Education – Page 40 – artdiamondblog.com

Let There Be Light

One of Mark Bent’s solar flashlights stuck in a wall to illuminate a classroom in Africa. Source of the photo: http://bogolight.com/images/success6.jpg

What Africa most needs, to grow and prosper, is to eject kleptocratic war-lord governments, and to embrace property rights and the free market. But in the meantime, maybe handing out some solar powered flashlights can make some modest improvements in how some people live.

The story excerpted below is an example of private, entrepreneur-donor-involved, give-while-you-live philanthropy that holds a greater promise of actually doing some good in the world, than other sorts of philanthropy, or than government foreign aid.

FUGNIDO, Ethiopia — At 10 p.m. in a sweltering refugee camp here in western Ethiopia, a group of foreigners was making its way past thatch-roofed huts when a tall, rail-thin man approached a silver-haired American and took hold of his hands.

The man, a Sudanese refugee, announced that his wife had just given birth, and the boy would be honored with the visitor’s name. After several awkward translation attempts of “Mark Bent,” it was settled. “Mar,” he said, will grow up hearing stories of his namesake, the man who handed out flashlights powered by the sun.

Since August 2005, when visits to an Eritrean village prompted him to research global access to artificial light, Mr. Bent, 49, a former foreign service officer and Houston oilman, has spent $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.

His invention gives up to seven hours of light on a daily solar recharge and can last nearly three years between replacements of three AA batteries costing 80 cents.

Over the last year, he said, he and corporate benefactors like Exxon Mobil have donated 10,500 flashlights to United Nations refugee camps and African aid charities.

Another 10,000 have been provided through a sales program, and 10,000 more have just arrived in Houston awaiting distribution by his company, SunNight Solar.

“I find it hard sometimes to explain the scope of the problems in these camps with no light,” Mr. Bent said. “If you’re an environmentalist you think about it in terms of discarded batteries and coal and wood burning and kerosene smoke; if you’re a feminist you think of it in terms of security for women and preventing sexual abuse and violence; if you’re an educator you think about it in terms of helping children and adults study at night.”

Here at Fugnido, at one of six camps housing more than 21,000 refugees 550 miles west of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, Peter Gatkuoth, a Sudanese refugee, wrote on “the importance of Solor.”

“In case of thief, we open our solor and the thief ran away,” he wrote. “If there is a sick person at night we will took him with the solor to health center.”

A shurta, or guard, who called himself just John, said, “I used the light to scare away wild animals.” Others said lights were hung above school desks for children and adults to study after the day’s work.

For the full story, see:

Will Connors and Ralph Blumenthal. "Letting Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poor." The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., May 20, 2007): 8.

(Note: the title of the article on line was: "Solar Flashlight Lets Africa’s Sun Deliver the Luxury of Light to the Poorest Villages.")

Source of map: online version of the NYT article cited above.

The Liberal Attack on Free Speech at Antioch

THIS is an obituary for a great American institution whose death was announced this week. After 155 years, Antioch College is closing.

. . .

With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, the college increased African-American enrollment to 25 percent in 1968, from virtually nil in previous years. The new students were recruited from the inner city. At around the same time, Antioch created coeducational residence halls, with no adult supervision. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll became the rule, as you might imagine, and there was enormous peer pressure to be involved in all of them. No member of the faculty or administration, and certainly none of the students, could guess what these sudden changes would mean. They were simply embraced in the spirit of the time.

I moved into this sociological petri dish from a well-to-do suburb. Within my first week I twice had guns drawn on me, once in fun and once in a state of drunken for real by a couple of ex-cons whom one of my classmates, in the interest of breaking down class barriers, had invited to live with her.

My roommate began the tortured process of coming out of the closet, first by pursuing women relentlessly and then accepting the truth and allowing himself to be pursued by men. He needed to talk all this out with himself when he came in each morning at 4 a.m., and in the face of his personal crisis, there was little I could do to assert my right to sleep.

. . .

Antioch College became a rump where the most illiberal trends in education became entrenched. Since it is always easier to impose a conformist ethos on a small group than a large one, as the student body dwindled, free expression and freedom of thought were crushed under the weight of ultraliberal orthodoxy. By the 1990s the breadth of challenging ideas a student might encounter at Antioch had narrowed, and the college became a place not for education, but for indoctrination. Everyone was on the same page, a little to the left of The Nation in worldview.

For the full commentary, see:

Michael Goldfarb. "Where the Arts Were Too Liberal." The New York Times, Section 4 (Sun., June 17, 2007): 13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Professors Have Lost the Skills to Write Lively Prose and Choose Interesting Topics

The excerpt below is from a WSJ summary of an article by Maureen Ogle in the March-April 2007 issue of HISTORICALLY SPEAKING.

History professors, writes Ms. Ogle in the History Society’s bimonthly bulletin, don’t make enough effort to connect with students who view the world through a lens shaped by iPods and instant messaging. Worse, professors have lost the skills needed to engage a general audience like writing lively prose or choosing interesting topics. Their careers depend on getting articles into tiny journals on abstruse topics, not conveying the importance of that research to the public. . . .

. . .

She resigned from her university post in 1999 and began a mission to provide nonacademic readers with "well-researched, well-documented, well-reasoned history." On the way, she discovered the perils, and pleasures, of writing for an audience "larger than six."

For the full summary, see:

"Informed Reader; ACADEMIA; Historians Belong on the Street, Not in the Tower." The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 31, 2007): B6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

Even France Recognizes English as the Language of Business

The story below provides further evidence that those who are working hard to make English the mandatory language of the United States, should find themselves a real problem to worry about.

PARIS, April 7 — When economics students returned this winter to the elite École Normale Supérieure here, copies of a simple one-page petition were posted in the corridors demanding an unlikely privilege: French as a teaching language.

“We understand that economics is a discipline, like most scientific fields, where the research is published in English,” the petition read, in apologetic tones. But it declared that it was unacceptable for a native French professor to teach standard courses to French-speaking students in the adopted tongue of English.

In the shifting universe of global academia, English is becoming as commonplace as creeping ivy and mortarboards. In the last five years, the world’s top business schools and universities have been pushing to make English the teaching tongue in a calculated strategy to raise revenues by attracting more international students and as a way to respond to globalization.

Business universities are driving the trend, partly because changes in international accreditation standards in the late 1990s required them to include English-language components. But English is also spreading to the undergraduate level, with some South Korean universities offering up to 30 percent of their courses in the language. The former president of Korea University in Seoul sought to raise that share to 60 percent, but ultimately was not re-elected to his post in December.

In Madrid, business students can take their admissions test in English for the elite Instituto de Empresa and enroll in core courses for a master’s degree in business administration in the same language. The Lille School of Management in France stopped considering English a foreign language in 1999, and now half the postgraduate programs are taught in English to accommodate a rising number of international students.

Over the last three years, the number of master’s programs offered in English at universities with another host language has more than doubled, to 3,300 programs at 1,700 universities, according to David A. Wilson, chief executive of the Graduate Management Admission Council, an international organization of leading business schools that is based in McLean, Va.

“We are shifting to English. Why?” said Laurent Bibard, the dean of M.B.A. programs at Essec, a top French business school in a suburb of Paris that is a fertile breeding ground for chief executives.

“It’s the language for international teaching,” he said. “English allows students to be able to come from anyplace in the world and for our students — the French ones — to go everywhere.”

For the full story, see:

DOREEN CARVAJAL. "English as Language of Global Education." The New York Times (Weds., April 11, 2007): A21.

Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin “Really Enjoyed the Montessori Method”

Source for the image of the Moment issue cover, on left: http://www.momentmag.com/issue/index.html Source for the image of the first page of the article, on right: online version of the Moment article cited below.

Sergey, who turned six that summer, remembers what followed as simply “unsettling”—literally so. “We were in different places from day to day,” he says. The journey was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the free world. Then, on to the suburbs of Paris, where Michael’s “unofficial” Jewish Ph.D. advisor, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Katok, who had emigrated the year before with his family, looked after the Brins and paved the way for Michael to teach at Maryland.

When the family finally landed in America on October 25, they were met at New York’s Kennedy Airport by friends from Moscow. Sergey’s first memory of the United States was of sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway as their hosts drove them home to Long Island.

The Brins found a house to rent in Maryland—a simple, cinder-block structure in a lower-middle-class neighborhood not far from the university campus. With a $2,000 loan from the Jewish community, they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick. And, at Katok’s suggestion, they enrolled Sergey in Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland.

He struggled to adjust. Bright-eyed and bashful, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent when he started school. “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” recalls Genia. “We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn’t the case.”

Patty Barshay, the school’s director, became a friend and mentor to Sergey and his parents. She invited them to a party at her house that first December (“a bunch of Jewish people with nothing to do on Christmas Day”) and wound up teaching Genia how to drive. Everywhere they turned, there was so much to take in. “I remember them inviting me over for dinner one day,” Barshay says, “and I asked Genia, ‘What kind of meat is this?’ She had no idea. They had never seen so much meat” as American supermarkets offer.

When I ask about her former pupil, Barshay lights up, obviously proud of Sergey’s achievements. “Sergey wasn’t a particularly outgoing child,” she says, “but he always had the self-confidence to pursue what he had his mind set on.”

He gravitated toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. “I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he tells me. “I could grow at my own pace.” He adds that the Montessori environment—which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests—helped foster his creativity.

“He was interested in everything,” Barshay says, but adds, “I never thought he was any brighter than anyone else.”

For the full story, see:

Mark Malseed. "The Story of Sergey Brin; How the Moscow-born entrepreneur cofounded and changed the way the world searches." Moment Magazine (February 2007).

“The Odor of Stagnation”

(p. 244) Whenever I walk into a public school, I stagger a bit at the entrance. The moment I step across the threshold, I’m nearly toppled by a wave of nostalgia. Most schools I’ve visited in the twenty-first century look and feel exactly like the central Ohio, public schools I attended in the 1970s. The classrooms are the same size. The desks stand in those same rows. Bulletin boards preview the next national holiday. The hallways even smell the same. Sure, some classrooms might have a computer or two. But in most respects, the schools American children attend today seem indistinguishable from the ones their parents and grandparents attended generations earlier.

At first such deja vu warmed my soul. But then I thought about it. How many other places look and feel exactly as they did twenty, thirty, or forty years ago? Banks don’t. Hospitals don’t. Grocery stores don’t. Maybe the sweet nostalgia I sniffed on those classroom visits was really the odor of stagnation.

Source:

Pink, Daniel H. Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live. New York: Warner Business Books, 2001.

(Note: italics in original.)

Aaron Brown Asks UNL Tough Questions on Students’ Right to Defend Themselves

Source of image is screen capture from KETV web page: http://www.ketv.com/news/13120432/detail.html

Aaron Brown was an excellent student in my micro-principles course several years ago, and now he is a law student at UNL. You may also remember him as a frequent contributor of comments to entries on this blog.

He’s gotten some attention today (4/26/07) by speaking out for the right of college students to defend themselves by bearing arms.

For the KETV (Omaha ABC channel 7) story, see: http://www.ketv.com/news/13120432/detail.html

For the KOLN (Omaha Fox channel 10) story, see: http://www.kolnkgin.com/news/headlines/7209236.html

Obama Should Support School Vouchers Experiment

There’s something about our nation’s capital that converts many leading Democrats to school choice. Perhaps it’s the glimpse that Washington, D.C. affords into inner-city public schools.

But in most cases this appreciation of school choice extends only to their own children — and not to the millions of children in failing public schools. Indeed, a nearly perfect correlation exists among Democratic presidential candidates who have exercised school choice for their own children and those who would deny such choices to the parents of other children.

. . .

The mystery man is Sen. Barack Obama, who sends his child to a private school in Chicago yet once referred to school vouchers as "social Darwinism." Still, he says that on education reform, "I think a good place to start would be for both Democrats and Republicans to say . . . we are willing to experiment and invest in anything that works."

Well, school choice works. Every study that compares children who applied for school choice scholarships and received them with those who applied but did not shows improved academic performance. More important, every study that has examined the effect of school choice competition has found significantly improved performance by public schools.

Given their track records it is doubtful how many candidates will agree with Sen. Obama’s professed openness to experiment. But as he might say, we can always have the audacity to hope.

For the full commentary, see:

CLINT BOLICK. "Selective School Choice." The Wall Street Journal (Fri., March 2, 2007): A11.

(Note: ellipsis between paragraphs was added; ellipsis within Obama quote was in the original.)

For Better Jobs, Immigrants Voluntarily Line Up to Learn English

In Mount Vernon, New York, Maria de Oliveira (center) waited three months for an opening in this English class. Source of photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

In the United States, other things equal, those who speak English earn more than those who do not. So there is a substantial incentive for immigrants to learn English, even in the absence of the much-debated proposed laws to mandate English in various ways. Consider the evidence in the article excerpted below:

(p. A1) MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Two weeks after she moved here from her native Brazil, Maria de Oliveira signed up for free English classes at a squat storefront in this working-class suburb, figuring that with an associate’s degree and three years as an administrative assistant, she could find a good job in America so long as she spoke the language.

The woman who runs the classes at Mount Vernon’s Workforce and Career Preparation Center added Ms. Oliveira’s name to her pink binder, at the bottom of a 90-person waiting list that stretched across seven pages. That was in October. Ms. Oliveira, 26, finally got a seat in the class on Jan. 16.

“I keep wondering how much more I’d know if I hadn’t had to wait so long,” she said in Portuguese.

. . .

Luis Sanchez, 47, a Peruvian truck driver for a beer distributor in New Brunswick, has been in this country (p. C14) 10 years — and on the waiting list for English classes in Perth Amboy five months. “You live from day to day, waiting to get the call that you can come to class,” Mr. Sanchez said in Spanish, explaining that he knew a little English but wanted to improve his writing skills so he could apply for better jobs. “I keep on waiting.”

. . .

In Newburgh, N.Y., an Orange County town where one in five of the 29,000 residents are immigrants, Blanca Saravia has amassed an impressive portfolio of odd jobs since arriving from Honduras in 2004: gas station attendant, office janitor, cook’s helper, and, for the last 14 months, packager at a local nail-polish factory. Speaking in her native Spanish, Ms. Saravia said that she has been able to get by with co-workers’ translating, but that “when the boss gives orders, I don’t understand.”

. . .

. . . Ahmed Al Saidi, 49, who works at a gas station and moved from Yemen in 1994, said in halting English that he wants to learn the language “for better work and to talk to people when I go to the store.”

Ms. Oliveira, the immigrant from Brazil, said she still knows too little English to venture into the marketplace; her husband, who is American born and supports the couple financially, encouraged her to enroll in the classes, held five mornings a week.

“I hope that when I’m speaking a little better, I’ll be able to find a job where I can use the English I learned here and the skills I have from back home,” she said in Portuguese. “When I was on the waiting list, there were times I thought this time would never come.”

For the full story, see:

FERNANDA SANTOS. "Demand for English Lessons Outstrips Supply." The New York Times (Tues., February 27, 2007): A1 & C14.

(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of graphic: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

UNO Economics RA Talks Personal Finance

Molly McGrath. Soure of photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.

Molly was one of our Research Assistants last year in the UNO economics department:

(p. 1D) Miss Nebraska Molly McGrath has driven more than 25,000 miles since being crowned in June, mostly to schools as she talks about personal finance issues like avoiding debt and using money as a tool to realize dreams.

"There is a drastic need for economic and financial education with all people, but especially in low-income communities and especially among our youth," McGrath told about a dozen people at a recent meeting of the Rotary Club of Omaha-North.

McGrath knows about making ends meet. Her parents could not help her pay for college, so she has used more than $20,000 in scholarships won through the Miss America program. She also cleaned toilets, dorm rooms and apartments as she earned her undergraduate degree at New York University in New York.

"I was known right away at NYU as the girl from Nebraska," McGrath said. "And after I started this cleaning business I was known as the girl from Nebraska who cleans toilets."

For the full story, see:

JOE RUFF. "Miss Nebraska teaches dollars and sense." Omaha World-Herald (Monday, February 26, 2007): 1D & 2D.

Omaha Public Schools’ Attack on Other Districts Costs $12 Million in Lawyer Fees

Source of graphic: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article cited below.

(p. 1A) Who’s winning in the Omaha-area disputes about school finances and boundaries?.

So far, it looks like the lawyers.

Taxpayers have shelled out $12 million to private lawyers hired to handle those matters for Omaha-area school districts and the State of Nebraska, a World-Herald study found.

Nearly all of that has been paid during the past 3¹/₂ years to two Omaha firms: Baird Holm, hired by the Omaha Public Schools, and Fraser Stryker, which was hired by the state and separately by the suburban districts.

The money has been spent on three interconnected items:

• The OPS lawsuit against the state’s school funding system, which accounts for most of the $12 million.

• The Omaha district’s effort, now on hold, to take over its suburban neighbors.

• And fallout from the Legislature’s 2006 law that would break apart OPS and create a two-county "learning community" for the Omaha metro area.

The $12 million doesn’t include lobbying costs or staff time for the three matters. And it doesn’t include millions of dollars the districts paid lawyers during the same period for routine legal work.

The three items have fueled a stunning increase in OPS payments to lawyers. The district now pays about $400,000 a month in legal fees – four times what it (p. 2A) paid five years ago.

"This seems to me to be crazy," said State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, who introduced a bill this year aimed at curbing school districts’ spending on legal fees.

"These are legal fees, paid pretty much by taxpayers, for a school district to conduct a legal war against another school district or against the state," said Raikes, who heads the Legislature’s education committee.