Many of my friends are teachers – some high school, some junior high, a couple in primary/elementary education. Lately, they have alerted me to a very disturbing trend: in Canada, students are no longer allowed to fail. Students don’t repeat grades anymore. This is causing a serious problem. Some high school seniors lack fundamental skills. [...]
Why is the healthcare industry hemorrhaging money? Why is the military being used to fight ideas, when ideas can’t be killed by bullets? Why is the legislature unable to make laws that make sense? How can 12 years of basic education produce an unthinking populace? How can a man believe in his god, but not [...]
Kavan recently did a great piece on why the world thinks we’re all idiots in the good ole’ US of A. One primary reason that he left out is that we are idiots. Our kids are stupid, and stupid kids grow up into stupid adults. A study done by the U.S. Department of Education in 2002 showed [...]
Tuning into talk radio can sometimes be a mind-numbing task that significantly lowers one’s IQ, but I occasionally throw myself in front of the train and risk my intellect to see what folks out there are talking about. Unfortunately, when I turned my radio on this morning, people were talking about why black Americans should [...]
Ben Stein, of Ferris Bueller fame, has finally done something to make me forget how much I enjoyed his droning hilarity in that film. He has brought so-called intelligent design to the forefront of public conversation once more, reviving one of the most widely-accepted hoaxes in the history of mankind. This latest bit of nonsense [...]
Once again, public policy is being manipulated by people who watch too many action movies. In light of the recent events at Virginia Tech, a number of states, including Virginia and Louisiana, unfortunately my home-state, are considering a brilliant new law to deal with the problem of shootings on college campuses: allowing students and teachers [...]
I have been around business schools a fair bit and have noticed a few disturbing trends. For one, it seems that the majority of undergraduate business programs include at least one core course involving Microsoft Access. Sometimes Access is taught in labs or tutorials outside regular class, but the question remains, why? I have received [...]
In my previous post I explained the true drug problem. I differentiated the symptoms from the underlying pathology by defining “the drug problem” as a conflict between: The right to choose how to live one’s own life. The responsibility not to cause harm to others. The unfortunate reality that use of and addiction to various [...]
The recent swell of support for US Presidential candidate Ron Paul is astounding. And I can see why: he’s anti-war, anti-torture, anti-taxes and anti-government-screwing-with-individuals. In other words, he’s not a sadistic, subhuman, nut-job radical like Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney. But when you probe a little deeper, and I just mean read the Wikipedia entry [...]
Do you know someone who has cancer and her treatment isn’t working? Do you know someone on psychiatric meds who is experiencing weird side effects? Do you know a business owner who’s struggling with decisions like whether to invest in high-tech equipment? Doctors are overworked and MBAs are poorly trained. If you want answers you’ve [...]