First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
And once more another proposition of the “our forebears were all idiots”, “tradition is always wrong”, “new and different is always better” school has fallen flat on its face in the light of objective evidence as reported by Graves. What current youth, for whom the Pleistocene ended sometime around the 1970ies, fail to realize is, how “old” the idolization of modernity really is. “Modern” and “neue Zeit” were the buzzwords of the Third Reich and before, back to about the end of WWI. The valuing of tradition came up in the early fifties, when people realized where being “modern” had led them. The self-righteous 68-ers never really grasped, whose tradition they were really in.
What’s supposed to be so surprising about Mervis? If you give one group of students a lot of extra care and tuition, of course they’ll succeed in passing exams at a higher rate. Isn’t the purpose of lower semester weeding out to find those, who can do it without that extra pampering? And if a higher fraction of that privileged group manage a degree at the expense of others, does that raise or lower the average competency of graduates?