Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Educational Choice

August 24, 2005

Back to school, back to parents

As the new school year begins, Anthony Bradley reflects on the role of the parent in creating educational success. “Overall, children in loving, stable two-parent homes have an academic and social advantage over those who do not,” he writes. Continue Reading...
August 23, 2005

Snubbed!

Once again, my alma mater, Michigan State University, has been snubbed by the Princeton Review. While the list of the “Top Party Schools” does feature four Big 10 campuses, MSU, which hosted at least 3 major alcohol-induced riots in the past decade, fail to crack the top twenty. Continue Reading...
August 15, 2005

A relevant essay

Given the discussion that’s been going on around the Acton site over the last week or so, I’m pointing out this timely piece (now archived) in yesterday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press, co-written by Todd Flanders, an Acton adjunct scholar and headmaster of Providence Academy. Continue Reading...
July 07, 2005

Book review: The Thinking Toolbox

The Thinking Toolbox: Thirty-Five Lessons That Will Build Your Reasoning Skills, by Nathaniel Bluedorn and Hans Bluedorn, illustrated by Richard LaPierre, ISBN 0974531510, 234 pp. Christian Logic, 2005. Nathaniel and Hans Bluedorn are brothers who live in Indiana (more about them at www.christianlogic.com) Continue Reading...
June 21, 2005

Causes of increasing tuition

Harvey Silverglate on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) blog, The Torch, passes on one explanation for why college tuition costs have been increasing at double digit rates for years on end. Continue Reading...
June 20, 2005

Social justice math

This EducatioNation blog post contains the text of an incisive WSJ editorial, along with a sample curriculum that illustrates the idiocy outlined in the editorial. In “Ethnomathematics,” Diane Ravitch writes, “In the early 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics issued standards that disparaged basic skills like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, since all of these could be easily performed on a calculator.” Continue Reading...
June 06, 2005

Good question

Edward Southerland wonders, “Does the job description for school administrators require that you leave your common sense at home when you go to work?” One of the reasons he asks the question: In Tennessee, the student giving the valedictory speech started with a joke. Continue Reading...
May 26, 2005

Those progressive conservatives

Very often in political discourse, the labels liberal/progressive are juxtaposed with conservative/traditional (or variants thereof). But there are numerous instances where these terms become misleading, not only due to various connotations associated with them, but because the denotation of each word may not adequately describe the position on either side. Continue Reading...
April 26, 2005

Defend civilization itself

An excerpt from a worthy commencement address by Mark Helprin, “Defend Civilization Itself,” delivered at Hillsdale College on May 24, 2002: I ask you to join this brotherhood, and, in your own way, whatever that may be, to defend and champion the sanctity of the individual, free and objective inquiry, government by consent of the governed, freedom of conscience, and the pursuit — rather than the degradation and denial — of truth and of beauty. Continue Reading...