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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-closing-doors-to-the-future-1302538.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Closing doors to the future
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Sunday, March 6, 2011
When my friends and I were growing up, public education was held sacred by our parents. As the children of immigrants, education had been their way into American society and their way up the economic ladder.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-universities-spending-on-sports-undermines-their-mission-1409458.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Universities’ spending on sports undermines their mission: education
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Monday, April 18, 2011
Since 2008, I have represented the University of Texas on the Coalition on Intercollegiate Athletics (COIA), the only faculty organization in the country monitoring National Collegiate Athletic Association programs within institutions of higher learning.
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http://www.statesman.com/opinion/palaima-single-sex-education-study-flawed-1912538.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Single-sex education study flawed
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Thursday, October 11, 2011
In the late 1960s, I learned how to read and think and talk and write at St. Ignatius High School, an all-boys school in Cleveland. Many of my teachers were Jesuit priests. They had doctor of divinity degrees and doctorates in a second subject area. They had done serious community service, like work among the urban poor in the United States or in foreign countries.
Our teachers at St. Ignatius were devoted to the life of the mind and to our minds. But they never forgot our souls and spirits and hearts. They taught us how to think. They even taught theology skeptically. My high school education prepared me to question my Catholic faith, but it instilled positive moral and social values that enrich my life to this day. I looked forward to school every day, although I had to travel 20 miles for 75 minutes on a public bus each way. I left home at 6:30 a.m. and got back in rush hour, about 6 p.m.
The buses were packed with working-class men and women and with teenage boys and girls going to Catholic high schools in the city. I felt lucky to be getting an education. I sensed how poor life could be without a cultivated mind and caring spirit. The worldly wise Jesuits reinforced this idea.
The controversy surrounding “single-sex schooling” and the Ann Richards School raised by a two-page article, “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling,” in the journal Science struck a deep chord in me and in others. I read the article as if it were assigned reading in a second-year English class at St. Ignatius. Here is my homework.
We might expect a priori that an article co-authored by eight active founders and board members of a national organization championing coeducational schooling would show some bias. It does.
Its authors, including a psychology professor at the University of Texas, accuse educators who support single-sex schooling of pseudo-science. For a psychology professor to join in doing this is “a pot calling kettles black.” Psychology itself is not an exact science.
The eight authors criticize proponents of single-sex schooling for cherry-picking their arguments. But they cherry-pick a straw man, a random “teacher in a single-sex public school classroom,” whose opinion they quote from a local newspaper, the Gaston Gazette.
Conforming to recent politically driven data mania within higher education, the Science article equates school success solely with standardized test scores. It declares that a sample single-sex school achieves the same high results as a sample magnet program. Instead of praising and supporting both kinds of schools, it proposes getting rid of single-sex schools. It then argues that the high scores of students in both types of schools are linked to their admissions policies, as if this is somehow bad. Should we then eliminate both magnet and single-sex schools?
The Science article does briefly consider a larger social issue. But it has nothing to do with the wide range of reasons that make parents want to send their children to single-sex schools.
The eight authors cherry-pick a United Kingdom study that argues that men who have had single-sex schooling are more likely to get divorced than those with co-educational educations, yet “no parallel differences were found for women.” We can make four points about this inept logical gambit:
Citing a U.K. study that isolates education as a factor in divorce is of dubious relevance to our American experience. British manners, customs, social attitudes and cultural values are very different from ours.
Does this mean that the authors think single-sex schooling is OK for women since they do not become more divorce-prone because of it?
If this were relevant and valid, why should we not isolate the factors in single-sex schooling that produce such results and adjust them to make men less divorce-prone?
My brother and I both went to coeducational grade schools. Unlike me, he went to coed high schools. He has been divorced twice. I have been divorced three times.
The factors leading to our divorces are many: family dynamics, religion, growing up in the 1950s, our individual personalities, our ex-spouses, bad luck.
I have seen therapists for more than 20 years now. Not one has said to me, “Tom, you should have gone to a coed high school.”
Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net .
Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/excess-in-education-hurts-everyone-2041751.html
COMMENTARY
Palaima: Excess in education hurts everyone
Thomas G. Palaima, REGULAR CONTRIBUTOR
Austin American-Statesman Tuesday, December 19, 2011
As published with, in square brackets, a section that was edited out.
The ancient Greeks had two famous sayings that have been used as guides to ethical conduct even in modern times: gnothi sauton “know yourself” and meden agan “nothing to excess.”
Diodorus Siculus reports in his “Library of History” how the Spartan statesman Chilon (sixth century BCE) carved these two maxims, and a third one, on a column in the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi as offerings to the god. Diodorus declared that Chilon’s apophthegms were worth more than all the magnificent dedications set up at Delphi during its long history by rich and powerful men, cities and countries. His sayings helped men lead good, humanly rewarding lives rather than accumulate wealth and power.
In Diodorus’ view, we can only know ourselves by becoming truly educated. True education will make us wise, moderate and prudent. False education will lead us to wrong values and eventually to ruinous excess.
“Observing due measure in all things” was equally important. Chilon therefore advised that we should “prefer to lose money to gaining it dishonestly because the one causes misery in the short term, the other in the long term.” Oliver Stone will never make a movie about this maxim.
Still reading about Chilon gets students thinking about moral and ethical values. In McGuffey’s “New Fifth Eclectic Reader,” widely used in the late 19th century, lesson XLII took up the theme: We must educate. It did not mean education to acquire the skills to make money, but education to develop “the conscience and the heart,” because otherwise “we must perish by our own prosperity in our haste to be rich and mighty.”
I have been thinking about what is called the “ethics flag” in undergraduate courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Ethics is a tricky and sensitive subject. It therefore tends to be avoided or given lip service in higher education. One assumption seems to be that, like former U.S. Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart and pornography, we will recognize unethical behaviors when we see them, and also know where they will lead.
Let’s take the recent scandal in the UT Law School as a case in point. As the American-Statesman‘s Ralph K.M. Haurwitz reported this month, an outside foundation provides private money that the dean controls.
http://www.statesman.com/news/local/ut-law-dean-forced-to-step-down-2021690.html
Is this a bad idea?
It is if the dean never read or thought about what concerned Chilon and McGuffey’s Reader and awards himself a $500,000 forgivable loan or if he offers a spokesperson the title of “visiting scholar” and $101,292 and she accepts. Where would they get the idea that to do such “not illegal” things was OK?
As we might guess, they had a model ready to hand. The chancellor and all the presidents in the UT System have modest base salaries paid by state appropriations. They get whopping amounts of money from supplemental outside sources called excellence and gift funds or interest on temporary investments. In fiscal year 2011, UT President Bill Powers’ base salary was $65,945. He received a $547,667 dollop from such other sources. Coaches’ salaries work the same way.
But university salaries should be determined by guidelines based on a holistic vision of the true good of public education. [Those in control of ‘private monies’ can play favorites. The regents can decide that the president of UT Austin who needed $265,279 in supplemental funds in 2003 cannot get by without twice that amount ($534,655) six years later. And the president’s successor as law school dean might decide that such wealth is his due measure, too.]
Wealth and power act upon ethics like narcotics. In the aftermath of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal that has ruined the lives of at least 10 boys and those who know and love them, the IMG Intercollegiate Athletics Forum met in New York City Dec. 7-8, “a must-attend by college athletics glitterati.” Penn State and its ethical issues were barely mentioned.
But Powers attended and spoke against reining in immoderation, or, as he put it, “We need to be careful not to punish success.”
But we should punish what is called success, wherever it leads to habits of behavior that cause those entrusted with the common good to act contrary to sound ethics, in extreme cases, to leave young boys undefended from adult predators.
Why, after Penn State and many other intercollegiate sports scandals, would the president of our public university want to help big business go on as usual?
Palaima is professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin: tpalaima@sbcglobal.net.
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