Quixotic Signage of the Day: Ed in '08

I would not give up hope for education yet. That higher education is an important subject is proven by the recent responses of professors of economics, who turned out to be surprisingly responsive and "articulate" in this economic crisis. Instead of waiting to publish a few obscure articles months later, they got to work rapidly and distinguished themselves.

If only we could say the same for Linguistics professors, who remain mired in terminal trivia, best exemplified by the fatuous Language Log. As if English were not a huge international factitious business costing the world economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and more, if we added in opportunity costs.

The New York Times should establish a powerful international higher education section (The Australian provides something of a beginner's model), with well-organized comment, as at www.reddit.com and www.slashdot.org. Except for the Macquarie U. Schwartz blog, www.vc.mq.edu.au, most academic blogs are pathetic. Something that an international higher education section at NYT could help change. The traditional reporting mechanisms on higher education--Chronicle of etc.--would put you into a terminal bureaucratic sleep.

The mystery of education is that so few in America paid any attention to the stunning collapse of ETS Europe in its UK marking fiasco, so that the conclusions that should have been drawn about ETS and Kaplan in the U.S. did not get drawn.

If the U.S. simply made the COBUILD Intermediate English Grammar and English Grammar, and the Longman Advanced American Dictionary and Language Activator, official for all schools and first-year university English, while teaching texts to support the official books ("Great Expectations" is excellent for conditions called counterfactuals), within two years America would have the most integrated English teaching methods in the world.

Instead, we have pervasive parasitism. Azar "grammars." TOEFL. SAT. The best introduction to our ways in education is "The Art of Being a Parasite," not really about education, but really about education. Try looking at first-year composition courses.

CJR itself (an honest and interesting publication) has just had--search Dion--a blog entry that indicates how slovenly English teaching is in most Journalism schools. CJR should explore the implications of this story.