Bthun, in the comments to a post at Cassidy's place, points to a fascinating talk on Jefferson and the Barbary pirates. It's a video recording, but very interesting.
Also, here are couple of good reads on education, thanks to Arts & Letters Daily. The first posits that reading is more than a skill, but rather a compliation of everything you've learned. As a result, you can't improve overall reading comprehension among students without teaching them a very broad base of knowledge indeed:
An educational experiment in 1989 pitted a group of students with high reading scores, selected especially for their lack of interest in baseball, against a group of low-scoring students who happened to be avid baseball fans. The two groups were asked to demonstrate their reading comprehension of a passage on baseball. Can you guess which team won?A followup piece looks at the degree to which even librarians no longer like books. The nexus of the two pieces is this: if we want smarter students, we need to increase the awareness of the whole tradition of the West among those students; but we've settled on the easier task of teaching them to use search engines.
PJM has a piece that says the State of the Union is a disaster. And, indeed, it is. I think, though, it is for far wider and deeper reasons than contemplated here. We've talked about the cracking structural faults in the Republic's foundational institutions.
What if we can't fix it? I wonder.
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