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A happy update: Laci has prevailed and has a great follow up post defending sex education online. ———————————————————– I consider Laci Green one of the ten best atheist YouTube video makers on the internet. Her video “Why Atheists Care About Your Religion” is something of an atheist YouTube classic. That it got her temporarily suspended from [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ Category
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January 15th, 2012 
Daniel Fincke How To Argue With Teens
January 9th, 2012 Daniel Fincke NPR reports on interesting research on how to grow a kid’s spine and how to weaken it: Teens should be rewarded when arguing calmly and persuasively and not when they indulge in yelling, whining, threats or insults, he says. In Allen’s study, 157 13-year-olds were videotaped describing their biggest disagreement with their parents. The most [...]
Did NYU Fire a Professor for Giving James Franco a D?
December 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke The Guardian: A professor who was fired by New York University has filed a lawsuit claiming he was dismissed for giving celebrity student James Franco a D grade for poor attendance. Dr José Angel Santana, who taught as an assistant arts professor on the actor’s graduate film course, says that Franco – who supplements his acting career [...]
Philosophy Students’ GRE Scores (Defending Philosophy 3)
November 9th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In order to take a step towards vindicating the practical value of concentrating on philosophy as an undergraduate student, below are charts on GRE scores, sorted by the subjects students are expecting to study in graduate school (their “Intended Graduate Major”)*. They demonstrate, through quantitative means, that philosophy really does enhance critical thinking and communication [...]
Retroactive Grade Inflation At Loyola Law School
October 27th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Last year Loyola Law School in Los Angelas decided to help its struggling graduates get jobs in the current miserable market by improving their grades for them retroactively. Loyola’s Law Dean Victor Gold explained at the time: Last week the faculty approved a proposal to modify the grading system. The change will boost by one [...]
A Call For Submissions From Closeted Religion-Critics In Academia (Or in Goverment, Or In Business, etc.)
October 27th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I just read Jen’s dispiriting blog post about how she needed to take down a blog post (one I very much liked) because she had to be wary about potential impacts on her relationships in her graduate school department and her potential to work in academia long term. And this reminded me of a plan I [...]
Fighting The Dictionary
October 18th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Ophelia wrote an insightful, controversial paragraph: Churches don’t do education. Religion doesn’t do education. Churches and religion do religion, which is different from education. Education is what schools do. It is fundamentally secular – it is about the world, and exploring and learning about the world. Like newspapers, like forensics, like medicine, like so many human institutions, [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Atheism, Atheism, Atheism, Atheistic Ethics, Atheistic Ethics, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Education, Ethical Pluralism, Ethical Pluralism, Ethics, Ethics, Morality, Morality, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Language, Secularism 
20 Comments »A Long Walk To Water
October 15th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Ms. White is a middle school teacher at Jefferson Middle School in Champaign, Illinois, with a great idea for an interdisciplinary project that she needs our help to fund since she works in an impoverished school district: My Students: One morning this summer I woke up and began reading “A Long Walk to Water”. An hour [...]
It’s Hard To Remember All Your Students
October 7th, 2011 Daniel Fincke I won’t feel so bad in the future when I can’t remember one of my eighteen hundred or so former students comes up to me and I can’t remember his or her name (though I always remember the face): Dr. Thomas Freeman remembers that moment more than four decades ago in Atlanta when he pointed [...]
What Would Stephen Colbert Do?
October 3rd, 2011 Daniel Fincke The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive If you’re anything like me, you routinely find yourself in difficult situations in life which require superhuman levels of ironic coolness, intellectual brilliance, quickness of wits, and deep personal goodness and you have to ask yourself, “What Would Stephen Colbert [...]
A Tax on Education, A Stifling of the Public Mind
September 25th, 2011 Daniel Fincke George Monbiot has a must read, should be outraged by, article about the costs of accessing peer-reviewed literature: The average cost of an annual subscription to a chemistry journal is $3,792. Some journals cost $10,000 a year or more to stock. The most expensive I’ve seen,Elsevier’s Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, is $20,930. Though academic libraries [...]
Encouragement
September 18th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Sierra writes about the impact of an English professor’s encouragement in opening her mind to her possibilities outside of the narrowly circumscribed life she was expecting from being raised in Christian patriarchy: One evening, as Bill handed me a paper I’d written with his comments, he asked, “Did you ever think of being a professional [...]
The Philosopher King As The Jester Mayor?
September 10th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Antanas Mockus, a mathematician and philosopher, decided to put his creatively shameless teacher’s sensibilities to the task of governing a violent city of 6.5 million, filled with corruption and thieving gangs of street children: When many hated the disordered and disorderly city of Bogotá, he wore a Superman costume and acted as a superhero called [...]
Can Good Teaching Be Measured?
September 8th, 2011 Daniel Fincke In recent posts I have been arguing that if only we interpret the word “good” to mean “effective” we can ground our discussions of values (moral and otherwise) in facts about effectivness. I argue that in that context we can have greater and lesser degrees of goodness, measurable in terms of greater or lesser degrees [...]
Posted in Contemporary Ethics, Contemporary Ethics, Education, Epistemic Justification, Epistemic Justification, Epistemology, Epistemology, Ethics, Ethics, Evidence, Evidence, Intellectual Virtues, Intellectual Virtues, Metaethics, Metaethics, Naturalistic Fallacy, Naturalistic Fallacy, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophical Ethics, Philosophy, Teleology, Teleology, Virtues, Virtues 6 Comments »Atheists Have Affirmative Positions On The Status Of Evidence And On The Standards Of Belief
February 21st, 2011 Daniel Fincke In reply to my defense of what is sometimes called “Evangelical Atheism” on my personal Facebook page, Greg Teed thinks my account comes “so close” to correct but argues that I missed something crucial: All good points, but there is a radical difference *in kind* between what atheists/skeptics promote and what the religious evangelical proselytizes. Sometimes [...]
Kansas vs. Darwin
February 12th, 2011 Daniel Fincke From today through March 12, you can screen Kansas vs. Darwin. Description of the film: Even before they took place, the 2005 Kansas school board hearings on evolution were recognized as a pivotal battle in America’s ongoing war over teaching evolution in the public schools. Organized by believers in Intelligent Design and convened by creationists, [...]
Daily Hilarity: The Grad Student Rap
January 31st, 2011 Daniel Fincke So the music is an abomination, the rhymes are mildly amusing, and the rapping is pathetic, but, you know, out of solidarity with all the grad students out there and in tribute to a decade of my life that is now mercifully over, I just had to post this: The book they’re hawking is Surviving [...]
Just How Much Control Over Their Children’s Thought Are Parents Entitled To?
January 31st, 2011 Daniel Fincke In reply to yesterday’s open philosophical question whether a Swedish law banning any school, even private ones, from indoctrinating students by teaching their religious tenets as truths (with the ulterior motive of undermining Islamic schools’ abilities to radicalize their students), Mary Young makes a rigorous and eloquent case against such bans well worth highlighting (and [...]
Posted in 'Nuff Said, 'Nuff Said, 'Nuff Said, Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Authority, Authority, Autonomy, Autonomy, Christianity, Christianity, Civil Liberties, Civil Liberties, Creationism, Creationism, Cultural Secularism, Cultural Secularism, Education, Featured, Free Speech, Free Speech, Fundamentalism, Fundamentalism, Islam, Islam, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Political Secularism, Political Secularism, Politics, Politics, Racism, Religion, Religion, Religious Rights, Religious Rights, Right Wing Politics, Right Wing Politics, Roman Catholic Church, Roman Catholic Church, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, Separation of Church and State 
Tags: Dogma, Dogmatism, Homeschooling, Indoctrination, Islamophobia, Parents' Rights 21 Comments »TOP Q: “Is It Unjust To Outlaw Schools, Even Private Religious Ones, From Teaching Religious Doctrines As Though True?”
January 30th, 2011 Daniel Fincke Sweden is planning to make it illegal, even for private schools, to teach religious doctrines as true. Their content may be discussed, of course, but they will not be able to be presented as facts. In The Guardian, Andrew Brown explains the issues involved and the ulterior motives which may really explain the legislation: The [...]
Posted in Applied Ethics, Applied Ethics, Civil Liberties, Civil Liberties, Creationism, Creationism, Education, Featured, Free Speech, Free Speech, Intelligent Design, Intelligent Design, Law, Law, Law & Politics, Politics, Religion, Religion, Religion and Science, Religious Rights, Religious Rights, Today's Open Philosophical Question (TOP Q) 9 Comments »Daily Hilarity: The Real Reasons To Go To Grad School?
December 10th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Harsh: See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor. Your Thoughts?
So You Want To Get A PhD In The Humanities
November 28th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Deeply cynical but painfully true: Your Thoughts?
Be Heard, Fellow Adjuncts!
October 2nd, 2010 Daniel Fincke If you are a non-tenured/non-tenure track instructor or professor of any sort at any American educational institution, please fill out this survey about your working conditions from the Coalition on the Academic Workforce and be sure to pass it on to any under-employed academics you know, including graduate student teachers on fellowships. (via) Your Thoughts?
Richard Dawkins: “Faith School Menace?”
August 22nd, 2010 Daniel Fincke Jerry Coyne relays this truly eye-opening new documentary from Richard Dawkins which aired in the UK last week: Here’s a link (thanks to Johann Hari) for donating to the cause of abolishing state funding of faith schools in the UK. Your Thoughts?
High School Valedictorian Lambasts The Priorities Of US Educational System
August 7th, 2010 Daniel Fincke Meet Erica Goldson, the 2010 valedictorian of Coxsackie-Athens High School: The full transcript of her speech is here. Your Thoughts?
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