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Not all equal This is obscenity in its most vomitive form. In Tennessee, school districts in Nashville have stopped releasing their honor rolls. Some are looking at ending the practice of hanging the best of student work in hallways. Spelling bees? Doomed, most likely. This is how the All Children Left Behind initiative begins. Parents of students at some Nashville schools complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the honors list. School attorneys extrapolated the rest -- some students' work in the halls, but not others, might create downtrodden students. This gets worse. Unbelievably, it gets worse....

Charles Murray believes Western men alone are responsible for all the great achievements of civilisation. To say that Charles Murray makes enemies easily is something of an understatement. His last major academic work was variously branded as "racist, philosophically shabby, politically ugly, disingenuous and creepy". These were judgments on his mid-1990s bestseller, The Bell-Curve, in which Murray argued that for genetic reasons African-Americans had significantly lower average IQs than whites or Asians. He then lay low, perhaps wondering how such a masterpiece of political incorrectness could be bettered. The answer comes in the form of Human Accomplishment: the Pursuit of...

In Nashville, Tennessee, the honor roll is no more. Schools there have done away with the traditional lists of distinction, which identify A-students, because parents have complained the lists make the non-honorees feel bad, and the school system lawyers say the lists violate state privacy laws. Even putting up little Suzie's exemplary macaroni collage in the hallway may soon be out of the question, since this too is apparently releasing private academic information without permission and could leave all the other children in the class with pasta-picture envy. The idea of eliminating rewards for academic achievement in order to spare...

In this age of diversity-worship, it is considered virtually axiomatic that all cultures are equal. Western culture, claim the intellectuals, is in no way superior to that of African tribalists or Eskimo seal hunters. There are no objective standards, they say, that can be used to evaluate the moral stature of different groups. They assert that to deny the equality of all cultures is to be guilty of the most heinous of intellectual sins: “ethnocentrism.” This is to flout the sacred principle of cultural relativism. I disagree with the relativists -- absolutely. There are three fundamental respects in which Western...

<p>The Best and Brightest Charles Murray tries to quantify "Human Achievement."</p> <p>BY GARY ROSEN Thursday, October 23, 2003 12:01 a.m.</p> <p>In our age of overused superlatives, none stands in greater need of rehabilitation than "genius," a title that Leonardo now shares with such eminences as Warren Buffett and Eminem. Charles Murray's rough-and-ready test is whether an individual's work makes us ask, in wonder, "How can a human being have done that?" But he doesn't stop there. Incorrigible social scientist that he is, Mr. Murray wants to prove that supreme excellence actually exists in the arts and sciences. The result is "Human Accomplishment," a systematic effort to rate and rank the likes of Aristotle, Mozart and Einstein and to describe the conditions that have allowed them to flourish. Much of this brick of a book is devoted to explaining, in tiresome detail, just how Mr. Murray goes about quantifying the seemingly unquantifiable. His trick is to consult the experts--or, rather, to distill usable numbers from their encyclopedias, anthologies, general histories and biographical dictionaries. An individual making an appearance in at least 50% of the selected sources for a given field wins the label "significant figure." By Mr. Murray's reckoning, there have been 4,002 such "people who matter" in the period 800 B.C. to 1950. Each member of this Pantheon gets an "index score" on a 100-point scale, based on how much attention--pages, column inches, etc.--he receives in the specialist literature.</p>

HOME SCHOOL STATISTICSThe following study can be found in its entirety at: http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/rudner1999/Rudner1.aspAbout the studyBob Jones University Press Testing and Evaluation Service, the largest home school testing service in the nation, provides Assessment services to home school students and private schools on a fee-for-service basis. In Spring 1998, 39,607 home school students were contracted to take the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS, grades K-8) or the Tests of Achievement and Proficiency (TAP, grades 9-12). Both the ITBS and TAP are published by Riverside Publishing Company and were developed after careful review of national and state curricula and standards.BJUP certified...

Earlier this year the College Board buckled to political pressure and agreed to turn the SAT into an achievement test. Although that move has been defended as a heightening of standards, I have argued that an achievement test is far more susceptible to dumbing down and grade inflation than an aptitude test. It turns out we don't have to wait for proof of just how corruptible achievement tests are. At the very moment America is abandoning its unique and democratic test of academic aptitude, Britain's college entrance test has fallen into crisis. The British college-entrance exam — which is an...

In August of that same year I was ready for a half marathon. It was a hot day and again, I finished last in three and a half hours. Bob Glover, our trainer at the Y, ran with me and to cool me off, he kept pouring water over my head. As the race progressed, my leg felt heavier and heavier, but I attributed that to the distance and my fatigue. After the race, when I took off my prosthesis, a quart of water poured out, the run-off of Bob's attempts to keep me cool.Again, the story of the...

Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2002 July 20 Footprints on Another World Credit: Apollo 11, NASA Explanation: On July 20th, 1969, humans first set foot on the Moon. Taken from a window of their Apollo 11 lunar module, the Eagle, this picture shows the footprints in the powdery lunar soil made by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. It has been estimated that one billion people on planet Earth watched Armstrong step from...

A drive to push up achievement among England's 11 to 14 year olds will help reduce teenage crime, says the Education Secretary Estelle Morris. There were "hidden dangers" - socially and academically - in failing to engage young teenagers in education, Ms Morris said. Estelle Morris is worried that pupils are struggling when they move up to secondary school And she warned that disaffected youngsters were "disappearing from the education system and then re-appearing in the courts". It was this age group that was responsible for much of the surge in crimes such as street robbery, she said. Emphasising the...