Teaching Teachers How Not to Teach
Do our schools of education really do good a job of training teachers?
Articles
Articles
UNC Education Schools: Helping or Hindering Potential Teachers?
This paper from the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy takes a critical look at what is being taught at University of North Carolina teacher education schools. It reveals the overemphasis on so-called “student-centered learning,” also known as “progressivism” and “constructivism.”
“UNC Education Schools: Helping or Hindering Potential Teachers?” by George K. Cunningham, a former professor in educational and counseling psychology at the University of Louisville, concludes that UNC’s education schools have major weaknesses when it comes to teaching teachers.
Good News on Historically Black Colleges and Universities
Despite declining enrollments, HBCUs produce many of nation’s black scientists.
Jon Sanders’ Top 10 Nuttiest N.C. Campus Events For 2007
Editor’s note: Jon Sanders compiles an annual “Top Ten” list of what he calls the “nuttiest campus events” in North Carolina. This year’s list makes a notable exception, granting the top spot (see below) to something that didn’t happen. What didn’t happen, he says, was so strikingly necessary that its predictable non-occurrence warrants attention.
Onward to this year’s list:
The Top 10 Clarion Calls of 2007!
From politically-indoctrinating professors to innovative educational programs, 2007 had it all.
Americans Want to Help Immigrants, Up to a Point
In 1982, the Supreme Court decided that K-12 education could not be denied to illegal immigrants. Symbolically speaking, these children have now grown up and, twenty-five years later, the issue is whether illegal immigrants should be denied a college education at public community colleges and universities.
My view is that individuals who live in the United States, even though illegally, should be allowed to attend college if they pay the full cost of their education.
Illegal immigration is an emotionally wrenching issue because most Americans believe two things that currently contradict one another. They believe that our laws should be obeyed. Yet they recognize that today’s tight immigration laws fly in the face of a major reality: millions of people live in nearby countries whose governments have ruined their economies, making their citizens desperate to leave.
Deconstructing America by Decree
Assume that a popularly-elected government enacts a law. The law has the backing of an overwhelming majority of the people. Yet government officials decide they don’t like the law and choose to ignore it.
The above describes a clear violation of the single most important foundation of a free society: rule of law. It also describes the actions of many decision makers in our federal and state governments regarding illegal immigration. Federal law clearly states that foreign citizens of any age who enter our country outside of legal channels are to be deported. And yet the powers-that-be find endless logic-defying means to cloud the issue, against the law and the will of the people.
The issue rose to the forefront recently in North Carolina because the community college system decided that illegal aliens should be officially admitted as students, pending a legislative review.
Higher Education for Illegal Immigrants
Should the UNC system enroll illegal immigrants?
Harry Potter Goes to College
Editor’s note: The latest installment in the wizarding movies, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will likely make an appearance under many Christmas trees this year. A more important question is whether the books should make an appearance in college courses. This article was originally published in the Charlotte Observer on August 9, 2007.
Universities across the country are adding Harry Potter to the curriculum in disciplines as diverse as English, philosophy, history, Latin, and science. Edmund M. Kern, an associate professor of history at Lawrence University and author of the reader’s guide The Wisdom of Harry Potter, is teaching an entire course on Harry Potter this fall.
The generation of students entering college this year has a mania for J. K. Rowling’s seven-book series about a young boy’s adventures in a fantastic magical world. Harry Potter’s ongoing battle against evil, with its themes of choice and consequences, life and death, and love and hate, reverberates among this generation as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five captured the students of the 1960s.
But are Harry Potter books good enough for the college curriculum?
All Rights, But No Freedom
Mock constitutional convention at UNC-Chapel Hill produces a document inspired by radical politics.