Links

Some Good Links:

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.