Thursday, June 09, 2005
Why Student Test Scores Keep Dropping
Teacher-training schools turn into leftist propaganda mills.
|posted by Jim on 6:39 PM|
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The Danger of Opting Out of the Democratic Process
is a topic I adddressed in National Review OnLine today.
While I'm happy that a good friend of official English like Bill Pryor was confirmed as a federal judge today, I sought to remind conservatives (and liberals) that any movement whose only friends are in the courts, the elite media and legislative back rooms is not likely to enjoy long-term success.
Democracy requires our best efforts to persuade our friends and neighbors of the rightness of our beliefs. That was true when democracy was born in in Athens, Greece. It remains true today, twenty-five centuries later. The hard way is the more lasting way.
|posted by Jim on 5:33 PM|
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More on Arabic
in Slate. Sample:
The State Department reckons that it takes 80 to 88 weeks (roughly a year in the classroom full-time and a year in-country) to get to a level 3 on a 5-point scale in Modern Standard Arabic, the language I am learning. But there's a twist. MSA has about the same role in the Arab world that Latin had in medieval Europe: It's the language of writing, religion, and formal speeches, but it is no one's native spoken language any more. Arabic has long since become a series of "dialects," which are actually more like separate languages, as many varieties are mutually incomprehensible.
So even paying for an Arabic translator does not guarantee the translation will be understood.
|posted by Jim on 3:54 PM|
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