Great 8:00 minute report from NRR’s Alix Spiegel on the importance of struggling to learn, and differences in perception between American and Asian cultures.  A few excerpts:

“I think that from very early ages we [in America] see struggle as an indicator that you’re just not very smart,” Stigler says. “It’s a sign of low ability — people who are smart don’t struggle, they just naturally get it, that’s our folk theory. Whereas in Asian cultures they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity.”

In Eastern cultures, Stigler says, it’s just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle.

“They’ve taught them that suffering can be a good thing,”

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Time magazine this week has a cover story on the future of higher education, discussing topics such as rising costs, troubling graduation rates, and the ascent of various models of online education (including “MOOCs” — massive open online courses).

The Institute for College Access & Success states in a press release today:

Students who borrowed for college and earned bachelor’s degrees in 2011 graduated with an average $26,600 in student loan debt, up from $25,250 in 2010, according to a new report from the Project on Student Debt at The Institute for College Access & Success (TICAS). This five-percent increase is similar to the average annual increase in recent years. The report also found that about two-thirds of the Class of 2011 had loans, and that private (non-federal) student loans comprised about one-fifth of what they owed.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

More than one out of eight student-loan borrowers who entered repayment from October 1, 2008, to September 30, 2009, defaulted within three years, the U.S. Education Department announced on Friday as part of its first release of official data on cohort default rates for federal student loans measured over three years.

The new figure on overall default rates, 13.4 percent, was released as the department switches from measuring the rates over three years instead of two. For-profit institutions had the highest average three-year default rates, at 22.7 percent, which was more than double the 11-percent rate among public institutions. Private, nonprofit institutions had an average three-year default rate of 7.5 percent.

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Doug Wilson:

“We tend to think of our students’ minds as finite shoeboxes, and we then think we must take special care not to put anything in there if we do not want it to remain there for life. But the brain is more like a muscle. A student who learns one language, such as Latin, is not stuck with his shoebox three-quarters full, with no room for Spanish. Rather the student has a mind that has been stretched and exercised in such a way that subsequent learning is much easier, not much harder.

“Now of course this kind of mental discipline could be acquired by requiring of the students the intellectual equivalent of running back and forth. While a football coach might be able to get away with this, because everyone understands the point, we should not attempt it in the classroom—although mental wind sprints that had no point in themselves would still be better than simple laziness. The reason this approach would not work in the classroom is that the human mind is inescapably teleological; it wants to know why it is learning something. Latin has the advantage of providing the grist for the mill of the mind, while also providing great practical advantages. To return to our metaphor of football, the study of Latin is therefore simultaneously an exercise to prepare for the game and part of the game.”

From The Case for Classical Christian Education(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003), 140-141.

HT: JT

Great observations from Howard Gardner in the Washington Post.  Dr. Gardner is a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-author of Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet.  In putting together Good Work, Dr. Garner and his colleagues interviewed “100 of the ‘best and brightest’ students and spoke with them in depth about life and work.”  They found:

Over and over again, students told us that they admired good work and wanted to be good workers. But they also told us they wanted — ardently — to be successful. They feared that their peers were cutting corners and that if they themselves behaved ethically, they would be bested. And so, they told us in effect, “Let us cut corners now and one day, when we have achieved fame and fortune, we’ll be good workers and set a good example.” A classic case of the ends justify the means.

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Mike Rowe, creator and executive producer of Discover Channel’s Dirty Jobs, writes an open letter to Mitt Romney. An excerpt:

Even as unemployment remains sky high, a whole category of vital occupations has fallen out of favor, and companies struggle to find workers with the necessary skills. The causes seem clear. We have embraced a ridiculously narrow view of education. Any kind of training or study that does not come with a four-year degree is now deemed “alternative.” Many viable careers once aspired to are now seen as “vocational consolation prizes,” and many of the jobs this current administration has tried to “create” over the last four years are the same jobs that parents and teachers actively discourage kids from pursuing. (I always thought there something ill-fated about the promise of three million “shovel ready jobs” made to a society that no longer encourages people to pick up a shovel.)

For a great book on the value of physical/manual labor, check out Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford (Penguin, 2010).

Related: The Trades Alternative

Update:  Governor Romney reads Rowe’s letter

Update #2:  Trade School Enrollment Soars:

Trade schools nationwide are bursting at the seams as demand for skilled factory workers pushes enrollment to record highs.American manufacturers in certain sectors are enjoying a rebirth fueled by the return of overseas production back to the United States. As factories crank up, they have an urgent need for high-skilled workers such as machinists and tool-and-die makers knowledgeable in computers.