Peter Levine on “why I am not a zealot about church and state”; well worth reading, quite independently of his excellent choice of source material. (Previous thoughts, from me, here).
Because it is impossible to find a live internet radio stream of World Cup matches, I am forced to follow the games on the text-only FIFA MatchCast. Winding up to the Poland vs Ecuador match, which is just starting, the Official MatchBot Commentator guy just wrote, “Poland’s record on German soil is excellent …” I guess it depends when you’re talking about.
The words “social justice” appear in a glossary of terms that the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education uses as an example of what programs might consider using when evaluating a teaching candidate’s “disposition” and classroom readiness.
Supporters of a traditional curriculum have argued that evaluating students based on their commitment to social justice is an inherently subjective practice with ideological undertones. Late last year, the National Association of Scholars filed a complaint with the Education Department saying the accreditor encourages standards that violate students’ First Amendment rights.
I surfed over to the Daily Telegraph’s “obits page”:http://tinyurl.com/qxxoc , looking for someone who wasn’t there, and was struck by the way in which the headline writers dispassionately express the achievements of the dead. So
bq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — Jordanian terrorist associated with bombings and beheadings of hostages in Iraq.
is immediately followed by
bq. Raymond Davis, Jr — Physicist whose proof that the Sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions won him the Nobel.
Almost as if proving the sun’s energy came from nuclear reactions and beheading hostages were just different ways of spending one’s life. Sadly, I also learned that “Billy Preston is dead”:http://tinyurl.com/oas9n aged only 59.