At a tangent to Jonah’s fine column on education, I note the following links from across the pond.

In this one, a high-school physics teacher deplores the mushing-down of his subject. Sample:

In this course, pupils debate topics like global warming and nuclear power. Debate drives science, but pupils do not learn meaningful information about the topics they debate. Scientific argument is based on quantifiable evidence. The person with the better evidence, not the better rhetoric or talking points, wins. But my pupils now discuss the benefits and drawbacks of nuclear power plants, without any real understanding of how they work or what radiation is.

That raises a thought I often have: That the law-school elites who run our affairs want us all to be lawyers, and can’t see much point in any other kind of intellectual activity.

This one takes a broad view of the corruption of education in general. Sample:

The contributors to The Corruption of the Curriculum show that no major subject area has escaped the blight of political interference. Michele Ledda shows how issues of race and gender (‘external criteria that have more to do with biology than literature’) trump the love of language in the works of literature that students are given to study. The anthology of poetry produced by the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) divides poetry into two groups: poetry from different cultures (16 poems) and a further 48 poems from British poets, of which 32 are post-1950…