Wednesday, May 3, 2023

Education and its Discontents



In September, two months before the 2022 elections, the Republican National Committee (RNC) announced that the committee had “surpassed another historic milestone: over 50 million voter contacts made cycle-to-date.” 
This January, State Voices, a nonprofit that convenes and coordinates left-wing nonprofit activist groups across the nation, issued a similar statement.
In 2022, the State Voices network made 140 million voter contacts “including 1.9 million calls, 34.5 million texts, and over 1 million doors, and 90 million contacts over mail via Voter Participation Center.” They also reported registering 820,000 new voters and making 3 million voter contacts during the Senate run-off election in Georgia.

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Everyone who has a job, even at minimum wage, is in the top 15 percent of the world's income distribution.

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After losing 100,000 registered nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, the nursing workforce is expected to lose an additional 900,000 workers by 2027, according to research from the National Council of State Boards of Nursing.




Education and its Discontents

George Will on the decline of interest in university:

There are powerful, immediate financial incentives to study, say, computer science rather than Victorian literature, but economic incentives only partially explain today’s flight from the humanities. Why study history when it is presented as a prolonged indictment — ax-grinding about the past’s failure to be as progressive as today’s professors? Who wants a literature major that is mostly about abstruse literary theories — “deconstruction,” etc.?

Recently the New Yorker magazine disturbed the academic pond with writer Nathan Heller’s 10,232-word attempt to explain plummeting enrollments in humanities classes and majors (“The End of the English Major”). Heller’s nuanced investigation suggests various explanations, including this:

Time was, Heller says, a student might have studied Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” for its “form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius.” But now a student “might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape.” Heller adds: “What does this have to do with how most humans read?”

Nothing. But it has everything to do with the saturation of academia with progressive politics.

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