Rusty Nails (SCO v. 36) – Graduate Edition

u no wat im sayin?
In We Don’t Need Know Education, Mike Adams laments the writing (and speaking) quality of today’s average university student.

I’m getting to be a crabby old man and I’m not even fifty. But working at a liberal university for eighteen years has taught me never to accept responsibility for my actions or my disposition. Instead I blame my most recent bad mood (the one I’m in right now) on a student who just asked me a question about the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case United States v. Leon, (1984). Wanting to know the holding, he asked if it meant “that the police can rely upon a search warrant they don’t reasonably no is invalid.” I almost told the student there was know way he was going to pass my course if he didn’t no the difference between “know” and “no.” But I just new I would get in trouble if I did.

Maybe I’m getting to be a crabby old man, and I’m already over fifty, but I don’t recall there being such a disparity between college-age adults and post-college adults when I was in university.

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Experience without Reason results in empty pews
It’s become hip for Christian leaders to toss around the “80% [or substitute some other large value] of the kids in our youth groups will leave Christianity by the time they finish college” warning. Regardless of the actual number, most will agree that we live in a time when more people claim to have no belief (or religious affiliation) than ever before.

Brett Kunkle, at Stand to Reason, has a novel idea: Why not teach apologetics to our Christian youth before they leave for college? Yeah, I know, in an age of touchy-feely, Jesus-wants-to-have-a-personal-relationship-with-you Christianity, teaching hard-hitting material which causes one to exercise their brain is considered revolutionary.

To drive the point home, Brett will sometimes role-play as an atheist college professor and present his case to unsuspecting Christian high school students (see video below). Take the time to see how the youth do in defending their faith. How would the youth group in your church do?

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I’m OK, You’re OK; but I can’t tie my shoes
From Jerry Weinberger,

I’ve been a professor of political philosophy in the political science department at Michigan State University for almost 40 years. I was chair of the department for four years. So I know a thing or two about the state of the student body…

…

…more and more of my students, and not just freshmen, can’t tie their own shoes. They lose syllabi and can’t follow simple instructions; they don’t get the right books; they e-mail me to ask when and where the final exam will be held (as if they didn’t know when they signed up and don’t know how to find out); they forget to bring blue books to exams; they make appointments and don’t keep them; and many never come to office hours at all, except perhaps on the day before an exam.

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College is a waste of time
Some college students are finding the whole idea of dropping a wad (or, their parent’s wad) to be caged in for four years, inculcated in the ways of the world, to not be their style. Dale Stephens writes,

I left college two months ago because it rewards conformity rather than independence, competition rather than collaboration, regurgitation rather than learning and theory rather than application. Our creativity, innovation and curiosity are schooled out of us.

Interesting. He also mentions Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future, which predicts a “free agent economy” in this new world economic order we’ve found ourselves in.

In a Michael Ellsberg article highlighting Stephens, we get a glimpse at the counter-cultural notion that young-adults (aka teenagers) are more than capable of entering the full-fledged “adult” world.

Usually when we hear the words “disruption” together with “teenagers,” we think of loud talking in movie theaters, playing clown in class, and other discipline problems.

But teenagers like Stephens are engaging forcefully in a very different—and more profitable—form of disruption: disruptive innovation, as first described in detail by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Instead of perpetuating the myth of adolescence, in which we train our young-adults to expect the years of 13 – 20+ to be years of unfettered FUN, why not task them with the responsibility of being productive members of society?

Yeah… I know. Where’s the fun in that?