The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
Kyle Murnen
Director of Online Learning
Hillsdale College
Ridgewood NJ, the Left has been busy convincing Americans that our Founding Fathers did not believe in the principle of equality set forth in the Declaration of Independence.
September 6,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Hillsdale, Mich, Hillsdale College is one of the nation’s best institutions for undergraduate education, according to The Princeton Review. The education services company features the College in the 2017 edition of its flagship college guide “The Best 381 Colleges,” published August 30, and cites the College as being one of the best in the Midwest.
“Hillsdale’s commitment to teaching not only the ‘what’ but also the ‘how’ and ‘why’ is rare in American colleges and universities today,” said Dr. David Whalen, provost of Hillsdale College. “But our inclusion among The Princeton Review’s ‘Best 381 Colleges,’ as an institution who accepts zero federal or state dollars, is further evidence that a classical liberal arts education is the best preparation for students to meet the challenges of modern life.”
In addition to profiling the nation’s 381 best colleges, The Princeton Review produces lists of the top 20 colleges ranked in various categories. Hillsdale College appeared on several of these lists, including:
No. 1 on Future Rotarians and Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)
No. 6 on Professors Get High Marks
No. 9 on Best College Newspaper
No. 15 on Students Most Engaged in Community Service
The Princeton Review also calculates ratings in eight categories based on institutional data it collected during the 2015-16 academic year and/or its student survey for the book. The ratings are based on a scale of 60 to 99. Hillsdale College scored:
97 for Professor Accessibility
99 for Professor Interest
93 for Academics
92 for Quality of Life*
In its profile of Hillsdale College, The Princeton Review notes that admission “is a privilege extended to students who will benefit from, and contribute to, the academic, social and spiritual environments of the College. Important determinants for admission are intellectual curiosity, ambition, leadership and volunteerism.”
Published annually since 1992, the ‘381 Best Colleges’ list includes detailed profiles of the colleges with rating scores for all of the schools in eight categories based on The Princeton Review’s surveys of students attending the colleges.
About Hillsdale College
Hillsdale College, founded in 1844, has built a national reputation through its classical liberal arts core curriculum and its principled refusal to accept federal or state taxpayer subsidies — even indirectly in the form of student grants or loans. It also conducts on outreach effort promoting civil and religious liberty, including a free monthly speech digest, Imprimis, with a circulation of more than 3.5 million.
About The Princeton Review
The Princeton Review is a leading tutoring, test prep and college-admission services company. Every year, it helps millions of college- and graduate school-bound students achieve their education and career goals through online and in-person courses delivered by a network of more than 4,000 teachers and tutors, online resources and its more than 150 print and digital books published by Penguin Random House.
* Indicates increase in rating from previous year
BY HILLSDALE COLLEGE ONLINE COURSES APRIL 24, 2015
According to Professor Kenneth Calvert, Common Core, well-intentioned from the beginning, will utterly fail its students. Rather than raising the educational standard in the United States, it codifies and federally enforces mediocrity. Worse yet, in regulating education the federal government has overstepped its constitutional boundaries, by attempting to control teaching methods, preventing teachers from exercising their craft effectively.
The following video is a clip from Q&A 5 of Hillsdale’s Online Course: “A Proper Understanding of K-12 Education: Theory and Practice,” featuring Kenneth Calvert, Associate Professor of History and Headmaster of Hillsdale Academy, and John J. Miller, Director of the Dow Journalism Program.
Transcript:
John J. Miller:
What do you think of Common Core?
Kenneth Calvert:
Common Core is one of these well-intentioned pieces of legislation in which the federal government is trying to do something for children. They’ve perceived that children are behind the rest of the world and so let’s create a national legislation that’s not going to be forced on states, but we’ll give them money, and the states will take it. It’s just wrong-headed in so many ways. Number one, it’s unconstitutional. From the get-go there is nothing constitutional about the federal government getting its hand into education. Number two, it doesn’t do what they want it to do.
[The Federal Government] wanted to raise standards in their minds commensurate with, equal with, world standards. Neither the literature nor the science or the math standards come anywhere near that. What Common Core has ended up doing is creating, basically, what they considered to be, the lowest common denominator, the average point which students can be expected to reach. In our school and from the Hillsdale perspective it’s our belief that if you hold the bar high, very few kids are going to get there, but most of these kids are going to get beyond anywhere they ever thought they would get, that they would actually achieve higher goals than they thought they could.
By keeping the bar low, by keeping it at this kind of average, you have doomed [students] to a low level of education. They never know how far they can go. We think that it lowers the bar. It lowers the expectations.
It also does not allow teachers to be teachers. Teachers in the Common Core are teaching to tests. Much of the curriculum more and more is becoming scripted so that can’t have a Socratic dialogue, a give and take where most of the real education actually takes place.
Teachers are being robbed of their calling, of their discipline. What you begin to create here in a number of these efforts of the Federal Government to create new educational legislation, what you’ve done is begin to create bureaucrats in the classroom rather than real teachers. I’ve met teachers in public and private and charter schools who are looking at what’s coming down the pike, and they are not happy. More and more, especially some of the older teachers, they will tell me that what they used to be able to do twenty years ago, which was exciting, enlivening, and drawing out a love of the life of the mind in their students—all of that is beginning to disappear.
It’s well-intentioned legislation, right? We know what good intentions lead to. It is not to the right place. We need to give our teachers, our schools–public, private, charter–greater freedom to be what they need to be. This also demands that our teachers be highly educated, learned, true experts in their areas. They need to be the ones in the classrooms really bringing out this love of learning and love of the life of the mind in these young ones. Honestly, we’re not doing a lot of that right now either.
https://blog.hillsdale.edu/online-courses/a-failing-grade-for-common-core
May 30,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Hillsdale College added a new video: Memorial Day Tribute | Hillsdale College.
On this Memorial Day weekend, we remember those who sacrificed their lives for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Our thoughts and prayers are with all those who are grieving. May we, as Abraham Lincoln famously said, “highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
