Arthur D. Hlavaty

University gives students access to an anonymous-comments app while requiring them to devote nearly three hours every Friday morning to an experimental honors course entitled “Interdisciplinary Exploration of Global Issues: The Environment: Space/Place, Purity/Danger, Hope/Activism.” Students say offensive things about the nearest target, the teachers. University is surprised.

Thanx to andrewducker

Genius child escapes 5th grade Special Ed, goes to college

ObSF: John Sladek, The Reproductive System/Mechasm

Give boredom a chance.

Thanx to andrewducker

The World Bank has recognized that there is no investment more effective for achieving development goals than educating girls. And of course not shooting the girls.

Gina Barreca on defending a dissertation.

Thanx to Chronicle

As Bart Simpson had to write on the blackboard over and over again. That quaint old skill, at which most of us reached our peak at age 8 or so, is being phased out, and there is great indignation among those who don't want the younger generation to escape any of their suffering. (Why, this could lead to using the metric system and depriving the kids of all that wonderful rote learning of feet & pounds & such!) Amanda Marcotte discusses.

Liberty University (which was named by the kind of person who calls Yao Ming "Shorty") has cut off student access to a newspaper website that reported how much federal aid it's getting. No doubt they think government money is obscene.

One of the great unannounced projects of the 20th century was the abolition of class. The United States ignored it in the hope that it would go away; that worked every bit as well with class as it did with the People's Republic of China. The USSR tried to smash it; that was just as successful, plus millions of deaths.

So it seems we are stuck with class, and we should think about making it work better. One answer is to cut the ends of the curve: make the uppers less powerful and the lowers less miserable. The other is class mobility, enabling lowers to reach the higher level they belong at. It's easy to pick on the ways in which lower-class people with the ability to rise are pulled down, by a culture of poverty that says, "Don't get ahead of yourself" (meaning "Don't get ahead of us") and the collectivists (many of them not poor) who turn it into an ideology.

But of course the real problem is the way they are pushed down, for irrelevant reasons like race or sex, by the classist assumption that all those born into the lower classes belong there, and by plain stupidity. fjm reports a particularly gross fail from the UK.

Fellow UNC & Duke grads, it's time to snicker.

Thanx to novapsyche.