Blog 3 Columns

Were Americans Illiterate Before the Arrival of Public Schools?1
- September 6, 2016
Were most Americans illiterate before the creation of our public education system in the 1830s? That seems to be a popular assumption, but is it true? If you’re looking for statistics, they’re notoriously hard to get when it comes to literacy rates in past centuries. Most historians of early American history have gravitated toward signatures on
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Maybe America Was Never ‘Great’?0
- History
- September 6, 2016
By now all of you have heard or seen Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again.” The slogan is a timely attempt to rally the still-patriotic contingent of U.S. citizens who hold to some level of American exceptionalism. But since first hearing the slogan I’ve had a nagging thought lingering in my head: Maybe America
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Don’t Be So Fast to Dismiss IQ Tests 0
- Education
- September 6, 2016
‘IQ tests just measure how good you are at doing IQ tests.’ This is the argument that is almost always made when intelligence-testing is mentioned. It’s often promoted by people who are, otherwise, highly scientifically literate. You wouldn’t catch them arguing that climate change is a myth or that vaccines might cause autism. But saying
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Can You Pass This Expansive Classics Quiz And Prove Your Mastery Of Literature?0
- Education
- September 6, 2016
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All Sides Agree: Politics is Strangling Social Science 0
- Culture
- September 6, 2016
If you thought that the progressive bias in social sciences was considered a problem only by tradition-minded folk, you might be surprised to hear the views of celebrity skeptic, Michael Shermer in Scientific American earlier this year: A 2015 study by psychologist José Duarte, then at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, entitled “Political
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A Few Reasons Why You Should NEVER Let a Dog Lick Your Face 0
- Education
- September 6, 2016
Being a dog person means a few things. You’re usually pretty carefree and easygoing, you are probably extroverted, and you might occasionally let your dog give you some love by licking your face. I, personally, had always found it a bit weird that people let dogs lick their faces. But after becoming quite close with my
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7 Teachers Guilty Of Sex Abuse Got No Prison Time in Violation of State Law, Newspaper Finds 0
- Culture
- September 6, 2016
In 1997, Iowa lawmakers passed legislation requiring mandatory prison time for any educator found guilty of sexually abusing a student. The law was passed after a female teacher found guilty of having sex with a male student avoided time behind bars. A recent analysis by the Des Moines Register, however, suggests that law is not
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Why America Shouldn’t Make College ‘Free’1
- Education
- September 2, 2016
How often are we told by our friends on the left that America ought to follow the lead of Europe, specifically western Europe, and make college “free”? Pretty often, by my reckoning. In the waning years of my community college teaching days a student raised that very matter on the first day of class. Obviously,
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When Finance and Philosophy Clash 0
- Economics
- September 2, 2016
Few people in our materialistic and avaricious age would consider making money a moral issue. Isn’t it merely one of the bare necessities of life? We speak of a “healthy profit” but nobody speaks about an unhealthy profit. To do so would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Not if you listen to some of the great
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Were Americans Illiterate Before the Arrival of Public Schools?1