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in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play

how should this diversity shape our politics? The standard liberal answer for nearly a generation now has been that we should become aware of and “celebrate” our differences.

Which is a splendid principle of moral pedagogy — but disastrous as a foundation for democratic politics in our ideological age

In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.

First, the accumulation of research has established a developmental framework for historical knowledge.  Development moves broadly from a naïve, unquestioning acceptance of the authority of historical texts and a judgment of the past by contemporary values and beliefs to a sophisticated recognition that the past is irretrievable and different (even strange), all accounts are human constructions, subject to challenge, and all sources are problematic. 

Second, sophisticated historical thinking can be broken into discrete cognitive “moves”  (2), which Reisman has condensed into sourcing, close reading, contextualization, and corroboration.

These skills seem effective for teaching at the secondary level, especially for the struggling readers in the study, but of course historians use more; for example, making connections, empathy, marshaling evidence, recognizing limits to one’s knowledge, and recognition of different perspectives.

First, it can hardly be a cause of celebration that students in independent schools are almost twice as likely to study GCSE history as those in maintained schools. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history.Second, as the inspectors' report acknowledges, England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory for students beyond the age of 14. Worse, many state schools now offer a two-year key stage 3 course, which allows some pupils to stop studying history at the age of 13.

• 25% of all schools no longer teach history as a discrete subject in year 7• 30% of comprehensives spend less than one hour a week on history in the years up to age 13• More GCSE candidates took design and technology than history last year• More A-level candidates took psychology.It is a paradox indeed. History has never been more popular outside schools than it is in Britain today. Yet history has never been so unpopular in British schools.

Even more disturbing is the evidence of widespread historical ignorance among school-leavers.

The standards, to go into effect in 2014, will replace a hodgepodge of state guidelines that have become the Achilles’ heel of the No Child Left Behind law. Many states, including New York, lowered standards in a push to meet the law’s requirement that all students reach grade level, as measured by each state, in English and math.

The new standards give specific goals that, by the end of the 12th grade, should prepare students for college work. Book reports will ask students to analyze, not summarize. Presentations will be graded partly on how persuasively students express their ideas. History papers will require reading from multiple sources; the goal is to get students to see how beliefs and biases can influence the way different people describe the same events.

There are guidelines for what students are expected to do in each grade, but it is still up to districts, schools and teachers to fill in the finer points of the curriculum, like what books to read. There is no national body responsible for seeing that the standards are carried out, because of fears of giving too much control of education to the federal government. So far, only a few other large cities, including Boston, Cleveland and Philadelphia, have begun to apply the standards in the classroom. And depending on how No Child Left Behind is refashioned, it may still be left to each state to measure its own success.

let's acknowledge that both candidates fudged, exaggerated, or flat-out lied on just about everything pertaining to foreign economic policy during last night's debate.  It was a truly bipartisan fib-fest.  I could go through the debate transcript line by line, but let's just hit the highlights.  At varous points, one or both of the candidates tried to convince undecided voters of the following:  1)  Energy independence is the cure for what ails the U.S. economy; 2)  The U.S. loses from trade with China, and tougher trade enforcement will fix that; 3)  Free trade with Latin America will create millions and millions of jobs; 4)  The only reason China is doing well comparatively is that it's keeping its currency undervalued; and finally 5)  Illegal immigration is threatening the American economy.  Let's inject a little reality here, shall we?  Repeat after me:  1)  Because most energy sources are traded in global markets, energy independence has zero effect on the economy (though there might be a few security dividends). 2)  The United States benefits a great deal from trade with China and the rest of the world. 3)  Perfect trade enforcement would have only a marginal impact on employment; 4)  China's currency interventions have been slowing down for much of 2012.  Literally. 5)  Illegal immigration into the United States "has been in reverse for several years."

The biggest whoppers in last night's U.S. presidential debate

After spending the past year designing  and making this course, however, let me say that those who believe that it will be easy to "scale up" existing lecture courses into the online world are kidding themselves.

Isis is indoctrinating children from birth through an extremism-based education similar to that taught by the Nazi regime in a bid to create a generation "more lethal than themselves", a study has revealed.

The report, Children of Islamic State, outlines how indoctrination by Isis through schools and training camps - which sees children encouraged to watch public executions, hold up decapitated heads and carry out killings - has been influenced by elements from Nazi Germany.

"Elements from Nazi Germany can be glimpsed in the systematic indoctrination of children through schools and training camps in IS. The concepts used by the Nazis are perfectly applicable to the Islamic State.

The first time California’s Department of Education published a draft of an ethnic studies “model curriculum” for high school students, in 2019, it managed the neat trick of omitting anti-Semitism while committing it.

There was also an approving mention of a Palestinian singer rapping that Israelis “use the press so they can manufacture” — the old refrain that lying Jews control the media.

One can still quarrel with the curriculum’s tendentiously racialized view of the American-Jewish experience. But at least the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist dog whistles have been taken out and the history of anti-Semitism has been put in.

clear advances in attitudes about race in recent years:

A 2020 Monmouth University poll found that 76 percent — including 71 percent of white respondents — considered racial and ethnic discrimination in this country a “big problem,” compared with just 51 percent who said the same in 2015.

Gallup found that from 1958 to 2021, approval of marriage between white and Black people has gone from 4 percent to 94 percent