Suppressing Summer Vacation

Obama thinks the school day should be extended and the summer vacation shortened.

It won’t take me much work to write a post about this, because I pretty much already did it, three years ago…

(August 01, 2006) Stopped at a store while driving through Georgia today, and the man mentioned that this is the first day of school for the local children. Googling around, it appears that lots of Georgia school systems are starting classes sometime this week. And the longer-school-year trend is by no means limited to Georgia.

This is really very sad. Children need time to be with their families. They need time to develop their dreams. They need time to learn things that are not part of any formal program.

Educational “experts” will try to justify a longer school year with the argument that “there’s just so much more to know these days.” Such claims are highly exaggerated. The truth is, most public K-12 schools make very poor use of the time of their students. They waste huge proportions of the millions of hours which have been entrusted to them–waste them through the mindless implementation of fads and theories, waste them through inappropriate teacher-credentialing processes, waste them through refusal to maintain high standards of performance and behavior.

When an organization or institution proves itself to be a poor steward of the resources that have been entrusted to it, the right answer is not to give it more resources to waste.

Just a few points to add to the above:

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Can This Ship Be Saved?

The SS United States, a fast and beautiful passenger liner, was built in 1952 and operated in commercial service until 1969. She is now in danger of being scrapped.

Lots of pictures in the slideshow at the link; also, some of the comments are interesting.

More about the ship at Wikipedia, and here is an organization which is attempting to save this vessel.

A Letter from Poland

…about Obama’s recent action regarding ballistic missile defense and the highly offensive way in which this action was announced. Here.

This is painful to read.

Lewis vs Haldane

J B S Haldane was an eminent British scientist (population genetics) and a Marxist. C S Lewis was…well, you probably already know who C S Lewis was.

In 1946, Haldane published an article critiquing a series of novels by Lewis known as the Ransom Trilogy, and particularly the last book of the series, That Hideous Strength. Lewis responded in a letter which remained unpublished for many of years. All this may sound ancient and estoteric, but I believe the Lewis/Haldane controversy is very relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape.

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