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“cult of educational testing” and argued that the accountability system was doing more harm than good

Of course, the stakes are high not just for kids but for adults too. Teachers whose students fail to improve—or don’t improve sufficiently—can find themselves out of a job. Students at poor-performing schools can transfer to better schools in their district—and take their state funding with them.

Shortly before he resigned as education commissioner, Robert Scott warned that assessment and accountability had grown into something akin to a “military-industrial complex,” a kind of public policy juggernaut with its own internal momentum.

Mr. Lanier’s book, which makes an impassioned case for “a digital humanism,” is only one of many recent volumes to take a hard but judicious look at some of the consequences of new technology and Web 2.0. Among them are several prescient books by Cass Sunstein, 55, which explore the effects of the Internet on public discourse; Farhad Manjoo’s “True Enough,” which examines how new technologies are promoting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact; “The Cult of the Amateur,” by Andrew Keen, which argues that Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise; and Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” (coming in June), which suggests that increased Internet use is rewiring our brains, impairing our ability to think deeply and creatively even as it improves our ability to multitask.

Steven Johnson, a founder of the online magazine Feed, for instance, wrote in an article in The Wall Street Journal last year that with the development of software for Amazon.com’s Kindle and other e-book readers that enable users to jump back and forth from other applications, he fears “one of the great joys of book reading — the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas — will be compromised.” He continued, “We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.”

Within this scheme, Leviticus presents the humbling of the foreskin of the heart as the resolution to the stubborn heart which brought the people into exile. Heart circumcision will bring the blessing of restoration.

It is in the context of the covenant curses that our reference to heart circumcision occurs in Leviticus 26:41, revealing that Israel had an internal heart problem which led them to curse God and therefore undergo his covenant curses.

Leviticus 26 describes the outworking of the blessing, curse-exile, and return from exile

Deuteronomy presents circumcision of the heart as important means for attaining the Deuteronomic vision of loyalty from a devoted heart.4