Last month, I wrote about The Washington Post’s attack on the PBS documentary “School, Inc.”, produced by the late Andrew Coulson, former director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. In a June Washington Post commentary launched by staunch public school advocate Diane Ravitch, “School, Inc.” is excoriated for presenting the successes of free-market
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To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a teacher is the most important component of a child’s education. As a result of this acknowledgement, conventional wisdom seems to indicate that the way to attract and retain effective, high-quality teachers is through lucrative salaries. But surprisingly, that may not be the case.
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“The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion,” Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor Nigel Lawson famously once observed. However, given the swivel-eyed fanaticism with which its supporters will defend it, even from the overwhelming evidence of its shortcomings, at this point it might be more accurate to describe the NHS as
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For generations, each autumn has bestowed the unofficial arrival of adulthood on young people as they head off to college for the first time. But while the entrance into the Ivy Halls has occurred for years, one part of that ritual seems to have disappeared, namely, the entrance examination. Oh sure, we have SATs and
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Around the world, Pope Francis is understandably rather popular. It’s not just that he’s a good pastor; it’s that he doesn’t hesitate to speak truth to power when he can have an effect. But he’s probably less popular among US Catholics than anywhere else in the Church. The reasons for that are instructive, and not
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Many educated people – though perhaps not enough – know that it was medieval monks who preserved classical culture. Between their daily offices, the monks huddled in their cells by candlelight to copy the great cultural artifacts of Western civilization. But why did they preserve works that had been produced by, and often reflected, the
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