A new study offers some dismal news about what college students learn in four years. “Seniors scored 1.5 percent higher on average than freshmen. In other words, four years and a couple hundred grand doesn’t buy much knowledge of American history. If the survey had been administered as an examination, seniors would fail with an average score of 53.2 percent The more elite institutions do not perform better than their less prestigious cousins—far from it.”
Tag: 11.06
Poking And Prodding Shakespeare
Ron Rosenbaum has “now done for Shakespeare studies what he did for Hitler studies: he has researched and interviewed the foremost living scholars, theater directors, actors, and critics, added summaries of the work of a few seminal critics of the last century, interjected asides concerning his own encounters with the poems and plays as well as with particularly memorable productions, and withal tried gamely to make the scholarly and critical issues being ‘warred’ over seem anything but parochial.”
A Turn To God?
“The decline in church attendance in Europe is seen as evidence that secular modernity has entered the lives of ordinary people. Some optimistic secularists even see signs that the US, noted as a religious exception among western nations, is finally showing evidence of declining church attendance. But amid the apparent dusk of faith in Europe, one can already spot the religious owl of Minerva taking flight. This religious revival may be as profound as that which changed the course of the Roman empire in the 4th century.”