Students aren't failing, but system is, teachers say
Educators feel pressured to ensure high schoolers pass; expert blames Ontario's drive to hike grad rates
By Joanne Laucius, The Ottawa Citizen
April 22, 2009
If you think credit rescue, credit recovery and credit integrity refer to the current recession, you would be wrong. These terms describe a different crisis -- what some feel is the erosion of high school education in Ontario.
The criticism starts in the classroom.
Teachers are saying they are increasingly pressured to make sure students pass. If a student fails to hand in assignments on time, cheats, plagiarizes or doesn't show up for tests, they can "rescue" their endangered credit.
If the student fails, he or she can re-do the assignments they bombed and "recover" a wayward credit.
Teachers are, as a result, concerned about "credit integrity" -- whether a final mark awarded to a student who procrastinates, plagiarizes and bombs tests should be worth the same as the mark awarded to a student who earned a credit by the books the first time around.
There has been so much frustration around the "assessment, evaluation and reporting" issue that the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation's Ottawa bargaining unit has surveyed its membership to gauge the depth of the problem. Union officials are to present the results to a public school board superintendent next week.
Bargaining unit president Kerry Houlahan won't discuss the results, but says she fields more calls about this issue than any other, including queries abut missing deadlines, plagiarism and how to assign grades to students who have missed assignments.
Teachers are stressed, concerned and confused, she said.
Caroline Orchard, a math teacher at Sir Robert Borden High School, feels the frustration. And it has been growing since the public school board revised its policies last September to align them with Ministry of Education direction, she said.
At the heart of the transformation is the belief that marks should not be negatively affected by behaviours such as tardiness in handing in assignments, failing to show up for a test or even academic dishonesty.
Teachers say they no longer have the leverage of awarding a student a zero.
"Even though we rarely used that leverage, it gave us a hammer," said Orchard, who has been a teacher for 34 years.
Meanwhile, teachers have to redesign tests for second, third and even more chances. It's unfair to teachers, unfair to other students who completed assignments on time and unfair to the affected students themselves, who are not learning life skills such as time management and meeting deadlines, Orchard said.
"You might have to reassess them ad infinitum," Orchard said. "At the end of the year, we get panic city. They're scrambling because they left it to the end."
The ranks of dissatisfied teachers are growing, said University of Western Ontario sociologist James Côté, author of Ivory Tower Blues, which tracked the malaise of grade inflation and the culture of entitlement in universities.
Côté's hunch is that the pressure in high schools comes from the provincial drive to increase graduation rates and decrease drop-out rates.
While 68 per cent of students graduated from high school within five years in 2003-2004, the province aims to increase the graduation rate to 85 per cent by 2010-2011. Last year, 13,500 more students graduated from Ontario high schools than in the previous year.
Côté believes students entering university are unprepared, but he doesn't blame teachers.
"It's pretty obvious that their hands are tied. The provincial government is making us do this," he said.
Meanwhile, parents are finding that they have to keep the academic pressure on their children because teachers don't have leverage of an "F."
"If the parent isn't there, the kids will slack off," Côté said. "People take the path of least resistance."
The provincial OSSTF already has a "credit integrity work group" and has held a conference on the topic, but the tipping point may have been a survey of university professors and librarians released two weeks ago.
A commentary released with the survey by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations says the pressure to increase graduation rates is creating a generation of immature students who fail to learn independently and expect success without effort.
It's not the job of universities to remediate academic skills after 12 years of elementary and secondary education, Côté said.
"If the government just wants babysitting, that's fine. We'll drop the pretense," he said.
"Kids aren't being pushed And you can't push them because they don't respond because you don't have weight behind you," said Jon Cowans, an English teacher in the Durham district who got the credit integrity debate rolling with an article called "Why Johnny can't fail" published in Education Forum.
The movement is starting to take on a life of its own.
In Owen Sound, a group of recently retired teachers who call themselves MendEd say they resigned from their jobs partly because they couldn't abide by their board's assessment and evaluation policy.
"Trying to uphold reasonable academic and behavioural expectations took on a nightmarish quality as students were no longer required to complete assignments, do homework, attend class regularly or be respectful," they noted last week in a letter to the editor of the Owen Sound Sun Times.
Teachers are organizing themselves to address the issues they have no power to affect in other ways, Cowans said. "It's beginning to dawn on teachers that they have to take an active voice."
Patricia MacNeil, a spokeswoman for the ministry of education, says it's a fallacy to say teachers have no leverage, although she "won't argue" that they have less than before.
However, the ministry believes that students need different assessment approaches, MacNeil said. Some teachers have set up full-year calendars to give students an opportunity to finish courses, while others have created parent contracts.
"Teachers have a continuum of options to deal with late and missing assignments," MacNeil said.
Only a small minority of students abuse the system, Orchard said, but she fears it will get worse as more students become aware of their rights and seek the path of least resistance.
© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen
THE YOUTH
May 8, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Harlem Miracle
By DAVID BROOKS
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.
They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”
These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren’t even involved in the other programs the organization offers.
To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.
To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
The Harlem Miracle
By DAVID BROOKS
The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains.
That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.”
Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools operated by the Harlem Children’s Zone. They compared students in these schools to students in New York City as a whole and to comparable students who entered the lottery to get into the Harlem Children’s Zone schools, but weren’t selected.
They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.
Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students.
Let me repeat that. It eliminated the black-white achievement gap. “The results changed my life as a researcher because I am no longer interested in marginal changes,” Fryer wrote in a subsequent e-mail. What Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children’s Zone’s founder and president, has done is “the equivalent of curing cancer for these kids. It’s amazing. It should be celebrated. But it almost doesn’t matter if we stop there. We don’t have a way to replicate his cure, and we need one since so many of our kids are dying — literally and figuratively.”
These results are powerful evidence in a long-running debate. Some experts, mostly surrounding the education establishment, argue that schools alone can’t produce big changes. The problems are in society, and you have to work on broader issues like economic inequality. Reformers, on the other hand, have argued that school-based approaches can produce big results. The Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right. The Promise Academy does provide health and psychological services, but it helps kids who aren’t even involved in the other programs the organization offers.
To my mind, the results also vindicate an emerging model for low-income students. Over the past decade, dozens of charter and independent schools, like Promise Academy, have become no excuses schools. The basic theory is that middle-class kids enter adolescence with certain working models in their heads: what I can achieve; how to control impulses; how to work hard. Many kids from poorer, disorganized homes don’t have these internalized models. The schools create a disciplined, orderly and demanding counterculture to inculcate middle-class values.
To understand the culture in these schools, I’d recommend “Whatever It Takes,” a gripping account of Harlem Children’s Zone by my Times colleague Paul Tough, and “Sweating the Small Stuff,” a superb survey of these sorts of schools by David Whitman.
Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school.
They also smash the normal bureaucratic strictures that bind leaders in regular schools. Promise Academy went through a tumultuous period as Canada searched for the right teachers. Nearly half of the teachers did not return for the 2005-2006 school year. A third didn’t return for the 2006-2007 year. Assessments are rigorous. Standardized tests are woven into the fabric of school life.
The approach works. Ever since welfare reform, we have had success with intrusive government programs that combine paternalistic leadership, sufficient funding and a ferocious commitment to traditional, middle-class values. We may have found a remedy for the achievement gap. Which city is going to take up the challenge? Omaha? Chicago? Yours?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/opini ... nted=print
Parental rights: Whose kids are they, anyway?
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary Herald
May 30, 2009
Maybe there really is no such thing as a motherhood issue any more. The phrase "parental rights,"which should be about as bland a declaration of principle as "women and children first," or "all calls will be handled in the order received," has instead provoked near-hysteria in Alberta.
It was introduced into provincial human rights legislation so parents might withdraw their children from instruction on religion, sexuality and sexual orientation, if they think it likely to conflict with their own beliefs. Apparently, it's a North American first, which is good news and bad: The good is that Alberta has acted, the bad that any action should be necessary.
For, deep down, it's a simple matter. Either there is a parental right to veto offensive moral teaching, or there isn't. If there is, fine. Alberta's affirmed it.
But if parents don't have such a right, who do you trust with the moral and legal right to decide what students must learn? Ottawa? The province? School boards? The Alberta Teachers' Association? The gay-activist couple British Columbia contracted to write gay-friendly curriculum for use in its public schools?
As the letter from Russ Green (opposite) shows, some people think it should all be left to teachers, as parents aren't up to it.
I see why Green says that. Too many people pay more attention to what's on TV, than what's in their children's' textbooks. Rights unexercised may be considered abandoned, and being closest to the scene, it's not surprising teachers would rush to squat on them. (But, they are squatting.) Meanwhile in B. C., the education ministry has ruled parents have no rights to pull their kids out of class, except in such narrow areas that no concerned parents could be satisfied.
So, obviously there's a constituency for parents meekly handing their children over to the state for indoctrination in the bromides of the day, be they concerned with sex-ed, global warming, theories of origin, gay rights or whatever else secular evangelists have on their mind this week. That would account for some of the puffy-cheeked criticism offered by teachers' groups, civil libertarians and columnists.
"It makes us look as if we are some Southern U. S. state, trying to enshrine some sort of religious dogma into our governing apparatus," political scientist Keith Brownsey told the National Post. "Where do we live? Oklahoma?" (What's wrong with Oklahoma?) The Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons deplored that "what Christian right-wing activists couldn't accomplish, even in George W. Bush's America, they're about to pull off here." NDP Leader Brian Mason thinks it's like the Scopes Monkey Trial case, which resulted in the teaching of evolution becoming unlawful in Tennessee public schools, and the Alberta Teachers' Association worries teachers may end up in front of a human rights commission. "These are the types of discussions you want to have with kids in school," Frank Bruseker told the Herald. "If parents want to talk about their differing viewpoints (on some teachings), they can do that at home."
The possibly unconscious emphasis in Bruseker's comment is interesting. It is further evidence of the implicit professional assumption among teachers that they own the curriculum, and may properly decide what discussions take place and, of course, in which direction they should be led. Parents?Well, if they have anything to say, say it some other time. Even the word "discussion" is misleading. Everybody knows the way to flunk a course is to reject the text: It would be a fearless student indeed who risked their grade on an essay, no matter how articulate, that pointed out flaws in the Theory of Evolution, or in B. C., defended a traditional view of marriage. Not to put too fine a point on it, outside the rigours of mathematics and chemistry, the business of mass education, since it first appeared 200 years ago, has been to socialize children according to the prevailing opinions of the day. A hundred years ago it was all God and country, all the time; now it's some cocktail of politically correct positions designed to exclude the One and redefine the other.
For once then, I find I'm with the Alberta government, which has rightly decided moms and dads who didn't like what was happening in B. C. shouldn't have to worry about it happening here. Bill 44 obliges schools to let parents know if there's a module coming up that deals with religion, human sexuality or sexual orientation. How hard can that be? Post it on the web, send home a note. Twitter.
Whether a parent's fears are reasonable, or their opinions offend today's self-proclaimed progressives, is not the point. What matters is that some decisions belong to parents, among them what their children are taught where fundamental beliefs about the world and morality often collide.
Children belong to parents, not the state, by right. Now, if we could just get more parents to accept their parallel responsibility to guide, inform and instruct. . . .
At least Alberta has offered a tool, however small, to those who are willing to do so.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Life/Paren ... story.html
By Nigel Hannaford, Calgary Herald
May 30, 2009
Maybe there really is no such thing as a motherhood issue any more. The phrase "parental rights,"which should be about as bland a declaration of principle as "women and children first," or "all calls will be handled in the order received," has instead provoked near-hysteria in Alberta.
It was introduced into provincial human rights legislation so parents might withdraw their children from instruction on religion, sexuality and sexual orientation, if they think it likely to conflict with their own beliefs. Apparently, it's a North American first, which is good news and bad: The good is that Alberta has acted, the bad that any action should be necessary.
For, deep down, it's a simple matter. Either there is a parental right to veto offensive moral teaching, or there isn't. If there is, fine. Alberta's affirmed it.
But if parents don't have such a right, who do you trust with the moral and legal right to decide what students must learn? Ottawa? The province? School boards? The Alberta Teachers' Association? The gay-activist couple British Columbia contracted to write gay-friendly curriculum for use in its public schools?
As the letter from Russ Green (opposite) shows, some people think it should all be left to teachers, as parents aren't up to it.
I see why Green says that. Too many people pay more attention to what's on TV, than what's in their children's' textbooks. Rights unexercised may be considered abandoned, and being closest to the scene, it's not surprising teachers would rush to squat on them. (But, they are squatting.) Meanwhile in B. C., the education ministry has ruled parents have no rights to pull their kids out of class, except in such narrow areas that no concerned parents could be satisfied.
So, obviously there's a constituency for parents meekly handing their children over to the state for indoctrination in the bromides of the day, be they concerned with sex-ed, global warming, theories of origin, gay rights or whatever else secular evangelists have on their mind this week. That would account for some of the puffy-cheeked criticism offered by teachers' groups, civil libertarians and columnists.
"It makes us look as if we are some Southern U. S. state, trying to enshrine some sort of religious dogma into our governing apparatus," political scientist Keith Brownsey told the National Post. "Where do we live? Oklahoma?" (What's wrong with Oklahoma?) The Edmonton Journal's Paula Simons deplored that "what Christian right-wing activists couldn't accomplish, even in George W. Bush's America, they're about to pull off here." NDP Leader Brian Mason thinks it's like the Scopes Monkey Trial case, which resulted in the teaching of evolution becoming unlawful in Tennessee public schools, and the Alberta Teachers' Association worries teachers may end up in front of a human rights commission. "These are the types of discussions you want to have with kids in school," Frank Bruseker told the Herald. "If parents want to talk about their differing viewpoints (on some teachings), they can do that at home."
The possibly unconscious emphasis in Bruseker's comment is interesting. It is further evidence of the implicit professional assumption among teachers that they own the curriculum, and may properly decide what discussions take place and, of course, in which direction they should be led. Parents?Well, if they have anything to say, say it some other time. Even the word "discussion" is misleading. Everybody knows the way to flunk a course is to reject the text: It would be a fearless student indeed who risked their grade on an essay, no matter how articulate, that pointed out flaws in the Theory of Evolution, or in B. C., defended a traditional view of marriage. Not to put too fine a point on it, outside the rigours of mathematics and chemistry, the business of mass education, since it first appeared 200 years ago, has been to socialize children according to the prevailing opinions of the day. A hundred years ago it was all God and country, all the time; now it's some cocktail of politically correct positions designed to exclude the One and redefine the other.
For once then, I find I'm with the Alberta government, which has rightly decided moms and dads who didn't like what was happening in B. C. shouldn't have to worry about it happening here. Bill 44 obliges schools to let parents know if there's a module coming up that deals with religion, human sexuality or sexual orientation. How hard can that be? Post it on the web, send home a note. Twitter.
Whether a parent's fears are reasonable, or their opinions offend today's self-proclaimed progressives, is not the point. What matters is that some decisions belong to parents, among them what their children are taught where fundamental beliefs about the world and morality often collide.
Children belong to parents, not the state, by right. Now, if we could just get more parents to accept their parallel responsibility to guide, inform and instruct. . . .
At least Alberta has offered a tool, however small, to those who are willing to do so.
nhannaford@theherald. canwest.com
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/Life/Paren ... story.html
May 31, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Cum Laude in Evading Bandits
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
One of the great failures of American universities is that they are far too parochial, rarely exposing students to worlds beyond our borders.
If colleges provide credit for dozing through an introductory Spanish class, why not give credit for a “gap year” in a Bolivian village? If students can learn about microfinance while sitting comatose in 9 a.m. lectures, couldn’t they learn more by volunteering with a lender in a Bangladesh slum?
So with summer starting, it’s up to students themselves to self-educate by setting off on their own. I hold my “win a trip” contest precisely to encourage such trips — I’m just back from visiting five West African countries with a University of South Carolina student. Yet when I encourage students’ wanderlust, questions invariably arise: Will I be safe? How do I avoid robbers and malaria?
In response, here are 15 tips for traveling to even the roughest of countries — and back:
1. Carry a “decoy wallet,” so that if you are robbed by bandits with large guns, you have something to hand over. I keep $40 in my decoy wallet, along with an old library card and frequent-flier card. (But don’t begrudge the wallet: when my travel buddy was pickpocketed in Peru, we tried to jump the pickpocket, who turned out to be backed by an entire gang ... )
2. Carry cash and your passport where no robber will find it. Assuming that few bandits read this column, I’ll disclose that I carry mine in a pouch that loops onto my belt and tucks under my trousers.
3. Carry a tiny ski lock with a six-foot retractable wire. Use it to lock your backpack to a hotel bed when you’re out, or to the rack of a train car.
4. At night, set a chair against your hotel door so that it will tip over and crash if someone slips in at 4 a.m. And lift the sheet to look for bloodstains on the mattress — meaning bed bugs.
5. When it gets dark, always carry a headlamp in your pocket. I learned that from a friend whose hotel in Damascus lost power. He lacked a light but was able to feel his way up the stairs in the dark, find his room and walk in. A couple of final gropes, and he discovered it wasn’t his room after all. Unfortunately, it was occupied.
6. If you’re a woman held up in an isolated area, stick out your stomach, pat it and signal that you’re pregnant. You might also invest in a cheap wedding band, for imaginary husbands deflect unwanted suitors.
7. Be wary of accepting drinks from anyone. Robbers sometimes use a date rape drug to knock out their victims — in bars, in trains, in homes. If presented with pre-poured drinks, switch them with your host, cheerfully explaining: “This is an American good luck ritual!”
8. Buy a secondhand local cell phone for $20, outfit it with a local SIM card and keep it in your pocket.
9. When you arrive in a new city, don’t take an airport taxi unless you know it is safe. If you do take a cab, choose a scrawny driver and lock ALL the doors — thieves may pull open the doors at a red light and run off with a bag.
10. Don’t wear a nice watch, for that suggests a fat wallet and also makes a target. I learned that lesson on my first trip to the Philippines: a robber with a machete had just encountered a Japanese businessman with a Rolex — who now, alas, has only one hand.
11. Look out for fake cops or crooked ones. If a policeman tries to arrest you, demand to see some ID and use your cell phone to contact a friend.
12. If you are held up by bandits with large guns, shake hands respectfully with each of your persecutors. It’s very important to be polite to people who might kill you. Surprisingly often, child soldiers and other bandits will reciprocate your fake friendliness and settle for some cash rather than everything you possess. I’ve even had thugs warmly exchange addresses with me, after robbing me.
13. Remember that the scariest people aren’t warlords, but drivers. In buses I sometimes use my pack as an airbag; after one crash I was the only passenger not hospitalized.
14. If terrorists finger you, break out singing “O Canada”!
15. Finally, don’t be so cautious that you miss the magic of escaping your comfort zone and mingling with local people and staying in their homes. The risks are minimal compared with the wonders of spending time in a small village. So take a gap year, or volunteer in a village or a slum. And even if everything goes wrong and you are robbed and catch malaria, shrug it off — those are precisely the kinds of authentic interactions with local cultures that, in retrospect, enrich a journey and life itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Cum Laude in Evading Bandits
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
One of the great failures of American universities is that they are far too parochial, rarely exposing students to worlds beyond our borders.
If colleges provide credit for dozing through an introductory Spanish class, why not give credit for a “gap year” in a Bolivian village? If students can learn about microfinance while sitting comatose in 9 a.m. lectures, couldn’t they learn more by volunteering with a lender in a Bangladesh slum?
So with summer starting, it’s up to students themselves to self-educate by setting off on their own. I hold my “win a trip” contest precisely to encourage such trips — I’m just back from visiting five West African countries with a University of South Carolina student. Yet when I encourage students’ wanderlust, questions invariably arise: Will I be safe? How do I avoid robbers and malaria?
In response, here are 15 tips for traveling to even the roughest of countries — and back:
1. Carry a “decoy wallet,” so that if you are robbed by bandits with large guns, you have something to hand over. I keep $40 in my decoy wallet, along with an old library card and frequent-flier card. (But don’t begrudge the wallet: when my travel buddy was pickpocketed in Peru, we tried to jump the pickpocket, who turned out to be backed by an entire gang ... )
2. Carry cash and your passport where no robber will find it. Assuming that few bandits read this column, I’ll disclose that I carry mine in a pouch that loops onto my belt and tucks under my trousers.
3. Carry a tiny ski lock with a six-foot retractable wire. Use it to lock your backpack to a hotel bed when you’re out, or to the rack of a train car.
4. At night, set a chair against your hotel door so that it will tip over and crash if someone slips in at 4 a.m. And lift the sheet to look for bloodstains on the mattress — meaning bed bugs.
5. When it gets dark, always carry a headlamp in your pocket. I learned that from a friend whose hotel in Damascus lost power. He lacked a light but was able to feel his way up the stairs in the dark, find his room and walk in. A couple of final gropes, and he discovered it wasn’t his room after all. Unfortunately, it was occupied.
6. If you’re a woman held up in an isolated area, stick out your stomach, pat it and signal that you’re pregnant. You might also invest in a cheap wedding band, for imaginary husbands deflect unwanted suitors.
7. Be wary of accepting drinks from anyone. Robbers sometimes use a date rape drug to knock out their victims — in bars, in trains, in homes. If presented with pre-poured drinks, switch them with your host, cheerfully explaining: “This is an American good luck ritual!”
8. Buy a secondhand local cell phone for $20, outfit it with a local SIM card and keep it in your pocket.
9. When you arrive in a new city, don’t take an airport taxi unless you know it is safe. If you do take a cab, choose a scrawny driver and lock ALL the doors — thieves may pull open the doors at a red light and run off with a bag.
10. Don’t wear a nice watch, for that suggests a fat wallet and also makes a target. I learned that lesson on my first trip to the Philippines: a robber with a machete had just encountered a Japanese businessman with a Rolex — who now, alas, has only one hand.
11. Look out for fake cops or crooked ones. If a policeman tries to arrest you, demand to see some ID and use your cell phone to contact a friend.
12. If you are held up by bandits with large guns, shake hands respectfully with each of your persecutors. It’s very important to be polite to people who might kill you. Surprisingly often, child soldiers and other bandits will reciprocate your fake friendliness and settle for some cash rather than everything you possess. I’ve even had thugs warmly exchange addresses with me, after robbing me.
13. Remember that the scariest people aren’t warlords, but drivers. In buses I sometimes use my pack as an airbag; after one crash I was the only passenger not hospitalized.
14. If terrorists finger you, break out singing “O Canada”!
15. Finally, don’t be so cautious that you miss the magic of escaping your comfort zone and mingling with local people and staying in their homes. The risks are minimal compared with the wonders of spending time in a small village. So take a gap year, or volunteer in a village or a slum. And even if everything goes wrong and you are robbed and catch malaria, shrug it off — those are precisely the kinds of authentic interactions with local cultures that, in retrospect, enrich a journey and life itself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/opini ... nted=print
June 6, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
48 of 48
By BOB HERBERT
The teenager’s voice on the other end of the phone on Thursday was more than exuberant. It was ecstatic.
“I’m going to college!” she said, virtually singing. “I’m going to college!”
I met Shanequa High some years ago when she was a sixth-grader at a middle school that was still in the embryonic stage (there were only two grades) in rural Gaston, N.C. The Gaston College Preparatory School was part of the KIPP network of charter schools, and the early word was that it was showing great promise.
Gaston was hardly a stereotypical stop for someone in search of academic excellence. The school’s new, low-rise building was built on land that had previously been a peanut and soybean farm. I remember driving past farm-equipment outlets and a cotton field on my way from the airport to the school.
Most of the students were black, and many were from low-income families. Most of the other schools in the region were struggling. When I spoke to Shanequa during that visit, one of the first things she told me was, “We don’t have any fighting here or any of that picking-on-people stuff.”
The original plan was that Gaston Prep would grow naturally into a school that encompassed grades 5 through 8, which is the normal KIPP model. (KIPP is short for the Knowledge Is Power Program, an effort that started in Houston and has become one of the most academically sound public school programs in the nation.) The goal was to lift the students out of the academic doldrums that handicapped the life chances of so many of their peers and get them onto a solid college track.
I remember being struck by how quiet the school was. It was a disciplined environment, and the schoolwork was approached with the utmost seriousness. I wrote: “The school lasts from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., which allows time for additional classroom work and extracurricular activities. After that, there are two hours of homework. The kids also attend classes every other Saturday. And there are three weeks of summer school.”
The school flourished. The youngsters worked so hard and did so well, so quickly, that the founders of the school felt they needed to create an academically rigorous high school if the hopes raised by the middle school were to be fully realized.
One of the founders, Tammi Sutton, noted that other places with KIPP middle schools — Houston and New York, for example — had many fine high schools that the KIPP middle school graduates could attend. That was not the case in Gaston and its environs.
So Ms. Sutton and Caleb Dolan, who had started Gaston Prep, took on the enormous task (with invaluable assistance from the Gates Foundation) of creating a high school from scratch. And not just a high school, but a first-rate, academically rigorous, full-service high school, complete with the extracurricular activities that are always an important component of the KIPP experience.
Nothing about it was easy. High-quality teachers from around the country and abroad had to be persuaded to set up shop in Gaston. An athletic program had to be established. Most important, the kids had to maintain their commitment to a high level of academic achievement.
How has it worked out? Shanequa is in the first graduating class of the new high school. Of the 48 seniors, 48 will be going on to college.
The pride in Ms. Sutton’s voice was as palpable as the joy in Shanequa’s. “All of our graduating seniors have been accepted into at least two colleges,” she said. “One hundred percent of them will be attending college in the fall.”
Most of the kids, including Shanequa, will be the first in their families ever to go to college.
What I thought was interesting was that neither Ms. Sutton nor Shanequa downplayed the difficulties of their respective efforts. The idea that there is any shortcut to real success — in school, in business, in government, in life, anywhere at all — is silly, a figment of the imaginations of those who have never stopped sitting on the sidelines.
Starting the high school was a “monstrous” undertaking, Ms. Sutton said.
And getting through it as a student was no cakewalk. “It has been very difficult,” Shanequa told me. “I had my ups and downs. There were some bad days, but I fought through them. My teachers were always pushing me: ‘Shanequa, you can do it. Don’t give up.’ ”
She then described the payoff: “When the acceptance letters started coming in the mail, I was like, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I wish I could do it all over again just to get the letters in the mail that said, ‘Shanequa, congratulations, you have been accepted at this university.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
48 of 48
By BOB HERBERT
The teenager’s voice on the other end of the phone on Thursday was more than exuberant. It was ecstatic.
“I’m going to college!” she said, virtually singing. “I’m going to college!”
I met Shanequa High some years ago when she was a sixth-grader at a middle school that was still in the embryonic stage (there were only two grades) in rural Gaston, N.C. The Gaston College Preparatory School was part of the KIPP network of charter schools, and the early word was that it was showing great promise.
Gaston was hardly a stereotypical stop for someone in search of academic excellence. The school’s new, low-rise building was built on land that had previously been a peanut and soybean farm. I remember driving past farm-equipment outlets and a cotton field on my way from the airport to the school.
Most of the students were black, and many were from low-income families. Most of the other schools in the region were struggling. When I spoke to Shanequa during that visit, one of the first things she told me was, “We don’t have any fighting here or any of that picking-on-people stuff.”
The original plan was that Gaston Prep would grow naturally into a school that encompassed grades 5 through 8, which is the normal KIPP model. (KIPP is short for the Knowledge Is Power Program, an effort that started in Houston and has become one of the most academically sound public school programs in the nation.) The goal was to lift the students out of the academic doldrums that handicapped the life chances of so many of their peers and get them onto a solid college track.
I remember being struck by how quiet the school was. It was a disciplined environment, and the schoolwork was approached with the utmost seriousness. I wrote: “The school lasts from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., which allows time for additional classroom work and extracurricular activities. After that, there are two hours of homework. The kids also attend classes every other Saturday. And there are three weeks of summer school.”
The school flourished. The youngsters worked so hard and did so well, so quickly, that the founders of the school felt they needed to create an academically rigorous high school if the hopes raised by the middle school were to be fully realized.
One of the founders, Tammi Sutton, noted that other places with KIPP middle schools — Houston and New York, for example — had many fine high schools that the KIPP middle school graduates could attend. That was not the case in Gaston and its environs.
So Ms. Sutton and Caleb Dolan, who had started Gaston Prep, took on the enormous task (with invaluable assistance from the Gates Foundation) of creating a high school from scratch. And not just a high school, but a first-rate, academically rigorous, full-service high school, complete with the extracurricular activities that are always an important component of the KIPP experience.
Nothing about it was easy. High-quality teachers from around the country and abroad had to be persuaded to set up shop in Gaston. An athletic program had to be established. Most important, the kids had to maintain their commitment to a high level of academic achievement.
How has it worked out? Shanequa is in the first graduating class of the new high school. Of the 48 seniors, 48 will be going on to college.
The pride in Ms. Sutton’s voice was as palpable as the joy in Shanequa’s. “All of our graduating seniors have been accepted into at least two colleges,” she said. “One hundred percent of them will be attending college in the fall.”
Most of the kids, including Shanequa, will be the first in their families ever to go to college.
What I thought was interesting was that neither Ms. Sutton nor Shanequa downplayed the difficulties of their respective efforts. The idea that there is any shortcut to real success — in school, in business, in government, in life, anywhere at all — is silly, a figment of the imaginations of those who have never stopped sitting on the sidelines.
Starting the high school was a “monstrous” undertaking, Ms. Sutton said.
And getting through it as a student was no cakewalk. “It has been very difficult,” Shanequa told me. “I had my ups and downs. There were some bad days, but I fought through them. My teachers were always pushing me: ‘Shanequa, you can do it. Don’t give up.’ ”
She then described the payoff: “When the acceptance letters started coming in the mail, I was like, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ I wish I could do it all over again just to get the letters in the mail that said, ‘Shanequa, congratulations, you have been accepted at this university.’ ”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/06/opini ... nted=print
June 7, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Rising Above I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.
Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.
As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.
Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.
“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.
In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.
One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder.
The Chinese-Americans were only half as likely as other children to repeat a grade in school, and by high school they were doing much better than European-Americans with the same I.Q.
As adults, 55 percent of the Chinese-American sample entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of whites. To succeed in a profession or as managers, whites needed an average I.Q. of about 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of just 93. In short, Chinese-Americans managed to achieve more than whites who on paper had the same intellect.
A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group.
The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education. You can still sometimes see in rural China the remains of a monument to a villager who triumphed in the imperial exams. In contrast, if an American town has someone who earns a Ph.D., the impulse is not to build a monument but to pass a hat.
Among West Indians, the crucial factors for success seem twofold: the classic diligence and hard work associated with immigrants, and intact families. The upshot is higher family incomes and fathers more involved in child-rearing.
What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Rising Above I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
In the mosaic of America, three groups that have been unusually successful are Asian-Americans, Jews and West Indian blacks — and in that there may be some lessons for the rest of us.
Asian-Americans are renowned — or notorious — for ruining grade curves in schools across the land, and as a result they constitute about 20 percent of students at Harvard College.
As for Jews, they have received about one-third of all Nobel Prizes in science received by Americans. One survey found that a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.
West Indian blacks, those like Colin Powell whose roots are in the Caribbean, are one-third more likely to graduate from college than African-Americans as a whole, and their median household income is almost one-third higher.
These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories. In the debate over nature and nurture, they suggest the importance of improved nurture — which, from a public policy perspective, means a focus on education. Their success may also offer some lessons for you, me, our children — and for the broader effort to chip away at poverty in this country.
Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, “Intelligence and How to Get It.” Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics.
“I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.,” he said, adding that there also seems to be no genetic difference in intelligence between whites and Asians. As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above-average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews. Dr. Nisbett is somewhat skeptical, noting that these results emerge from samples that may not be representative.
In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have.
One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder.
The Chinese-Americans were only half as likely as other children to repeat a grade in school, and by high school they were doing much better than European-Americans with the same I.Q.
As adults, 55 percent of the Chinese-American sample entered high-status occupations, compared with one-third of whites. To succeed in a profession or as managers, whites needed an average I.Q. of about 100, while Chinese-Americans needed an I.Q. of just 93. In short, Chinese-Americans managed to achieve more than whites who on paper had the same intellect.
A common thread among these three groups may be an emphasis on diligence or education, perhaps linked in part to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy — the better to read the Talmud — some 1,700 years before any other group.
The parallel force in China was Confucianism and its reverence for education. You can still sometimes see in rural China the remains of a monument to a villager who triumphed in the imperial exams. In contrast, if an American town has someone who earns a Ph.D., the impulse is not to build a monument but to pass a hat.
Among West Indians, the crucial factors for success seem twofold: the classic diligence and hard work associated with immigrants, and intact families. The upshot is higher family incomes and fathers more involved in child-rearing.
What’s the policy lesson from these three success stories?
It’s that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren’t transfer payments but education, education, education. For at-risk households, that starts with social workers making visits to encourage such basic practices as talking to children. One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school.
The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs.
Perhaps the larger lesson is a very empowering one: success depends less on intellectual endowment than on perseverance and drive. As Professor Nisbett puts it, “Intelligence and academic achievement are very much under people’s control.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opini ... nted=print
University’s international ambitions resonate with students
Former ISA President Alykhan Kassam, after having his head shaved to raise funds for cancer research. Photo: Courtesy of Alykhan Kassam
The University of Alberta, which recently celebrated its centennial, is an educational epicentre to over 37 000 students in 18 different faculties. Among them are over 200 members of the University’s Ismaili Students’ Association (ISA). A self-funded, self-governing student group located at the main Edmonton campus, the ISA actively encourages its members to be positive, contributors to University society.
Through the Association, young Ismaili women and men partake in a range of campus activities, such as ISA-supported intramural sports teams that include ultimate (Frisbee), volleyball, soccer, and floor hockey. In recent years, the ISA has raised funds for cancer research through its annual Head Shave for Cancer event. It has also canvassed donations and helped build awareness of the Canadian Blood Donor Clinic, and operated a food bank benefiting less fortunate members on campus.
Ismaili students at the University are equally active off-campus. Assembling a team for the 25th World Partnership Walk that recently took place in nine cities across Canada, the students raised nearly CAD $22 000 in the fight against global poverty.
Students gather for a photo at the 25th World Partnership Walk in Edmonton. Photo: Courtesy of Irfan DevjiIn addition to being fun and having an impact, ISA activities offer “a great opportunity to educate other students and professors” about who Ismaili Muslims are, says outgoing ISA President Irfaan Gilani. People sometimes have a skewed perspective of the values associated with Islam and Muslims, but “through integration and positive contributions, we have the potential to change that image,” he says.
It is a message that also resonates in the initiatives of individual Ismailis. Nursing student Nurin Dhanji recently organised a volunteer opportunity through the university Rotary Club to build local schools, community centres, and health clinics in Mexico. Aly Bhatia, who is pursuing Biology, became the new president of the International Volunteers Club, an initiative aimed at raising funds to aid impoverished third world countries. And Aliya Jiwani’s passion for working with children, led her to the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa, where she will have an opportunity to complete a teaching practicum towards her Bachelor of Education.
That students at the University of Alberta should seek to have an international impact so early in their careers is no coincidence. The University is engaged in an array of international collaborations with institutions around the world, a fact remarked upon by Mawlana Hazar Imam in his address to the University’s graduates yesterday, after he received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws.
Mawlana Hazar Imam at the University of Alberta Convocation ceremony where he was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Photo: Moez Visram
The University of Alberta’s impressive agenda of international goals, said Mawlana Hazar Imam, “represents precisely the sort of outreach from Western intellectual centres which I believe is essential for global progress.” He noted that the impact of the University’s work “is reinforced by the high regard in which Canada itself is held as a valued development partner.”
“As young people with a Canadian education, you will be warmly welcomed by the global community if you should choose to spend some time in international activity, making the world your workplace.”
Earlier in the day, Mawlana Hazar Imam and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the University of Alberta and the Aga Khan University. The agreement aims to advance both institutions’ goals to increase global engagement and to promote equitable human advancement and social justice throughout the world.
In his speech Mawlana Hazar Imam also announced that he was presenting the University with a gift of a traditional Islamic garden, marking the institution’s 100th anniversary and his Golden Jubilee — both of which were commemorated last year. He expressed hope that it would be a space of “educational and aesthetic value, a setting for learning more about Muslim culture and design, as well as a place for public reflection.”
Members of the Ismaili Students Association Executive team gather for a summer retreat to plan the following year’s activities. Photo: Nimeera Nanji
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/731/Unive ... h-students
Former ISA President Alykhan Kassam, after having his head shaved to raise funds for cancer research. Photo: Courtesy of Alykhan Kassam
The University of Alberta, which recently celebrated its centennial, is an educational epicentre to over 37 000 students in 18 different faculties. Among them are over 200 members of the University’s Ismaili Students’ Association (ISA). A self-funded, self-governing student group located at the main Edmonton campus, the ISA actively encourages its members to be positive, contributors to University society.
Through the Association, young Ismaili women and men partake in a range of campus activities, such as ISA-supported intramural sports teams that include ultimate (Frisbee), volleyball, soccer, and floor hockey. In recent years, the ISA has raised funds for cancer research through its annual Head Shave for Cancer event. It has also canvassed donations and helped build awareness of the Canadian Blood Donor Clinic, and operated a food bank benefiting less fortunate members on campus.
Ismaili students at the University are equally active off-campus. Assembling a team for the 25th World Partnership Walk that recently took place in nine cities across Canada, the students raised nearly CAD $22 000 in the fight against global poverty.
Students gather for a photo at the 25th World Partnership Walk in Edmonton. Photo: Courtesy of Irfan DevjiIn addition to being fun and having an impact, ISA activities offer “a great opportunity to educate other students and professors” about who Ismaili Muslims are, says outgoing ISA President Irfaan Gilani. People sometimes have a skewed perspective of the values associated with Islam and Muslims, but “through integration and positive contributions, we have the potential to change that image,” he says.
It is a message that also resonates in the initiatives of individual Ismailis. Nursing student Nurin Dhanji recently organised a volunteer opportunity through the university Rotary Club to build local schools, community centres, and health clinics in Mexico. Aly Bhatia, who is pursuing Biology, became the new president of the International Volunteers Club, an initiative aimed at raising funds to aid impoverished third world countries. And Aliya Jiwani’s passion for working with children, led her to the Aga Khan Academy Mombasa, where she will have an opportunity to complete a teaching practicum towards her Bachelor of Education.
That students at the University of Alberta should seek to have an international impact so early in their careers is no coincidence. The University is engaged in an array of international collaborations with institutions around the world, a fact remarked upon by Mawlana Hazar Imam in his address to the University’s graduates yesterday, after he received an Honorary Doctorate of Laws.
Mawlana Hazar Imam at the University of Alberta Convocation ceremony where he was conferred an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Photo: Moez Visram
The University of Alberta’s impressive agenda of international goals, said Mawlana Hazar Imam, “represents precisely the sort of outreach from Western intellectual centres which I believe is essential for global progress.” He noted that the impact of the University’s work “is reinforced by the high regard in which Canada itself is held as a valued development partner.”
“As young people with a Canadian education, you will be warmly welcomed by the global community if you should choose to spend some time in international activity, making the world your workplace.”
Earlier in the day, Mawlana Hazar Imam and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the University of Alberta and the Aga Khan University. The agreement aims to advance both institutions’ goals to increase global engagement and to promote equitable human advancement and social justice throughout the world.
In his speech Mawlana Hazar Imam also announced that he was presenting the University with a gift of a traditional Islamic garden, marking the institution’s 100th anniversary and his Golden Jubilee — both of which were commemorated last year. He expressed hope that it would be a space of “educational and aesthetic value, a setting for learning more about Muslim culture and design, as well as a place for public reflection.”
Members of the Ismaili Students Association Executive team gather for a summer retreat to plan the following year’s activities. Photo: Nimeera Nanji
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/731/Unive ... h-students
Your Story
College is a series of transformations — moments that change the way you view the world. And yourself. Where better to get a sense of this idealized passage than from the thick of it? In time for everyone heading back to campus, we invited students to tell us their experiences in their own words and pictures. We received about 800 contributions, from freshmen to Ph.D. candidates. Here are a few that struck a chord.
Links and multimedia can be accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/ ... ?th&emc=th
The Learning Tree
Matthew Scult (Brown): Chemistry for Non-Dummies
.Emily Finn (Yale): How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics
.Melody Rod-Ari (U.C.L.A.): My ‘Irrelevant’ Field, the Humanities
.Christopher Gilson (U. of Connecticut): Flunking Out, Then Flying
.Multimedia
Slide Show: Pride and Achievement
College students submitted visual expressions of their drive, passion and spirit.
.The Freshman Experience
Emma Barrie (Sarah Lawrence): The Roommate Diaries
.Emily Macrander (U. of Texas, Austin): My Interior Monologue
.Debra H. Cohen (U. of Virginia): Three Views of a Freshman’s Night
.Zara Kessler (Yale): Freshman Year’s Seven Deadly Sins
.Anne Collins (U. of Washington): I Was Cool, and Out Cold
.Dana Walters (Middlebury College): The Imperfect Eating Disorder
.Multimedia
Slide Show: College Life
In images of parties, people and activities, students made a statement about their college years.
.College Life
Atticus Lee (Stanford): A Year Among the Naked, the Pagan and the Vegan
.Emily Banks (U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Becoming a Tar Heel
.Harsimarbir Singh (Duke): Becoming a Dukie (and an American)
.Kahley Sullivan (College of Charleston): The Joy of (Mom’s) Cooking
.Marie Mencher (Wesleyan): Romance Crushed
.Maggie Holmes (U. of Texas, Austin): Waking Up From Pompom Dreams
.Multimedia
Slide Show: Abstract Expressions
Students submitted photos with an artsy eye on the higher-ed experience.
.Life's Big Questions
Dustin Junkert (George Fox University): What My Faith in God Looks Like
.Caronae Howell (Columbia): In Pursuit of Happiness
.Gabino Iglesias (U. of Texas, Austin): An Awful ‘Why?’ Hung Over My Head
.Multimedia
Slide Show: A Sense of Place
Students expressed their higher-ed experience through images of where they have been, and where they are. The common theme: broadening horizons.
.Overcoming Odds
Julie Bishop (Lee College): Tourette’s Toll/Triumph
.Khanh-Anh Le (U. of Pennsylvania): My Eczema, My Shame
.Tierionna Morris (Miami University of Ohio): No Money, No Meal Plan
.Javier A. Daniel (Brooklyn College): College Life? Hold the Frats and Frills
.Doing Good
Fatima Hassan (Stanford): Documenting Brutalities to Change the World
.Eric J. Layer (New Mexico State): A True Representative, From the Desert to D.C.
.Brett Westcott (Purdue University): The Compliment Guy
.Continuing On
Lorene Farnsworth (Southern Oregon U.): A New Life, Off the D List
.Tamara Livshiz (U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor): The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Applying to Med School
.Brighid Castacio (College of Staten Island): A Dillar a Dollar, a 12 O’Clock Scholar
.
A blog examining all facets of college and university admissions.
Go to The Choice »
College is a series of transformations — moments that change the way you view the world. And yourself. Where better to get a sense of this idealized passage than from the thick of it? In time for everyone heading back to campus, we invited students to tell us their experiences in their own words and pictures. We received about 800 contributions, from freshmen to Ph.D. candidates. Here are a few that struck a chord.
Links and multimedia can be accessed at:
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/education/ ... ?th&emc=th
The Learning Tree
Matthew Scult (Brown): Chemistry for Non-Dummies
.Emily Finn (Yale): How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Linguistics
.Melody Rod-Ari (U.C.L.A.): My ‘Irrelevant’ Field, the Humanities
.Christopher Gilson (U. of Connecticut): Flunking Out, Then Flying
.Multimedia
Slide Show: Pride and Achievement
College students submitted visual expressions of their drive, passion and spirit.
.The Freshman Experience
Emma Barrie (Sarah Lawrence): The Roommate Diaries
.Emily Macrander (U. of Texas, Austin): My Interior Monologue
.Debra H. Cohen (U. of Virginia): Three Views of a Freshman’s Night
.Zara Kessler (Yale): Freshman Year’s Seven Deadly Sins
.Anne Collins (U. of Washington): I Was Cool, and Out Cold
.Dana Walters (Middlebury College): The Imperfect Eating Disorder
.Multimedia
Slide Show: College Life
In images of parties, people and activities, students made a statement about their college years.
.College Life
Atticus Lee (Stanford): A Year Among the Naked, the Pagan and the Vegan
.Emily Banks (U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): Becoming a Tar Heel
.Harsimarbir Singh (Duke): Becoming a Dukie (and an American)
.Kahley Sullivan (College of Charleston): The Joy of (Mom’s) Cooking
.Marie Mencher (Wesleyan): Romance Crushed
.Maggie Holmes (U. of Texas, Austin): Waking Up From Pompom Dreams
.Multimedia
Slide Show: Abstract Expressions
Students submitted photos with an artsy eye on the higher-ed experience.
.Life's Big Questions
Dustin Junkert (George Fox University): What My Faith in God Looks Like
.Caronae Howell (Columbia): In Pursuit of Happiness
.Gabino Iglesias (U. of Texas, Austin): An Awful ‘Why?’ Hung Over My Head
.Multimedia
Slide Show: A Sense of Place
Students expressed their higher-ed experience through images of where they have been, and where they are. The common theme: broadening horizons.
.Overcoming Odds
Julie Bishop (Lee College): Tourette’s Toll/Triumph
.Khanh-Anh Le (U. of Pennsylvania): My Eczema, My Shame
.Tierionna Morris (Miami University of Ohio): No Money, No Meal Plan
.Javier A. Daniel (Brooklyn College): College Life? Hold the Frats and Frills
.Doing Good
Fatima Hassan (Stanford): Documenting Brutalities to Change the World
.Eric J. Layer (New Mexico State): A True Representative, From the Desert to D.C.
.Brett Westcott (Purdue University): The Compliment Guy
.Continuing On
Lorene Farnsworth (Southern Oregon U.): A New Life, Off the D List
.Tamara Livshiz (U. of Michigan, Ann Arbor): The Dog-Eat-Dog World of Applying to Med School
.Brighid Castacio (College of Staten Island): A Dillar a Dollar, a 12 O’Clock Scholar
.
A blog examining all facets of college and university admissions.
Go to The Choice »
August 16, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
By ALISON GOPNIK
Berkeley, Calif.
GENERATIONS of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.
New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.
This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of “The Philosophical Baby.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think
By ALISON GOPNIK
Berkeley, Calif.
GENERATIONS of psychologists and philosophers have believed that babies and young children were basically defective adults — irrational, egocentric and unable to think logically. The philosopher John Locke saw a baby’s mind as a blank slate, and the psychologist William James thought they lived in a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Even today, a cursory look at babies and young children leads many to conclude that there is not much going on.
New studies, however, demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old babies were shown a box full of mixed-up Ping-Pong balls: mostly white but with some red ones mixed in. The babies were more surprised, and looked longer and more intently at the experimenter when four red balls and one white ball out of the box — a possible, yet improbable outcome — than when four white balls and a red one were produced.
In 2007, Laura Schulz and Elizabeth Baraff Bonawitz at M.I.T. demonstrated that when young children play, they are also exploring cause and effect. Preschoolers were introduced to a toy that had two levers and a duck and a puppet that popped up. One group was shown that when you pressed one lever, the duck appeared and when you pressed the other, the puppet popped up. The second group observed that when you pressed both levers at once, both objects popped up, but they never got a chance to see what the levers did separately, which left mysterious the causal relation between the levers and the pop-up objects. Then the experimenter gave the children the toys to play with. The children in the first group played with the toy much less than the children in the second group did. When the children already knew how the toy worked, they were less interested in exploring it. But the children in the second group spontaneously played with the toy, and just by playing around, they figured out how it worked.
In 2007 in my lab at Berkeley, Tamar Kushnir and I discovered that preschoolers can use probabilities to learn how things work and that this lets them imagine new possibilities. We put a yellow block and a blue block on a machine repeatedly. The blocks were likely but not certain to make the machine light up. The yellow block made the machine light up two out of three times; the blue block made it light up only two out of six times.
Then we gave the children the blocks and asked them to light up the machine. These children, who couldn’t yet add or subtract, were more likely to put the high-probability yellow block, rather than the blue one, on the machine.
We also did the same experiment, but instead of putting the high-probability block on the machine, we held it up over the machine and the machine lit up. Children had never seen a block act this way, and at the start of the experiment, they didn’t think it could. But after seeing good evidence, they were able to imagine the peculiar possibility that blocks have remote powers. These astonishing capacities for statistical reasoning, experimental discovery and probabilistic logic allow babies to rapidly learn all about the particular objects and people surrounding them.
Sadly, some parents are likely to take the wrong lessons from these experiments and conclude that they need programs and products that will make their babies even smarter. Many think that babies, like adults, should learn in a focused, planned way. So parents put their young children in academic-enrichment classes or use flashcards to get them to recognize the alphabet. Government programs like No Child Left Behind urge preschools to be more like schools, with instruction in specific skills.
But babies’ intelligence, the research shows, is very different from that of adults and from the kind of intelligence we usually cultivate in school. Schoolwork revolves around focus and planning. We set objectives and goals for children, with an emphasis on skills they should acquire or information they should know. Children take tests to prove that they have absorbed a specific set of skills and facts and have not been distracted by other possibilities.
This approach may work for children over the age of 5 or so. But babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
Babies are captivated by the most unexpected events. Adults, on the other hand, focus on the outcomes that are the most relevant to their goals. In a well-known experiment, adults saw a video of several people tossing a ball to one another. The experimenter told them to count how many passes particular people made. In the midst of this, a person in a gorilla suit walked slowly through the middle of the video. A surprising number of adults, intent on counting, didn’t even seem to notice the unexpected gorilla.
Adults focus on objects that will be most useful to them. But as the lever study demonstrated, children play with the objects that will teach them the most. In our study, 4-year-olds imagined new possibilities based on just a little data. Adults rely more on what they already know. Babies aren’t trying to learn one particular skill or set of facts; instead, they are drawn to anything new, unexpected or informative.
Part of the explanation for these differing approaches can be found in the brain. The young brain is remarkably plastic and flexible. Brains work because neurons are connected to one another, allowing them to communicate. Baby brains have many more neural connections than adult brains. But they are much less efficient. Over time, we prune away the connections we don’t use, and the remaining ones become faster and more automatic. Moreover, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls the directed, planned, focused kind of intelligence, is exceptionally late to mature, and may not take its final shape until our early 20s.
In fact, our mature brain seems to be programmed by our childhood experiences — we plan based on what we’ve learned as children. Very young children imagine and explore a vast array of possibilities. As they grow older and absorb more evidence, certain possibilities become much more likely and more useful. They then make decisions based on this selective information and become increasingly reluctant to give those ideas up and try something new. Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting — a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.
Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more quickly but may also lock in what you already know, closing you off to alternative possibilities. We need both blue-sky speculation and hard-nosed planning. Babies and young children are designed to explore, and they should be encouraged to do so.
The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)
But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology at Berkeley and the author of “The Philosophical Baby.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opini ... nted=print
Chewing over the benefits of family meals
Matt Bonsall and Stephanie Small of Ottawa sit down for dinner this week with their daughters, Nettie, 7, and Daisy, 10. for The Globe and Mail
Children who eat with their parents have more self-esteem and, some scientists say, better brain development
Anne McIlroy
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009 03:11AM EDT
As evidence mounts that eating as a family can protect children from all sorts of harm, experts say the bonding and connectedness that comes with regular family meals may positively influence the brain development of kids.
Studies have found that by adolescence, the more often a family eats together the less likely children are to smoke, use alcohol and drugs, suffer from an eating disorder or consider suicide. Family meals have also been linked to higher self-esteem and better performance at school.
There isn't a cause-and-effect relationship. Still, the correlations are strong enough for researchers to say regular family meals offer a protective effect. Now, they want to find out why.
“A lot of kids are not getting the environment their brains require for their development. I am talking the physiology of the brain and connections,” says Gabor Maté, a Vancouver physician, and co-author of Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers , which he wrote with developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld.
But could regular family meals really affect brain development?
The idea makes sense, says Tomas Paus, a Canadian neuroscientist who is charting the changes that take place in the adolescent brain. He and his colleagues have taken brain scans and interviewed 600 volunteers aged 12 to 18 in the Saguenay region of Quebec.
They found that in adolescent boys, the volume of white matter in their brain increases by 25 per cent over those years. White matter connects different parts of the brain together and the rapid growth appears to be mediated by testosterone.
In girls, the changes are less dramatic, about a 5-per-cent increase in white matter.
The changes bolster the notion that adolescence is a time of integration for the brain. There are also more subtle alterations occurring in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in impulse control and reasoning.
Dr. Paus and his colleagues are also looking at the impact of “positive youth development” on the brain, assessing what they call the five Cs: connectedness with friends and families, character, caring, competence and confidence.
Family interaction – including time around the dinner table – can help build all five Cs, says Dr. Paus, who will be moving back to Canada from Britain in January to take a position at the University of Toronto.
And it is very likely, he says, that brains of youngsters who rank high in the five Cs will develop in a healthy manner.
“That would also mean potentially less psychiatric problems.”
As schools and extracurricular activities begin in earnest after the summer break, many parents feel stretched, and sometimes guilty if they miss dinner or breakfast, or both. Studies are inconclusive as to whether both parents in a two-parent family should ideally be present, or if it matters that a meal was at a fast-food restaurant and not at home.
Is one meal, for example, more important than another? Does the age of the child factor in?
Jayne Fulkerson, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, has started an in-depth study monitoring parents eating with their toddlers in an effort to learn more. She says a family meal doesn't have to be a pot roast. Breakfast counts. So do picnics at the soccer pitch, such as the pizza Stephanie Small and Matt Bonsall shared earlier this week with their daughters, Nettie, 7, and Daisy, 10.
The girls had soccer four nights a week all summer, so the Ottawa family had supper together early, at 5:30 p.m. Ms. Small and her husband run their own business, Bonsall Communications, and life can be hectic, especially now that school has started again.
But she says they enjoy eating together, and she and her husband often share both breakfast and supper with their daughters.
“We don't do it because I think it is good for them. We just like to do it,” she says.
In the best instances, family mealtimes offer a brief but consistent check-in during which parents can talk to their adolescents about the decisions they are facing, like what to wear to the dance, how to use spending money, or what topic to choose for a school project. This gives the chance for kids to practice important reasoning skills, says Marla Eisenberg, assistant professor of Adolescent Health and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
It might be that parents who eat regularly with their children may learn earlier about trouble at school or with friends, Dr. Eisenberg says.
Dr. Eisenberg notes that in the teenage years, kids are developing their capacity for higher-order thinking, decision making and impulse control.
“One thing parents can do to help in this process is allow adolescents the room to ‘practice' making meaningful decisions – the thinking is that this will help strengthen these neurological pathways earlier.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nat ... le1285286/
Matt Bonsall and Stephanie Small of Ottawa sit down for dinner this week with their daughters, Nettie, 7, and Daisy, 10. for The Globe and Mail
Children who eat with their parents have more self-esteem and, some scientists say, better brain development
Anne McIlroy
From Saturday's Globe and Mail Last updated on Saturday, Sep. 19, 2009 03:11AM EDT
As evidence mounts that eating as a family can protect children from all sorts of harm, experts say the bonding and connectedness that comes with regular family meals may positively influence the brain development of kids.
Studies have found that by adolescence, the more often a family eats together the less likely children are to smoke, use alcohol and drugs, suffer from an eating disorder or consider suicide. Family meals have also been linked to higher self-esteem and better performance at school.
There isn't a cause-and-effect relationship. Still, the correlations are strong enough for researchers to say regular family meals offer a protective effect. Now, they want to find out why.
“A lot of kids are not getting the environment their brains require for their development. I am talking the physiology of the brain and connections,” says Gabor Maté, a Vancouver physician, and co-author of Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers , which he wrote with developmental psychologist Gordon Neufeld.
But could regular family meals really affect brain development?
The idea makes sense, says Tomas Paus, a Canadian neuroscientist who is charting the changes that take place in the adolescent brain. He and his colleagues have taken brain scans and interviewed 600 volunteers aged 12 to 18 in the Saguenay region of Quebec.
They found that in adolescent boys, the volume of white matter in their brain increases by 25 per cent over those years. White matter connects different parts of the brain together and the rapid growth appears to be mediated by testosterone.
In girls, the changes are less dramatic, about a 5-per-cent increase in white matter.
The changes bolster the notion that adolescence is a time of integration for the brain. There are also more subtle alterations occurring in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in impulse control and reasoning.
Dr. Paus and his colleagues are also looking at the impact of “positive youth development” on the brain, assessing what they call the five Cs: connectedness with friends and families, character, caring, competence and confidence.
Family interaction – including time around the dinner table – can help build all five Cs, says Dr. Paus, who will be moving back to Canada from Britain in January to take a position at the University of Toronto.
And it is very likely, he says, that brains of youngsters who rank high in the five Cs will develop in a healthy manner.
“That would also mean potentially less psychiatric problems.”
As schools and extracurricular activities begin in earnest after the summer break, many parents feel stretched, and sometimes guilty if they miss dinner or breakfast, or both. Studies are inconclusive as to whether both parents in a two-parent family should ideally be present, or if it matters that a meal was at a fast-food restaurant and not at home.
Is one meal, for example, more important than another? Does the age of the child factor in?
Jayne Fulkerson, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, has started an in-depth study monitoring parents eating with their toddlers in an effort to learn more. She says a family meal doesn't have to be a pot roast. Breakfast counts. So do picnics at the soccer pitch, such as the pizza Stephanie Small and Matt Bonsall shared earlier this week with their daughters, Nettie, 7, and Daisy, 10.
The girls had soccer four nights a week all summer, so the Ottawa family had supper together early, at 5:30 p.m. Ms. Small and her husband run their own business, Bonsall Communications, and life can be hectic, especially now that school has started again.
But she says they enjoy eating together, and she and her husband often share both breakfast and supper with their daughters.
“We don't do it because I think it is good for them. We just like to do it,” she says.
In the best instances, family mealtimes offer a brief but consistent check-in during which parents can talk to their adolescents about the decisions they are facing, like what to wear to the dance, how to use spending money, or what topic to choose for a school project. This gives the chance for kids to practice important reasoning skills, says Marla Eisenberg, assistant professor of Adolescent Health and Medicine at the University of Minnesota.
It might be that parents who eat regularly with their children may learn earlier about trouble at school or with friends, Dr. Eisenberg says.
Dr. Eisenberg notes that in the teenage years, kids are developing their capacity for higher-order thinking, decision making and impulse control.
“One thing parents can do to help in this process is allow adolescents the room to ‘practice' making meaningful decisions – the thinking is that this will help strengthen these neurological pathways earlier.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nat ... le1285286/
Ismaili Student Network introduces young Ismailis to university life
This autumn, many young Ismailis in the United Kingdom, like myself, began the transition to university. Although it is a time of excitement and eagerness for independence, many of us will also feel apprehension at the prospect of living away from home for the first time, and being responsible for ourselves.
Suddenly, the idea of managing our own budgets, seeking out a new group of friends, and cooking for ourselves was dauntingly real. So it was greatly reassuring to receive a personal letter from the Ismaili Student Network (ISN) inviting us to join the network, and to attend their ‘Get Fresh’ event in early September.
The Ismaili Student Network “Get Fresh” event brought together students from universities throughout the UK. Photo: Jamil Teja
Arriving at the Ismaili Centre, London at midday — a suitable start time for a student event — I was unsure of what to expect. But I found myself at ease among students from universities as diverse as Edinburgh and Nottingham. Moreover, the entire event was co-ordinated and run by students and recent graduates.
Drawing on their experience was extremely useful. We were each presented with a copy of Alykhan Kassam’s Ultimate Survival Guide for University, which provides essential advice such as the need to register with a GP, as well as less formal tips on stress reduction (“Place print-out on hard surface and bang head against...”)
Perhaps a better strategy for stress management was offered by Sameer Mawji, whose Student Finance session provided us with the tools to help us budget and avoid finding ourselves in the red. We were each given a blank budget to work through, and assistance with filling it in.
The exercise was an eye-opener, as we were introduced to less obvious costs such as books, gym memberships and travel. We picked up advice from current students, such as how to make the most of student discounts and seeking out the highest interest-free overdraft in a student bank account.
The day also included talks addressing other matters, such as maintaining balance in life. Alwaez Mohammed Sachedina reminded us of the importance of maintaining a balance between the worldly and spiritual dimensions of our lives. Shalina Ibrahim talked about opportunities to offer service during our time at university. Her personal accounts inspired many of the participants to get involved through the ISN or in other ways.
A highlight of the event was the cooking demonstration given by Pinky Lilani. Photo: Jamil Teja
A highlight of the day was the cooking demonstration given by Pinky Lilani, who showed us how to prepare a couple of mouth-watering dishes in minutes. She also generously gave each of us a copy of her book, Spice Magic, along with copious amounts of motherly advice — both of which are sure to come in handy.
This was then followed by an ISN presentation detailing its objectives and the benefits of membership. Each participant received a sheet with their ISN representative’s details as well as details of the nearest Jamatkhana, along with a “take-home pack” of items from a list of university essentials to packets of sun lotion (perhaps for those planning a year abroad?) We were also introduced to the “Cookies and Conversation” initiative, as a programme aimed at youth to explore matters of faith. The day finished with a dinner for participants, speakers and ISN representatives, enabling us to establish contacts, share knowledge and arrange to help each other out.
Overall, the day provided us with a great chance to get to meet those heading to our universities, as well as to receive some important information and advice before the start of our university lives. The importance of the network, as a means of meeting new students, and as a web of support throughout our university lives has become very clear indeed, and I am sure the latest cohort to join the ISN will be willing to become involved in as many ways as possible.
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/899/spinner
This autumn, many young Ismailis in the United Kingdom, like myself, began the transition to university. Although it is a time of excitement and eagerness for independence, many of us will also feel apprehension at the prospect of living away from home for the first time, and being responsible for ourselves.
Suddenly, the idea of managing our own budgets, seeking out a new group of friends, and cooking for ourselves was dauntingly real. So it was greatly reassuring to receive a personal letter from the Ismaili Student Network (ISN) inviting us to join the network, and to attend their ‘Get Fresh’ event in early September.
The Ismaili Student Network “Get Fresh” event brought together students from universities throughout the UK. Photo: Jamil Teja
Arriving at the Ismaili Centre, London at midday — a suitable start time for a student event — I was unsure of what to expect. But I found myself at ease among students from universities as diverse as Edinburgh and Nottingham. Moreover, the entire event was co-ordinated and run by students and recent graduates.
Drawing on their experience was extremely useful. We were each presented with a copy of Alykhan Kassam’s Ultimate Survival Guide for University, which provides essential advice such as the need to register with a GP, as well as less formal tips on stress reduction (“Place print-out on hard surface and bang head against...”)
Perhaps a better strategy for stress management was offered by Sameer Mawji, whose Student Finance session provided us with the tools to help us budget and avoid finding ourselves in the red. We were each given a blank budget to work through, and assistance with filling it in.
The exercise was an eye-opener, as we were introduced to less obvious costs such as books, gym memberships and travel. We picked up advice from current students, such as how to make the most of student discounts and seeking out the highest interest-free overdraft in a student bank account.
The day also included talks addressing other matters, such as maintaining balance in life. Alwaez Mohammed Sachedina reminded us of the importance of maintaining a balance between the worldly and spiritual dimensions of our lives. Shalina Ibrahim talked about opportunities to offer service during our time at university. Her personal accounts inspired many of the participants to get involved through the ISN or in other ways.
A highlight of the event was the cooking demonstration given by Pinky Lilani. Photo: Jamil Teja
A highlight of the day was the cooking demonstration given by Pinky Lilani, who showed us how to prepare a couple of mouth-watering dishes in minutes. She also generously gave each of us a copy of her book, Spice Magic, along with copious amounts of motherly advice — both of which are sure to come in handy.
This was then followed by an ISN presentation detailing its objectives and the benefits of membership. Each participant received a sheet with their ISN representative’s details as well as details of the nearest Jamatkhana, along with a “take-home pack” of items from a list of university essentials to packets of sun lotion (perhaps for those planning a year abroad?) We were also introduced to the “Cookies and Conversation” initiative, as a programme aimed at youth to explore matters of faith. The day finished with a dinner for participants, speakers and ISN representatives, enabling us to establish contacts, share knowledge and arrange to help each other out.
Overall, the day provided us with a great chance to get to meet those heading to our universities, as well as to receive some important information and advice before the start of our university lives. The importance of the network, as a means of meeting new students, and as a web of support throughout our university lives has become very clear indeed, and I am sure the latest cohort to join the ISN will be willing to become involved in as many ways as possible.
http://www.theismaili.org/cms/899/spinner
February 20, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Spirit Quest
By CHARLES M. BLOW
I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.
She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.
In fact, two recently released reports seem to buttress this observation.
A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.
So, anyone laboring under the delusion that the generation weaned on MTV would move us closer to being weaned of an abnormally high level of religiosity — at least when compared with other industrialized countries — may have to keep waiting.
In fact, on some measures, the data suggest that these so-called millennials may be more spiritually thirsty than older generations. According to a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll also released this month, being “spiritual or close to God” was the most selected of any other “primary long-term life goal” among those 18 to 29 years old (other choices included “to get married and have a family” and “to get rich”). The rate at which they selected it was significantly higher than other generational groups, and nearly twice that of Generation X.
And the spiritual quests of the millennials may eventually have policy implications. According to the Pew report, “They are slightly more supportive than their elders of government efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involvement in politics by churches and other houses of worship.”
That last point worries me. It makes me want a double shot of that Costa Rican rum. Maybe then I, too, can find the spirit in the spirits.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at [email protected].
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Spirit Quest
By CHARLES M. BLOW
I recently met a young woman who was just back from a monthlong Costa Rican vacation. She said that she had gone in part to connect with her spiritual self, to shed the moral strictures of her youth and to find her place of peace as an adult. In her mind at least, it had been a successful trip. She was a new woman, spiritually awakened.
She told me that she had gone from religious to nonbeliever, and then to spiritual. Putting aside the fact that most young people probably couldn’t afford to take a monthlong vacation in a foreign country, and the fact that her spiritual awakening was admittedly spiked with copious amounts of Costa Rican rum, her story struck me as increasingly normative rather than anomalous. Many young adults seem to be moving away from organized religion while simultaneously trying desperately to connect with their spirituality.
In fact, two recently released reports seem to buttress this observation.
A report entitled “Religion Among the Millennials” produced by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and released this week found that one in four people 18 to 29 years old are unaffiliated with a religion. But that by no means makes them all atheists or agnostics. While there are always religious people among the unaffiliated, the numbers are significantly higher among the younger unaffiliated crowd. While they are less likely than those unaffiliated and older than them to believe in God, they are more likely to believe in life after death, heaven and hell, and miracles.
So, anyone laboring under the delusion that the generation weaned on MTV would move us closer to being weaned of an abnormally high level of religiosity — at least when compared with other industrialized countries — may have to keep waiting.
In fact, on some measures, the data suggest that these so-called millennials may be more spiritually thirsty than older generations. According to a Knights of Columbus/Marist poll also released this month, being “spiritual or close to God” was the most selected of any other “primary long-term life goal” among those 18 to 29 years old (other choices included “to get married and have a family” and “to get rich”). The rate at which they selected it was significantly higher than other generational groups, and nearly twice that of Generation X.
And the spiritual quests of the millennials may eventually have policy implications. According to the Pew report, “They are slightly more supportive than their elders of government efforts to protect morality, as well as somewhat more comfortable with involvement in politics by churches and other houses of worship.”
That last point worries me. It makes me want a double shot of that Costa Rican rum. Maybe then I, too, can find the spirit in the spirits.
•
I invite you to visit my blog, By the Numbers. Please also join me on Facebook, and follow me on Twitter, or e-mail me at [email protected].
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opini ... nted=print
March 21, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
America’s Real Dream Team
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Went to a big Washington dinner last week. You know the kind: Large hall; black ties; long dresses. But this was no ordinary dinner. There were 40 guests of honor. So here’s my Sunday news quiz: I’ll give you the names of most of the honorees, and you tell me what dinner I was at. Ready?
Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamin Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakant, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo and Namrata Anand.
No, sorry, it was not a dinner of the China-India Friendship League. Give up?
O.K. All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.
Indeed, if you need any more convincing about the virtues of immigration, just come to the Intel science finals. I am a pro-immigration fanatic. I think keeping a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country — whether they wear blue collars or lab coats — is the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we hope to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in an orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.
This isn’t complicated. In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.
If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it. I can use Amazon.com to handle fulfillment. I can use freelancer.com to find someone to do my logo and manage by backroom. And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea. And this Intel dinner was all about our best sparklers.
Before the dinner started, each contestant stood by a storyboard explaining their specific project. Namrata Anand, a 17-year-old from the Harker School in California, patiently explained to me her research, which used spectral analysis and other data to expose information about the chemical enrichment history of “Andromeda Galaxy.” I did not understand a word she said, but I sure caught the gleam in her eye.
My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely “supportive parents” and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to “buy a home” in her Lynbrook school district because it produced “two Intel science winners.”
Seriously, ESPN or MTV should broadcast the Intel finals live. All of the 40 finalist are introduced, with little stories about their lives and aspirations. Then the winners of the nine best projects are announced. And finally, with great drama, the overall winner of the $100,000 award for the best project of the 40 is identified. This year it was Erika Alden DeBenedictis of New Mexico for developing a software navigation system that would enable spacecraft to more efficiently “travel through the solar system.” After her name was called, she was swarmed by her fellow competitor-geeks.
Gotta say, it was the most inspiring evening I’ve had in D.C. in 20 years. It left me thinking, “If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.” It left me feeling that maybe Alice Wei Zhao of North High School in Sheboygan, Wis., chosen by her fellow finalists to be their spokeswoman, was right when she told the audience: “Don’t sweat about the problems our generation will have to deal with. Believe me, our future is in good hands.”
As long as we don’t shut our doors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
America’s Real Dream Team
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Went to a big Washington dinner last week. You know the kind: Large hall; black ties; long dresses. But this was no ordinary dinner. There were 40 guests of honor. So here’s my Sunday news quiz: I’ll give you the names of most of the honorees, and you tell me what dinner I was at. Ready?
Linda Zhou, Alice Wei Zhao, Lori Ying, Angela Yu-Yun Yeung, Lynnelle Lin Ye, Kevin Young Xu, Benjamin Chang Sun, Jane Yoonhae Suh, Katheryn Cheng Shi, Sunanda Sharma, Sarine Gayaneh Shahmirian, Arjun Ranganath Puranik, Raman Venkat Nelakant, Akhil Mathew, Paul Masih Das, David Chienyun Liu, Elisa Bisi Lin, Yifan Li, Lanair Amaad Lett, Ruoyi Jiang, Otana Agape Jakpor, Peter Danming Hu, Yale Wang Fan, Yuval Yaacov Calev, Levent Alpoge, John Vincenzo Capodilupo and Namrata Anand.
No, sorry, it was not a dinner of the China-India Friendship League. Give up?
O.K. All these kids are American high school students. They were the majority of the 40 finalists in the 2010 Intel Science Talent Search, which, through a national contest, identifies and honors the top math and science high school students in America, based on their solutions to scientific problems. The awards dinner was Tuesday, and, as you can see from the above list, most finalists hailed from immigrant families, largely from Asia.
Indeed, if you need any more convincing about the virtues of immigration, just come to the Intel science finals. I am a pro-immigration fanatic. I think keeping a constant flow of legal immigrants into our country — whether they wear blue collars or lab coats — is the key to keeping us ahead of China. Because when you mix all of these energetic, high-aspiring people with a democratic system and free markets, magic happens. If we hope to keep that magic, we need immigration reform that guarantees that we will always attract and retain, in an orderly fashion, the world’s first-round aspirational and intellectual draft choices.
This isn’t complicated. In today’s wired world, the most important economic competition is no longer between countries or companies. The most important economic competition is actually between you and your own imagination. Because what your kids imagine, they can now act on farther, faster, cheaper than ever before — as individuals. Today, just about everything is becoming a commodity, except imagination, except the ability to spark new ideas.
If I just have the spark of an idea now, I can get a designer in Taiwan to design it. I can get a factory in China to produce a prototype. I can get a factory in Vietnam to mass manufacture it. I can use Amazon.com to handle fulfillment. I can use freelancer.com to find someone to do my logo and manage by backroom. And I can do all this at incredibly low prices. The one thing that is not a commodity and never will be is that spark of an idea. And this Intel dinner was all about our best sparklers.
Before the dinner started, each contestant stood by a storyboard explaining their specific project. Namrata Anand, a 17-year-old from the Harker School in California, patiently explained to me her research, which used spectral analysis and other data to expose information about the chemical enrichment history of “Andromeda Galaxy.” I did not understand a word she said, but I sure caught the gleam in her eye.
My favorite chat, though, was with Amanda Alonzo, a 30-year-old biology teacher at Lynbrook High School in San Jose, Calif. She had taught two of the finalists. When I asked her the secret, she said it was the resources provided by her school, extremely “supportive parents” and a grant from Intel that let her spend part of each day inspiring and preparing students to enter this contest. Then she told me this: Local San Jose realtors are running ads in newspapers in China and India telling potential immigrants to “buy a home” in her Lynbrook school district because it produced “two Intel science winners.”
Seriously, ESPN or MTV should broadcast the Intel finals live. All of the 40 finalist are introduced, with little stories about their lives and aspirations. Then the winners of the nine best projects are announced. And finally, with great drama, the overall winner of the $100,000 award for the best project of the 40 is identified. This year it was Erika Alden DeBenedictis of New Mexico for developing a software navigation system that would enable spacecraft to more efficiently “travel through the solar system.” After her name was called, she was swarmed by her fellow competitor-geeks.
Gotta say, it was the most inspiring evening I’ve had in D.C. in 20 years. It left me thinking, “If we can just get a few things right — immigration, education standards, bandwidth, fiscal policy — maybe we’ll be O.K.” It left me feeling that maybe Alice Wei Zhao of North High School in Sheboygan, Wis., chosen by her fellow finalists to be their spokeswoman, was right when she told the audience: “Don’t sweat about the problems our generation will have to deal with. Believe me, our future is in good hands.”
As long as we don’t shut our doors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/opini ... nted=print
March 28, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Boys Have Fallen Behind
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Around the globe, it’s mostly girls who lack educational opportunities. Even in the United States, many people still associate the educational “gender gap” with girls left behind in math.
Yet these days, the opposite problem has sneaked up on us: In the United States and other Western countries alike, it is mostly boys who are faltering in school. The latest surveys show that American girls on average have roughly achieved parity with boys in math. Meanwhile, girls are well ahead of boys in verbal skills, and they just seem to try harder.
The National Honor Society says that 64 percent of its members — outstanding high school students — are girls. Some colleges give special help to male applicants — yes, that’s affirmative action for white males — to avoid skewed sex ratios.
A new report just issued by the Center on Education Policy, an independent research organization, confirms that boys have fallen behind in reading in every single state. It found, for example, that in elementary schools, about 79 percent of girls could read at a level deemed “proficient,” compared with 72 percent of boys. Similar gaps were found in middle school and high school.
In every state, in each of the three school levels, girls did better on average than boys.
“The most pressing issue related to gender gaps is the lagging performance of boys in reading,” the report said.
A sobering new book, “Why Boys Fail,” by Richard Whitmire, cites mountains of evidence to make the point:
¶The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.
¶Boys are twice as likely to get suspended as girls, and three times as likely to be expelled. Estimates of dropouts vary, but it seems that about one-quarter more boys drop out than girls.
¶Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.
¶In federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent.
There is one important exception: Boys still beat out girls at the very top of the curve, especially in math.
In the high school class of 2009, a total of 297 students scored a perfect triple-800 on the S.A.T., 62 percent of them boys, according to Kathleen Steinberg of the College Board. And of the 10,052 who scored an 800 in the math section, 69 percent were boys.
Some say that the “boy problem” is just a problem for members of minorities. But “Why Boys Fail” says that at the end of high school, among white boys who have at least one parent who attended college, 23 percent score “below basic” in reading. Only 7 percent of their female counterparts score that low.
Likewise, boys are also lagging in Scandinavia, Canada, Britain and throughout the industrialized world.
What is going on?
Many theories have been proposed. Some people think that boys are hard-wired so that they learn more slowly, perhaps because they evolved to fight off wolves more than to raise their hands in classrooms. But that doesn’t explain why boys have been sinking in recent decades.
Mr. Whitmire argues that the basic problem is an increased emphasis on verbal skills, often taught in sedate ways that bore boys. “The world has gotten more verbal,” he writes. “Boys haven’t.”
The upshot, he writes, is that boys get frustrated, act out, and learn to dislike school. “Poor reading skills snowball through the grades,” he writes. “By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year.”
Some educators say that one remedy may be to encourage lowbrow, adventure or even gross-out books that disproportionately appeal to boys. (I confess that I was a huge fan of the Hardy Boys, and then used them to entice my own kids into becoming avid readers as well.)
Indeed, the more books make parents flinch, the more they seem to suck boys in. A Web site, guysread.com, offers useful lists of books to coax boys into reading, and they are helpfully sorted into categories like “ghosts,” “boxers, wrestlers, ultimate fighters,” and “at least one explosion.”
At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys. If that means nurturing boys with explosions, that’s a price worth paying.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Columnist
The Boys Have Fallen Behind
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Around the globe, it’s mostly girls who lack educational opportunities. Even in the United States, many people still associate the educational “gender gap” with girls left behind in math.
Yet these days, the opposite problem has sneaked up on us: In the United States and other Western countries alike, it is mostly boys who are faltering in school. The latest surveys show that American girls on average have roughly achieved parity with boys in math. Meanwhile, girls are well ahead of boys in verbal skills, and they just seem to try harder.
The National Honor Society says that 64 percent of its members — outstanding high school students — are girls. Some colleges give special help to male applicants — yes, that’s affirmative action for white males — to avoid skewed sex ratios.
A new report just issued by the Center on Education Policy, an independent research organization, confirms that boys have fallen behind in reading in every single state. It found, for example, that in elementary schools, about 79 percent of girls could read at a level deemed “proficient,” compared with 72 percent of boys. Similar gaps were found in middle school and high school.
In every state, in each of the three school levels, girls did better on average than boys.
“The most pressing issue related to gender gaps is the lagging performance of boys in reading,” the report said.
A sobering new book, “Why Boys Fail,” by Richard Whitmire, cites mountains of evidence to make the point:
¶The average high school grade point average is 3.09 for girls and 2.86 for boys. Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to repeat a grade.
¶Boys are twice as likely to get suspended as girls, and three times as likely to be expelled. Estimates of dropouts vary, but it seems that about one-quarter more boys drop out than girls.
¶Among whites, women earn 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees. Among blacks, the figures are 66 percent and 72 percent.
¶In federal writing tests, 32 percent of girls are considered “proficient” or better. For boys, the figure is 16 percent.
There is one important exception: Boys still beat out girls at the very top of the curve, especially in math.
In the high school class of 2009, a total of 297 students scored a perfect triple-800 on the S.A.T., 62 percent of them boys, according to Kathleen Steinberg of the College Board. And of the 10,052 who scored an 800 in the math section, 69 percent were boys.
Some say that the “boy problem” is just a problem for members of minorities. But “Why Boys Fail” says that at the end of high school, among white boys who have at least one parent who attended college, 23 percent score “below basic” in reading. Only 7 percent of their female counterparts score that low.
Likewise, boys are also lagging in Scandinavia, Canada, Britain and throughout the industrialized world.
What is going on?
Many theories have been proposed. Some people think that boys are hard-wired so that they learn more slowly, perhaps because they evolved to fight off wolves more than to raise their hands in classrooms. But that doesn’t explain why boys have been sinking in recent decades.
Mr. Whitmire argues that the basic problem is an increased emphasis on verbal skills, often taught in sedate ways that bore boys. “The world has gotten more verbal,” he writes. “Boys haven’t.”
The upshot, he writes, is that boys get frustrated, act out, and learn to dislike school. “Poor reading skills snowball through the grades,” he writes. “By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year.”
Some educators say that one remedy may be to encourage lowbrow, adventure or even gross-out books that disproportionately appeal to boys. (I confess that I was a huge fan of the Hardy Boys, and then used them to entice my own kids into becoming avid readers as well.)
Indeed, the more books make parents flinch, the more they seem to suck boys in. A Web site, guysread.com, offers useful lists of books to coax boys into reading, and they are helpfully sorted into categories like “ghosts,” “boxers, wrestlers, ultimate fighters,” and “at least one explosion.”
At a time when men are still hugely overrepresented in Congress, on executive boards, and in the corridors of power, does it matter that boys are struggling in schools? Of course it does: our future depends on making the best use of human capital we can, whether it belongs to girls or boys. If that means nurturing boys with explosions, that’s a price worth paying.
I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 2, 2010
International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN
CUMBERLAND, Me. — SAT, ACT, A.P. ... I.B.?
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board’s A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work, and a potential edge in admissions.
The lesser-known I.B., a two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, first took hold in the United States in private schools. But it is now offered in more than 700 American high schools — more than 90 percent of them public schools — and almost 200 more have begun the long certification process.
Many parents, schools and students see the program as a rigorous and more internationally focused curriculum, and a way to impress college admissions officers.
To earn an I.B. diploma, students must devote their full junior and senior years to the program, which requires English and another language, math, science, social science and art, plus a course on theory of knowledge, a 4,000-word essay, oral presentations and community service.
Here in Cumberland, Greely High School adopted the I.B. this year to make students more aware of the world beyond the United States.
“When our grads would visit from college, they’d tell us that while Greely gave them great academic preparation, they’d had no idea there was a big wide world out there,” said David Galin, Greely’s I.B. coordinator.
To that end, Greely’s I.B. 11th graders read literature from India (“God of Small Things”), South Africa (“Master Harold ... and the Boys”), what is now the Czech Republic (“The Metamorphosis”), Chile (“The House of the Spirits”), Egypt (“Midaq Alley”) and Colombia (“Chronicle of a Death Foretold”).
“Our students don’t have as much diversity as people in some other areas, so this makes them open their eyes,” said Deb Pinkham, the program’s English teacher.
The I.B. program is used in 139 countries, and its international focus has drawn criticism from some quarters.
Some parents say it is anti-American and too closely tied to both the United Nations and radical environmentalism. From its start in 1968 until 1976, the program was financed partly by Unesco. It is now associated with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and until recently it endorsed the Earth Charter, a declaration of principles of sustainability that originated at the United Nations.
“When there is a program at the school with a specific agenda, which in this case is the United Nations agenda, I have a problem with it,” said Ann Marie Banfield, who unsuccessfully opposed the adoption of the I.B. program in Bedford, N.H.
Others object to its cost — the organization charges $10,000 a year per school, $141 per student and $96 per exam — and say it is neither as effective as the A.P. program nor likely to reach as many students.
“We have 337 kids, and 80 of them take at least one of our 16 A.P. classes,” said John Eppolito, a parent who opposes the planned introduction of the I.B. in Incline Village, Nev. “If we switched to the I.B., the district estimates that 15 kids would get a I.B. diploma in two years.”
I.B. opponents have created a Web site, truthaboutib.com, to serve as a clearinghouse for their views.
Many schools, and many parents, see the I.B. partly as a way to show college admissions offices that students have chosen a rigorous program, with tests graded by I.B. examiners around the world.
“I don’t think there is anyone who does not respect the I.B.,” said Panetha Ott, an admissions officer at Brown.
Fewer colleges give credit for the I.B. than for A.P., but dozens give students with an I.B. diploma sophomore standing and some offer special scholarships.
The I.B. is also being offered now in some struggling urban schools where educators say it helps put low-income students on par with their richer peers.
Last fall, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the program a three-year $2.4 million grant to prepare low-income and minority students to participate in the I.B.
California and Florida have the most I.B. schools, and New England the fewest.
In Cumberland, some parents questioned the I.B.’s cost, but none complained about the program’s content, according to Chris Mosca, Greely’s principal.
“No question, the people who founded the I.B. were sitting in Geneva, post-World War II, thinking about how to ensure world peace, so the clear philosophical bent is that by integrating learning and understanding issues from multiple perspectives, we can promote global thinking,” he said. “But what sold me on the program was that it’s good pedagogy, that it really shows kids how things go together.”
Still, Mr. Mosca has no plans to eliminate the school’s Advanced Placement offerings.
“A.P. is great for content-based traditional learning,” he said. “It’s great for kids who like to memorize. But for more creative kids, who want to make those connections, there’s nothing like the I.B.”
On a spring Tuesday, Greely’s I.B. history class was working in small groups, analyzing the Suez crisis with original source documents from Israel, Egypt, the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Nations.
Emily Hill, presenting a document from the Soviet foreign office’s Middle East desk, reminded the group that it was a secret memo, translated several times.
Emily, who said she was bored with school last year, said the I.B. program had been more interesting and challenging.
Because it is so rigorous, the I.B. is not for everyone. At Greely, only 21 juniors started the full program this year, and three subsequently shifted to a mix of I.B. and regular classes.
But those who stayed with it seemed enthusiastic.
“It’s like a little club of scholars,” said Maggie Bauer, a junior. “It seems more real-world than how we used to learn, and it’s changed how we look at the world.”
Down the coast, where Kennebunk High School just graduated its first group of I.B. students, Sue Cressey, the I.B. coordinator, said that most of the students in the program the first year had thought about dropping out.
“There was a bad period after everybody flunked a biology exam,” she said. “I had to send a letter home to parents, reassuring them. It’s a new way of thinking, but the kids grew into it. I feel better about sending these kids to college than any group I’ve ever sent.”
The graduates, too, say they feel well prepared.
“In our Theory of Knowledge class, when we debated health care, my role was to take Rush Limbaugh’s position, which couldn’t be further from my own,” said Michael Tahan, one of the graduates.
“I.B. taught us how to think through a position, and support it,” he added. “And while I understand why some parents might worry that the program is international-based, I think it’s good for America for students to learn how others nations think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/educa ... 1xzRo+UN0w
Link to MHI's speech on IB
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... -aga-khan/
*****
http://www.akysbp.org/bhyc2010/index.html
Welcome
Aga Khan Youth & Sports Board for Pakistan (AKYSBP) is mandated to work towards improving the quality of life through youth development programs and sports promotional activities organized all over Pakistan.
The organization delivers this mandate through thematic workshops, seminars, lectures, camps and events which are strategically designed to cater to specific needs of the youth, keeping in mind issues and opportunities prevailing within our society.
Broadening Horizons Youth Convention
Aga Khan Youth & Sports Board for Pakistan presents Broadening Horizons Youth Convention 2010 – an Annual Residential Youth Convention, scheduled to be held in Karachi from July 17 to July 20.
Broadening Horizons - the theme says it all! It is about expanding one’s vision to the maximum. In a rapidly changing global scenario, youth need to have a holistic approach towards life. The Youth Convention aims to facilitate the growth of vision and to contribute to youth development through providing exposure to diverse world views, learning opportunities and excessive networking.
The underlying theme of convention design came from an excerpt from the speech of Mawlana Hazar Imam:
Education that prepares children for life must go beyond fundamental skills to stimulate creativity, intellectual curiosity and honest inquiry. Advancement and development, both personal and social, is dependent on these elements, innovation and progress arise from the ability to approach a challenge in a new way and offer a solution.
Included in last year’s content was a focus on Social Leadership, Educational, Culture and Governance. Speakers included acclaimed educationists, artists, corporate heads, government officials and leadership experts.
Keeping in mind the vibrant nature of youth the approach of the convention was a mix of education and entertainment – Edutainment!
Theme: Jo Tum Ho Woh Mein Bhi Hoon
The convention 2010 theme depicts the importance of diversity and pluralism in contemporary society. The convention through panel discussions, thematic workshops, field trip and intellectual discourses will introduce participants to the idea of pluralism; explore its academic roots, study its practical implications in solving modern-day conflicts and expressing the notion through aesthetics.
International Program Catches On in U.S. Schools
By TAMAR LEWIN
CUMBERLAND, Me. — SAT, ACT, A.P. ... I.B.?
The alphabet soup of college admissions is getting more complicated as the International Baccalaureate, or I.B., grows in popularity as an alternative to the better-known Advanced Placement program.
The College Board’s A.P. program, which offers a long menu of single-subject courses, is still by far the most common option for giving students a head start on college work, and a potential edge in admissions.
The lesser-known I.B., a two-year curriculum developed in the 1960s at an international school in Switzerland, first took hold in the United States in private schools. But it is now offered in more than 700 American high schools — more than 90 percent of them public schools — and almost 200 more have begun the long certification process.
Many parents, schools and students see the program as a rigorous and more internationally focused curriculum, and a way to impress college admissions officers.
To earn an I.B. diploma, students must devote their full junior and senior years to the program, which requires English and another language, math, science, social science and art, plus a course on theory of knowledge, a 4,000-word essay, oral presentations and community service.
Here in Cumberland, Greely High School adopted the I.B. this year to make students more aware of the world beyond the United States.
“When our grads would visit from college, they’d tell us that while Greely gave them great academic preparation, they’d had no idea there was a big wide world out there,” said David Galin, Greely’s I.B. coordinator.
To that end, Greely’s I.B. 11th graders read literature from India (“God of Small Things”), South Africa (“Master Harold ... and the Boys”), what is now the Czech Republic (“The Metamorphosis”), Chile (“The House of the Spirits”), Egypt (“Midaq Alley”) and Colombia (“Chronicle of a Death Foretold”).
“Our students don’t have as much diversity as people in some other areas, so this makes them open their eyes,” said Deb Pinkham, the program’s English teacher.
The I.B. program is used in 139 countries, and its international focus has drawn criticism from some quarters.
Some parents say it is anti-American and too closely tied to both the United Nations and radical environmentalism. From its start in 1968 until 1976, the program was financed partly by Unesco. It is now associated with the United Nations Economic and Social Council, and until recently it endorsed the Earth Charter, a declaration of principles of sustainability that originated at the United Nations.
“When there is a program at the school with a specific agenda, which in this case is the United Nations agenda, I have a problem with it,” said Ann Marie Banfield, who unsuccessfully opposed the adoption of the I.B. program in Bedford, N.H.
Others object to its cost — the organization charges $10,000 a year per school, $141 per student and $96 per exam — and say it is neither as effective as the A.P. program nor likely to reach as many students.
“We have 337 kids, and 80 of them take at least one of our 16 A.P. classes,” said John Eppolito, a parent who opposes the planned introduction of the I.B. in Incline Village, Nev. “If we switched to the I.B., the district estimates that 15 kids would get a I.B. diploma in two years.”
I.B. opponents have created a Web site, truthaboutib.com, to serve as a clearinghouse for their views.
Many schools, and many parents, see the I.B. partly as a way to show college admissions offices that students have chosen a rigorous program, with tests graded by I.B. examiners around the world.
“I don’t think there is anyone who does not respect the I.B.,” said Panetha Ott, an admissions officer at Brown.
Fewer colleges give credit for the I.B. than for A.P., but dozens give students with an I.B. diploma sophomore standing and some offer special scholarships.
The I.B. is also being offered now in some struggling urban schools where educators say it helps put low-income students on par with their richer peers.
Last fall, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the program a three-year $2.4 million grant to prepare low-income and minority students to participate in the I.B.
California and Florida have the most I.B. schools, and New England the fewest.
In Cumberland, some parents questioned the I.B.’s cost, but none complained about the program’s content, according to Chris Mosca, Greely’s principal.
“No question, the people who founded the I.B. were sitting in Geneva, post-World War II, thinking about how to ensure world peace, so the clear philosophical bent is that by integrating learning and understanding issues from multiple perspectives, we can promote global thinking,” he said. “But what sold me on the program was that it’s good pedagogy, that it really shows kids how things go together.”
Still, Mr. Mosca has no plans to eliminate the school’s Advanced Placement offerings.
“A.P. is great for content-based traditional learning,” he said. “It’s great for kids who like to memorize. But for more creative kids, who want to make those connections, there’s nothing like the I.B.”
On a spring Tuesday, Greely’s I.B. history class was working in small groups, analyzing the Suez crisis with original source documents from Israel, Egypt, the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Nations.
Emily Hill, presenting a document from the Soviet foreign office’s Middle East desk, reminded the group that it was a secret memo, translated several times.
Emily, who said she was bored with school last year, said the I.B. program had been more interesting and challenging.
Because it is so rigorous, the I.B. is not for everyone. At Greely, only 21 juniors started the full program this year, and three subsequently shifted to a mix of I.B. and regular classes.
But those who stayed with it seemed enthusiastic.
“It’s like a little club of scholars,” said Maggie Bauer, a junior. “It seems more real-world than how we used to learn, and it’s changed how we look at the world.”
Down the coast, where Kennebunk High School just graduated its first group of I.B. students, Sue Cressey, the I.B. coordinator, said that most of the students in the program the first year had thought about dropping out.
“There was a bad period after everybody flunked a biology exam,” she said. “I had to send a letter home to parents, reassuring them. It’s a new way of thinking, but the kids grew into it. I feel better about sending these kids to college than any group I’ve ever sent.”
The graduates, too, say they feel well prepared.
“In our Theory of Knowledge class, when we debated health care, my role was to take Rush Limbaugh’s position, which couldn’t be further from my own,” said Michael Tahan, one of the graduates.
“I.B. taught us how to think through a position, and support it,” he added. “And while I understand why some parents might worry that the program is international-based, I think it’s good for America for students to learn how others nations think.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/03/educa ... 1xzRo+UN0w
Link to MHI's speech on IB
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2008/0 ... -aga-khan/
*****
http://www.akysbp.org/bhyc2010/index.html
Welcome
Aga Khan Youth & Sports Board for Pakistan (AKYSBP) is mandated to work towards improving the quality of life through youth development programs and sports promotional activities organized all over Pakistan.
The organization delivers this mandate through thematic workshops, seminars, lectures, camps and events which are strategically designed to cater to specific needs of the youth, keeping in mind issues and opportunities prevailing within our society.
Broadening Horizons Youth Convention
Aga Khan Youth & Sports Board for Pakistan presents Broadening Horizons Youth Convention 2010 – an Annual Residential Youth Convention, scheduled to be held in Karachi from July 17 to July 20.
Broadening Horizons - the theme says it all! It is about expanding one’s vision to the maximum. In a rapidly changing global scenario, youth need to have a holistic approach towards life. The Youth Convention aims to facilitate the growth of vision and to contribute to youth development through providing exposure to diverse world views, learning opportunities and excessive networking.
The underlying theme of convention design came from an excerpt from the speech of Mawlana Hazar Imam:
Education that prepares children for life must go beyond fundamental skills to stimulate creativity, intellectual curiosity and honest inquiry. Advancement and development, both personal and social, is dependent on these elements, innovation and progress arise from the ability to approach a challenge in a new way and offer a solution.
Included in last year’s content was a focus on Social Leadership, Educational, Culture and Governance. Speakers included acclaimed educationists, artists, corporate heads, government officials and leadership experts.
Keeping in mind the vibrant nature of youth the approach of the convention was a mix of education and entertainment – Edutainment!
Theme: Jo Tum Ho Woh Mein Bhi Hoon
The convention 2010 theme depicts the importance of diversity and pluralism in contemporary society. The convention through panel discussions, thematic workshops, field trip and intellectual discourses will introduce participants to the idea of pluralism; explore its academic roots, study its practical implications in solving modern-day conflicts and expressing the notion through aesthetics.
July 12, 2010
Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)
By BRENT STAPLES
A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web.
“I have to assume that in every class, someone will do it,” he said. “It doesn’t stop them if you say, ‘This is plagiarism. I won’t accept it.’ I have to tell them that it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave.”
Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, that what he’d done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.
As my friend sees it: “This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.”
Like many other professors, he no longer sees traditional term papers as a valid index of student competence. To get an accurate, Internet-free reading of how much students have learned, he gives them written assignments in class — where they can be watched.
These kinds of precautions are no longer unusual in the college world. As Trip Gabriel pointed out in The Times recently, more than half the colleges in the country have retained services that check student papers for material lifted from the Internet and elsewhere. Many schools now require incoming students to take online tutorials that explain what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
Nationally, discussions about plagiarism tend to focus on questions of ethics. But as David Pritchard, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently: “The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that kids don’t learn if they don’t do the work.”
Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have copied the most answers from others started out with the same math and physics skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more likely to fail.
The Pritchard axiom — that repetitive cheating undermines learning — has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.
If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.
This habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opini ... nted=print
Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis by (Insert Name)
By BRENT STAPLES
A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop. He begins the semester collecting evidence, in the form of an in-class essay that gives him a sense of how well students think and write. He looks back at the samples later when students turn in papers that feature their own, less-than-perfect prose alongside expertly written passages lifted verbatim from the Web.
“I have to assume that in every class, someone will do it,” he said. “It doesn’t stop them if you say, ‘This is plagiarism. I won’t accept it.’ I have to tell them that it is a failing offense and could lead me to file a complaint with the university, which could lead to them being put on probation or being asked to leave.”
Not everyone who gets caught knows enough about what they did to be remorseful. Recently, for example, a student who plagiarized a sizable chunk of a paper essentially told my friend to keep his shirt on, that what he’d done was no big deal. Beyond that, the student said, he would be ashamed to go home to the family with an F.
As my friend sees it: “This represents a shift away from the view of education as the process of intellectual engagement through which we learn to think critically and toward the view of education as mere training. In training, you are trying to find the right answer at any cost, not trying to improve your mind.”
Like many other professors, he no longer sees traditional term papers as a valid index of student competence. To get an accurate, Internet-free reading of how much students have learned, he gives them written assignments in class — where they can be watched.
These kinds of precautions are no longer unusual in the college world. As Trip Gabriel pointed out in The Times recently, more than half the colleges in the country have retained services that check student papers for material lifted from the Internet and elsewhere. Many schools now require incoming students to take online tutorials that explain what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
Nationally, discussions about plagiarism tend to focus on questions of ethics. But as David Pritchard, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me recently: “The big sleeping dog here is not the moral issue. The problem is that kids don’t learn if they don’t do the work.”
Prof. Pritchard and his colleagues illustrated the point in a study of cheating behavior by M.I.T. students who used an online system to complete homework. The students who were found to have copied the most answers from others started out with the same math and physics skills as their harder-working classmates. But by skipping the actual work in homework, they fell behind in understanding and became significantly more likely to fail.
The Pritchard axiom — that repetitive cheating undermines learning — has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.
If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.
They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.
This habit of mind is already pervasive in the culture and will be difficult to roll back. But parents, teachers and policy makers need to understand that this is not just a matter of personal style or generational expression. It’s a question of whether we can preserve the methods through which education at its best teaches people to think critically and originally.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opini ... nted=print
There is a related video and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/techn ... nes&emc=a2
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
Excerpt:
"Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.
It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook."
******
November 20, 2010
Teaching for America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department. President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.
Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4 speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment.
“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”
That is why Duncan is starting a “national teacher campaign” to recruit new talent. “We have to systemically create the environment and the incentives where people want to come into the profession. Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that will truly ensure our national security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opini ... s&emc=a212
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/techn ... nes&emc=a2
Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction
Excerpt:
"Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.
It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook."
******
November 20, 2010
Teaching for America
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When I came to Washington in 1988, the cold war was ending and the hot beat was national security and the State Department. If I were a cub reporter today, I’d still want to be covering the epicenter of national security — but that would be the Education Department. President Obama got this one exactly right when he said that whoever “out-educates us today is going to out-compete us tomorrow.” The bad news is that for years now we’ve been getting out-educated. The good news is that cities, states and the federal government are all fighting back. But have no illusions. We’re in a hole.
Here are few data points that the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, offered in a Nov. 4 speech: “One-quarter of U.S. high school students drop out or fail to graduate on time. Almost one million students leave our schools for the streets each year. ... One of the more unusual and sobering press conferences I participated in last year was the release of a report by a group of top retired generals and admirals. Here was the stunning conclusion of their report: 75 percent of young Americans, between the ages of 17 to 24, are unable to enlist in the military today because they have failed to graduate from high school, have a criminal record, or are physically unfit.” America’s youth are now tied for ninth in the world in college attainment.
“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
Duncan, with bipartisan support, has begun several initiatives to energize reform — particularly his Race to the Top competition with federal dollars going to states with the most innovative reforms to achieve the highest standards. Maybe his biggest push, though, is to raise the status of the teaching profession. Why?
Tony Wagner, the Harvard-based education expert and author of “The Global Achievement Gap,” explains it this way. There are three basic skills that students need if they want to thrive in a knowledge economy: the ability to do critical thinking and problem-solving; the ability to communicate effectively; and the ability to collaborate.
If you look at the countries leading the pack in the tests that measure these skills (like Finland and Denmark), one thing stands out: they insist that their teachers come from the top one-third of their college graduating classes. As Wagner put it, “They took teaching from an assembly-line job to a knowledge-worker’s job. They have invested massively in how they recruit, train and support teachers, to attract and retain the best.”
Duncan disputes the notion that teachers’ unions will always resist such changes. He points to the new “breakthrough” contracts in Washington, D.C., New Haven and Hillsborough County, Fla., where teachers have embraced higher performance standards in return for higher pay for the best performers.
“We have to reward excellence,” he said. “We’ve been scared in education to talk about excellence. We treated everyone like interchangeable widgets. Just throw a kid in a class and throw a teacher in a class.” This ignored the variation between teachers who were changing students’ lives, and those who were not. “If you’re doing a great job with students,” he said, “we can’t pay you enough.”
That is why Duncan is starting a “national teacher campaign” to recruit new talent. “We have to systemically create the environment and the incentives where people want to come into the profession. Three countries that outperform us — Singapore, South Korea, Finland — don’t let anyone teach who doesn’t come from the top third of their graduating class. And in South Korea, they refer to their teachers as ‘nation builders.’ ”
Duncan’s view is that challenging teachers to rise to new levels — by using student achievement data in calculating salaries, by increasing competition through innovation and charters — is not anti-teacher. It’s taking the profession much more seriously and elevating it to where it should be. There are 3.2 million active teachers in America today. In the next decade, half (the baby boomers) will retire. How we recruit, train, support, evaluate and compensate their successors “is going to shape public education for the next 30 years,” said Duncan. We have to get this right.
Wagner thinks we should create a West Point for teachers: “We need a new National Education Academy, modeled after our military academies, to raise the status of the profession and to support the R.& D. that is essential for reinventing teaching, learning and assessment in the 21st century.”
All good ideas, but if we want better teachers we also need better parents — parents who turn off the TV and video games, make sure homework is completed, encourage reading and elevate learning as the most important life skill. The more we demand from teachers the more we have to demand from students and parents. That’s the Contract for America that will truly ensure our national security.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/opini ... s&emc=a212
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
Bus Shelters is a creative arts project run by the community learning team at London Transport Museum.
The latest bus shelter project showcases the talents of young people from the Ismaili Centre’s Youth Arts Initiative. Working with professional lyricists, visual artists and filmmakers they have created artwork and a spoken word film based on the theme of journeys.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
Using the Museum’s collections as inspiration, project participants looked at the idea of a journey as both a physical and spiritual concept. They developed ideas around seven key journey themes; motivation, perspective, spice, challenges, movement, expression and inspiration.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
Their artwork will be displayed and a short trailer for their film will be available for download at a Bus Shelter on Gloucester Road from Monday 31 January until Sunday 13 February 2011.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltmuseum/s ... 430624192/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltmuseum/5 ... 5884461999
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... ilimail%29
Bus Shelters is a creative arts project run by the community learning team at London Transport Museum.
The latest bus shelter project showcases the talents of young people from the Ismaili Centre’s Youth Arts Initiative. Working with professional lyricists, visual artists and filmmakers they have created artwork and a spoken word film based on the theme of journeys.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
Using the Museum’s collections as inspiration, project participants looked at the idea of a journey as both a physical and spiritual concept. They developed ideas around seven key journey themes; motivation, perspective, spice, challenges, movement, expression and inspiration.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
Their artwork will be displayed and a short trailer for their film will be available for download at a Bus Shelter on Gloucester Road from Monday 31 January until Sunday 13 February 2011.
Ismaili Youth Arts Initiative and London Transport Museum create bus shelter displays
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltmuseum/s ... 430624192/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltmuseum/5 ... 5884461999
http://ismailimail.wordpress.com/2011/0 ... ilimail%29
May 30, 2011
It’s Not About You
By DAVID BROOKS
Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.
College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.
Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.
Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.
Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opini ... emc=tha212
It’s Not About You
By DAVID BROOKS
Over the past few weeks, America’s colleges have sent another class of graduates off into the world. These graduates possess something of inestimable value. Nearly every sensible middle-aged person would give away all their money to be able to go back to age 22 and begin adulthood anew.
But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.
More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.
No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.
Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.
But, of course, this mantra misleads on nearly every front.
College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to. The successful young adult is beginning to make sacred commitments — to a spouse, a community and calling — yet mostly hears about freedom and autonomy.
Today’s graduates are also told to find their passion and then pursue their dreams. The implication is that they should find themselves first and then go off and live their quest. But, of course, very few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.
Most successful young people don’t look inside and then plan a life. They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life. A relative suffers from Alzheimer’s and a young woman feels called to help cure that disease. A young man works under a miserable boss and must develop management skills so his department can function. Another young woman finds herself confronted by an opportunity she never thought of in a job category she never imagined. This wasn’t in her plans, but this is where she can make her contribution.
Most people don’t form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
The graduates are also told to pursue happiness and joy. But, of course, when you read a biography of someone you admire, it’s rarely the things that made them happy that compel your admiration. It’s the things they did to court unhappiness — the things they did that were arduous and miserable, which sometimes cost them friends and aroused hatred. It’s excellence, not happiness, that we admire most.
Finally, graduates are told to be independent-minded and to express their inner spirit. But, of course, doing your job well often means suppressing yourself. As Atul Gawande mentioned during his countercultural address last week at Harvard Medical School, being a good doctor often means being part of a team, following the rules of an institution, going down a regimented checklist.
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/opini ... emc=tha212
Project Updates - A Quest Beyond Limits - A Mountaineering & Filming Expedition for Gender Equality
In less than one year, Pakistan Youth Outreach has organized three expeditions as well as a training camp for boys and girls, all in the Shimshal/Mulungutti area. Pakistan Youth Outreach’s purpose and aim is to educate youth about mountaineering and the outdoors, to promote women’s adventure, and to explore the great adventure areas of Pakistan.
After two previous, successful expeditions by Pakistan Youth Outreach, the third expedition was named the “Gender Equality Expedition” and the expedition was to an unclimbed, unnamed peak in the Karakorum, Gojerave area of Shimshal, Gilgit-Baltistan.
More....
http://www.pakyouthoutreach.com/project_updates3.html
In less than one year, Pakistan Youth Outreach has organized three expeditions as well as a training camp for boys and girls, all in the Shimshal/Mulungutti area. Pakistan Youth Outreach’s purpose and aim is to educate youth about mountaineering and the outdoors, to promote women’s adventure, and to explore the great adventure areas of Pakistan.
After two previous, successful expeditions by Pakistan Youth Outreach, the third expedition was named the “Gender Equality Expedition” and the expedition was to an unclimbed, unnamed peak in the Karakorum, Gojerave area of Shimshal, Gilgit-Baltistan.
More....
http://www.pakyouthoutreach.com/project_updates3.html
PHOTOS: Tri-Cities youth tackle graffiti
Coquitlam NOW August 18, 2011
PORT COQUITLAM — Armed with paintbrushes and rollers, Tri-Cities youth tackled graffiti at Birchland Elementary last weekend.
The clean-up crew included young volunteers from the Ismaili Muslim Civic Group and the Youth Tag Team, along with representatives from The Meridian Village Resident’s Association, Metro Vancouver Housing, Port Coquitlam community police stations and the Coquitlam RCMP.
“I’m very pleased to see dozens of energetic volunteers coming out to paint the fence at Birchland Elementary,” Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Jamie Chung said in a press release.
“This type of event gives our young people a sense of accomplishment by feeling that they can change the community for the better.”
According to police, graffiti often attracts more vandalism and taggers to the area. As well, taxpayers can get stuck with the cost of cleanup. Last year, the City of Port Coquitlam and School District 43 spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up graffiti.
The graffiti project was followed by a “Pop Culture — Positive Art” event at Lions Park, which included music and skateboarding.
At the event, kids had the chance to paint artwork on a piece of paper. Judges will choose a winning submission to make into a Hydro box wrap.
Coquitlam RCMP encourages graffiti victims to report the crime to police and get a file number. Then they can take the police file number to their local community police station to get a voucher, which can be redeemed at any General Paint location.
http://www.thenownews.com/PHOTOS+Cities ... story.html
Coquitlam NOW August 18, 2011
PORT COQUITLAM — Armed with paintbrushes and rollers, Tri-Cities youth tackled graffiti at Birchland Elementary last weekend.
The clean-up crew included young volunteers from the Ismaili Muslim Civic Group and the Youth Tag Team, along with representatives from The Meridian Village Resident’s Association, Metro Vancouver Housing, Port Coquitlam community police stations and the Coquitlam RCMP.
“I’m very pleased to see dozens of energetic volunteers coming out to paint the fence at Birchland Elementary,” Coquitlam RCMP Cpl. Jamie Chung said in a press release.
“This type of event gives our young people a sense of accomplishment by feeling that they can change the community for the better.”
According to police, graffiti often attracts more vandalism and taggers to the area. As well, taxpayers can get stuck with the cost of cleanup. Last year, the City of Port Coquitlam and School District 43 spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to clean up graffiti.
The graffiti project was followed by a “Pop Culture — Positive Art” event at Lions Park, which included music and skateboarding.
At the event, kids had the chance to paint artwork on a piece of paper. Judges will choose a winning submission to make into a Hydro box wrap.
Coquitlam RCMP encourages graffiti victims to report the crime to police and get a file number. Then they can take the police file number to their local community police station to get a voucher, which can be redeemed at any General Paint location.
http://www.thenownews.com/PHOTOS+Cities ... story.html
September 12, 2011
If It Feels Right ...
By DAVID BROOKS
During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.
Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”
Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism. (This was the summer of 2008, just before the crash).
Many of these shortcomings will sort themselves out as these youngsters get married, have kids, enter a profession or fit into more clearly defined social roles. Institutions will inculcate certain habits. Broader moral horizons will be forced upon them. But their attitudes at the start of their adult lives do reveal something about American culture. For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism.
Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.
Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.
In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opini ... emc=tha212
If It Feels Right ...
By DAVID BROOKS
During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America’s youth.
Smith and company asked about the young people’s moral lives, and the results are depressing.
It’s not so much that these young Americans are living lives of sin and debauchery, at least no more than you’d expect from 18- to 23-year-olds. What’s disheartening is how bad they are at thinking and talking about moral issues.
The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don’t have the categories or vocabulary to do so.
When asked to describe a moral dilemma they had faced, two-thirds of the young people either couldn’t answer the question or described problems that are not moral at all, like whether they could afford to rent a certain apartment or whether they had enough quarters to feed the meter at a parking spot.
“Not many of them have previously given much or any thought to many of the kinds of questions about morality that we asked,” Smith and his co-authors write. When asked about wrong or evil, they could generally agree that rape and murder are wrong. But, aside from these extreme cases, moral thinking didn’t enter the picture, even when considering things like drunken driving, cheating in school or cheating on a partner. “I don’t really deal with right and wrong that often,” is how one interviewee put it.
The default position, which most of them came back to again and again, is that moral choices are just a matter of individual taste. “It’s personal,” the respondents typically said. “It’s up to the individual. Who am I to say?”
Rejecting blind deference to authority, many of the young people have gone off to the other extreme: “I would do what I thought made me happy or how I felt. I have no other way of knowing what to do but how I internally feel.”
Many were quick to talk about their moral feelings but hesitant to link these feelings to any broader thinking about a shared moral framework or obligation. As one put it, “I mean, I guess what makes something right is how I feel about it. But different people feel different ways, so I couldn’t speak on behalf of anyone else as to what’s right and wrong.”
Smith and company found an atmosphere of extreme moral individualism — of relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Again, this doesn’t mean that America’s young people are immoral. Far from it. But, Smith and company emphasize, they have not been given the resources — by schools, institutions and families — to cultivate their moral intuitions, to think more broadly about moral obligations, to check behaviors that may be degrading. In this way, the study says more about adult America than youthful America.
Smith and company are stunned, for example, that the interviewees were so completely untroubled by rabid consumerism. (This was the summer of 2008, just before the crash).
Many of these shortcomings will sort themselves out as these youngsters get married, have kids, enter a profession or fit into more clearly defined social roles. Institutions will inculcate certain habits. Broader moral horizons will be forced upon them. But their attitudes at the start of their adult lives do reveal something about American culture. For decades, writers from different perspectives have been warning about the erosion of shared moral frameworks and the rise of an easygoing moral individualism.
Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb warned that sturdy virtues are being diluted into shallow values. Alasdair MacIntyre has written about emotivism, the idea that it’s impossible to secure moral agreement in our culture because all judgments are based on how we feel at the moment.
Charles Taylor has argued that morals have become separated from moral sources. People are less likely to feel embedded on a moral landscape that transcends self. James Davison Hunter wrote a book called “The Death of Character.” Smith’s interviewees are living, breathing examples of the trends these writers have described.
In most times and in most places, the group was seen to be the essential moral unit. A shared religion defined rules and practices. Cultures structured people’s imaginations and imposed moral disciplines. But now more people are led to assume that the free-floating individual is the essential moral unit. Morality was once revealed, inherited and shared, but now it’s thought of as something that emerges in the privacy of your own heart.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/opini ... emc=tha212
November 19, 2011
How About Better Parents?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.
To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.
These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.
The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.
“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”
To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opini ... emc=tha212
How About Better Parents?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student’s achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here’s what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children’s education can also make a huge difference in a student’s achievement.
How do we know? Every three years, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., conducts exams as part of the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which tests 15-year-olds in the world’s leading industrialized nations on their reading comprehension and ability to use what they’ve learned in math and science to solve real problems — the most important skills for succeeding in college and life. America’s 15-year-olds have not been distinguishing themselves in the PISA exams compared with students in Singapore, Finland and Shanghai.
To better understand why some students thrive taking the PISA tests and others do not, Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the exams for the O.E.C.D., was encouraged by the O.E.C.D. countries to look beyond the classrooms. So starting with four countries in 2006, and then adding 14 more in 2009, the PISA team went to the parents of 5,000 students and interviewed them “about how they raised their kids and then compared that with the test results” for each of those years, Schleicher explained to me. Two weeks ago, the PISA team published the three main findings of its study:
“Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all. The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socioeconomic background. Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.”
Schleicher explained to me that “just asking your child how was their school day and showing genuine interest in the learning that they are doing can have the same impact as hours of private tutoring. It is something every parent can do, no matter what their education level or social background.”
For instance, the PISA study revealed that “students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘every day or almost every day’ or ‘once or twice a week’ during the first year of primary school have markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents reported that they had read a book with their child ‘never or almost never’ or only ‘once or twice a month.’ On average, the score difference is 25 points, the equivalent of well over half a school year.”
Yes, students from more well-to-do households are more likely to have more involved parents. “However,” the PISA team found, “even when comparing students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds, those students whose parents regularly read books to them when they were in the first year of primary school score 14 points higher, on average, than students whose parents did not.”
The kind of parental involvement matters, as well. “For example,” the PISA study noted, “on average, the score point difference in reading that is associated with parental involvement is largest when parents read a book with their child, when they talk about things they have done during the day, and when they tell stories to their children.” The score point difference is smallest when parental involvement takes the form of simply playing with their children.
These PISA findings were echoed in a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, and written up by the center’s director, Patte Barth, in the latest issue of The American School Board Journal.
The study, called “Back to School: How parent involvement affects student achievement,” found something “somewhat surprising,” wrote Barth: “Parent involvement can take many forms, but only a few of them relate to higher student performance. Of those that work, parental actions that support children’s learning at home are most likely to have an impact on academic achievement at school.
“Monitoring homework; making sure children get to school; rewarding their efforts and talking up the idea of going to college. These parent actions are linked to better attendance, grades, test scores, and preparation for college,” Barth wrote. “The study found that getting parents involved with their children’s learning at home is a more powerful driver of achievement than parents attending P.T.A. and school board meetings, volunteering in classrooms, participating in fund-raising, and showing up at back-to-school nights.”
To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opini ... emc=tha212
Saeeda Mir won in international book writing
Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani on Monday stressed the need for a conducive environment to better utilize the potential of country’s talented youth. The Prime Minister expressed these views while talking to Saeeda Mir, a student from Gilgit-Baltistan who won first position in the international book-writing competition held in the United States among 1,900 competitors from around the world. The Prime Minister awarded a cash prize of Rs 500,000 to Saeeda Mir on her outstanding performance. Gilani said he had full confidence in the capabilities of the country’s youth who had made their mark in all walks of life, both at national and international levels.
“The youth of Pakistan symbolize hope and bright future of the nation. They are immensely talented and what they need is the provision of a conducive environment and facilitation to demonstrate their talent,” he added.
The Prime Minister said Saeeda Mir had made people of the country proud. She was an example of a beacon of light for the rest of youth especially girls. He said the government was committed to empowerment of women and had introduced various reforms at political, administrative, legislative and economic levels to enable them to play their role in the national development.
http://gilgitbaltistan.net63.net/saeeda_mir.html
Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani on Monday stressed the need for a conducive environment to better utilize the potential of country’s talented youth. The Prime Minister expressed these views while talking to Saeeda Mir, a student from Gilgit-Baltistan who won first position in the international book-writing competition held in the United States among 1,900 competitors from around the world. The Prime Minister awarded a cash prize of Rs 500,000 to Saeeda Mir on her outstanding performance. Gilani said he had full confidence in the capabilities of the country’s youth who had made their mark in all walks of life, both at national and international levels.
“The youth of Pakistan symbolize hope and bright future of the nation. They are immensely talented and what they need is the provision of a conducive environment and facilitation to demonstrate their talent,” he added.
The Prime Minister said Saeeda Mir had made people of the country proud. She was an example of a beacon of light for the rest of youth especially girls. He said the government was committed to empowerment of women and had introduced various reforms at political, administrative, legislative and economic levels to enable them to play their role in the national development.
http://gilgitbaltistan.net63.net/saeeda_mir.html
How Adulthood Happens
Every society has its rites of passage, marking the transition from youth to adulthood. Most of these rites of passage are ritualized and structured, with adult supervision and celebration. But the major rite of passage in our society is unritualized, unstructured and unnamed. Most of the people in the middle of it don’t even know it is going on. It happens between ages 22 and 30.
The people who endure this rite of passage have often attended colleges where they were not taught how to work hard. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa write in their book “Aspiring Adults Adrift,” the average student at a four-year college studies alone just over one hour per day. That is roughly half of how much students were compelled to study just a generation ago.
Meanwhile, colleges have become socially rich, stocked with student centers, student organizations, expensive gyms, concerts and activities. As Arum’s and Roksa’s research demonstrates, academic life is of secondary or tertiary importance to most students. Social life comes first. Students experience college as a place to meet other people and learn to build relationships.
When they leave campus, though, most of those social connections and structures are ripped away. Suddenly fresh alumni are cast out into a world almost without support organizations and compelled to hustle for themselves.
These twenty-somethings live in a world of radical freedom, flux and insecurity. Surveys show they are very pessimistic about the state of the country, but amazingly optimistic about their own eventual destiny. According to the Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults, 86 percent agree with the statement, “I am confident that eventually I will get what I want out of life.”
In the meantime, many spend the first few years out of college aspiring but adrift. They are largely unattached to religious institutions. Two-thirds report that they are not politically engaged. Half the students in Arum’s and Roksa’s recent study reported that they lacked clear goals or a sense of direction two years after graduation.
Yet they are not sure they want to rush into adulthood. As Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel write in “Getting to 30,” “The value of youth has risen, and the desirability of adulthood has dropped accordingly. Today’s young people expect to reach adulthood eventually, and they expect to enjoy their adult lives, but most are in no hurry to get there.”
One way they cope is by moving back home. A third of the graduates in the Arum and Roksa sample were living at home, levels roughly double the share of grads living at home in the 1960s. Three-quarters of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not living at home received financial assistance from their parents. American parents provide an average of $38,000 in assistance to their young adult children.
The first big ordeal is finding a job. Many young adults have not been given basic information about how to go about this. As my Times colleague April Lawson, 28, notes, they are often given the advice, “Follow your dream! The possibilities are limitless!” which is completely discordant with the grubby realities they face. They want meaningful work with social impact. They want to bring their whole selves to work, and ignore the distinctions between professional and intimate life that were in the heads of earlier generations. But meaningful work is scarce. Fifty-three percent of college graduates in the Arum and Roksa sample who were in the labor force were unemployed, underemployed or making less that $30,000 a year.
As emerging adults move from job to job, relationship to relationship and city to city, they have to figure out which of their meanderings are productive exploration and which parts are just wastes of time. This question is very confusing from the inside, and it is certainly confusing for their parents.
Yet here is the good news. By age 30, the vast majority are through it. The sheer hardness of the “Odyssey Years” teaches people to hustle. The trials and errors of the decade carve contours onto their hearts, so they learn what they love and what they don’t. They develop their own internal criteria to make their own decisions. They fear what other people think less because they learn that other people are not thinking about them; they are busy thinking about themselves.
Finally, they learn to say no. After a youth dazzled by possibilities and the fear of missing out, they discover that committing to the few things you love is a sort of liberation. They piece together their mosaic.
One thing we can tell young grads and their parents is that this is normal. This phase is a thing. It’s a not a sentence to a life of video games, loneliness and hangovers. It’s a rite of passage that makes people strong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/opini ... pe=article
Every society has its rites of passage, marking the transition from youth to adulthood. Most of these rites of passage are ritualized and structured, with adult supervision and celebration. But the major rite of passage in our society is unritualized, unstructured and unnamed. Most of the people in the middle of it don’t even know it is going on. It happens between ages 22 and 30.
The people who endure this rite of passage have often attended colleges where they were not taught how to work hard. As Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa write in their book “Aspiring Adults Adrift,” the average student at a four-year college studies alone just over one hour per day. That is roughly half of how much students were compelled to study just a generation ago.
Meanwhile, colleges have become socially rich, stocked with student centers, student organizations, expensive gyms, concerts and activities. As Arum’s and Roksa’s research demonstrates, academic life is of secondary or tertiary importance to most students. Social life comes first. Students experience college as a place to meet other people and learn to build relationships.
When they leave campus, though, most of those social connections and structures are ripped away. Suddenly fresh alumni are cast out into a world almost without support organizations and compelled to hustle for themselves.
These twenty-somethings live in a world of radical freedom, flux and insecurity. Surveys show they are very pessimistic about the state of the country, but amazingly optimistic about their own eventual destiny. According to the Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults, 86 percent agree with the statement, “I am confident that eventually I will get what I want out of life.”
In the meantime, many spend the first few years out of college aspiring but adrift. They are largely unattached to religious institutions. Two-thirds report that they are not politically engaged. Half the students in Arum’s and Roksa’s recent study reported that they lacked clear goals or a sense of direction two years after graduation.
Yet they are not sure they want to rush into adulthood. As Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Elizabeth Fishel write in “Getting to 30,” “The value of youth has risen, and the desirability of adulthood has dropped accordingly. Today’s young people expect to reach adulthood eventually, and they expect to enjoy their adult lives, but most are in no hurry to get there.”
One way they cope is by moving back home. A third of the graduates in the Arum and Roksa sample were living at home, levels roughly double the share of grads living at home in the 1960s. Three-quarters of 18- to 25-year-olds who were not living at home received financial assistance from their parents. American parents provide an average of $38,000 in assistance to their young adult children.
The first big ordeal is finding a job. Many young adults have not been given basic information about how to go about this. As my Times colleague April Lawson, 28, notes, they are often given the advice, “Follow your dream! The possibilities are limitless!” which is completely discordant with the grubby realities they face. They want meaningful work with social impact. They want to bring their whole selves to work, and ignore the distinctions between professional and intimate life that were in the heads of earlier generations. But meaningful work is scarce. Fifty-three percent of college graduates in the Arum and Roksa sample who were in the labor force were unemployed, underemployed or making less that $30,000 a year.
As emerging adults move from job to job, relationship to relationship and city to city, they have to figure out which of their meanderings are productive exploration and which parts are just wastes of time. This question is very confusing from the inside, and it is certainly confusing for their parents.
Yet here is the good news. By age 30, the vast majority are through it. The sheer hardness of the “Odyssey Years” teaches people to hustle. The trials and errors of the decade carve contours onto their hearts, so they learn what they love and what they don’t. They develop their own internal criteria to make their own decisions. They fear what other people think less because they learn that other people are not thinking about them; they are busy thinking about themselves.
Finally, they learn to say no. After a youth dazzled by possibilities and the fear of missing out, they discover that committing to the few things you love is a sort of liberation. They piece together their mosaic.
One thing we can tell young grads and their parents is that this is normal. This phase is a thing. It’s a not a sentence to a life of video games, loneliness and hangovers. It’s a rite of passage that makes people strong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/opini ... pe=article
Today’s Exhausted Superkids
There are several passages in the new book “Overloaded and Underprepared” that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat.
But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.
It’s a prerequisite for healthy growth. It’s a linchpin of sanity. Before adulthood, a baseline amount is fundamental and nonnegotiable, or should be.
But many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they’re getting only a fraction of the rest they need. The book mentions a high school in Silicon Valley that brought in outside sleep experts, created a kind of sleep curriculum and trained students as “sleep ambassadors,” all to promote shut-eye.
The school even held a contest that asked students for sleep slogans. The winner: “Life is lousy when you’re drowsy.”
Sleep ambassadors? Sleep rhymes? Back when I was in high school in the 1980s, in a setting considered intense in its day, the most common sleep problem among my peers was getting too much of it and not waking up in time for class.
Now the concern isn’t how to rouse teens but how to lull them. And that says everything about the way childhood has been transformed — at least among an ambitious, privileged subset of Americans — into an insanely programmed, status-obsessed and sometimes spirit-sapping race.
Take one more Advanced Placement class. Add another extracurricular. Apply to all eight Ivies.
Lose a few winks but never a few steps.
“Overloaded and Underprepared,” published on Tuesday, was written by Denise Pope, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles, all affiliated with a Stanford University-based group called Challenge Success, which urges more balanced learning environments. The book looks at homework loads, school-day structures and much more.
And it joins an urgently needed body of literature that pushes back at helicopter parenting, exorbitant private tutoring, exhaustive preparation for standardized tests and the rest of it. This genre goes back at least a decade and includes, notably, Madeline Levine’s “The Price of Privilege” and Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed.”
But it has expanded with particular velocity of late. “How to Raise an Adult,” by Julie Lythcott-Haims, came out last month. “The Gift of Failure,” by Jessica Lahey, will be released in two weeks.
There’s a unifying theme: Enough is enough.
“At some point, you have to say, ‘Whoa! This is too crazy,’ ” Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford, told me.
Sleep deprivation is just a part of the craziness, but it’s a perfect shorthand for childhoods bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the “pressure of perfection,” to quote the headline on a story by Julie Scelfo in The Times this week.
Scelfo wrote about six suicides in a 13-month period at the University of Pennsylvania; about the prevalence of anxiety and depression on college campuses; about many star students’ inability to cope with even minor setbacks, which are foreign and impermissible.
Those students almost certainly need more sleep. In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.
“I’ve got kids on a regular basis telling me that they’re getting five hours,” Pope said. That endangers their mental and physical health.
Smartphones and tablets aggravate the problem, keeping kids connected and distracted long after lights out. But in communities where academic expectations run highest, the real culprit is panic: about acing the exam, burnishing the transcript, keeping up with high-achieving peers.
I’ve talked with many parents in these places. They say that they’d love to pull their children off such a fast track, but won’t the other children wind up ahead?
They might — if “ahead” is measured only by a spot in U-Penn’s freshman class and if securing that is all that matters.
But what about giving a kid the wiggle room to find genuine passions, the freedom to discover true independence, the space to screw up and bounce back? Shouldn’t that matter as much?
“No one is arguing for a generation of mediocre or underachieving kids — but plenty of people have begun arguing for a redefinition of what it means to achieve at all,” wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine last week. He noted, rightly, that “somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos, there has to be a place where kids can breathe.”
And where they can tumble gently into sleep, which is a gateway, not an impediment, to dreams.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/opini ... d=45305309
There are several passages in the new book “Overloaded and Underprepared” that fill me with sadness for American high school students, the most driven of whom are forever in search of a competitive edge. Some use stimulants like Adderall. Some cheat.
But the part of the book that somehow got to me most was about sleep.
It’s a prerequisite for healthy growth. It’s a linchpin of sanity. Before adulthood, a baseline amount is fundamental and nonnegotiable, or should be.
But many teenagers today are so hyped up and stressed out that they’re getting only a fraction of the rest they need. The book mentions a high school in Silicon Valley that brought in outside sleep experts, created a kind of sleep curriculum and trained students as “sleep ambassadors,” all to promote shut-eye.
The school even held a contest that asked students for sleep slogans. The winner: “Life is lousy when you’re drowsy.”
Sleep ambassadors? Sleep rhymes? Back when I was in high school in the 1980s, in a setting considered intense in its day, the most common sleep problem among my peers was getting too much of it and not waking up in time for class.
Now the concern isn’t how to rouse teens but how to lull them. And that says everything about the way childhood has been transformed — at least among an ambitious, privileged subset of Americans — into an insanely programmed, status-obsessed and sometimes spirit-sapping race.
Take one more Advanced Placement class. Add another extracurricular. Apply to all eight Ivies.
Lose a few winks but never a few steps.
“Overloaded and Underprepared,” published on Tuesday, was written by Denise Pope, Maureen Brown and Sarah Miles, all affiliated with a Stanford University-based group called Challenge Success, which urges more balanced learning environments. The book looks at homework loads, school-day structures and much more.
And it joins an urgently needed body of literature that pushes back at helicopter parenting, exorbitant private tutoring, exhaustive preparation for standardized tests and the rest of it. This genre goes back at least a decade and includes, notably, Madeline Levine’s “The Price of Privilege” and Paul Tough’s “How Children Succeed.”
But it has expanded with particular velocity of late. “How to Raise an Adult,” by Julie Lythcott-Haims, came out last month. “The Gift of Failure,” by Jessica Lahey, will be released in two weeks.
There’s a unifying theme: Enough is enough.
“At some point, you have to say, ‘Whoa! This is too crazy,’ ” Pope, a senior lecturer at Stanford, told me.
Sleep deprivation is just a part of the craziness, but it’s a perfect shorthand for childhoods bereft of spontaneity, stripped of real play and haunted by the “pressure of perfection,” to quote the headline on a story by Julie Scelfo in The Times this week.
Scelfo wrote about six suicides in a 13-month period at the University of Pennsylvania; about the prevalence of anxiety and depression on college campuses; about many star students’ inability to cope with even minor setbacks, which are foreign and impermissible.
Those students almost certainly need more sleep. In a study in the medical journal Pediatrics this year, about 55 percent of American teenagers from the ages of 14 to 17 reported that they were getting less than seven hours a night, though the National Sleep Foundation counsels 8 to 10.
“I’ve got kids on a regular basis telling me that they’re getting five hours,” Pope said. That endangers their mental and physical health.
Smartphones and tablets aggravate the problem, keeping kids connected and distracted long after lights out. But in communities where academic expectations run highest, the real culprit is panic: about acing the exam, burnishing the transcript, keeping up with high-achieving peers.
I’ve talked with many parents in these places. They say that they’d love to pull their children off such a fast track, but won’t the other children wind up ahead?
They might — if “ahead” is measured only by a spot in U-Penn’s freshman class and if securing that is all that matters.
But what about giving a kid the wiggle room to find genuine passions, the freedom to discover true independence, the space to screw up and bounce back? Shouldn’t that matter as much?
“No one is arguing for a generation of mediocre or underachieving kids — but plenty of people have begun arguing for a redefinition of what it means to achieve at all,” wrote Jeffrey Kluger in Time magazine last week. He noted, rightly, that “somewhere between the self-esteem building of going for the gold and the self-esteem crushing of the Ivy-or-die ethos, there has to be a place where kids can breathe.”
And where they can tumble gently into sleep, which is a gateway, not an impediment, to dreams.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/opini ... d=45305309
Teenagers, Medication and Suicide
IS our culture of relentless achievement and success driving our young people to suicide? You would certainly think so, given the prevailing narrative in the media about the recent spate of suicides on college campuses: one high-achieving student after another succumbing to the toxic social pressure for perfection.
It’s a plausible but incomplete explanation. No doubt the intense social pressure on young people, especially girls and young women, is daunting, but stress is only part of the story: We should also focus on adolescent mental illness and its treatment.
At least 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable and potentially treatable mental illness like depression, or alcohol or other drug abuse problems, often in combination. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people and has been rising since 2007. The unidentified killer in this story is untreated psychiatric illness.
In 2013, for example, 8.7 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 25 experienced a major depression episode in the previous year, but only half of them received any psychiatric treatment, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. And in 57 percent of these episodes, patients were seen by a general practitioner or family doctor — neither of whom is typically an expert in the treatment of mental illness.
Worse, antidepressants, which can be lifesaving, are probably being underused in young people. Their use fell significantly after the Food and Drug Administration issued its so-called black-box warning in 2004, stating that all antidepressants were associated with a risk of increased suicidal feeling, thinking and behavior in adolescents. That warning was later extended to young adults.
One very large study, including 1.1 million adolescents and 1.4 million young adults, examined data for automated health care claims for 2000 to 2010 from 11 health plans in the United States Mental Health Research Network. Disturbingly, the study found that antidepressant use plunged 31 percent among adolescents and 24 percent among young adults within two years after the F.D.A. advisory was issued.
It’s not hard to understand why. The F.D.A.’s well-intended warning was alarming to the public and most likely discouraged many patients from taking antidepressants. Physicians, too, were anxious about the admittedly small possible risks posed by antidepressants and were probably more reluctant to prescribe them.
What the public and some in the medical community did not understand then — and perhaps still don’t know — is that the risk of antidepressant treatment is minuscule: In the F.D.A. meta-analysis of some 372 clinical trials involving nearly 100,000 subjects, the rate of suicidal thinking and behavior was 4 percent in people taking antidepressants, compared with 2 percent in people taking a placebo.
This very small risk of suicidal behavior posed by antidepressant treatment has always been dwarfed by the deadly risk of untreated depression: 2 to 15 percent of depressed people actually commit suicide.
The somewhat good news is that the downward trend in antidepressant use among adolescents following the F.D.A. advisory reversed a bit after 2008. Still, the rates of antidepressant use since the F.D.A. warning was issued have remained below the levels that would have been predicted based on pre-warning use patterns.
This pattern is very disturbing, since in the decade before this downturn in prescribing of antidepressants — 1990 to 2000 — there was a steady decline in adolescent suicide rates that coincided with an increase in the use of antidepressants in this age group.
One study found that a 1 percent increase in adolescent use of antidepressants was associated with a decrease of 0.23 suicides per 100,000 adolescents per year. (Of course, correlation cannot prove causality; other factors, like reduced rates of alcohol and drug use and more stringent gun safety regulations during this period, may have played a role, too.)
Since there is no evidence that the F.D.A. black-box warning has been helpful, and there is a very reasonable possibility that it has discouraged patients from taking antidepressants and physicians from prescribing these medications, the government should rescind the black-box warning on antidepressants altogether.
Parents and teenagers, and their doctors, too, should not be afraid of antidepressants and should know that they can be very helpful. Indeed, with careful use and monitoring, they can be lifesaving. The only thing we should all fear is depression, a natural killer that we can effectively treat.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a contributing opinion writer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/opini ... ef=opinion
IS our culture of relentless achievement and success driving our young people to suicide? You would certainly think so, given the prevailing narrative in the media about the recent spate of suicides on college campuses: one high-achieving student after another succumbing to the toxic social pressure for perfection.
It’s a plausible but incomplete explanation. No doubt the intense social pressure on young people, especially girls and young women, is daunting, but stress is only part of the story: We should also focus on adolescent mental illness and its treatment.
At least 90 percent of people who commit suicide have a diagnosable and potentially treatable mental illness like depression, or alcohol or other drug abuse problems, often in combination. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people and has been rising since 2007. The unidentified killer in this story is untreated psychiatric illness.
In 2013, for example, 8.7 percent of people between the ages of 18 and 25 experienced a major depression episode in the previous year, but only half of them received any psychiatric treatment, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. And in 57 percent of these episodes, patients were seen by a general practitioner or family doctor — neither of whom is typically an expert in the treatment of mental illness.
Worse, antidepressants, which can be lifesaving, are probably being underused in young people. Their use fell significantly after the Food and Drug Administration issued its so-called black-box warning in 2004, stating that all antidepressants were associated with a risk of increased suicidal feeling, thinking and behavior in adolescents. That warning was later extended to young adults.
One very large study, including 1.1 million adolescents and 1.4 million young adults, examined data for automated health care claims for 2000 to 2010 from 11 health plans in the United States Mental Health Research Network. Disturbingly, the study found that antidepressant use plunged 31 percent among adolescents and 24 percent among young adults within two years after the F.D.A. advisory was issued.
It’s not hard to understand why. The F.D.A.’s well-intended warning was alarming to the public and most likely discouraged many patients from taking antidepressants. Physicians, too, were anxious about the admittedly small possible risks posed by antidepressants and were probably more reluctant to prescribe them.
What the public and some in the medical community did not understand then — and perhaps still don’t know — is that the risk of antidepressant treatment is minuscule: In the F.D.A. meta-analysis of some 372 clinical trials involving nearly 100,000 subjects, the rate of suicidal thinking and behavior was 4 percent in people taking antidepressants, compared with 2 percent in people taking a placebo.
This very small risk of suicidal behavior posed by antidepressant treatment has always been dwarfed by the deadly risk of untreated depression: 2 to 15 percent of depressed people actually commit suicide.
The somewhat good news is that the downward trend in antidepressant use among adolescents following the F.D.A. advisory reversed a bit after 2008. Still, the rates of antidepressant use since the F.D.A. warning was issued have remained below the levels that would have been predicted based on pre-warning use patterns.
This pattern is very disturbing, since in the decade before this downturn in prescribing of antidepressants — 1990 to 2000 — there was a steady decline in adolescent suicide rates that coincided with an increase in the use of antidepressants in this age group.
One study found that a 1 percent increase in adolescent use of antidepressants was associated with a decrease of 0.23 suicides per 100,000 adolescents per year. (Of course, correlation cannot prove causality; other factors, like reduced rates of alcohol and drug use and more stringent gun safety regulations during this period, may have played a role, too.)
Since there is no evidence that the F.D.A. black-box warning has been helpful, and there is a very reasonable possibility that it has discouraged patients from taking antidepressants and physicians from prescribing these medications, the government should rescind the black-box warning on antidepressants altogether.
Parents and teenagers, and their doctors, too, should not be afraid of antidepressants and should know that they can be very helpful. Indeed, with careful use and monitoring, they can be lifesaving. The only thing we should all fear is depression, a natural killer that we can effectively treat.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a contributing opinion writer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/03/opini ... ef=opinion
The New Romantics in the Computer Age
Just once I’d like to have a college student come up to me and say, “I really wanted to major in accounting, but my parents forced me to major in medieval art.” That probably won’t happen. It always seems to be the parents who are pushing their children in the “practical” or mercenary direction.
These parents are part of the vast apparatus — college résumés, standardized tests, the decline of humanities majors — that has arisen to make our culture more professional and less poetic.
But you see a counterreaction setting in. You see, here and there, signs of a new romanticism.
Ironically, technological forces may be driving some of the romantic rebirth. As Geoff Colvin points out in his book “Humans Are Underrated,” computers will soon be able to do many of the cognitive tasks taught in places like law schools and finance departments.
Computers can already go through millions of legal documents and sort them for relevance to an individual case, someday allowing one lawyer to do the work of 500. Computers may soon be able to cruise through troves of data and offer superior financial advice. Computers are not only getting smarter at systems analysis, they are improving at rates no human can match.
Colvin argues that improving your cognitive skills is no longer good enough. Simply developing more generic human capital will not help people prosper in the coming economy. You shouldn’t even ask, What jobs can I do that computers can’t do? That’s because they are getting good at so many disparate things. You should instead ask, What are the activities that we humans, driven by our deepest nature or by the realities of daily life, will simply insist be performed by other humans?
Those tasks are mostly relational. Being in a position of authority or accountability. Being a caregiver. Being part of a team. Transactional jobs are declining but relational jobs are expanding.
Empathy becomes a more important workplace skill, the ability to sense what another human being is feeling or thinking. Diabetes patients of doctors who scored high on empathy tests do better than patients with low-empathy doctors.
The ability to function in a group also becomes more important — to know how to tell stories that convey the important points, how to mix people together.
Secure workers will combine technical knowledge with social awareness — the sort of thing you get from your genes, from growing up in a certain sort of family and by widening your repertoire of emotions through reflection, literature and a capacity for intimacy.
But the new romanticism won’t only be built on workplace incentives. It will be driven, too, by the inherent human craving for the transcendent. Through history there have always been moments when eras of pragmatism give way to eras of high idealism.
Mark Edmundson’s new book, “Self and Soul,” is a blow in that direction. He observes that “culture in the West has become progressively more practical, materially oriented, and skeptical.” But he argues that history has left us different idealistic models worth pondering and reviving.
There is the hero of courage, who possesses prowess and risks life and limb for a cause, thus arousing admiration and awe. There is the hero of compassion, like Buddha or Jesus, who puts others before him or herself. Edmundson writes: “The saint seeks a life full of meaningful compassion. The acquisition of goods, the piling up of wealth, only serves to draw force from his proper pursuit. The saint lives — or tries to live — beyond desire. The saint lives for hope.”
There is the hero of serious thought. “Even early on,” Edmundson says, “as they enter the first phase of their lives as thinkers, they’ll have one of the greatest satisfactions a human being can have: They won’t lie. They’ll follow Socrates, and they’ll look out at the world, and with whatever mix of irony and sweetness and exasperation, they will describe it as it is to them. When others trim and sidestep, they will have the satisfaction of voicing honest perceptions.”
I could imagine a time when young thinkers discard the strictures of the academic professionalism and try to revive the model of the intellectual as secular sage. I could see other young people tiring of résumé-building do-goodism and trying to live more radically for the poor. The romantic tries as much as possible to ground his or her life in purer love that transforms — making him or her more inspired, creative and dedicated, and therefore better able to live as a modern instantiation of some ideal.
I’m not sure we’re about to be overrun with waves of Byronic romantics, but we have been living through an unromantic period and there’s bound to be a correction. People eventually want their souls stirred, especially if the stuff regarded as soft and squishy turns out in a relational economy to be hard and practical.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/opini ... pe=article
Just once I’d like to have a college student come up to me and say, “I really wanted to major in accounting, but my parents forced me to major in medieval art.” That probably won’t happen. It always seems to be the parents who are pushing their children in the “practical” or mercenary direction.
These parents are part of the vast apparatus — college résumés, standardized tests, the decline of humanities majors — that has arisen to make our culture more professional and less poetic.
But you see a counterreaction setting in. You see, here and there, signs of a new romanticism.
Ironically, technological forces may be driving some of the romantic rebirth. As Geoff Colvin points out in his book “Humans Are Underrated,” computers will soon be able to do many of the cognitive tasks taught in places like law schools and finance departments.
Computers can already go through millions of legal documents and sort them for relevance to an individual case, someday allowing one lawyer to do the work of 500. Computers may soon be able to cruise through troves of data and offer superior financial advice. Computers are not only getting smarter at systems analysis, they are improving at rates no human can match.
Colvin argues that improving your cognitive skills is no longer good enough. Simply developing more generic human capital will not help people prosper in the coming economy. You shouldn’t even ask, What jobs can I do that computers can’t do? That’s because they are getting good at so many disparate things. You should instead ask, What are the activities that we humans, driven by our deepest nature or by the realities of daily life, will simply insist be performed by other humans?
Those tasks are mostly relational. Being in a position of authority or accountability. Being a caregiver. Being part of a team. Transactional jobs are declining but relational jobs are expanding.
Empathy becomes a more important workplace skill, the ability to sense what another human being is feeling or thinking. Diabetes patients of doctors who scored high on empathy tests do better than patients with low-empathy doctors.
The ability to function in a group also becomes more important — to know how to tell stories that convey the important points, how to mix people together.
Secure workers will combine technical knowledge with social awareness — the sort of thing you get from your genes, from growing up in a certain sort of family and by widening your repertoire of emotions through reflection, literature and a capacity for intimacy.
But the new romanticism won’t only be built on workplace incentives. It will be driven, too, by the inherent human craving for the transcendent. Through history there have always been moments when eras of pragmatism give way to eras of high idealism.
Mark Edmundson’s new book, “Self and Soul,” is a blow in that direction. He observes that “culture in the West has become progressively more practical, materially oriented, and skeptical.” But he argues that history has left us different idealistic models worth pondering and reviving.
There is the hero of courage, who possesses prowess and risks life and limb for a cause, thus arousing admiration and awe. There is the hero of compassion, like Buddha or Jesus, who puts others before him or herself. Edmundson writes: “The saint seeks a life full of meaningful compassion. The acquisition of goods, the piling up of wealth, only serves to draw force from his proper pursuit. The saint lives — or tries to live — beyond desire. The saint lives for hope.”
There is the hero of serious thought. “Even early on,” Edmundson says, “as they enter the first phase of their lives as thinkers, they’ll have one of the greatest satisfactions a human being can have: They won’t lie. They’ll follow Socrates, and they’ll look out at the world, and with whatever mix of irony and sweetness and exasperation, they will describe it as it is to them. When others trim and sidestep, they will have the satisfaction of voicing honest perceptions.”
I could imagine a time when young thinkers discard the strictures of the academic professionalism and try to revive the model of the intellectual as secular sage. I could see other young people tiring of résumé-building do-goodism and trying to live more radically for the poor. The romantic tries as much as possible to ground his or her life in purer love that transforms — making him or her more inspired, creative and dedicated, and therefore better able to live as a modern instantiation of some ideal.
I’m not sure we’re about to be overrun with waves of Byronic romantics, but we have been living through an unromantic period and there’s bound to be a correction. People eventually want their souls stirred, especially if the stuff regarded as soft and squishy turns out in a relational economy to be hard and practical.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/04/opini ... pe=article
FARMAN ON US YOUTH AS ROLE MODELS
When you enter a new culture or a new country, you enter with your own traditions, your own values. You are not obligated to accept everything that is in the culture or tradition of the country that you enter. Use good judgment, retain what is good, make it part of your lives, improve the quality of your lives. But make wise judgments, keep the values that are ours historically and do not indulge in activities which are damaging for you, or which are damaging for your families, or which are damaging for the future generations, or which are damaging to the image of the Jamat in the United States. This is an important matter for the younger generation particularly to keep in mind, that they are living in a country which is viewed outside as the most powerful country in the world today. Therefore what the young do in the United States, is in many ways, going to be looked upon by the young in other countries, as being a way to behave. Therefore the young in the United States have upon themselves not only the need to apply wisdom for themselves, but to apply wisdom as role models for future generations in the most powerful country in the world. This is an important aspect for the youth of the Jamat in the United States. (Houston, June 24, 2002)
When you enter a new culture or a new country, you enter with your own traditions, your own values. You are not obligated to accept everything that is in the culture or tradition of the country that you enter. Use good judgment, retain what is good, make it part of your lives, improve the quality of your lives. But make wise judgments, keep the values that are ours historically and do not indulge in activities which are damaging for you, or which are damaging for your families, or which are damaging for the future generations, or which are damaging to the image of the Jamat in the United States. This is an important matter for the younger generation particularly to keep in mind, that they are living in a country which is viewed outside as the most powerful country in the world today. Therefore what the young do in the United States, is in many ways, going to be looked upon by the young in other countries, as being a way to behave. Therefore the young in the United States have upon themselves not only the need to apply wisdom for themselves, but to apply wisdom as role models for future generations in the most powerful country in the world. This is an important aspect for the youth of the Jamat in the United States. (Houston, June 24, 2002)
Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — During orientation at Harvard Divinity School here in 2013, Angie Thurston wandered amid the tables set up by the various campus ministries. Catholic, Methodist, Muslim — they mostly served to reinforce the sense that Ms. Thurston did not fit into an organized religion.
Here she was, starting her graduate studies in religion when she did not know the definition of liturgy, had never read the Bible and could not have identified a major theologian like Karl Barth, even if it would have won her a fortune on “Jeopardy!” Yet something in organized religion hinted at an answer to the atomized, unmoored life she led.
“I didn’t feel unwelcome, but I did feel like it was a call to creativity,” Ms. Thurston, 30, recalled of her initiation. “I wanted to respond to what I saw as a crisis of isolation among young people.”
She added, “I wanted to create a meaningful community that came together based on a shared goal rather than a shared religious creed.”
From such an unlikely beginning — a self-described “religious weirdo” enrolling in an elite divinity school — has grown a fascinating phenomenon. Now in her final year at Harvard, Ms. Thurston is a central figure in a boomlet of students who are secular or unaffiliated with any religious denomination, commonly known as “nones,” attending divinity school. While Harvard may be the center, nones can be found at other divinity schools around the country, especially those inclined toward theologically and politically liberal Protestantism, like Chicago Theological Seminary.
Two factors are driving this surge. First, the proportion of nones in the United States has grown to about a third of all millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Second, divinity school offers even atheists and spiritual seekers a language of moral discourse and training in congregational leadership. The traits appeal to nones who aspire to careers in activism, social work, chaplaincy or community organizing rather than taking to a pulpit.
“Nones are not entirely opposed to religious traditions, though they don’t attach to a specific one,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, who has seen the trend while visiting campuses. “No small part of them are attracted to the search for social justice and for spiritual meaning. And they recognize those things as the fruits of religious tradition. So it makes sense to go to a place where you can study religious tradition.”
Within higher education, divinity programs often stand apart from the cult of relativism in the liberal arts and the utilitarian emphasis in professional schools focusing on business and law, for example.
“If you were simply looking for the skills, you might go to the Kennedy School of Government,” said the Rev. Dudley C. Rose, the associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard. “And philosophy and liberal-arts fields have given up on the project of finding a moral language, an articulation of values. That language isn’t found in many places. And when you find it, it’s not easy to abstract it. You have to connect it to a tradition.”
In Harvard’s case, the influx of secular and unaffiliated students had one early and visible pioneer, Greg M. Epstein. In 2004, while already serving as the assistant humanist chaplain for Harvard students and staff members who are atheist or agnostic, Mr. Epstein enrolled in divinity school. He took classes in everything from existentialist philosophy to musicology to nonprofit administration, and he did a practicum in ministry with a cohort of Unitarian Universalist students, the closest thing he could find to atheists.
By the time he graduated in 2007, Mr. Epstein could see a “trickle” of other humanist students entering the divinity school, and he set out to recruit more. “I see myself like a college football coach,” said Mr. Epstein, who comes by the metaphor honestly as an alumnus of the University of Michigan. “I want to constantly be bringing in new talent.”
On campus, Mr. Epstein replaced the retiring humanist chaplain. Off campus, he put together a community center, the Humanist Hub. In both guises, he differed markedly from prominent atheists by adapting some of organized religion’s models of ritual, moral language and communal purpose rather than merely denouncing belief as superstition.
Ms. Thurston, for example, applied to Harvard Divinity School specifically because of what she knew about Mr. Epstein’s work. She does not consider herself secular; rather, she follows the precepts of the Urantia Book, a 2,000-page work of philosophy and spirituality that has some elements of Christianity. She also critiques terms like “nones” and “unaffiliated,” and the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
“It’s difficult to foster community based on negation, on saying what you aren’t,” she said. “To live in this soup of negation, it’s just not lasting.”
The group that Ms. Thurston helped start, Harvard Religious Nones, includes almost 70 people on its email list and regularly attracts 20 people to its meetings, not insignificant in a divinity school with 350 students. The divinity school also has a humanist group with about a half-dozen members.
One of her classmates, Casper ter Kuile, and a recent divinity school graduate, Vanessa Zoltan, teach a weekly course together for about 55 people on “Harry Potter” as a sacred text at the off-campus Humanist Hub. This weekend, Ms. Thurston and her collaborator Aisha Ansano are holding a workshop about the Harvard Religious Nones at the Parliament of World’s Religions in Salt Lake City.
Throughout the academic year, the divinity school’s nones gather regularly to sing, share personal experiences and offer support. Ms. Thurston and Mr. ter Kuile wrote a report, “How We Gather,” that identified successful modern examples of community-building, from the exercise program SoulCycle to dinner parties in which bereaved people meet over a meal.
Ms. Zoltan typifies the portion of Harvard Divinity School students who are avowedly secular. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and the child of fervent atheists, she partook in Shabbat dinners and attended a Hebrew school purely as forms of cultural affirmation.
“Our family felt like, ‘God isn’t just dead, but if he’s real, he hates us,’ ” she recalled. “I was raised to believe that humans are what matter. And art. We worshiped movies and books. Our Bible was everything from Neil Simon to the Russian novelists.”
Yet when Ms. Zoltan attended graduate school at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for nonprofit management, she rejected the capitalist theology there that the market is a value system. The Great Recession proved to her, she recalled, “Your way is wrong.”
A course in ethics, though, began to point her in an unexpected direction. She slowly came to recognize that the people she admired most — Gandhi, King, Emerson, Tolstoy and Alcott — had deep religious or spiritual lives.
“It was in the back of my head that Judaism has answers, that there were laws and the laws were based in ethics,” Ms. Zoltan, 33, said. “I kept saying, ‘I should’ve gone to Div School,’ and my boyfriend said, ‘Why don’t you try?’ ”
During her years at Harvard, she said, she opened herself up to the possibility of a deity. Every time, the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide or the Syrian civil war convinced her nothing supernatural existed.
The concept of sacredness, however, gripped her, and she sought out ways to consecrate the secular. With a divinity school professor, Stephanie Paulsell, she did an independent study in “Jane Eyre” as a holy book. Mr. Epstein and she studied Judaic texts together in the yeshiva system of chavruta, meaning fellowship.
“I got inspired,” she said. “I’d spent a lot of my 20s being disappointed by grad school and the nonprofit world. And at Div School, people are excited. They get Alice-in-Wonderland lost in theology. It made me happy.”
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SamuelGFreedman
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/us/mo ... d=45305309
******
Divinity School ‘Nones’
“Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School,” by Samuel G. Freedman (On Religion column, Oct. 10), identifies an important trend at major seminaries throughout the country. Here at Union Theological Seminary, we see incoming classes that are a third unaffiliated, mirroring national trends.
At Union, however, we have noticed that in addition to our unaffiliated students who are agnostic or atheist, many believe in God but don’t belong to a specific religious organization. They come to ask questions about the meaning of life and to change the world.
Maybe what we see emerging is not a lack of religion but a different kind of religion. Is it perhaps a second reformation?
SERENE JONES
President
Union Theological Seminary
New York
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — During orientation at Harvard Divinity School here in 2013, Angie Thurston wandered amid the tables set up by the various campus ministries. Catholic, Methodist, Muslim — they mostly served to reinforce the sense that Ms. Thurston did not fit into an organized religion.
Here she was, starting her graduate studies in religion when she did not know the definition of liturgy, had never read the Bible and could not have identified a major theologian like Karl Barth, even if it would have won her a fortune on “Jeopardy!” Yet something in organized religion hinted at an answer to the atomized, unmoored life she led.
“I didn’t feel unwelcome, but I did feel like it was a call to creativity,” Ms. Thurston, 30, recalled of her initiation. “I wanted to respond to what I saw as a crisis of isolation among young people.”
She added, “I wanted to create a meaningful community that came together based on a shared goal rather than a shared religious creed.”
From such an unlikely beginning — a self-described “religious weirdo” enrolling in an elite divinity school — has grown a fascinating phenomenon. Now in her final year at Harvard, Ms. Thurston is a central figure in a boomlet of students who are secular or unaffiliated with any religious denomination, commonly known as “nones,” attending divinity school. While Harvard may be the center, nones can be found at other divinity schools around the country, especially those inclined toward theologically and politically liberal Protestantism, like Chicago Theological Seminary.
Two factors are driving this surge. First, the proportion of nones in the United States has grown to about a third of all millennials, those born between 1981 and 1996, according to the Pew Research Center. Second, divinity school offers even atheists and spiritual seekers a language of moral discourse and training in congregational leadership. The traits appeal to nones who aspire to careers in activism, social work, chaplaincy or community organizing rather than taking to a pulpit.
“Nones are not entirely opposed to religious traditions, though they don’t attach to a specific one,” said Eboo Patel, the founder and president of Interfaith Youth Core, who has seen the trend while visiting campuses. “No small part of them are attracted to the search for social justice and for spiritual meaning. And they recognize those things as the fruits of religious tradition. So it makes sense to go to a place where you can study religious tradition.”
Within higher education, divinity programs often stand apart from the cult of relativism in the liberal arts and the utilitarian emphasis in professional schools focusing on business and law, for example.
“If you were simply looking for the skills, you might go to the Kennedy School of Government,” said the Rev. Dudley C. Rose, the associate dean for ministry studies at Harvard. “And philosophy and liberal-arts fields have given up on the project of finding a moral language, an articulation of values. That language isn’t found in many places. And when you find it, it’s not easy to abstract it. You have to connect it to a tradition.”
In Harvard’s case, the influx of secular and unaffiliated students had one early and visible pioneer, Greg M. Epstein. In 2004, while already serving as the assistant humanist chaplain for Harvard students and staff members who are atheist or agnostic, Mr. Epstein enrolled in divinity school. He took classes in everything from existentialist philosophy to musicology to nonprofit administration, and he did a practicum in ministry with a cohort of Unitarian Universalist students, the closest thing he could find to atheists.
By the time he graduated in 2007, Mr. Epstein could see a “trickle” of other humanist students entering the divinity school, and he set out to recruit more. “I see myself like a college football coach,” said Mr. Epstein, who comes by the metaphor honestly as an alumnus of the University of Michigan. “I want to constantly be bringing in new talent.”
On campus, Mr. Epstein replaced the retiring humanist chaplain. Off campus, he put together a community center, the Humanist Hub. In both guises, he differed markedly from prominent atheists by adapting some of organized religion’s models of ritual, moral language and communal purpose rather than merely denouncing belief as superstition.
Ms. Thurston, for example, applied to Harvard Divinity School specifically because of what she knew about Mr. Epstein’s work. She does not consider herself secular; rather, she follows the precepts of the Urantia Book, a 2,000-page work of philosophy and spirituality that has some elements of Christianity. She also critiques terms like “nones” and “unaffiliated,” and the phrase “spiritual but not religious.”
“It’s difficult to foster community based on negation, on saying what you aren’t,” she said. “To live in this soup of negation, it’s just not lasting.”
The group that Ms. Thurston helped start, Harvard Religious Nones, includes almost 70 people on its email list and regularly attracts 20 people to its meetings, not insignificant in a divinity school with 350 students. The divinity school also has a humanist group with about a half-dozen members.
One of her classmates, Casper ter Kuile, and a recent divinity school graduate, Vanessa Zoltan, teach a weekly course together for about 55 people on “Harry Potter” as a sacred text at the off-campus Humanist Hub. This weekend, Ms. Thurston and her collaborator Aisha Ansano are holding a workshop about the Harvard Religious Nones at the Parliament of World’s Religions in Salt Lake City.
Throughout the academic year, the divinity school’s nones gather regularly to sing, share personal experiences and offer support. Ms. Thurston and Mr. ter Kuile wrote a report, “How We Gather,” that identified successful modern examples of community-building, from the exercise program SoulCycle to dinner parties in which bereaved people meet over a meal.
Ms. Zoltan typifies the portion of Harvard Divinity School students who are avowedly secular. Growing up in suburban Los Angeles as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and the child of fervent atheists, she partook in Shabbat dinners and attended a Hebrew school purely as forms of cultural affirmation.
“Our family felt like, ‘God isn’t just dead, but if he’s real, he hates us,’ ” she recalled. “I was raised to believe that humans are what matter. And art. We worshiped movies and books. Our Bible was everything from Neil Simon to the Russian novelists.”
Yet when Ms. Zoltan attended graduate school at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for nonprofit management, she rejected the capitalist theology there that the market is a value system. The Great Recession proved to her, she recalled, “Your way is wrong.”
A course in ethics, though, began to point her in an unexpected direction. She slowly came to recognize that the people she admired most — Gandhi, King, Emerson, Tolstoy and Alcott — had deep religious or spiritual lives.
“It was in the back of my head that Judaism has answers, that there were laws and the laws were based in ethics,” Ms. Zoltan, 33, said. “I kept saying, ‘I should’ve gone to Div School,’ and my boyfriend said, ‘Why don’t you try?’ ”
During her years at Harvard, she said, she opened herself up to the possibility of a deity. Every time, the Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide or the Syrian civil war convinced her nothing supernatural existed.
The concept of sacredness, however, gripped her, and she sought out ways to consecrate the secular. With a divinity school professor, Stephanie Paulsell, she did an independent study in “Jane Eyre” as a holy book. Mr. Epstein and she studied Judaic texts together in the yeshiva system of chavruta, meaning fellowship.
“I got inspired,” she said. “I’d spent a lot of my 20s being disappointed by grad school and the nonprofit world. And at Div School, people are excited. They get Alice-in-Wonderland lost in theology. It made me happy.”
Email: [email protected] Twitter: @SamuelGFreedman
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/17/us/mo ... d=45305309
******
Divinity School ‘Nones’
“Secular, but Feeling a Call to Divinity School,” by Samuel G. Freedman (On Religion column, Oct. 10), identifies an important trend at major seminaries throughout the country. Here at Union Theological Seminary, we see incoming classes that are a third unaffiliated, mirroring national trends.
At Union, however, we have noticed that in addition to our unaffiliated students who are agnostic or atheist, many believe in God but don’t belong to a specific religious organization. They come to ask questions about the meaning of life and to change the world.
Maybe what we see emerging is not a lack of religion but a different kind of religion. Is it perhaps a second reformation?
SERENE JONES
President
Union Theological Seminary
New York