Author Archives: Coach

How government creates conflict

 

How government creates conflict

 

Different Americans have different and often intense preferences for all kinds of goods and services. Some of us have strong preferences for beer and distaste for wine while others have the opposite preference – strong preferences for wine and distaste for beer. Some of us hate three-piece suits and love blue jeans while others love three-piece suits and hate blue jeans. When’s the last time you heard of beer drinkers in conflict with wine drinkers, or three-piece suit lovers in conflict with lovers of blue jeans? It seldom if ever happens because beer and blue jean lovers get what they want. Wine and three-piece suit lovers get what they want and they all can live in peace with one another.

It would be easy to create conflict among these people. Instead of free choice and private decision-making, clothing and beverage decisions could be made in the political arena. In other words, have a democratic majority-rule process to decide what drinks and clothing that would be allowed. Then we would see wine lovers organized against beer lovers, and blue jean lovers organized against three-piece suit lovers. Conflict would emerge solely because the decision was made in the political arena. Why? The prime feature of political decision-making is that it’s a zero-sum game. One person’s gain is of necessity another person’s loss. That is, if wine lovers won, beer lovers lose. As such, political decision-making and allocation of resources is conflict-enhancing while market decision-making and allocation is conflict-reducing. The greater the number of decisions made in the political arena, the greater the potential for conflict.

Take the issue of prayer in school as an example. I think that everyone, except a maniacal tyrant, would agree that a parent has the right to decide whether his child will recite a morning prayer in school. Similarly, a parent has a right to decide that his child will not recite a morning prayer. Conflict arises because schools are government-owned. That means it is a political decision whether prayers will be permitted or not. A win for one parent means a loss for another parent. The losing parent, to get what he wants, would have to muster up private school tuition while continuing to pay taxes for a school for which he has no use. If education were only government-financed, as opposed to being government-financed and produced, say through education vouchers, the conflict would be reduced. Both parents could have their wishes fulfilled by enrolling their child in a private school of their choice.

Conflict in education is just one minor example of how government allocation can raise the potential for conflict. Others would include government-backed allocation of jobs and education slots by race and sex, plus the current large conflict over government allocation of health services. Interestingly enough, the very people in our society who protest the loudest against human conflict and violence are the very ones calling for increased government resource allocation. These people fail to recognize or even wonder why our nation, with people of every race, ethnic group and religious group, has managed to live together relatively harmoniously. In their countries of origin, the same ethnic, racial and religious groups have been trying to slaughter one another for centuries. A good part of the answer is that in the United States, there was little to be gained from being a Frenchman, a German, a Jew, a Protestant or a Catholic. The reason it did not pay was because for most of our history, government played a small part in our lives. When there’s significant government allocation of resources, the most effective means of organizing for the gains are those proven most divisive, such as race, ethnicity, religion and region.

As our nation forsakes our founders’ wisdom of constitutional limitations placed on Washington, we raise the potential for conflict.

 

The Case for Saturday School

The Case for Saturday School

 

  • The Wall Street Journal

The Case for Saturday School

Kids in China already attend school 41 days a year more than students in the U.S. Now, schools across the country are cutting back to four-day weeks. Chester E. Finn Jr. on how to build a smarter education system.

“He who labors diligently need never despair, for all things are accomplished by diligence and labor.” —Menander

How many days a year did the future Alexander the Great study with Aristotle? Did Socrates teach Plato on Saturdays as well as weekdays? During summer’s heat and winter’s chill?

Though such details remain shrouded in mystery, historians have unearthed some information about education in ancient times. Spartans famously put their children through a rigorous public education system, although the focus was on military training rather than reading and writing. Students in Mesopotamia attended their schools from sunrise to sunset.

In the face of budget shortfalls, school districts in many parts of the United States today are moving toward four-day weeks. This is despite evidence that longer school weeks and years can improve academic performance. Schoolchildren in China attend school 41 days a year more than most young Americans—and receive 30% more hours of instruction. Schools in Singapore operate 40 weeks a year. Saturday classes are the norm in Korea and other Asian countries—and Japanese authorities are having second thoughts about their 1998 decision to cease Saturday-morning instruction. This additional time spent learning is one big reason that youngsters from many Asian nations routinely out-score their American counterparts on international tests of science and math.

Some U.S. schools have figured this out. Those that boast extraordinary success with poor and minority youngsters typically surround them, like Mesopotamians, with learning from dawn to dusk. The celebrated Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), a network of over 80 charter schools around the country, subjects its middle-schoolers to 60% more instructional time than the typical public school—including eight- to 10-hour days, Saturday morning classes and abbreviated summer breaks.

“Summer learning loss” is no joke. When they return to school in late August or early September, many children, especially the least advantaged among them, have shed a sizable portion of what they had learned by May—a full month’s worth, by most estimates, adding up to 1.3 school years by the end of high school.

The typical young American, upon turning 18, will have spent just 9% of his or her hours on this planet under the school roof (and that assumes full-day kindergarten and perfect attendance) versus 91% spent elsewhere. As for the rest of that time, the Kaiser Family Foundation recently reported that American youngsters now devote an astounding 7.5 hours per day to “using entertainment media” (including TV, Internet, cellphones and videogames). That translates to about 53 hours a week—versus 30 hours in school.

It’s scarcely news that young Americans devote less time to formal learning than their international counterparts. A federal commission on time and learning reported 16 years ago that “students in other postindustrial countries receive twice as much instruction in core academic areas during high school.” Required courses in those four years consumed 3,280 hours in French schools versus 1,460 in the U.S. Young Germans routinely devoted two hours a night to homework. Half of Japan’s ninth graders moved every afternoon from school to private “juku” for additional instruction in core subjects.

Nor is it news that “time on task” has a powerful influence on educational attainment. In 1994, for example, economist Robert Margo reported that historical differences in school-year length for black and white youngsters attending segregated schools accounted for much of the gap in their adult earnings.

A fascinating new study by University of Maryland analyst Dave Marcotte shows that even the loss of a few instructional days can erode academic performance. Examining the days forfeited to snow and other “unscheduled closings” in Maryland in 2002-2003, he concluded that two-thirds of the elementary schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” (the federal benchmark under “No Child Left Behind”) in math that year would have done so “if they had been open during all scheduled school days.”

Where things start to get complicated is that time spent in school does not equal time fruitfully applied to learning basic skills and core content—a mismatch that looms larger in the U.S. than in most other places. Measured by simple clock hours or days per year in school, we look good alongside Europe and decent in comparison with most of Asia. Not good enough, especially for disadvantaged kids whose nonschool hours often undermine what they’re taught in class, but pretty good.

Our deeper problem is the enormous amount of time that typical American schools spend on gym, recess, lunch, assembly, changing classes, homeroom, lining up to go to the art room, looking at movies, writing down homework assignments, quieting the classroom, celebrating this or that holiday, and other pursuits. It’s not all wasted time but neither are these minutes spent in ways that boost test scores, enhance college-readiness or deepen pupils’ understanding of literature, geography or algebra.

Visit a KIPP school or another high-performance institution and you find that a big reason for the longer day is that it accommodates these nonacademic pursuits without sacrificing the instructional core. They tolerate remarkably little wasted time, particularly in the classroom setting. Their teachers squander minimal class time on discipline challenges or distributing and collecting materials. They systematically deliver lessons that are carefully planned and structured—and youngsters who need additional help to understand something get it later, sometimes in the evening via the teacher’s cellphone, so that the entire class doesn’t need to pause for an explanation.

Longer school days and years also aid working parents; for many of them, 2:30 dismissal times and three-month summer breaks are more burden than benefit. And the more time kids spend in safe schools, the less time they have to go astray at home or in the neighborhood.

Critics of extending the day and year occasionally note, with some justification, that U.S. schools don’t need more total time so much as they need to make better use of the time they’ve got. Indeed, the 1994 “time and learning” commission underscored that point in its recommendations, which urged schools to set aside a full 5.5 hours every day for “core subjects”—nearly doubling the time devoted to them.

Yet American public education is so hard to change in fundamental ways—so much like turning an aircraft carrier or, as Admiral Hyman Rickover once remarked, moving a cemetery—that reform typically comes by adding something on top of what we already have. It’s actually easier to add an hour to the school day or a few weeks to the year than to alter the established routines of schools and school systems. (A worthy nonprofit outfit called the National Center on Time and Learning is working at such additions—and can point to some success in its pilot schools in Massachusetts.)

As with everything else in public education, however, the threat of change brings interest groups out of the woodwork. Although many parents—particularly poor and working-class parents—welcome the prospect of schools tending to a larger portion of their kids’ lives, others are so enamored of their summer cottages, travel plans, grandparent visits, after-school piano lessons and soccer leagues that they balk at any big shifts in calendar or schedule.

Communities that have experimented with “year-round” schooling have often had to backtrack under pressure from the summer-vacation industry, including camps needing counselors, resorts needing waiters, pools needing lifeguards—and all of them needing clients with “traditional” vacation schedules. After 13 years, Jefferson County, Colo., abandoned its year-round school calendar in 1989. The longer school year lasted nine years in Prince William County, Va.

This issue brings out the teacher unions, too, demanding more pay for extra hours, hence fatter school-system budgets in a lean fiscal time. Little wonder that taxpayers are legitimately wary. It’s no secret that public education’s institutional imperatives point toward more of everything, especially money. School systems are keen to mount programs for 4-year-olds, for instance, and (so long as they get the cash from local, state, federal or philanthropic sources) to run summer schools and extended-day programs, up to and including three meals a day for participants. Some of this is absolutely legitimate—an earnest effort to respond to the needs of children and families in their communities and to the academic-results-based accountability regimens of state and national governments. But some of it reflects the inexorable expansionism and unquenchable appetites of the public sector and its employees.

Over the long run, technology holds much potential to boost student learning time in flexible ways and at modest cost. We can stipulate that kids are addicted to it; that “virtual” instruction can happen at very nearly any time or place; and that well-designed distance-learning programs (and suitable hardware) enable greater individualization of learning, with each child moving at his/her own pace, diving deeper when warranted, and going back over things they didn’t quite understand the first time. This already happens in the best online schools, of which the U.S. already has several dozen, often operating statewide, such as the Florida Virtual School and Ohio Virtual Academy.

It also happens in “hybrids” that make astute and economical use of computer-delivered instruction, testing and such within brick-and-mortar schools that also have flesh-and-blood teachers. Rocketship Education, a small but growing network of elementary charter schools in San Jose, Calif., is such a creation, skillfully blending online lessons, practice and testing with a small but terrific team of instructors.

With continuing advances in hardware and software, the boundaries among “learning in school,” “learning in other settings” and “learning on your own” will gradually disappear, with potent implications for time spent learning, which need no longer be confined to the classroom hours stipulated in the teachers’ union (or custodians’ union) contract or the 180-day year prescribed in state law (and, in some jurisdictions, not allowed to start before Labor Day).

But we must not be naive. The education establishment will vigorously defend those traditional boundaries and “gradually” may be a long time in coming. Just as important, although most youngsters are self-motivated when it comes to what Kaiser terms “entertainment media,” far fewer will take the initiative to learn more geometry or rules of grammar on their own. While glitzy technology will make such things more tempting for more kids, and well-organized (and prosperous) parents can help make that happen, millions of girls and boys are likely to continue doing most of their academic learning in places called school, during “school hours” and under a teacher’s supervision.

Which brings us back to high-performance schools, institutions that commandeer far more than 9% of their students’ lives and use the extra time to accomplish three things: more hours to imbibe important skills and knowledge; fewer hours outside school to waste or get into trouble; and a de facto culture transplant, wrought by dynamic teachers who instill in their young charges the college aspirations, appreciation of learning, good behavior and orderly habits that are too often missing from homes and neighborhoods.

Disadvantaged youngsters really need—for their own good—the benefits of longer days, summer classes and Saturday mornings in school. But nearly every young American needs to learn more than most are learning today, both for the sake of their own prospects and on behalf of the nation’s competitiveness in a shrinking, dog-eat-dog world. Yes, it will disrupt everything from school-bus schedules to family vacations. Yes, it will carry some costs, at least until we eke offsetting savings from the technology-in-education revolution. But even Aristotle might conclude that this is a price worth paying.

—Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is a former assistant secretary at the Department of Education.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W1

C

 

Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen

Climategate Was an Academic Disaster Waiting to Happen

 

By Peter Berkowitz  Wall Street Journal  3/13/2010

Last fall, emails revealed that scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England and colleagues in the U.S. and around the globe deliberately distorted data to support dire global warming scenarios and sought to block scholars with a different view from getting published. What does this scandal say generally about the intellectual habits and norms at our universities?

This is a legitimate question, because our universities, which above all should be cultivating intellectual virtue, are in their day-to-day operations fostering the opposite. Fashionable ideas, the convenience of professors, and the bureaucratic structures of academic life combine to encourage students and faculty alike to defend arguments for which they lack vital information. They pretend to knowledge they don’t possess and invoke the authority of rank and status instead of reasoned debate.

Consider the undergraduate curriculum. Over the last several decades, departments have watered down the requirements needed to complete a major, while core curricula have been hollowed out or abandoned. Only a handful of the nation’s leading universities—Columbia and the University of Chicago at the forefront—insist that all undergraduates must read a common set of books and become conversant with the main ideas and events that shaped Western history and the larger world.

There are no good pedagogical reasons for abandoning the core. Professors and administrators argue that students need and deserve the freedom to shape their own course of study. But how can students who do not know the basics make intelligent decisions about the books they should read and the perspectives they should master?

The real reasons for releasing students from rigorous departmental requirements and fixed core courses are quite different. One is that professors prefer to teach boutique classes focusing on their narrow areas of specialization. In addition, they believe that dropping requirements will lure more students to their departments, which translates into more faculty slots for like-minded colleagues. By far, though, the most important reason is that faculty generally reject the common sense idea that there is a basic body of knowledge that all students should learn. This is consistent with the popular campus dogma that all morals and cultures are relative and that objective knowledge is impossible.

The deplorable but predictable result is that professors constantly call upon students to engage in discussions and write papers in the absence of fundamental background knowledge. Good students quickly absorb the curriculum’s unwritten lesson—cutting corners and vigorously pressing strong but unsubstantiated opinions is the path to intellectual achievement.

The production of scholarship also fosters intellectual vice. Take the peer review process, which because of its supposed impartiality and objectivity is intended to distinguish the work of scholars from that of journalists and commercial authors.

Academic journals typically adopt a double blind system, concealing the names of both authors and reviewers. But any competent scholar can determine an article’s approach or analytical framework within the first few paragraphs. Scholars are likely to have colleagues and graduate students they support and whose careers they wish to advance. A few may even have colleagues whose careers, along with those of their graduate students, they would like to tarnish or destroy. There is no check to prevent them from benefiting their friends by providing preferential treatment for their orientation and similarly punishing their enemies.

That’s because the peer review process violates a fundamental principle of fairness. We don’t allow judges to be parties to a controversy they are adjudicating, and don’t permit athletes to umpire games in which they are playing. In both cases the concern is that their interest in the outcome will bias their judgment and corrupt their integrity. So why should we expect scholars, especially operating under the cloak of anonymity, to fairly and honorably evaluate the work of allies and rivals?

Some university presses exacerbate the problem. Harvard University Press tells a reviewer the name of a book manuscript’s author but withholds the reviewer’s identity from the author. It would be hard to design a system that provided reviewers more opportunity to reward friends and punish enemies.

Harvard Press assumes that its editors will detect and avoid conflicts of interest. But if reviewers are in the same scholarly field as, or in a field related to that of, the author—and why would they be asked for an evaluation if they weren’t?—then the reviewer will always have a conflict of interest.

Then there is the abuse of confidentiality and the overreliance on arguments from authority in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. Owing to the premium the academy places on specialization, most university departments today contain several fields, and within them several subfields. Thus departmental colleagues are regularly asked to evaluate scholarly work in which they have little more expertise than the man or woman on the street.

Often unable to form independent professional judgments—but unwilling to recuse themselves from important personnel decisions—faculty members routinely rely on confidential letters of evaluation from scholars at other universities. Once again, these letters are written—and solicited—by scholars who are irreducibly interested parties.

There are no easy fixes to this state of affairs. Worse, our universities don’t recognize they have a problem. Instead, professors and university administrators are inclined to indignantly dismiss concerns about the curriculum, peer review, and hiring, promotion and tenure decisions as cynically calling into question their good character. But these concerns are actually rooted in the democratic conviction that professors and university administrators are not cut from finer cloth than their fellow citizens.

Our universities shape young men’s and women’s sensibilities, and our professors are supposed to serve as guardians of authoritative knowledge and exemplars of serious and systematic inquiry. Yet our campuses are home today to a toxic confluence of fashionable ideas that undermine the very notion of intellectual virtue, and to flawed educational practices and procedures that give intellectual vice ample room to flourish.

Just look at Climategate.

Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

America’s Top College Professor

America’s Top College Professor

Fayetteville, Ark.

Elliott West doesn’t seem like the coolest guy on campus. With his tweed coat and thinning hair, he appears to be the stereotype of a studious professor, only truly at home among library stacks or in a dusty archive. But Prof. West, who teaches American history at the University of Arkansas, is in the midst of a heated public competition: He is one of three finalists in a contest that will confer a prize on the best college teacher in America. In the highest sense of the word, Prof. West is a competitive performer.

The prize itself—sponsored by Baylor University and called the Cherry Teaching Award, after the late alumnus whose donation made it possible—is one of the biggest money awards that an American professor can win ($200,000). And its measure of merit is not scholarly output but classroom performance—that crucial aspect of the teaching mission that is so often overshadowed, these days, by the arcana of specialized research and the mad race for publication and tenure.

The Cherry award seeks out college teachers who, according to both students and fellow teachers, are especially good at making clear, forceful, inspiring, knowledge-rich classroom presentations that actually help students to learn. The finalists this year include, in addition to Prof. West, Roger Rosenblatt of Stony Brook University and Edward Burger of Williams College. Each has been asked to deliver a public lecture at Baylor and another lecture on his home campus. The winner—chosen by a panel of Baylor-appointed judges—will have the privilege of spending a semester teaching at Baylor (as well as cashing that hefty award-check).

On an unseasonably warm fall day here at the University of Arkansas, hundreds of Prof. West’s students and colleagues, along with interested observers, are crowded into a standing-room-only lecture hall to hear him talk about “The West Before Lewis and Clark.” Over the course of 45 minutes he spins stories of three individuals living beyond the Mississippi in the century before the great explorers set out. The French man, the Spanish woman and the Osage Indian are, he says, meant to illustrate how the West was the setting for an “imperial tussle.”

Prof. West is not a comedian. There are occasional moments of levity, as when he cites an article about the French man, who, at the age of 15, murdered his ship’s captain: “Precocious depravity,” Prof. West says with a chuckle. There is a PowerPoint presentation running behind him, but it is a series of old maps and photographs. No words are flying around the screen. There is no audience participation, and there are no props either. Prof. West does not go in for theatrics. But the people filling the seats are rapt. No one around me is whispering or even checking his iPhone.

Over lunch, Prof. West tells me that “every teacher needs to find his style” and that his is “old-fashioned lecturing.” He observes that he has become more “conversational” over the past 40 years of teaching; not once during his lecture did he consult any notes. Professors, he says, need to figure out how to play to their strengths—by listening and watching their students carefully. “I look out at every class to figure out what’s working and what’s not.”

There are tricks and devices that can help. For instance: “Never underestimate the power of dead air.” Prof. West advises “asking a question and simply waiting for the answer.” He has noticed that “people will get very uncomfortable and start squirming, until someone will try.” For the really tough crowds, he says, he will surprise them. They think that he is carrying around a cup of coffee, but actually he has candy inside and when someone finally answers a question correctly, he will throw a piece to that student. He smiles slyly: “It’s like training seals.”

Edward Burger is not Elliott West’s polar opposite, but Mr. Burger, a professor of mathematics at Williams College and another finalist for the Cherry award, is a magnetic personality. When we walk into a restaurant in Williamstown, Mass., on a Friday night, he is the most popular guy in the room. Freshmen keep coming over to introduce him to their families, who are in town for first-year parents’ weekend.

At a lecture on Saturday morning, hundreds of families pack the hall to hear Prof. Burger talk about, well, math. The audience is rolling in the aisles as he proves, mathematically, that an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters could produce “Hamlet.”

Like Prof. West, Prof. Burger believes that empathy is the key to good teaching. Whether he is teaching a seminar at Williams or a class of 200 at the University of Colorado, where he has been a visiting professor, Prof. Burger says that he wants “to think about what it’s like to be sitting in that audience, in a sea of people, when the professor is so far away he’s a dot and I’m looking at overhead transparencies. What is that experience like?”

Prof. Burger says that the role of a teacher is to change lives. His own path was changed as an undergraduate. He planned to be a lawyer, but the math professors at Connecticut College “just kept feeding coal into the fire.” And so he went to graduate school “to find out what math really is.” He never got to law school.

As much as he finds math fascinating, he realizes that most people will not use calculus after college. The utilitarian promise “is an empty one,” he notes. “You don’t need to know how to build a bridge to go over one.” He says that the hardest thing professors can ask themselves is “the 10-year question.” “What will my students retain from my class 10 years out?” And so his lecture is devoted to showing the audience how to “think mathematically.”

Prof. Burger, who acknowledges being one of the tougher graders on campus—”I don’t give grades; I just report the news”—says that he is only convinced a student understands a concept when he can “explain it to an 8-year-old.” I wouldn’t put it past him to bring a fourth-grader to class for that purpose, but he says he just forces students to explain concepts without using jargon.

It would be hard to imagine the Cherry award’s third finalist, Roger Rosenblatt, resorting to jargon. As a former commentator for the “NewsHour” on PBS, he has had to address, routinely, a larger and more general audience than either Prof. West or Prof. Burger. The lecture he gave at Baylor a couple of weeks ago, on “why we tell stories,” was relaxed and entertaining. But not too entertaining. “You can be entertaining at the expense of being useful,” he told me recently. “At the end of the class, they think ‘Wasn’t he delightful?’ But they don’t learn anything.”

Like the other finalists, Prof. Rosenblatt says that it took him a while to develop a style. But the most important thing young professors can do, he says, is “learn their subject well. Otherwise it’s just chatter.”

The best professors he had in school, Mr. Rosenblatt recalls, “worried about their subjects in front of us,” almost as if they were thinking aloud. “When I saw a teacher lost in thought in front of me, I knew I had the goods.” He mentions one in particular, John Kelleher, the late professor of Irish studies at Harvard. “I hadn’t the slightest idea about Irish studies,” Mr. Rosenblatt says, but “I was smart enough to know that Kelleher was the man I wanted to study with.” It was “the seriousness with which Kelleher took learning and the seriousness with which he took students that was a model to me.”

That Mr. Rosenblatt, a best-selling writer, public commentator and playwright—in short, a man who has other opportunities open to him—takes his students so seriously is a testament to his love of the profession. “I like my students,” he explains. For the thousands of less famous professors across the country, there is almost no incentive to focus on teaching to the extent that these three men do. Both Prof. West and Prof. Burger have spent significant amounts of time helping high-school teachers learn how to teach better, mentoring them and even, in the case of Prof. Burger, producing videos to help instruction.

 

All three finalists emphasize that teaching is something you have to work at. It takes time to prepare. It takes time to practice. It takes time to process the feedback from students. Maybe that sounds obvious. But the truth is that many professors don’t bother. It’s an old observation but a true one. At most colleges, promotion and tenure decisions are made based on a record of publication. Even at liberal-arts colleges, studies have shown that a financial premium is placed on publication.

And so last year more than 100 academic books were published on Shakespeare alone. According to a recent study by Mark Bauerlein of Emory University, the number of academic publications has soared more than 400% in the past half-century, to 72,000 from 13,000 per year. Meanwhile, universities continue to subsidize such work by giving reduced teaching loads to faculty members who publish. All told, a typical humanities monograph could cost as much as $50,000. Is this what parents are paying tuition for?

As senior professors are engaged in this endless publication, inexperienced and overworked adjunct professors and graduate students are engaged in teaching. Prof. West says that he could probably request to teach only graduate seminars if he wanted, but he actually enjoys teaching undergraduates. In an ideal world, senior professors, who have the most experience teaching, would be forced to teach freshman survey courses. Instead, professors at many universities are told by their mentors not to focus on teaching at all. And the joke on many campuses is that the winner of a school’s teaching award is guaranteed to be denied tenure.

All three Cherry-award finalists are well-published in their respective fields, and they don’t think that a professor must focus on one or the other. But the truth of the matter is that they are the exception.

Some academics say that publication is easier to measure than teaching, and that is why the university has settled on the system it has. And, alas, many parents have bought into this idea, not even bothering to check out what’s going on in the classrooms before signing their tuition checks. But student and peer evaluations can certainly go a long way toward correcting this measurement problem. There are surveys like the National Survey of Student Engagement that can be used to measure how much time students spend working outside the classroom, how often they interact with professors, and how bored they are in class. John Silber, the former longtime president of Boston University, told me that he never gave professors tenure without sitting in on their classes first. He insists that it is pretty easy to tell a good teacher from a bad one. “I damn sure wouldn’t hire or promote a faculty member to anything like that salary without having known what they are doing [in the classroom],” he told me recently.

The winner of the Cherry Teaching Award will be announced next spring. Prof. Rosenblatt will be delivering his lecture at Stony Brook University, part of New York’s SUNY system, next week. Like the other lectures, his will be open to the public. Prof. Rosenblatt’s competition is stiff, but if parents want to see what good teaching looks like—and if Mr. Silber is right, it should be easy to tell—they could do worse than to watch a Cherry award finalist in action.

 

The Letter

 

The Letter

“I am a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me.   Instead, we are burdened with Congressional Dukes and Duchesses who think they know better than the citizens they are supposed to represent.
There must be someone. Please tell me who you are.. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you’re willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now.
You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would feel so horribly disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut-job am I? Well, these briefly are the views and issues for which I seek representation:

One
, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I’m not a racist. This is not to be confused with legallimmigration.


Two, the STIMULUS bill.
 I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you No, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.


Three: Czars.
I want the circumvention of our constitutional checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president.. Stop trampling on our Constitution, and honor it.


Four, cap and trade.
The debate on global warming is not over. There are many conflicting opinions and it is too soon for this radical legislation. Quit throwing our nation into politically-correct quicksand.


Five, universal healthcare
. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision that will burden me, my children, and grandchildren. Don’t you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night without even reading it. Slow down!  Fix only what is broken — we have the best health care system in the world — and test any new program in one or two states first.


Six, growing government control.
I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. More is not better! Shrink it down. Mind your own business.  You have enough to take care of with your real [Constitutional] obligations. Why don’t you start there.


Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census.
I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes — how did they pull that one off?  Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census with our taxpayer money. I don’t trust them with any of our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.


Eight, redistribution of wealth
. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs — and that is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person! Why do you want me to hate my employers? And what do you have against shareholders making a profit?


Nine, charitable contributions.
Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.


Ten, corporate bailouts.
Knock it off. Every company must sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we’ll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. (Have you ever ripped off a Band-Aid?) We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.


Eleven, transparency and accountability.
How about it? No, really, how about it? Let’s have it. Let’s say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please stop trying to manipulate and appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.


Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now
.
Take a breath. Listen to the people. Slow down and get some input from nonpoliticians and experts on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed-reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I’m busy.  I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.


I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened?
You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not.
It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is needless urgency and recklessness in all of your recent spending of our tax dollars.

From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making.. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on bringing our concerns to Washington . Our president often knows all the right buzzwords like unsustainable. Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don’t want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we’re morons.

We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented.. You think we’re so busy with our lives that we will never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work, pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone… and we are now looking at you.
You have awakened us, the patriotic freedom spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office.
We have cancelled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn’t ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us who will rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.

Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don’t care. Political parties are meaningless to us Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution, and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them.. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you.
If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming.”

How much oil in the USA?

How much oil in the USA?

Reston, VA – North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.

A U.S. Geological Survey assessment, released April 10, shows a 25-fold increase in the amount of oil that can be recovered compared to the agency’s 1995 estimate of 151 million barrels of oil.

Technically recoverable oil resources are those producible using currently available technology and industry practices. USGS is the only provider of publicly available estimates of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and gas resources.

New geologic models applied to the Bakken Formation, advances in drilling and production technologies, and recent oil discoveries have resulted in these substantially larger technically recoverable oil volumes. About 105 million barrels of oil were produced from the Bakken Formation by the end of 2007.

The USGS Bakken study was undertaken as part of a nationwide project assessing domestic petroleum basins using standardized methodology and protocol as required by the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 2000.

The Bakken Formation estimate is larger than all other current USGS oil assessments of the lower 48 states and is the largest “continuous” oil accumulation ever assessed by the USGS. A “continuous” oil accumulation means that the oil resource is dispersed throughout a geologic formation rather than existing as discrete, localized occurrences. The next largest “continuous” oil accumulation in the U.S. is in the Austin Chalk of Texas and Louisiana, with an undiscovered estimate of 1.0 billions of barrels of technically recoverable oil.

“It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil – the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today’s technology?” said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. “To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation.”

The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.

USGS worked with the North Dakota Geological Survey, a number of petroleum industry companies and independents, universities and other experts to develop a geological understanding of the Bakken Formation. These groups provided critical information and feedback on geological and engineering concepts important to building the geologic and production models used in the assessment.

Five continuous assessment units (AU) were identified and assessed in the Bakken Formation of North Dakota and Montana – the Elm Coulee-Billings Nose AU, the Central Basin-Poplar Dome AU, the Nesson-Little Knife Structural AU, the Eastern Expulsion Threshold AU, and the Northwest Expulsion Threshold AU.

At the time of the assessment, a limited number of wells have produced oil from three of the assessments units in Central Basin-Poplar Dome, Eastern Expulsion Threshold, and Northwest Expulsion Threshold.
The Elm Coulee oil field in Montana, discovered in 2000, has produced about 65 million barrels of the 105 million barrels of oil recovered from the Bakken Formation.

Results of the assessment can be found at http://energy.usgs.gov.

For a podcast interview with scientists about the Bakken Formation, listen to episode 38 of CoreCast at http://www.usgs.gov/corecast/.

 

USGS provides science for a changing world. For more information, visit www.usgs.gov.

Subscribe to USGS News Releases via our electronic mailing list or RSS feed.

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Taking responsibility for learning

Taking responsibility for learning

Many of the issues of our times are hard to understand without understanding the vision of the world that they are part of. Whether the particular issue is education, economics or medical care, the preferred explanation tends to be an external explanation – that is, something outside the control of the individuals directly involved.

Education is usually discussed in terms of the money spent on it, the teaching methods used, class sizes or the way the whole system is organized. Students are discussed largely as passive recipients of good or bad education.

But education is not something that can be given to anybody. It is something that students either acquire or fail to acquire. Personal responsibility may be ignored or downplayed in this “non-judgmental” age, but it remains a major factor nevertheless.

After many students go through a dozen years in the public schools, at a total cost of $100,000 or more per student – and emerge semi-literate and with little understanding of the society in which they live, much less the larger world and its history – most discussions of what is wrong leave out the fact that many such students may have chosen to use school as a place to fool around, act up, organize gangs or even peddle drugs.

The great escape of our times is escape from personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s own behavior. Differences in infant mortality rates provoke pious editorials on a need for more prenatal care to be provided by the government for those unable to afford it. In other words, the explanation is automatically assumed to be external to the mothers involved and the solution is assumed to be something that “we” can do for “them.”

While it is true that black mothers get less prenatal care than white mothers and have higher infant mortality rates, it is also true that women of Mexican ancestry also get less prenatal care than white women and yet have lower infant mortality rates than white women. But, once people with the prevailing social vision see the first set of facts, they seldom look for any other facts that might go against the explanation that fits their vision of the world.

No small part of the current confusion between “health care” and medical care comes from failing to recognize that Americans can have the best medical care in the world without having the best health or longevity because so many people choose to live in ways that shorten their lives.

There can be grave practical consequences of a dogmatic insistence on external explanations that allow individuals to escape personal responsibility. Americans can end up ruining the best medical care in the world in the vain hope that a government takeover will give us better health.

Economic issues are approached in the same way. People with low incomes are seen as a problem for other people to solve. Studies which follow the same individuals over time show that the vast majority of working people who are in the bottom 20 percent of income earners at a given time end up rising out of that bracket.

Many are simply beginners who get beginners’ wages but whose pay rises as they acquire more skills and experience. Yet there is a small minority of workers who do not rise and a large number of people who seldom work and who – surprise! – have low incomes as a result.

Seldom is there any thought that people who choose to waste years of their own time (and the taxpayers’ money) in school need to change their own behavior – or to visibly suffer the consequences, so that their fate can be a warning to others coming after them, not to make that same mistake.

It is not just the “non-judgmental” ideology of the intelligentsia but also the self-interest of politicians that leads to so much downplaying of personal responsibility in favor of external explanations and external programs to “solve” the “problem.”

On these and other issues, government programs are far less likely to solve the country’s problems than to solve the politicians’ problem of getting the votes of those whose think the answer to every problem is for the government to “do something.”

A Nation of Wimps – Psychology Today

A Nation of Wimps – Psychology Today

 

Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyper concern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they’re breaking down in record numbers.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on November 01, 2004 – last reviewed on May 22, 2007

 

Maybe it’s the cyclist in the park, trim under his sleek metallic blue helmet, cruising along the dirt path… at three miles an hour. On his tricycle.

Or perhaps it’s today’s playground, all-rubber-cushioned surface where kids used to skin their knees. And… wait a minute… those aren’t little kids playing. Their mommies—and especially their daddies—are in there with them, coplaying or play-by-play coaching. Few take it half-easy on the perimeter benches, as parents used to do, letting the kids figure things out for themselves.

Then there are the sanitizing gels, with which over a third of parents now send their kids to school, according to a recent survey. Presumably, parents now worry that school bathrooms are not good enough for their children.

Consider the teacher new to an upscale suburban town. Shuffling through the sheaf of reports certifying the educational “accommodations” he was required to make for many of his history students, he was struck by the exhaustive, well-written—and obviously costly—one on behalf of a girl who was already proving among the most competent of his ninth-graders. “She’s somewhat neurotic,” he confides, “but she is bright, organized and conscientious—the type who’d get to school to turn in a paper on time, even if she were dying of stomach flu.” He finally found the disability he was to make allowances for: difficulty with Gestalt thinking. The 13-year-old “couldn’t see the big picture.” That cleverly devised defect (what 13-year-old can construct the big picture?) would allow her to take all her tests untimed, especially the big one at the end of the rainbow, the college-worthy SAT.

Behold the wholly sanitized childhood, without skinned knees or the occasional C in history. “Kids need to feel badly sometimes,” says child psychologist David Elkind, professor at Tufts University. “We learn through experience and we learn through bad experiences. Through failure we learn how to cope.”

Messing up, however, even in the playground, is wildly out of style. Although error and experimentation are the true mothers of success, parents are taking pains to remove failure from the equation.

“Life is planned out for us,” says Elise Kramer, a Cornell University junior. “But we don’t know what to want.” As Elkind puts it, “Parents and schools are no longer geared toward child development, they’re geared to academic achievement.”

No one doubts that there are significant economic forces pushing parents to invest so heavily in their children’s outcome from an early age. But taking all the discomfort, disappointment and even the play out of development, especially while increasing pressure for success, turns out to be misguided by just about 180 degrees. With few challenges all their own, kids are unable to forge their creative adaptations to the normal vicissitudes of life. That not only makes them risk-averse, it makes them psychologically fragile, riddled with anxiety. In the process they’re robbed of identity, meaning and a sense of accomplishment, to say nothing of a shot at real happiness. Forget, too, about perseverance, not simply a moral virtue but a necessary life skill. These turn out to be the spreading psychic fault lines of 21st-century youth. Whether we want to or not, we’re on our way to creating a nation of wimps.

 

The Fragility Factor

 

College, it seems, is where the fragility factor is now making its greatest mark. It’s where intellectual and developmental tracks converge as the emotional training wheels come off. By all accounts, psychological distress is rampant on college campuses. It takes a variety of forms, including anxiety and depression—which are increasingly regarded as two faces of the same coin—binge drinking and substance abuse, self-mutilation and other forms of disconnection. The mental state of students is now so precarious for so many that, says Steven Hyman, provost of Harvard University and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, “it is interfering with the core mission of the university.”

The severity of student mental health problems has been rising since 1988, according to an annual survey of counseling center directors. Through 1996, the most common problems raised by students were relationship issues. That is developmentally appropriate, reports Sherry Benton, assistant director of counseling at Kansas State University. But in 1996, anxiety overtook relationship concerns and has remained the major problem. The University of Michigan Depression Center, the nation’s first, estimates that 15 percent of college students nationwide are suffering from that disorder alone.

Relationship problems haven’t gone away; their nature has dramatically shifted and the severity escalated. Colleges report ever more cases of obsessive pursuit, otherwise known as stalking, leading to violence, even death. Anorexia or bulimia in florid or subclinical form now afflicts 40 percent of women at some time in their college career. Eleven weeks into a semester, reports psychologist Russ Federman, head of counseling at the University of Virginia, “all appointment slots are filled. But the students don’t stop coming.”

Drinking, too, has changed. Once a means of social lubrication, it has acquired a darker, more desperate nature. Campuses nationwide are reporting record increases in binge drinking over the past decade, with students often stuporous in class, if they get there at all. Psychologist Paul E. Joffe, chair of the suicide prevention team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, contends that at bottom binge-drinking is a quest for authenticity and intensity of experience. It gives young people something all their own to talk about, and sharing stories about the path to passing out is a primary purpose. It’s an inverted world in which drinking to oblivion is the way to feel connected and alive.

“There is a ritual every university administrator has come to fear,” reports John Portmann, professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia. “Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen and within two or three days many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm’s way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy.”

Heavy drinking has also become the quickest and easiest way to gain acceptance, says psychologist Bernardo J. Carducci, professor at Indiana University Southeast and founder of its Shyness Research Institute. “Much of collegiate social activity is centered on alcohol consumption because it’s an anxiety reducer and demands no social skills,” he says. “Plus it provides an instant identity; it lets people know that you are willing to belong.”

 

Welcome to the Hothouse

 

Talk to a college president or administrator and you’re almost certainly bound to hear tales of the parents who call at 2 a.m. to protest Branden’s C in economics because it’s going to damage his shot at grad school.

Shortly after psychologist Robert Epstein announced to his university students that he expected them to work hard and would hold them to high standards, he heard from a parent—on official judicial stationery—asking how he could dare mistreat the young. Epstein, former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, eventually filed a complaint with the California commission on judicial misconduct, and the judge was censured for abusing his office—but not before he created havoc in the psychology department at the University of California, San Diego.

Enter: grade inflation. When he took over as president of Harvard in July 2001, Lawrence Summers publicly ridiculed the value of honors after discovering that 94 percent of the college’s seniors were graduating with them. Safer to lower the bar than raise the discomfort level. Grade inflation is the institutional response to parental anxiety about school demands on children, contends social historian Peter Stearns of George Mason University. As such, it is a pure index of emotional overinvestment in a child’s success. And it rests on a notion of juvenile frailty—the assumption that children are easily bruised and need explicit uplift,” Stearns argues in his book, Anxious Parenting: A History of Modern Childrearing in America.

Parental protectionism may reach its most comic excesses in college, but it doesn’t begin there. Primary schools and high schools are arguably just as guilty of grade inflation. But if you’re searching for someone to blame, consider Dr. Seuss. “Parents have told their kids from day one that there’s no end to what they are capable of doing,” says Virginia’s Portmann. “They read them the Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and create bumper stickers telling the world their child is an honor student. American parents today expect their children to be perfect—the smartest, fastest, most charming people in the universe. And if they can’t get the children to prove it on their own, they’ll turn to doctors to make their kids into the people that parents want to believe their kids are.”

What they’re really doing, he stresses, is “showing kids how to work the system for their own benefit.”

And subjecting them to intense scrutiny. “I wish my parents had some hobby other than me,” one young patient told David Anderegg, a child psychologist in Lenox, Massachusetts, and professor of psychology at Bennington College. Anderegg finds that anxious parents are hyperattentive to their kids, reactive to every blip of their child’s day, eager to solve every problem for their child—and believe that’s good parenting. “If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don’t have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it’s not the end of the world.”

 

Arrivederci, Playtime

 

In the hothouse that child raising has become, play is all but dead. Over 40,000 U.S. schools no longer have recess. And what play there is has been corrupted. The organized sports many kids participate in are managed by adults; difficulties that arise are not worked out by kids but adjudicated by adult referees.

“So many toys now are designed by and for adults,” says Tufts’ Elkind. When kids do engage in their own kind of play, parents become alarmed. Anderegg points to kids exercising time-honored curiosity by playing doctor. “It’s normal for children to have curiosity about other children’s genitals,” he says. “But when they do, most parents I know are totally freaked out. They wonder what’s wrong.”

Kids are having a hard time even playing neighborhood pick-up games because they’ve never done it, observes Barbara Carlson, president and cofounder of Putting Families First. “They’ve been told by their coaches where on the field to stand, told by their parents what color socks to wear, told by the referees who’s won and what’s fair. Kids are losing leadership skills.”

A lot has been written about the commercialization of children’s play, but not the side effects, says Elkind. “Children aren’t getting any benefits out of play as they once did.” From the beginning play helps children learn how to control themselves, how to interact with others. Contrary to the widely held belief that only intellectual activities build a sharp brain, it’s in play that cognitive agility really develops. Studies of children and adults around the world demonstrate that social engagement actually improves intellectual skills. It fosters decision-making, memory and thinking, speed of mental processing. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, the human mind is believed to have evolved to deal with social problems.

 

The Eternal Umbilicus

 

It’s bad enough that today’s children are raised in a psychological hothouse where they are over monitored and over sheltered. But that hothouse no longer has geographical or temporal boundaries. For that you can thank the cell phone. Even in college—or perhaps especially at college—students are typically in contact with their parents several times a day, reporting every flicker of experience. One long-distance call overheard on a recent cross-campus walk: “Hi, Mom. I just got an ice-cream cone; can you believe they put sprinkles on the bottom as well as on top?”

“Kids are constantly talking to parents,” laments Cornell student Kramer, which makes them perpetually homesick. Of course, they’re not telling the folks everything, notes Portmann. “They’re not calling their parents to say, ‘I really went wild last Friday at the frat house and now I might have Chlamydia. Should I go to the student health center?'”

The perpetual access to parents infantilizes the young, keeping them in a permanent state of dependency. Whenever the slightest difficulty arises, “they’re constantly referring to their parents for guidance,” reports Kramer. They’re not learning how to manage for themselves.

Think of the cell phone as the eternal umbilicus. One of the ways we grow up is by internalizing an image of Mom and Dad and the values and advice they imparted over the early years. Then, whenever we find ourselves faced with uncertainty or difficulty, we call on that internalized image. We become, in a way, all the wise adults we’ve had the privilege to know. “But cell phones keep kids from figuring out what to do,” says Anderegg. “They’ve never internalized any images; all they’ve internalized is ‘call Mom or Dad.'”

Some psychologists think we have yet to recognize the full impact of the cell phone on child development, because its use is so new. Although there are far too many variables to establish clear causes and effects, Indiana’s Carducci believes that reliance on cell phones undermines the young by destroying the ability to plan ahead. “The first thing students do when they walk out the door of my classroom is flip open the cell phone. Ninety-five percent of the conversations go like this: ‘I just got out of class; I’ll see you in the library in five minutes.’ Absent the phone, you’d have to make arrangements ahead of time; you’d have to think ahead.”

Herein lies another possible pathway to depression. The ability to plan resides in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the executive branch of the brain. The PFC is a critical part of the self-regulation system, and it’s deeply implicated in depression, a disorder increasingly seen as caused or maintained by unregulated thought patterns—lack of intellectual rigor, if you will. Cognitive therapy owes its very effectiveness to the systematic application of critical thinking to emotional reactions. Further, it’s in the setting of goals and progress in working toward them, however mundane they are, that positive feelings are generated. From such everyday activity, resistance to depression is born.

What’s more, cell phones—along with the instant availability of cash and almost any consumer good your heart desires—promote fragility by weakening self-regulation. “You get used to things happening right away,” says Carducci. You not only want the pizza now, you generalize that expectation to other domains, like friendships and intimate relationships. You become frustrated and impatient easily. You become unwilling to work out problems. And so relationships fail—perhaps the single most powerful experience leading to depression.

 

From Scrutiny to Anxiety… and Beyond

 

The 1990s witnessed a landmark reversal in the traditional patterns of psychopathology. While rates of depression rise with advancing age among people over 40, they’re now increasing fastest among children, striking more children at younger and younger ages.

In his now-famous studies of how children’s temperaments play out, Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan has shown unequivocally that what creates anxious children is parents hovering and protecting them from stressful experiences. About 20 percent of babies are born with a high-strung temperament. They can be spotted even in the womb; they have fast heartbeats. Their nervous systems are innately programmed to be over excitable in response to stimulation, constantly sending out false alarms about what is dangerous.

As infants and children this group experiences stress in situations most kids find unthreatening, and they may go through childhood and even adulthood fearful of unfamiliar people and events, withdrawn and shy. At school age they become cautious, quiet and introverted. Left to their own devices they grow up shrinking from social encounters. They lack confidence around others. They’re easily influenced by others. They are sitting ducks for bullies. And they are on the path to depression.

While their innate reactivity seems to destine all these children for later anxiety disorders, things didn’t turn out that way. Between a touchy temperament in infancy and persistence of anxiety stand two highly significant things: parents. Kagan found to his surprise that the development of anxiety was scarcely inevitable despite apparent genetic programming. At age 2, none of the over excitable infants wound up fearful if their parents backed off from hovering and allowed the children to find some comfortable level of accommodation to the world on their own. Those parents who overprotected their children—directly observed by conducting interviews in the home—brought out the worst in them.

A small percentage of children seem almost invulnerable to anxiety from the start. But the overwhelming majority of kids are somewhere in between. For them, over parenting can program the nervous system to create lifelong vulnerability to anxiety and depression.

There is in these studies a lesson for all parents. Those who allow their kids to find a way to deal with life’s day-to-day stresses by themselves are helping them develop resilience and coping strategies. “Children need to be gently encouraged to take risks and learn that nothing terrible happens,” says Michael Liebowitz, clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and head of the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at New York State Psychiatric Institute. “They need gradual exposure to find that the world is not dangerous. Having overprotective parents is a risk factor for anxiety disorders because children do not have opportunities to master their innate shyness and become more comfortable in the world.” They never learn to dampen the pathways from perception to alarm reaction.

Hothouse parenting undermines children in other ways, too, says Anderegg. Being examined all the time makes children extremely self-conscious. As a result they get less communicative; scrutiny teaches them to bury their real feelings deeply. And most of all, self-consciousness removes the safety to be experimental and playful. “If every drawing is going to end up on your parents’ refrigerator, you’re not free to fool around, to goof up or make mistakes,” says Anderegg.

Parental hovering is why so many teenagers are so ironic, he notes. It’s a kind of detachment, “a way of hiding in plain sight. They just don’t want to be exposed to any more scrutiny.”

Parents are always so concerned about children having high self-esteem, he adds. “But when you cheat on their behalf to get them ahead of other children”—by pursuing accommodations and recommendations—you just completely corrode their sense of self. They feel ‘I couldn’t do this on my own.’ It robs them of their own sense of efficacy.” A child comes to think, “if I need every advantage I can get, then perhaps there is really something wrong with me.” A slam-dunk for depression.

Virginia’s Portmann feels the effects are even more pernicious; they weaken the whole fabric of society. He sees young people becoming weaker right before his eyes, more responsive to the herd, too eager to fit in—less assertive in the classroom, unwilling to disagree with their peers, afraid to question authority, more willing to conform to the expectations of those on the next rung of power above them.

 

Endless Adolescence

 

The end result of cheating childhood is to extend it forever. Despite all the parental pressure, and probably because of it, kids are pushing back—in their own way. They’re taking longer to grow up.

Adulthood no longer begins when adolescence ends, according to a recent report by University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank F. Furstenberg and colleagues. There is, instead, a growing no-man’s-land of post adolescence from 20 to 30, which they dub “early adulthood.” Those in it look like adults but “haven’t become fully adult yet—traditionally defined as finishing school, landing a job with benefits, marrying and parenting—because they are not ready or perhaps not permitted to do so.”

Using the classic benchmarks of adulthood, 65 percent of males had reached adulthood by the age of 30 in 1960. By contrast, in 2000, only 31 percent had. Among women, 77 percent met the benchmarks of adulthood by age 30 in 1960. By 2000, the number had fallen to 46 percent.

 

Boom Boom Boomerang

 

Take away play from the front end of development and it finds a way onto the back end. A steady march of success through regimented childhood arranged and monitored by parents creates young adults who need time to explore themselves. “They often need a period in college or afterward to legitimately experiment—to be children,” says historian Stearns. “There’s decent historical evidence to suggest that societies that allow kids a few years of latitude and even moderate [rebellion] end up with healthier kids than societies that pretend such impulses don’t exist.”

Marriage is one benchmark of adulthood, but its antecedents extend well into childhood. “The precursor to marriage is dating, and the precursor to dating is playing,” says Carducci. The less time children spend in free play, the less socially competent they’ll be as adults. It’s in play that we learn give and take, the fundamental rhythm of all relationships. We learn how to read the feelings of others and how to negotiate conflicts. Taking the play out of childhood, he says, is bound to create a developmental lag, and he sees it clearly in the social patterns of today’s adolescents and young adults, who hang around in groups that are more typical of childhood. Not to be forgotten: The backdrop of continued high levels of divorce confuses kids already too fragile to take the huge risk of commitment.

 

Just Whose Shark Tank Is It Anyway?

 

The stressful world of cutthroat completion that parents see their kids facing may not even exist. Or it exists, but more in their mind than in reality—not quite a fiction, more like a distorting mirror. “Parents perceive the world as a terribly competitive place,” observes Anderegg. “And many of them project that onto their children when they’re the ones who live or work in a competitive environment. They then imagine that their children must be swimming in a big shark tank, too.”

“It’s hard to know what the world is going to look like 10 years from now,” says Elkind. “How best do you prepare kids for that? Parents think that earlier is better. That’s a natural intuition, but it happens to be wrong.”

What if parents have micromanaged their kids’ lives because they’ve hitched their measurement of success to a single event whose value to life and paycheck they have frantically overestimated? No one denies the Ivy League offers excellent learning experiences, but most educators know that some of the best programs exist at schools that don’t top the U.S. News and World Report list, and that with the right attitude—a willingness to be engaged by new ideas—it’s possible to get a meaningful education almost anywhere. Further, argues historian Stearns, there are ample openings for students at an array of colleges. “We have a competitive frenzy that frankly involves parents more than it involves kids themselves,” he observes, both as a father of eight and teacher of many. “Kids are more ambivalent about the college race than are parents.”

Yet the very process of application to select colleges undermines both the goal of education and the inherent strengths of young people. “It makes kids sneaky,” says Anderegg. Bending rules and calling in favors to give one’s kid a competitive edge is morally corrosive.

Like Stearns, he is alarmed that parents, pursuing disability diagnoses so that children can take untimed SATs, actually encourage kids to think of themselves as sickly and fragile. Colleges no longer know when SATs are untimed—but the kids know. “The kids know when you’re cheating on their behalf,” says Anderegg, “and it makes them feel terribly guilty. Sometimes they arrange to fail to right the scales. And when you cheat on their behalf, you completely undermine their sense of self-esteem. They feel they didn’t earn it on their own.”

In buying their children accommodations to assuage their own anxiety, parents are actually locking their kids into fragility. Says the suburban teacher: “Exams are a fact of life. They are anxiety-producing. The kids never learn how to cope with anxiety.”

 

Putting Worry in its Place

 

Children, however, are not the only ones who are harmed by hyper concern. Vigilance is enormously taxing—and it’s taken all the fun out of parenting. “Parenting has in some measurable ways become less enjoyable than it used to be,” says Stearns. “I find parents less willing to indulge their children’s sense of time. So they either force-feed them or do things for them.”

Parents need to abandon the idea of perfection and give up some of the invasive control they’ve maintained over their children. The goal of parenting, Portmann reminds, is to raise an independent human being. Sooner or later, he says, most kids will be forced to confront their own mediocrity. Parents may find it easier to give up some control if they recognize they have exaggerated many of the dangers of childhood—although they have steadfastly ignored others, namely the removal of recess from schools and the ubiquity of video games that encourage aggression.

The childhood we’ve introduced to our children is very different from that in past eras, Epstein stresses. Children no longer work at young ages. They stay in school for longer periods of time and spend more time exclusively in the company of peers. Children are far less integrated into adult society than they used to be at every step of the way. We’ve introduced laws that give children many rights and protections—although we have allowed media and marketers to have free access.

In changing the nature of childhood, Stearns argues, we’ve introduced a tendency to assume that children can’t handle difficult situations. “Middle-class parents especially assume that if kids start getting into difficulty they need to rush in and do it for them, rather than let them flounder a bit and learn from it. I don’t mean we should abandon them,” he says, “but give them more credit for figuring things out.” And recognize that parents themselves have created many of the stresses and anxieties children are suffering from, without giving them tools to manage them.

While the adults are at it, they need to remember that one of the goals of higher education is to help young people develop the capacity to think for themselves.

Although we’re well on our way to making kids more fragile, no one thinks that kids and young adults are fundamentally more flawed than in previous generations. Maybe many will “recover” from diagnoses too liberally slapped on to them. In his own studies of 14 skills he has identified as essential for adulthood in American culture, from love to leadership, Epstein has found that “although teens don’t necessarily behave in a competent way, they have the potential to be every bit as competent and as incompetent as adults.”

Parental anxiety has its place. But the way things now stand, it’s not being applied wisely. We’re paying too much attention to too few kids—and in the end, the wrong kids. As with the girl whose parents bought her the Gestalt-defect diagnosis, resources are being expended for kids who don’t need them.

There are kids who are worth worrying about—kids in poverty, stresses Anderegg. “We focus so much on our own children,” says Elkind, “It’s time to begin caring about all children.”

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs

Mathematicians Land Top Spot in New Ranking of Best and Worst Occupations in the U.S.

Nineteen years ago, Jennifer Courter set out on a career path that has since provided her with a steady stream of lucrative, low-stress jobs. Now, her occupation — mathematician — has landed at the top spot on a new study ranking the best and worst jobs in the U.S.

[Best and Worst Jobs] Scott Brundage

“It’s a lot more than just some boring subject that everybody has to take in school,” says Ms. Courter, a research mathematician at mental images Inc., a maker of 3D-visualization software in San Francisco. “It’s the science of problem-solving.”

The study, released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress. (CareerCast.com is published by Adicio Inc., in which Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. holds a minority stake.)

The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac,” and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.

According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions — indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise — unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren’t expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching — attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber.

The study also considers pay, which was determined by measuring each job’s median income and growth potential. Mathematicians’ annual income was pegged at $94,160, but Ms. Courter, 38, says her salary exceeds that amount.

The Best and Worst Jobs

Of 200 Jobs studied, these came out on top — and at the bottom:

The Best The Worst
1. Mathematician 200. Lumberjack
2. Actuary 199. Dairy Farmer
3. Statistician 198. Taxi Driver
4. Biologist 197. Seaman
5. Software Engineer 196. EMT
6. Computer Systems Analyst 195. Roofer
7. Historian 194. Garbage Collector
8. Sociologist 193. Welder
9. Industrial Designer 192. Roustabout
10. Accountant 191. Ironworker
11. Economist 190. Construction Worker
12. Philosopher 189. Mail Carrier
13. Physicist 188. Sheet Metal Worker
14. Parole Officer 187. Auto Mechanic
15. Meteorologist 186. Butcher
16. Medical Laboratory Technician 185. Nuclear Decontamination Tech
17. Paralegal Assistant 184. Nurse (LN)
18. Computer Programmer 183. Painter
19. Motion Picture Editor 182. Child Care Worker
20. Astronomer 181. Firefighter

More on the Methodology

Her job entails working as part of a virtual team that designs mathematically based computer programs, some of which have been used to make films such as “The Matrix” and “Speed Racer.” She telecommutes from her home and rarely works overtime or feels stressed out. “Problem-solving involves a lot of thinking,” says Ms. Courter. “I find that calming.”

Other jobs at the top of the study’s list include actuary, statistician, biologist, software engineer and computer-systems analyst, historian and sociologist.

Mark Nord is a sociologist working for the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C. He studies hunger in American households and writes research reports about his findings. “The best part of the job is the sense that I’m making some contribution to good policy making,” he says. “The kind of stuff that I crank out gets picked up by advocacy organizations, media and policy officials.”

The study estimates sociologists earn $63,195, though Mr. Nord, 62, says his income is about double that amount. He says he isn’t surprised by the findings because his job generates little stress and he works a steady 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule. “It’s all done at the computer at my desk,” he says. “The main occupational hazard is carpal tunnel syndrome.”

More Career Stories and Advice

On the opposite end of the career spectrum are lumberjacks. The study shows these workers, also known as timber cutters and loggers, as having the worst occupation, because of the dangerous nature of their work, a poor employment outlook and low annual pay — just $32,124.

New protective gear — such as trouser covers made of fiber-reinforcement materials — and an increased emphasis on safety have helped to reduce injuries among lumberjacks, says Paul Branch, who manages the timber department at Pike Lumber Co. in Akron, Ind. Still, accidents do occur from time to time, and some even result in death. “It’s not a job everybody can do,” says Mr. Branch.

But Eric Nellans, who has been cutting timber for the past 11 years for Pike Lumber, is passionate about his profession. “It’s a very rewarding job, especially at the end of the day when you see the work you accomplished,” he says. Mr. Nellans, 35, didn’t become discouraged even after he accidentally knocked down a dead tree and broke his right leg in the process four years ago. “I was back in the woods cutting timber in five weeks,” he says.

Other jobs at the bottom of the study: dairy farmer, taxi driver, seaman, emergency medical technician and roofer.

Mike Riegel, a 43-year-old roofer in Flemington, N.J., says he likes working “outside in the fresh air.” Since he runs his own business, which he inherited from his father, he can start and end his day early in hot weather or do the opposite when it’s cold.

The study estimates roofers earn annual incomes of $34,164, which Mr. Riegel says is consistent with what he pays new employees. Roofers also ranked poorly because of their hazardous working conditions. “You obviously can’t be afraid of heights,” says Mr. Riegel, who once fell two stories while working on a rooftop in the rain but luckily landed safely on a pile of soft dirt. “I missed some cement by 10 feet.”

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page D2

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Summer homework for kids: brush up those manners

 

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Summer homework for kids: brush up those manners

Also, don’t hold children back a grade just because they’re small.

Carol Veravanich

Ask the Teacher
Special to the Orange County Register
goasktheteacher@yahoo.com

 

Question.   Every June I hear the same question from parents to the teachers, “What should my child work on over the summer so they’ll be ready for next year?” I’d like to make a suggestion. As a parent that has volunteered at least two days a week in the classroom and library, gone on field trips, and worked on the playground as a supervisor, I have seen what the kids need to work on.

Parents need to spend the entire summer drilling manners into their children. It is amazing that this simple thing is overlooked, underestimated, and not taught in the home. Good manners should not be taught by the teacher, just reinforced. Kids with good manners help the teachers teach. It frees them up from a wide variety of behavior problems. Good manners would reduce the amount of conflicts on the playgrounds. Good manners can be very simple. Learn to say please, thank you, and excuse me.

Answer.   I am asked all the time, “What should we have our children work on during the summer to get ahead?” I enjoyed your suggestion. This does seem like common sense, and it is in many homes, but I agree that manners would be an excellent place to start.

Going further, I think parents need to turn off the TV and computers to stop these influences as well. Kids need to have human interaction, and it is lacking for many children. Can you imagine a summer with no TV or computers? Fewer video games and more exercise?

Children would rather text each other silly little sentences, with horrendous grammar, rather than speak to each other face to face. E-mail and social networking sites makes kids say and act in ways they would not attempt if the person they were communicating with was in front of them. Technology is great, but it should not raise your children for you.