Joseph C. Phillips talks about the failure of public schools and the need to ask hard questions. He points to last years scores on student performance.

These are not students failing because they do not have access to the internet or don’t have Olympic sized swimming pools. The sad fact is that the report demonstrates that middle-class black boys are scoring about as well as poor white boys. These are students who are not proficient in the basics of math and English.

With education experts always calling for more money, is it evident at last that the experts either don’t know how to educate children or more likely have conflicting goals which practically hinder education?

Our friend Loren Eaton, of the I Saw Lightning Fall blog, sent me this link from Tor.com, an article by Ryan Britt on the new BBC Sherlock series (which you may recall I liked), linking it to Science Fiction.

The notion of Sherlock being a sort of cerebral superhero came up a lot. He does seem a lot like Mr. Spock or The Doctor when viewed through a certain lens. However, there might be something even more alien about Holmes than Data, Spock, or The Doctor put together. Doctor Who show-runner and co-creator of Sherlock, Stephen Moffat explains in this brief interview below.

First Thoughts, the First Things blog, links to this article on a remarkable educational phenomenon going on in Kurdish Iraq. In a piece called “Something Terrible and Wonderful,” Joseph Knippenberg tells of a new university, where westerners teach in the old western liberal tradition.

From what I can tell (having visited the institution some months ago), the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani is unique in Iraq, where higher education emphasizes rote learning, large lectures, and high-stakes testing. By contrast, at AUIS, classes are small and discussion-oriented. The students understand and appreciate the difference, as this press release about auditions for a production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth seems to indicate:

I don’t even like poetry,” said Khende Asaad, an International Studies major from Erbil. “But when I hear Shakespeare, I feel like this big door is opening, and something terrible and wonderful is about to happen.”