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Lori Gottlieb, writing in The Atlantic last year, claimed that child-rearing in the current generation has been excessively focused on preserving self-esteem.  As an illustration of one symptom of this, Gottlieb quoted clinical psychologist Wendy Mogel as saying that parents are actually relieved to be told that their struggling children are learning disabled, so that today "every child is either learning disabled, gifted, or both – there's no curve left, no average."  To claim a learning disability is the only way to set legitimate lower benchmarks for performance.  Kids are never just bad at anything anymore, because that's seen as being more harmful to self-esteem.

But my worries about the individual effects of the death of aptitude are dwarfed by my concern for its effect on the institutions of higher learning that those individuals are entering.  College is not a one-directional relationship of dispensing knowledge to young people.  The entire institution gains or loses value on the basis of what its students put into it.  By telling students with low aptitude and low interest that they can, should, and must strive to accomplish the same things as their higher-achieving peers, I fear that we're saturating higher education with people who subtract value from their institutions by committing minimum effort and lowering whatever curve still exists for the measurement of performance.

We all seem to agree that standards for college readiness need to improve, but you'll hear virtually no one asserting that when those standards are not met, the student ought to leave off college altogether, or to defer it until they have acquired, by sheer will or by natural intellectual growth, the aptitude to be successful at the proper level.  Indeed, just as common in criticism of education is the sentiment that we must see to it that more children enter and complete college.  But if those children don't have the aptitude to do so, the goal of improving college curriculum contradicts the goal of college-for-all.

We can't keep pretending that there is no such thing as aptitude and that every child has equal cause to vie for the topmost positions of intellectual esteem.  It does a disservice to the student and the school in kind.

WikiLeaks fascine la presse, qui voit en lui une partie de son avenir.

Une équipe mystérieuse

Menacé par les services secrets américains et par tous les acteurs qu'il bouscule, WikiLeaks se protège. Pas de bureau ou d'adresse physique : seule une boîte postale à l'université de Melbourne, ainsi que des adresses e-mail anonymisées permettent aux informateurs de contacter l'équipe.

L'infrastructure technique, parfois en peine par manque de financement, est basée en Suède, chez un hébergeur lié au très controversé The Pirate Bay. D'autres serveurs sont répartis dans le monde entier,

le budget annuel de 600.000 dollars n'en est pas pour autant bouclé.

Le porte-parole, Julian Assange, a toutefois mis en place un comité éditorial restreint, dont neuf noms sont dévoilés. Parmi eux, Wang Dan, l'un des 21 étudiants "les plus recherchés" par la Chine après les manifestations de Tiananmen en 1989, le Britannique Ben Laurie, génie mondialement reconnu de la cryptographie, ou encore le Brésilien Chico Whitaker, cofondateur du Forum social mondial.

WikiLeaks a travaillé avec des élus islandais sur l'Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI)

Son objectif dans la vie ? "Provoquer ou orienter des réformes politiques", en révélant des informations jusque-là cachées aux citoyens. Un peu comme ce qu'avait fait son modèle, Daniel Ellsberg, en 1971 : cet ancien analyste de la RAND Corporation (un très influent think tank américain) avait alors transmis à la presse les "Pentagon papers"