I think it must be that people like Friedman, Bruni and Brooks, who had such a different, and probably wonderful, experience in college and with their professors – different from what is most students experience today – that they just can’t believe how much has changed.
Here is their background. (It is this background that I think keeps them from understanding the data, reports and books.)
Friedman graduated from Brandeis Summa Cum Laude, went to Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship, and started college in the early 70’s when even average students studied 20-25 hours a week.
Bruni graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1986 (when the average student studied 20 hours a week) with a B.A. in English. He was a Morehead Scholar and was a staff writer for the student paper, The Daily Tar Heel.Bruni graduated second in his class with a master of science degree in journalism from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he also won a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship.
Brooks’ father taught English literature at New York University, while his mother studied nineteenth-century British history at Columbia. Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983.
(All of this info about them is from wikipedia.)
I think that until they see it with their own eyes – and many times at that – they are going to have serious problems comprehending. As my students tell me, they need examples.
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