I was sorry to see that a recent Rasmussen poll which reported that 2/3′s of Americans oppose full forgiveness for student loans (“66% Oppose Forgiveness of Student Loans“). That contrasts sharply with Obama’s announcement limiting loan repayment to around 10% of income for 20 years before forgiveness (President to Ease Student Loan Burden for Low-Income Graduates“).

Or maybe the contrast only suggests Obama’s tedious sense of caution… Either way, I think we need to do a lot more work in putting student debt into the context of the ongoing destruction of both class mobility in general and the middle class standard of living in particular.  It’s part of the same conservative economic world that brought us the…

When I was writing my dissertation one of my advisers, Dr. Syverson, used to gently tease me about my over-use of the word crisis. Academics, she said, always feel that academia is in crisis. It’s true, and yet I still believe that academia is nearing some sort of profound change, even if that change is less revolutionary than evolutionary. It’s a big sluggish set of institutions and nothing happens quickly.

What  happened to the U.S. postal system is happening to education: the public monopoly is over, for good or worse. It was a bad idea to allow the fully unregulated growth of online private education. Too often, it allowed the industry to fall victim to it’s own worst instincts….

I’ve said before that we– those of us who love computers and new communication technologies and who adapted them early and often– have often been very wrong in our initial assumptions. In the late 1990s we thought that multitasking was a technologically enhanced way to work and learn and play. As it turns out, brains don’t work or play or learn that way at all.

Or, rather, brains can work and learn and play that way, but only by severely limiting the quality of work or play or learning. It’s probably fine to have the radio on the background as you write, but you can’t email with one hand while answering questions in an online classroom with the other; both email…

I don’t mind memorials, of course, and there were a lot of heroes killed on September 11, 2001. I admire firefighters who, as the cliché goes, ran to the disaster when everyone else was running away. Those passengers on Flight 93, probably taught al Qaeda an important lesson. You can’t quite trust crazy Americans to sit quietly and accept their fates. A few might charge the cockpit. Yesterday, though, was like a marathon of the big lie.

A big lie is a lie repeated so often that people forget that it is a lie. One of the worst, which I heard on National Public Radio, is the notion that we “were at war, but didn’t know it until those…

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the 1980s, and I thought a lot about imperialism. The truth is that I wanted to get out of the country, and I didn’t want to join the military, and I was too poor to be able to afford travel. In one sense it was selfish, but in another sense it created an opportunity for me to cross borders that would have ordinarily been barriers. That seemed like a good thing.

I think imperialism works through ignorance as well as power. As a volunteer, I might not change the world– or the Philippines where I worked– but I might be able, simply by going, to embody a more complex view of my culture, if…

Twenty years ago, when I began teaching writing, I tried to  teach critical thinking by presenting two opposing arguments and letting students work their way through each of them. I quickly learned that with certain arguments this led nowhere fast. Reason meet faith; debate over.

Many of my students are profoundly ant-intellectual. It’s not youthful sloth or ignorance or posturing, although there’s plenty of those things, youthful or otherwise, it’s a specific set of ideas they have been taught. It isn’t every religion, and it isn’t all Christian sects, but too many are raised to mistrust reason.

The problem, in a nutshell, is the Christian fundamentalist rejection of all substantive debate as such. This rejection, often termed the belief in the literal…