I don't think Lou would like this finding.

Via PhysOrg:

Immigrants who seek a better life in Western countries may not be able to escape the influence of their home country when it comes to their children's academic performance, according to findings from the October issue of the American Sociological Review.
...
The research, which looked at the mathematical literacy scores of thousands of 15-year-old immigrants to 13 Western
nations from 35 different native countries, indicates that economic development and political conditions in an immigrant's home country impact the child's academic success in his or her destination country.
Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.

...
The study authors also analyzed the impact of policies and political conditions in destination countries. In
traditional immigrant-receiving countries such as Australia and New Zealand, they found that immigrant children academically outperformed their counterparts in other Western nations. The authors theorize that this finding is likely the result of restrictive immigration policies that ensure that better qualified adults emigrate (e.g., those with employment and high levels of education), rather than a receptive climate toward immigrants or education policies designed to meet their needs.

I really wonder what that anti-immigration CNN anchor, Lou Dobbs, would say about this. After continuously calling for bans on immigration and mass-deportation of immigrants, here is a small report showing that the children of immigrants outperform the home nation's children. We can't have that now, can we? I mean, we shouldn't allow for more competition in primary, secondary, and tertiary education! It would be unfair to nationals of the country! (boo-hoo.)

I recently was talking with my housemate on the issue of immigration-and-citizenship. He proposed that it would be a good idea of allowing a person to obtain citizenship in the US if they satisfactorily complete secondary school. I agreed with him to a point. I think that a person who successfully completes secondary school in four or five years (hey, many have to deal with a second language), then that student should be awarded a work visa once he or she turns eighteen. What is "satisfactory"? Well, having a single nation-wide test of competency at graduation should provide an answer to what is "satisfactory." This effectively happens every year when thousands of teenagers take the SATs and SATIIs to get into university. I think that having something similar for all highschool graduates should provide an opportunity for immigrant highschoolers a chance to both get into universtity as well as a chance at a work permit in the United States. Then, if an immigrant successfully completes an undergraduate education (to use a parallel metric, they would take the GRE, GMAT, LSAT, etc.), then they should be allowed full citizenship. All this ties into the rhetoric that we (Americans) want to have competent workers, instead of incompetent ones; that we want immigrants to "play by the rules" (without many Americans knowing how difficult and counterproductive those rules are); and that these immigrants shouldn't "steal our jobs" (thus the provision of a work visa with satisfactory completion of a US highschool degree).

This would allow immigrants to be easily hired by employers without having the employer do all the paperwork necessary for hiring a non-citizen. This would allow a legal path to citizenship through scholarly achievement (as opposed to military or natal paths). Of course, I also think that this path would be a non-starter for so many Americans that it would never see the light of day as a bill in Congress ("You're going to give those illegals a work visa, just because they have a highschool degree? F**k that!"). Oh well, one can always dream of a better way than what we have now.

Walking is ... GOOD for you?

Wait. Hold on. Hold the phone. This is some crazy results:

"With childhood obesity expanding to epidemic proportions in the United States, educators, researchers and health practitioners are actively seeking to identify effective means of addressing this public-health crisis."

Well, I had hoped that this was the case... However, what do to when people constantly cite the diminished level of formal phys. ed. in schools (along with arts). Apparently, members at a conference at the University of Illinois called for integrating exercise with learning, such as going on walks to different areas of a city to help teach art and design or conduct physical activity to learn about biological energy transfer.

Chodzko-Zajko said the concept of integrating topics across the curriculum is not necessarily a new pedagogical idea. ... "If you talk to the pedagogy people, they say two things: Kids need physical education, where they learn motor skills and activities that are going to set them up to develop the competencies they need to be physically active. But they also need to know how to be regularly physically active.

I agree with the idea that this isn't new: I learned many things through "ambulatory learning" - observations in the field - like Socrates and Aristotle in ancient times. Of course, this was done in undergraduate and graduate school work. However, there were class projects in highschool that asked students to walk through their neighborhoods to create written "maps" of the place; provide observations of parks and thoroughfares; etc. It wasn't teaching us the mechanics of how to exercise, but it did tie non-physical education with physical activity; the one cannot really fully happen without the other.

The article goes into greater topics, but this seems to me to be an easy way to think about how to integrate learning with physical activity. Of course, there is always going to be the type of teacher who doesn't see "ambulatory learning" as a "proper" method of learning the material. The only thing that this sort of idea gives is a contempt of alternative methods; a contempt of physical activity in the pursuit of mental knowledge; and a lack of desire to explore the outdoors.

Role of Universities

One very interesting lecture presented was Jim Duderstadt’s presentation on the history of the institution of “the university,” the university in Britain, the early United States, and The University of Michigan. The concluding remarks about the future of higher education, as well as the Spellings Commission were also very elucidating.

A couple of points of interest that came up for me were:

· the continued desire of higher education to continue to require a liberal arts education;

· research universities teaching basic classes; and

· an (apparent) lack of connection between secondary and higher education.

With regard to the first point – the continued desire to teach a liberal arts education – is, I believe, one of the major points of weakness in the US higher education system. While this is usually seen as a major strength of the US system, I am cognizant of the continually quickening pace of the world’s economies. Students in US higher education are waiting two years – half of their potential time of training at university – to decide their major field of study. This is compared to students in the UK who are admitted directly into their majors, and take courses almost exclusively within it. In Taiwan – as far as I understand their curriculum – all students are required to take a series of “core” courses (“colloquia”), but then stay pretty confined to their disciplines.

The idea that the US-educated university graduate knows a little about everything, and more about their topic is a good thing to have, but I believe that there are enough students who are in the system that have little desire to learn outside their field. This leaves me at an intellectual fork-in-the-road situation: should students be forced to take courses they do not want to (and professors and lecturers teach courses to these students who do all wish to learn) in order to have a liberal education, or should the requirements of education be changed to be more in line with a different goal?

I feel that a student body should not be forced to take courses for the sake of broadening their education – that is what personal development (for which everyone has a whole lifetime) is for. Instead, the US university system should use the first two years of each students’ academic tenure to try and instill the traits they desire in their graduates. Hopefully, these would include a strong basis in ethics, as well as training in thoughtful reasoning, leadership, and cooperation, as well as the basic tools each student would need in continuing within their chosen field.

This last point brings me to my second point of interest: research universities teaching basic classes. Should UofM be offering classes in basic algebra, biology, chemistry, etc? What difference does it make for a student to take such courses at an expensive research university, as opposed to a community college? A lecturer at a community college should have as much knowledge with such foundational material as any professor, lecturer, or graduate student at a research university. Indeed, I would make the argument that a professor at a research university who is interested in the cutting-edge of science might be less inclined to be interested in re-hashing the basics of his or her field every four months. If this is the case, it makes little sense that such a professor would teach such a class, leaving it (or as much of the running of it as possible) to his or her graduate students – which is what happens in many of these introductory 100-level courses around campus. So why should a student (or the parents of a student) pay thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars to learn material from a graduate student when they can pay a fraction of the cost to learn the same material at a community college? Although Jim didn’t go into it very much in his presentation, I subsequently learned from him that the original setup of the University of California system was set up to focus only on upper-level and graduate courses, but was eventually scrapped due to recruitment concerns.

Of course, this could potentially all be solved by having a much-improved secondary education system in the United States. The major gap was one of the major findings of the Spellings Commission (barring the meta-findings of political “tampering”). In the UK, there is a Department for Education and Skills which can set teaching (and presumably learning) requirements nationwide, and although many debates occurred in the UK about the benefits and pitfalls surrounding teaching to tests, during my time living there, I felt that those students coming into universities were of a greater level of academic maturity than many of the Junior Year Abroad (JYA) students from the United States. While there are definite problems with the British education system, there should be a greater emphasis on connecting the skills learned in secondary education with those of university. Potentially having upper-tier universities require certain prerequisites for entry, or have a “catch-up” year or semester for students who need one before starting in on their actual degree.

And this leads me back, full-circle, to the questionable insistence by United States universities to stick to a liberal arts education. I feel that the problems with holding onto this commodity – decreased specialization, recalcitrant students being taught by disinterested lecturers/professors, high financial costs to learn basic subject matter, etc – will outweigh the benefits of a broader education. A breadth of education should be encouraged throughout a person’s schooling and life, and not forced upon those individuals who choose to be specialists. At the same time, universities should strive to teach all their students a set of tools – thoughtful reasoning, leadership, cooperation, etc – to help study and solve field-spanning problems that we are beginning to see today.