Rodent Regatta

A few wonderfully inflammatory and thought-provoking ideas from an interview with Jeff Schmidt, the author of Disciplined Minds:

”Graduate school is an intensive and protracted period of scrutiny during which the individual is pressured to conform under threat of expulsion. The tenuring process is another years-long process of scrutiny. Those who remain after the two long rounds of weeding and transformation are so intellectually and politically timid that they don’t need tenure. Thus the people who need the protection of tenure don’t have it, and those who have it don’t need it, because they have nothing provocative to say.”
”Our society features a single, thoroughly integrated system of education and employment. The education component is hierarchical and competitive because it is a sorting machine for employers, a gate-keeper for the corporations and academic institutions.”
”Learning doesn’t require credentialing, ranking, grading, high-stakes testing, groveling for letters of recommendation and so on. Good teachers don’t need—or want—the power to crush their students socially.” [Ken Rawlings]