…if politicians don’t ruin it. Unfortunately, that’s a pretty big if. Ruining the future is what politicians generally do.
Oh, and here’s the book in question
The Ongoing Educational Disaster
Next up: math textbooks.
Really, this shouldn’t be that hard. Pre-calculus math hasn’t changed much over the past several decades. But it all comes down to the perverse incentives in the public-school monopoly, in which having a worthless degree in “education” is more important than having actual useful knowledge to impart to your charges.
James Q. Wilson’s Insight
…improved America. As opposed to the insight of (say) Barack Obama.
[UPdate a while later]
More (and lengthy) thoughts from Roger Kimball:
The Moral Sense is far from being anti-intellectual. But it is, in part, a cautionary tale about the dangers of taking intellectuals, especially academic intellectuals, too seriously. Given the presumption that education will broaden one’s perspective, it is curious that the chief danger is a narrowing of horizons. The peculiar combination of arrogance and despair that seems characteristic of homo academicus today breeds a remarkable obtuseness about many important questions. Wilson puts it thus: “Someone once remarked that the two great errors in moral philosophy are the belief that we know the truth and the belief that there is no truth to be known. Only people who have had the benefit of higher education seem inclined to fall into so false a choice.” It is a sobering thought that last year in the United States, some thirteen million students partook of that benefit.
Sobering indeed.
Be Breitbart
And some thoughts from his (and my) friend, Bill Whittle.
[Update a while later]
Repeat after me: The Shirley Sherrod tape was not misleading.
Yes, the only defense that the lying Left has against those who expose the truth is to tell more lies. Breitbart’s point wasn’t about Sherrod at all, but about the NAACP crowd’s racist reaction to her.
[Update later afternoon]
One thing we must learn from Andrew’s life: If Breitbart could do it, anyone could do it. We no longer have any excuse. America’s bloggers and citizen-journalists and new-media mavens need to get off our collective asses and make news happen.
Every day, you need to ask yourself: What Would Breitbart Do?
And then do it.
Too many bloggers and pundits are responding to Breitbart’s passing with an air of resignation and deflation. Instead, we should look to him as an inspiration, a model of how we all should act. That’s what Andrew would want.
Imagine not one Andrew Breitbart smashing the status quo on a daily basis, but a million Andrew Breitbarts. (Heck, I’d be satisfied with a hundred, but following my own blandishments, I’m reaching for the stars.) The oppressive, smothering narrative chokehold of the entrenched media-political-academic monopoly would be decisively broken once and for all.
If we could get a dozen Breitbarts we’d be ahead of the game.
Steady As She Goes
A no-pulse human heart. That would make it kind of hard to check for someone’s pulse to see if they’re still alive. I wonder if you can hear the “whirrrr” if you put your ear to the chest? And does it automatically increase flow rate with activity?
Off The Air
I’m heading down to the Queen Mary in Long Beach to give a talk at BIL2012.
Sandra Fluke Isn’t A Slut
She’s a femmegogue.
The Left’s War On Science
Yes, chicks dig jerks.
The Administration Signals To Syria
They’re the wrong ones:
Even if the administration wants to avoid military action (as it should if at all possible), it should be talking tough so as to help along diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis and ease Bashar al-Assad out of power. Unless there are some visible sticks, a carrots-only approach is not likely to work. The president seems to have belatedly figured this out with regard to Iran, which presumably is why he is talking tougher about the mullahs’ nuclear project, telling Jeffrey Goldberg, “I don’t bluff. I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.”
So why at the same time is the administration sending a signal to the Syrian regime it has nothing to worry about regarding outside intervention to end its horrific and indiscriminate violence?I guess it’s just more of the smart diplomacy we were promised four years ago.
I guess it’s just more of that “smart diplomacy we were promised four years ago.
James Q. Wilson
RIP. It’s been a bad couple days for conservatives.