Thursday scan

I had the luxury of a little time this morning, and actually read all my favorite web sites.  I have to get to work now, but thought that, before I sign off, I’d share my favorite links with you, plus a few comments of my own.

You know a Democratic policy is bad if even Al Sharpton opposes it.  Yesterday, he came out against the “Employee Free Choice Act,” an Act with a spectacularly Orwellian name, since it actually means that employee’s who don’t side with unions will be exposed to harassment and even thuggery.

If you’re in the mood for a laugh that comes complete with a knife’s edge, check out Times’ Watch’s notable quotes for 2008.  A laugh, because the quoted remarks are ludicrously biased or fatuous or just plain out right; a knife’s edge because so many still view the New York Times as a genuinely reputable publication that actually purveys news and intelligent commentary.

Although Obama has managed to keep himself squeaky clean so far regarding Blago (despite Obama’s regrettable, and completely narcissistic, penchant for protective lying), Byron York reminds us that with the Fitzgerald pit bull on the case, he’s not out of the woods yet.

I tend to avoid books that receive awards.  This is a reminder of why I started that policy.  Another good rule of thumb, of course, is never, never to read anything from Oprah’s book club.

I’ve commented before on the fact that teacher training doesn’t seem to have given teacher’s anything beyond a cant vocabulary that they can’t remember just a few years after they leave teaching school.  That is, the teaching schools don’t seem to teach the nuts-and-bolts of teaching, so much as they do an educational ideological that has little to do enabling teachers to communicate practical skills (such as reading, writing, and arithmetic) to the students in their charge.  My instincts seem to be sound:  it’s much better to take someone with existing skills and teach that person how to communicate them, than it is to teach the “theory of teaching” to someone who has no background skills in the first place.

And speaking of education, one of my pet peeves is the way in which school districts force children to do “volunteer” work.  Funnily enough, it used to be called “mandatory volunteer requirement” until the schools realized that the oxymoron was turning their students into little cynics.  Now it’s called community service, and the theory is that students ought to learn how to “give back.”  I don’t think that’s the school’s business.  I think that’s the family’s business, and I recent that the school is abandoning education time and trying to co-opt my role as parent.  Thomas Sowell sees the Leftist scam for what it is, and I couldn’t agree with him more.  Indeed, his writing is so on-point, I just have to quote it here:

There are high schools [and, in our case, middle schools] across the country from which you cannot graduate, and colleges where your application for admission will not be accepted, unless you have engaged in activities arbitrarily defined as “community service.”

The arrogance of commandeering young people’s time, instead of leaving them and their parents free to decide for themselves how to use that time, is exceeded only by the arrogance of imposing your own notions as to what is or is not a service to the community.

Working in a homeless shelter is widely regarded as “community service”– as if aiding and abetting vagrancy is necessarily a service, rather than a disservice, to the community.

Is a community better off with more people not working, hanging out on the streets, aggressively panhandling people on the sidewalks, urinating in the street, leaving narcotics needles in the parks where children play?

This is just one of the ways in which handing out various kinds of benefits to people who have not worked for them breaks the connection between productivity and reward, as far as they are concerned.

As for me, I’ve told my daughter’s school that I strongly disapprove of this practice, that I will not aid her in any way with fulfilling those hours, and that they’d better not penalize her for my stance.