Whenever I hear that only 12 percent of American students are proficient in history, I have to shake my head in amazement. How in the world can so few students be proficient in a subject that’s so fascinating? Historian David McCullough may have an answer to that question. Several years ago he noted that contemporary
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While visiting friends this summer, I had the opportunity to spend some time at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. As the largest home in the United States, Biltmore is a time capsule of valuable treasures spanning everything from Napoleon’s chess set to tapestries from sixteenth-century Belgium. It was while viewing one of these tapestries
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Every week for two months, quarterback Colin Kaepernick of the American professional football team the San Francisco 49ers has refused to stand during the playing of his country’s national anthem. He has instead knelt down as his protest of alleged systematic racism in American society and in solidarity with the powerful Black Live Matters movement.
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Since its beginnings, America has directed most of its educational energies toward creating average students. Already in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his classic Democracy in America, “I do not believe that there is a country in the world where, in proportion to the population, there are so few uninstructed and at the same time
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With due allegiance to persons and places, it is only right that we should love and respect our parents and grandparents. But we can do this without canonising the World War Two generation as the greatest, a piece of excessive sentimentality and sloppy thinking if ever there was one. The phrase was coined by the
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Late last week, I ran across an intriguing article on the state of the Church of England in The Telegraph. According to the paper: “Churches with small and declining congregations may no longer have to hold weekly Sunday services as the Church of England considers dropping the legal requirement. A Church of England task group
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