SICK EDUCATION

Soviet history lives! In Australia. Australian academic historians want to make it an offence to "publicly question the integrity or competence of their colleagues". No free-speech, no academic freedom, no open debate -- just a licence for Leftists to lie. No wonder they mourn the downfall of the Soviet Union. You can see what they liked about it.

Bureaucracy versus education: "When it takes an average of six years to build a new public school in California, what industrialist David L. Brennan did eight years ago in Cleveland borders on the miraculous in the slow-moving world of public education. When Brennan discovered, two weeks before school started, that some 360 initial voucher applicants could not find places in the city's private schools, he created two new HOPE Academies in just 15 days."

Teachers versus education: "Some say high-stakes testing is to blame for cheating in the classroom. But in this case, it's not the students getting caught -- it's the teachers. A recent study shows as many as 200 teachers in California were caught cheating to help their students perform better on rigorous new standardized tests, which are part of the President Bush's 'No Child Left Behind' education plan, which calls for greater accountability among teachers. Since the law was implemented, more teachers have been caught helping students cheat in about a dozen states around the country."

From a reader: "It occurred to me that perhaps there is more than meets the eye in Leftist support for more and more access to higher education. At the risk of sounding 'conspiratorial', do you suppose that they so strongly support easy, cheap, and open access to higher education so that they, since they so thoroughly control higher education, will have the opportunity to indoctrinate more and more people to their way of thinking?"

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