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How is Liberty Lost?0
- August 4, 2015
Many Americans feel that their liberties are being continuously eroded through government overreach and overregulation. But the following quotation from the eighteenth-century British statesman Edmund Burke makes one wonder: has the government’s erosion of liberty been preceded by the failure over time of Americans to live freely? Burke writes: “What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue?
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Phrase of the Day: Nostalgie de la Boue 0
- August 4, 2015
Tom Wolfe, probably most famous for authoring The Bonfire of the Vanities and The Right Stuff, has a fascinating explanation of the phrase in his book Radical Chic. In it, Wolfe lampoons wealthy, New York socialites of the 1970s for embracing groups like the Black Panthers who ultimately wanted to upend the social order that
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Check Out David Foster Wallace’s Course Syllabus 0
- August 3, 2015
With the July 31 release of the biopic The End of the Tour, the late author David Foster Wallace is once again in the news. Wallace is best known for his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, which Time named one of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923. For your interest, here is a link
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Is Our Education System Putting Our Country At Risk?0
- August 3, 2015
Below is the opening statement of “A Nation at Risk,” a 1983 document from Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education that warned of the urgent need to right the ship of the American education system: “Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being
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Today’s Schools Are Passing Kids Even When They Fail 2
- August 3, 2015
Are schools increasingly passing students on to the next grade despite poor performance in class? That’s the issue recently explored by Jay Matthews in the Washington Post. Matthews describes the experiences of one parent who knew her daughter was deliberately ignoring her school work, yet was rewarded with a passing grade by her teacher: “A
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I’m Tired of Celebrating “Teachers”0
- July 31, 2015
The latest Key & Peele sketch “TeachingCenter” is still going viral. It’s a spoof of SportsCenter that imagines a world where we put as much time, energy, and money into honoring teachers as we do athletes. In case you haven’t seen it, here it is: Most of the reactions have been predictable: “If only…”; “Teachers
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How is Liberty Lost?0