Tuesday, April 17, 2007

The Daily Dose

Check out Google's latest toy, Image Labeler, through which you can improve the Internet and sharpen your Scattergory skills simultaneously.

I was fortunate enough to attend a college where the majority of professors, despite being opinionated liberals, did not politicize the classroom. (It helped that I was outspoken.) But my alma mater appears to be an anomaly, as evidenced by a new documentary by Evan Coyne Maloney, Indoctrinate U, the trailer of which appears below. (To get a ticket for the DC screening, contact Audrey Mullen of Advocacy Ink.)



Advocates of a national curriculum assume that higher standards produce better-educated students. But, in fact, as Cato's Andrew Coulson demonstrates, it is the competitive pursuit of better-educated students that produces high standards: "We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn't progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from five to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious. Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive."

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