My first Kickstarter project created a book called 'Clear and Present Thinking', a college-level textbook on logic and critical reasoning, which was made available to the world for free. As a professor myself, I observed that the price of textbooks was too high for some of my students.
Every one of us owes a debt to the people who have shaped our minds and influenced our thinking and very often reasoning. For some, it is a school teacher or then professor in college for others, it could be a family member, a character of a book or movie.
The world we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have
done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level at which we have created them.... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humankind is to survive.
I was a mere 29-year-old instructor at Kyoto, enjoying daily research work with some young students. Nothing had prepared me to be a professor at a major national university. Being too young and inexperienced to be a Full Professor, I was first appointed Associate Professor of Chemistry.
Despite the evidence that we already have too many students in higher education, the hot new idea among the political class is to double down by pushing for 'free college tuition.' The problem with the 'free college' idea is, however, not merely financial. It also reinforces the myth that college is appropriate or even possible for all students.
Many textbooks fail to present students with both sides of an issue. Students are being pushed toward an education that demonizes free enterprise while advocating top-down government, deficit spending and class warfare.
The dumbing down of elementary and secondary education has made its way to the collegiate level; too many unprepared students are admitted despite their inability to do college-level work.
Common Core reminds us what testing can do right. Modeled on standards of the world's education superpowers, questions demand critical thinking and creativity. Students are asked to write at length, show their work, and explain their reasoning.
In some of the classes, especially the introductory religion courses I took, the professors can veer into a particular strain of religious anti-intellectualism. Professors typically aren't given tenure at Liberty, so there's pressure to hew to the party line on religious and social issues. I didn't see a whole lot of my professors encouraging critical thinking among their students. Which isn't to say that students don't engage critical thinking skills at Liberty - just that it wasn't part of my classroom experience there.
Howard Zinn ran what is called the Zinn Education Project. It is a radical, radical bunch of insane lunatic leftists. And there is a project at the Zinn Educational Project: A People's History of Muslims in the United States - What School Textbooks and the Media Miss. And this program is teaching your high school student, juror junior high or middle school student.
In terms of mathematics textbooks, why can't you have the scale of a national market? Right now, we have a Texas textbook that's different from a California textbook that's different from a Massachusetts textbook. That's very expensive.
Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school ... not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and [in] all my Earth science books when I was a student - I had to give the wrong answer to get an A.
We need to make college affordable in price, and also have lower-cost student loans and more available grants for students.
Among all the liberal arts, the first is logic, and specifically that part of logic which gives initial instruction about words. ... [T]he word "logic" has a broad meaning, and is not restricted exclusively to the science of argumentative reasoning. [It includes] Grammar [which] is "the science of speaking and writing correctly-the starting point of all liberal studies."
The East knew and to the present day knows only that One is Free; the Greek and the Roman world, that some are free; the German World knows that All are free. The first political form therefore which we observe in History, is Despotism, the second Democracy and Aristocracy, the third, Monarchy.
If logic itself is created rather than being inborn, it follows that the first task of education is to form reasoning.
Everybody had to go to some college or other. A business college, a junior college, a state college, a secretarial college, an Ivy League college, a pig farmer's college. The book first, then the work.