There will be time enough to get here.

Last night I had the pleasure of meeting with a group of Penn Staters from HP, one of whom has become a friend over the last few years. His son has just entered Kindergarten and he is already reading. This is becoming more and more common, that children should be reading earlier and earlier, and we have all seen the videos where kids are reading from the age of 6 months with a special system that can be yours for only 4 payments of $19.95! Our son is entering the second grade and while he is reading very well now (he just passed/exceeded the standards test for beginning of the second grade) he only started reading last year. Was he behind? Are we bad parents?

Some would say the answer is yes, we are delinquent as parents. We should be getting our children to read as soon as possible to give them every advantage. Certainly we read with our children, often noted as the most important thing a parent can do for their development, from their earliest days on. But I am in agreement with Malcolm Gladwell who in an interview commented that this push for early reading is misplaced. Reading is not like a sport where repetition allows one to build upon skills and develop new ones. Sure, vocabulary will increase but it is not like one is developing better “reading muscles.”

Our daughter was also a bit slower at reading, but by the time she had finished second grade, however, she was reading all of the Harry Potter books then published. This summer she read constantly and wrote over 100 pages of her own fiction. I am not worried.

What my friend and I noticed was that his daughter is only three years older than his son whereas our daughter is six years older. His son saw his big sister learning how to read and joined in, wanting to do everything she did. From our son’s perspective big sis had always been reading and often read to him. There was not then the same challenge or incentive for him. Different context led to different results. Will his son be farther along by second grade than my son?

As far as reading goes, not likely. Just because you are already reading doesn’t mean that you are comprehending more difficult concepts. (Math is a different subject entirely, double entendre intended.)

Sports, as I suggested, are different again. My son is soccer mad and plays all the time. You can definitely tell the difference between those kids who have played soccer for the last two years and those just starting. But even there the learning curve is not so great that an athletic and focused child can’t become very good very quickly. Remember Tim Duncan, NBA two-time MVP? He didn’t play basketball until he got to college.

The moral of my essay? Care for your children, never neglect their education, and let them have a childhood.

 

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the young men went up to university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society. The stock argument in favor of postponing the school-leaving age and prolonging the period of education generally is there there is now so much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partly true, but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects–but does that always mean that they actually know more?

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

A bit more after the jump.

To be honest, I could not find the actual date of this composition by Dorothy L. Sayers. I did discover, however, that this essay has become “the clarion call for the restoration of classical education in the United States, particularly in the homeschooling movement.” Who knew? Not me (but I am sure many of you did).

I first read this years ago and it still strikes me as incredibly relevant. I am particularly mindful of her comments as we begin an inaugural program on critical inquiry. I don’t consider myself nostalgic for a bygone age of education, but I do believe one of the constant conversations that we must have in academia is the question of education versus training. What are we offering our students today?

 

Wondermark by David Malki

HT to KO with whom I “audited” many classes at Cornell.

 

Today is our medal ceremony, the day before graduation when we present medals to our honors scholars who are graduating. This week I have had to deal with many students who will not be graduating with honors for various reasons. All were upset, understandably, and many insisted that I didn’t know what they are truly capable of. I hope so, I hope they, like those in the video, go on to do tremendous things in their fields. What the video does not go into is the fact that each of the individuals, like Michael Jordan who, the video reminds us, when cut from the high school basketball team went into his room and cried, eventually came out of that room and worked harder than anyone else to succeed. Failure is not the end and rejection is not the final verdict. It may indicate that you are in the wrong field but it can also spur one on to work harder than they have before and so to reach their full potential.

 

The return of an adult-education class in the Northport school district teaching creationism may provoke litigation.

(Via NYT > Education.)

 

The statement is on the American Jewish Committee’s website and reads, in part,

August 8, 2007 – New York – College and university presidents across the United States are signing on to a statement by Columbia University President Lee Bollinger denouncing the decision by the union representing British academics to promote a boycott of Israeli educational institutions….

The appeal to U.S. college and university presidents to follow Bollinger’s example came from eight of their colleagues: Jehuda Reinharz, president, Brandeis University; Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor, University of California, Berkeley; Richard Herman, chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Donna E. Shalala, president, University of Miami; Henry S. Bienen, president, Northwestern University; Graham B. Spanier, Pennsylvania State University; Lawrence S. Bacow, president, Tufts University; M. Lee Pelton, Willamette; and, Harold Shapiro, president emeritus, Princeton University.

For more, see the Chronicle’s article.

College Presidents Attack Proposed Faculty Boycott of Israeli Academics – Chronicle.com

More than 300 presidents of American colleges and universities have signed a statement assailing a proposal by Britain’s leading faculty union to consider a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The statement, which was written by Columbia University’s president, Lee C. Bollinger and ran as an advertisment in Wednesday’s New York Times, follows widespread criticism since the University and College Union passed a resolution in May calling for the group to debate whether to refuse to work with Israeli academics over the country’s Palestinian policies. Last week a group called Scholars for Peace in the Middle East said it had gathered 10,000 signatures on an online petition opposing the faculty union’s proposal. —Andrew Mytelka

(Via The Chronicle of Higher Education.)

 

Biblical Studies Carnival Update and Reminder

I wanted to thank everyone who volunteered to host a future Biblical Studies Carnival. I now have hosts scheduled into the new year. Here is a list of upcoming hosts:

• Biblical Studies Carnival XX (Claude Mariottini, Dr. Claude Mariottini – Professor of Old Testament – August 2007)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXI (Duane Smith, Abnormal Interests – September 2007)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXII (Tim Bulkeley, Sansblogue – October 2007)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXIII (John Hobbins, Ancient Hebrew Poetry – November 2007)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXIV (James M. Darlack, Old in the New – December 2007)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXV (Christian Brady, Targuman – January 2008)
• Biblical Studies Carnival – Best of 2007 (Tyler F. Williams, Codex: Biblical Studies Blogspot - January 2008)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXVI (Kevin Edgecomb, Biblicalia – February 2008)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXVII (Kevin Wilson, Blue Cord – March 2008)
• Biblical Studies Carnival XXVIII (Chris Weimer, Thoughts on Antiquity – April 2008)

As you can see from the list, I put myself in to do a “Best of 2007″ post in the new year (I quite liked writing that up last January).  Also, Claude Mariottini will be hosting the next Biblical Studies Carnival at his eponymous blog in the first week of August 2007.  I encourage you to submit a post today! This can be one of your own posts or you can nominate a post written by someone else — don’t forget that the post needs to fit into the general category of academic biblical studies and cognate areas and needs to have been written sometime in June 2007.

You can submit/nominate posts via the submission form at BlogCarnival.com or you may email them to biblical_studies_carnival AT hotmail DOT com.

For more information, consult the Biblical Studies Carnival Homepage.

Tags: Biblical Studies Carnival

(Via Codex: Biblical Studies Blogspot.)

 

It was also encouraging to hear that in many ways we have been and are leading the way. For example, it is only in the last few years that several of the schools have begun to move towards a university-wide honors program and some are still not yet at that point. It was 1985 when the Penn State University Scholars Program was established across all academic units. I was reminded yet again of what a great program I am privileged to lead.

I have to share with you as well that these were wonderful colleagues. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly. It was a great, cordial exchange of ideas. We will be at Purdue next year and SHC-PSU will host in 2009!

(Now, to make my way back to State College. Hopefully with my luggage!)

 

CIC: Committee on Institutional Cooperation – About CIC

ABOUT CICThe CIC is a consortium of 12 research universities, including the 11 members of the Big Ten Conference and the University of Chicago. With campuses in 8 states, CIC universities enroll more than 300,000 undergraduates and 76,000 graduate students, and employ some 33,000 full-time faculty and 139,000 full-time staff. The CIC is guided by the Provosts of the member universities