One does not have to be a suspicious Luddite to be engaged by the argument offered in Mark Bauerlein’s book The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Penguin 2008).  Essentially, Mr Bauerlein argues that American high school students, despite their unprecedented access to information, wallow in ignorance because their attachment to all things digital has eroded “their attention spans and their analytic abilities.”  As Charles McGrath puts it in his recent New York Times Book Review piece entitled “Growing Up for Dummies”: ”most high school  Continue reading →

“We of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits without the fatigue of reading or thinking.” Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, 1704

Teaching students to think critically seems to be an educational goal that is as broadly demanded and as it is frequently unfulfilled. Generally speaking, all of the parties involved in the ongoing discussion of critical thinking agree that, when acquired, it enables students to thoughtfully weigh evidence, entertain both sides of an issue, advance an argument through substantiated claims, arrive at conclusions through deduction and inference, solve multi-step problems, and so on. Like reading, writing, and arithmetic, critical thinking is

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As an Academic Approach instructor and a mother of a daughter in law school, I’ve seen my fair share of learning styles and differences. And throughout my experience and research, one term has shed light on the brain functions associated with thinking and behavior—that term is executive function (EF). It is the group of thought processes which direct planning and organizing goal-directed actions. Discussing these functions has become increasingly popular in educational literature and in learning diagnoses. But what are these mysterious functions exactly? Are they the exclusive property of CEOs? Continue reading →

A recent piece in the NYT muses on the question of brain enhancement and the emerging field of cosmetic neurology that, like cosmetic surgery, intervenes to nip and tuck, as it were, minds not as beautiful as they might be with a bit of neuro-medical intervention. Continue reading →

“My green light?” asked a student who has been studying Gatsby in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School as reported recently in the NYT. “My green light is Harvard.” Later, she explicates a bit further: “Gatsby’s hopes and dreams are American ideals. His effort is the real ideal of the American dream.” Another student adds, “It’s a very inspirational tale.” The article goes on to report how a new generation of strivers finds new meaning in American literature’s most mulled-over symbol. What the article fails to report, however, is that these seemingly innocent student observations are symptomatic of how poorly our students are being prepared as readers (of even the most sophomoric of American high-school curriculum classics) even at elite schools with humanities-based curricula such as Boston Latin. Without belaboring the point too much, Continue reading →

Assuming that Hillary Clinton does on occasion converse with the man who once asked the nation to consider “what the meaning of is is,” it ought to come as no surprise that she has an ear more attuned than most to the nuance and power of the spoken word. As the former first lady’s campaign for the democratic nomination has moved into what must be its last gasp effort to salvage victory out of a ruinous campaign strategy that has lurched from her autumnal preening over the inevitability of an early-February coronation to her wintry performance of a snarling victimhood (we will leave further commentary to the political bloggers), Ms. Clinton has made language itself an issue. Continue reading →

Over the past decade or so, a journalistic genre has emerged that seasonally represents the nation-wide anxiety that bleeds into upper-middle-class concerns about the college admissions process. Every fall and spring, articles represent the anxious hand-wringing of families that have marshaled considerable resources ($25,000+ private school tuition, Continue reading →