Saturday, November 11, 2006
German vs. US Higher Education
I like this guy Fehrenbach, who apparently writes for the San Antonio Express-News. In this piece he discusses European universities, American universities, and elitism. I'm not sure it's "elitism" to say that one school is better, or more rigorous, than another, but go read anyway.
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3 comments:
Didn't you ever have to read T.R.'s book "This Kind of War" while you were on active duty. After the Berlin Wall feel the Korean Scenerio became big and T.R.'s book became the reference that everyone was reading.
No, I didn't. I did, however, read "Air War South Atlantic", about the air operations in the Falklands War. As an air defense artilleryman I found it an amazing book, in part because we Americans were (again) reinventing the wheel that the Brits had figured out almost a decade before.
Interesting piece. I got a laugh out of the fact that "bum" derives from an old German word describing undergraduates.
However, I didn't care for this closing statement: "...we have largely kept science and engineering pure, above ideology, and this brings in maybe 50,000 students from China alone." First of all, who's "we"? I think it's more a case that scientists and engineers keep *themselves* less ideologically busy. Secondly, unfortunately this ideological purity might be on its way out with the politicization of scientific issues such as stem cell research and global warming (to say nothing of the evolution/intelligent design "debate").
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