Overpaid schoolteachers are fired for refusing to work an additional half hour a day. Too bad they can’t be fired for incompetence.
Category Archives: Education
The Failure Of Intelligent Design
…whereas the advance of science continually strengthens the broader and more traditional version of the design argument, the ID movement’s version is hostage to every advance in biological science. Science must fail for ID to succeed. In the famous “explanatory filter” of William A. Dembski, one finds “design” by eliminating “law” and “chance” as explanations. This, in effect, makes it a zero-sum game between God and nature. What nature does and science can explain is crossed off the list, and what remains is the evidence for God. This conception of design plays right into the hands of atheists, whose caricature of religion has always been that it is a substitute for the scientific understanding of nature.
The ID movement has also rubbed a very raw wound in the relation between science and religion. For decades scientists have had to fend off the attempts by Young Earth creationists to promote their ideas as a valid alternative science. The scientific world’s exasperation with creationists is understandable. Imagine yourself a serious historian in a country where half the population believed in Afrocentric history, say, or a serious political scientist in a country where half the people believed that the world is run by the Bilderberg Group or the Rockefellers. It would get to you after a while, especially if there were constant attempts to insert these alternative theories into textbooks. So, when the ID movement came along and suggested that its ideas be taught in science classrooms, it touched a nerve. This is one reason that the New Atheists attracted such a huge audience.
It is indeed frustrating to argue about science and evolution with people who understand neither. And they don’t realize how much damage they do to their cause.
Historians Gone Wild
For some reason, the History News Network has decided to go on the attack against Liberal Fascism (the book, not the belief system), two years after it was first published. Jonah responds.
The Revolutions
I saw this on Friday, and it’s a good primer for young (and perhaps even old) leftists (or people who think they’re leftists) unfamiliar with their own intellectual history (not to mention why it’s odious to wear a Che teeshirt).
“Mr. Right”
…has left the building.
Head Start
A $166B failure:
…if the president were true to his own rhetoric, he would immediately reverse course. At least six times since the fall of 2008, President Obama has said: “We’ve got to eliminate programs that don’t work, and we’ve got to make sure that the programs that we do have are more efficient and cost less.” Well, Mr. President, your own Department of Health and Human Services has demonstrated that Head Start does not work.
Anyone want to make book on whether or not he will?
No one should be surprised. Much of The Great Society was, and remains an expensive failure, not just for the taxpayers, but for those it was supposed to help. Yet the so-called “progressives” want to double down on it.
The Insularity Of The Left
Some thoughts on why they were surprised yesterday.
President Obama is as insular as any president we’ve had. It is laughable to imagine Obama as the liberal Ronald Reagan, because Reagan himself was a Hollywood liberal and union head until the 1950s. Reagan knew how the other side lived and thought. He even liked some of them. Obama has had no such experience. He has had almost no personal relationships or consequential political dealings with conservatives during his whole life. In Obama’s mental map, conservatives are space aliens.
This puts Obama and insular liberals like him at a substantial political disadvantage. But even after Tuesday’s Brown Revolt, do they know it?
I think that when it comes to understanding small-government types, the left is don’t know squared. They don’t know what they don’t know. And it’s easy to defeat them in argument, because they’ve never really had to defend their positions, taking them morally and intellectually for granted in their hot-house environs.
The New US Security Risk
Well, they’re certainly not encouraged by the current educational system.
Unspeakable Truths
Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
I am fortunate for a wonderful graduate education in the PhD program at Stanford, but I learned more about the way the world works in two months of farming (which saved a wretch like me) than in four years of concentrated study.
In short, the world does not work on a nine-month schedule. It does not recognize concepts like tenure. It does not care for words without action. And brilliance is not measured by vocabulary or SAT scores. Wowing a dean, or repartee into a seminar, or clever put-downs of rivals in the faculty lounge don’t translate into running a railroad—or running the country. One Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower is worth three Bill Clintons or Barack Obamas. If that sounds reductionist, simplistic, or anti-intellectual, it is not meant to—but so be it nonetheless.
I’ve never been less impressed with Ivy League degrees than I am now.
The Politically Correct Sissies At Yale
College speech codes become ever more ridiculous.