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Phrase of the Day: Nostalgie de la Boue0
- 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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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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Today’s Schools Are Passing Kids Even When They Fail2
- 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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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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Check Out David Foster Wallace’s Course Syllabus0
- 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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Wendell Berry’s Unsettling Description of Modern Life1
- July 31, 2015
“Man is a political animal.” Chances are that you’ve come across this line from Aristotle. You’ve also probably encountered the John Donne line that “No man is an island entire of itself.” And you may have heard them used to justify our life in modern society, where many of us are packed into cities and
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Is It Okay to Bribe Your Kids?0
- July 31, 2015
One of the “joys” of parenting is struggling to get your children to perform required tasks. The most difficult struggles usually involve getting them to do chores and homework. Sometimes, after initial pleas and threats have been fruitless, after the child has done a mediocre job, or even after the child has been punished,
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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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Cursive: Easier Than We’ve Been Led to Believe?0
- July 31, 2015
You’ve either heard of a situation like the following or been in it yourself: The 29-year-old head of the customer service department walks down the hall and passes a hand-written complaint to a middle-age employee. “Here,” she says, “can you read this note for me? I can’t read the woman’s handwriting.” Puzzled, he looks at
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