, Conn., police to break up a party by Yale University students led to claims of police brutality and excessive force.

One week later, a party by Penn State University students turned violent when a fight between two women spilled out onto the streets of State College, leaving two students with stab wounds.

Last week, Pace University football player Danroy “DJ” Henry was shot and killed by police outside a popular eatery frequented by students from the nearby Pace campus.

What they have in common is alcohol ”” a common component in encounters between police and college students that can fuel tensions.

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Democrat Vincent Sheheen said Monday that the state must invest more in college and early childhood education as the economy improves, while Republican Nikki Haley said the state must ask businesses and faith-based groups to do more in the schools, from providing preschool to stocking public libraries.

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A global report on school violence identifies bullying as the biggest problem in US school playgrounds.

Slut. Fat. Gay. Those are some common words – weapons – America’s youth uses to target each other in bullying.

A global report released on Monday by children’s development organisation Plan International gauges the economic impact of school violence, which it categorised as corporal punishment, sexual abuse and bullying.

The US pays a high price for its youth violence, both in and out of schools. Plan estimated the total cost of all forms of youth violence at $158bn (£100bn).

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For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.

The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.

Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.

Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.

Read it all (emphasis mine).

When Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi killed himself after his roommate allegedly broadcast his sexual encounter with another man, the Rev. R. Albert Mohler wondered if anything could have prevented the 18-year-old’s suicide.

“Tyler could just have well been one of our own children,” said Mohler, a father of two and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who criticized the Christian treatment of gays on his blog.

“Christians have got to stop talking about people struggling with sexual issues as a tribe apart.”

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Students in…[New South Wales] will be offered ethics classes as an alternative to scripture classes by next year, under a proposal the government is expected to adopt.

The Minister for Education, Verity Firth, will release today the findings of an independent report on a trial of ethics classes held in 10 schools over 10 weeks this year.
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The 102-page report, by Sue Knight and three colleagues at the University of South Australia, recommends the government adopts the ethics classes model used in the trial if it decides to establish the classes.

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