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  • Why Security Measures Won’t Stop School Shootings

    Why Security Measures Won’t Stop School Shootings0

    When deadly school shootings like the one that took place on Valentine’s Day in Broward County, Florida occur, often they are followed by calls for more stringent security measures. For instance, after the Jan. 23 case in which a 15-year-old student allegedly shot and killed two students and wounded 16 others at a small-town high

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  • Why Science Badly Needs Philosophy

    Why Science Badly Needs Philosophy0

    It isn’t uncommon for scientists to try to use philosophers for target practice. The trouble is that the ones who tend to know the least about what they criticize (which is most of them) end up shooting wide of the mark. Not only that, but philosophers tend to fire back. Prominent scientists such as physicist

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  • Why Schools Shouldn’t Teach Generic Critical-Thinking

    Why Schools Shouldn’t Teach Generic Critical-Thinking0

    Being an air-traffic controller is not easy. At the heart of the job is a cognitive ability called ‘situational awareness’ that involves ‘the continuous extraction of environmental information [and the] integration of this information with prior knowledge to form a coherent mental picture’. Vast amounts of fluid information must be held in the mind and,

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  • Why Schools Should Teach Rational Discourse

    Why Schools Should Teach Rational Discourse0

    The day before the 2016 election, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a revealing story on the state of rational discourse in today’s schools. The story centered on two young men – Elijah Rockhold and Sam Buisman – from the public high school in Chanhassen, a suburb of the Twin Cities. Although Rockhold and Buisman are

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  • Why Schools Should Reconsider Abandoning This One Simple Subject

    Why Schools Should Reconsider Abandoning This One Simple Subject0

    Over the weekend, I spent a good deal of time reading a fascinating book entitled “Lords of the Earth.” The book tells the true story of Stanley Albert Dale, an Australian who eventually went to the primitive mountain regions of Papau, Indonesia, to work with a number of stone age cannibal tribes known as the

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  • Why Schools Need to Go Back to the Basics of Writing

    Why Schools Need to Go Back to the Basics of Writing0

    Once upon a time in America’s schools, teachers were instructed to teach their students the basics of good composition. According to Bernard Sheridan, a school superintendent in Massachusetts in 1917, these basics included: An absolute mastery of ‘the sentence idea.’ Freedom from glaring grammatical mistakes. Correct spelling of all ordinary words. Unfailing use of the

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