Education

Education articles feature analysis of education policy, universities, trends, and current events.

Including impacts on social life, public health, freedom of speech, and personal liberty.

All Brownstone Institute education articles are translated into multiple languages.

fear of a microbial planet

The Evolution of Thin Skin

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Many universities have abandoned their mission of truth-seeking in favor of promoting social justice and all its quasi-religious trappings. This new mission has infiltrated every level of higher education, even medical schools. With this cultural slide, not only is it wrong to attack fellow student’s or professor’s work, it is wrong to even challenge or debate their ideas entirely. If the work of the professors or students falls in line with the new mission, it becomes insulated from any criticism.

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university-failures

Structural Reasons Why Today’s Universities Fail

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Administrative bloat has many other consequences, amongst which is that many university functions now follow bureaucratic rather than academic logic, ignoring the purely academic benefits to activities and focusing instead on finding and privileging reasons for the bureaucracy’s own existence. This leads to a perennial search for problems that can be exaggerated and turned into a justification for more administration (e.g., ‘Is there a problem I can pretend to solve by creating an additional compliance problem?’).

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campus closures

The Human Costs of Campus Closures

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In our unhinged pursuit of a covid-free fantasyland, we wreaked untold and immeasurable havoc on the entire higher education ecosystem. Whether this is reversible remains to be seen. But for the damage not to be permanent, we must at the very least resolve never to do it again. Another round of campus closures like the last one will likely permanently destroy higher ed as we know it.   

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digital learning

The Dashed Dreams of Digital Learning

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The results we were promised from increased tech adoption, always available learning content, and a device for every child has turned out to be not much more than a successful marketing campaign. One where tech corporations cashed in, government overspent taxpayer money, and once again, the children were let down.

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college administrators

College Administrators Need to Admit Wrongdoing and Beg Forgiveness

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Traditionally, college commencement addresses are corny or grandiose exhortations for grads to devote their lives to serving others. But this year, commencement speakers should show self-awareness and focus on how badly they and their peers have failed their students and an entire generation of young people during the past 38 months. They need to apologize profusely, specifically and at length. 

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Randi Weingarten

The Truth about Randi Weingarten and the School Closures

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In reality, Weingarten did everything in her power to keep schools shuttered; she just pretended that she wanted them open. She had a direct line to Rochelle Walensky, the Director of the CDC, and interjected impossible-to-meet guidelines about what was necessary to re-open schools “safely.” Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act in May 2021 revealed that the AFT lobbied the CDC and suggested language for the agency’s federal reopening guidance.

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competing interests

A Failure to Disclose Competing Interests

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This is a story of an author who promoted COVID-19 vaccine uptake among adolescents while failing to disclose significant competing interests (e.g., his holding of an unrestricted research grant from Pfizer). This is also a story of a failure of the author’s publisher Nature Reviews Cardiology to enforce Nature Portfolio’s declaration-of-competing-interests policy.

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parent child state

Who Is Better at Raising Your Child, You or the State?

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Just as the state cannot trust the weighty job of parenting to parents, it cannot trust the job of childcare to childcare providers. They will therefore have to be subjected to strict protocols, as befits a good bureaucracy. And those protocols will be designed by experts who have scientifically determined which conditioning techniques lead to the best adapted little New Citizen.

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University of Chicago

University of Chicago Students Speak Out

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For the past three years, students at the University of Chicago have been exposing the facade without intimidation or fear, and they just keep raising the bar. One week from today, students will be hosting academic and industry leaders to discuss “Academia’s COVID Failures”, and you cannot miss the livestream of this event.

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social science and humanities

A Crumbling Regime: Lessons for the Social Sciences and Humanities

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COVID-19 landed in an impoverished information ecology – especially in academic institutions – where increasingly all forms of information and arguments are vetted through ideological lines. In other words, arguments are measured against an always moving line of demarcation based on their suspected rootedness in simplistic political camps. 

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