Hi Friends,
Wishing you all a very healthy, happy and prosperous New year.
I was reading this wonderful articles and hence sharing both with all. Happy reading.
God bless all! :)
1) Hi All,
Please read the following:
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/mumbai/Meet-the-new-breed-of-generosity-entrepreneurs/articleshow/17813291.cms
http://www.servicespace.org/join/?pg=form
www.ted.com/conversations/1890/do_we_need_money_at_all_ca.ht
2) Posted by Nipun Mehta on Jun 28, 2011
2366 reads 3
An Excerpt From New Yorker Article by Louis Menad ...
My first job as a
professor was at an Ivy League university. Soon after I started
teaching there, someone raised his hand and asked, about a text I had
assigned: “Why do we have to read this book?” I could see that this was
not only a perfectly legitimate question; it was a very interesting
question. The students were asking me to justify the return on
investment in a college education. I just had never been called upon to
think about this before. It wasn’t part of my training. We took the
value of the business we were in for granted.
I could have said, “You are reading these books because you’re in college, and these are the kinds of books that people in college read.” If you hold a certain theory of education, that answer is not as circular as it sounds. The theory goes like this: In any group of people, it’s easy to determine who is the fastest or the strongest or even the best-looking. But picking out the most intelligent person is difficult, because intelligence involves many attributes that can’t be captured in a one-time assessment, like an I.Q. test. There is no intellectual equivalent of the hundred-yard dash. An intelligent person is open-minded, an outside-the-box thinker, an effective communicator, is prudent, self-critical, consistent, and so on. These are not qualities readily subject to measurement.
Society needs a
mechanism for sorting out its more intelligent members from its less
intelligent ones, just as a track team needs a mechanism (such as a
stopwatch) for sorting out the faster athletes from the slower ones.
Society wants to identify intelligent people early on so that it can
funnel them into careers that maximize their talents. It wants to get
the most out of its human resources. College is a process that is
sufficiently multifaceted and fine-grained to do this.
College is,
essentially, a four-year intelligence test. Students have to demonstrate
intellectual ability over time and across a range of subjects. If
they’re sloppy or inflexible or obnoxious—no matter how smart they might
be in the I.Q. sense—those negatives will get picked up in their
grades. As an added service, college also sorts people according to
aptitude. It separates the math types from the poetry types. At the end
of the process, graduates get a score, the G.P.A., that professional
schools and employers can trust as a measure of intellectual capacity
and productive potential. It’s important, therefore, that everyone is
taking more or less the same test.
I could have
answered the question in a different way. I could have said, “You’re
reading these books because they teach you things about the world and
yourself that, if you do not learn them in college, you are unlikely to
learn anywhere else.” This reflects a different theory of college, a
theory that runs like this: In a society that encourages its members to
pursue the career paths that promise the greatest personal or financial
rewards, people will, given a choice, learn only what they need to know
for success. They will have no incentive to acquire the knowledge and
skills important for life as an informed citizen, or as a reflective and
culturally literate human being. College exposes future citizens to
material that enlightens and empowers them, whatever careers they end up
choosing.
In performing this
function, college also socializes. It takes people with disparate
backgrounds and beliefs and brings them into line with mainstream norms
of reason and taste. Independence of mind is tolerated in college, and
even honored, but students have to master the accepted ways of doing
things before they are permitted to deviate. Ideally, we want everyone
to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It’s a
way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.
If you like the
first theory, then it doesn’t matter which courses students take, or
even what is taught in them, as long as they’re rigorous enough for the
sorting mechanism to do its work. All that matters is the grades. If you
prefer the second theory, then you might consider grades a useful
instrument of positive or negative reinforcement, but the only thing
that matters is what students actually learn. There is stuff that every
adult ought to know, and college is the best delivery system for getting
that stuff into people’s heads.
A lot of confusion
is caused by the fact that since 1945 American higher education has been
committed to both theories. The system is designed to be both
meritocratic (Theory 1) and democratic (Theory 2). Professional schools
and employers depend on colleges to sort out each cohort as it passes
into the workforce, and elected officials talk about the importance of
college for everyone. We want higher education to be available to all
Americans, but we also want people to deserve the grades they receive.
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