A White House Education...in Ms. Rogers' neighborhood...

An interesting piece by Mr. Herbert on Education in the NYT..In Search of Education Leaders. In it he writes "For me, the greatest national security crisis in the United States is the crisis in education. We are turning out new generations of Americans who are whizzes at video games and may be capable of tweeting 24 hours a day but are nowhere near ready to cope with the great challenges of the 21st century..."
My comment: Thanks to Mr. Herbert for writing on this topic and providing a forum for continuing the discussion on this issue. As an associate professor of business in a liberal arts institution, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses. I have taught first year seminars and I can say that a) there is a high variance in basic writing and analytical skills among freshmen, b) there is a high sense of entitlement - a C grade (Average) is considered unacceptable, and everyone expects to get an A (excellent)or B (Above Average), and c) students in my class recently revealed that they put in a total of 2 to 6 hours of studying per week outside of class for all courses combined. The issues are complex, but the changes have to start with parents who should sacrifice more of their time and money for their children. They should not expect teachers to take the entire brunt of education and make geniuses of their darlings. Simplification of life helps- students are juggling many things, and multi-tasking is perhaps not an efficient way to learn the basics.

***Ms. Maureen Dowd had another of her biting articles- The Lady and the Tiger- in which she critiques Ms. Desiree Rogers and Tiger Woods.

My comment: The Obama White House should have reserved the use of 'Executive Privilege' for something far more serious than protecting Ms. Rogers from Congressional questioning. Actions like these make the Obama WH look just like the Cheney Bush WH, which Jon Stewart and others have pointed out.

Mr. Rich strikes a somewhat similar theme in his NYT piece "Obama’s Logic Is No Match for Afghanistan." He writes "...That’s the bet Obama made. As long as our wars remain sacrifice-free, safely buried in the back pages behind Tiger Woods and reality television stunts, he’ll be able to pursue it. But I keep returning to the crashers at the gates, who have no respect for our president’s orderliness of mind and action. All it takes is a few of them at the wrong time and wrong place, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan or America or sites unknown, and all bets will be off..."

Not surprisingly, a news story in the NYT today reads "The Obama administration sent a forceful public message Sunday that American military forces could remain in Afghanistan for a long time, seeking to blunt criticism that President Obama had sent the wrong signal in his war-strategy speech last week by projecting July 2011 as the start of a withdrawal.In a flurry of coordinated television interviews, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top administration officials said that any troop pullout beginning in July 2011 would be slow and that the Americans would only then be starting to transfer security responsibilities to Afghan forces under Mr. Obama’s new plan..."