With the possible exception of Texas A&M’s poultry judging squad, no college team is as dominant right now as University of Maryland-Baltimore County’s chess club. The school recently earned yet another national title, its ninth in the past 14 years. It has done so by recruiting a United Nations’ worth of grandmasters, including such notables [...]
Entries Tagged as 'education'
Words to Flail By
December 7th, 2009 · 3 Comments
A Thursday comment thread led us to unearth a true Web gem: an English translation of the Ruhnama, the textbook authored by the late Saparmurat Niyazov, better known to the world as the megalomaniacal dictator Turkmenbashi. The tome was infamously the only source of history and philosophy instruction for pupils during Turkmenbashi’s ruinous reign, a [...]
Tags:dictatorship·education·Ruhnama·Turkmenbashi·Turkmenistan
The Universality of Whaam!
October 29th, 2009 · 4 Comments
We’ll confess, we often scoff at university courses that focus exclusively on contemporary pop culture—as much as we would have liked to have taken “The Simpsons as Satirical Authors,” for example, we’re not entirely convinced those classroom hours couldn’t be better spent slogging through Ulysses.
But we’d make an exception for a comparative literature course on [...]
Tags:comics·education·Gundala·Indonesia·superheroes·The Simpsons
Permission Slips…for Failure?
October 26th, 2009 · No Comments
Pity the poor children of Jinja, who have lost one of the great privileges of the grade-school years: the right to periodically spend a day at the zoo, museum, or box factory in the name of education. The field trip is no longer welcome in Uganda’s second city, having been blamed for declining grades and [...]
The Walls Tell All
October 8th, 2009 · 1 Comment
We’ve long believed that there’s far more wisdom scrawled on bathroom walls than is to be found in, say, the average self-help manual or Chick tract. And we know we’re certainly not alone in that contrarian assessment. But until this morning, we never realized that loo graffiti was also a subject of serious academic discourse [...]
Tags:bathroom graffiti·Chick tracts·education·Humboldt State University
The Literacy Laggard
September 25th, 2009 · 2 Comments
We have to think there’s some sort of correlation between Pakistan’s persistent internal turmoil and its atrociously bad system of primary education. The nation may have one of the world’s top fifty economies, but its literacy rate officially languishes around the 50 percent mark. That makes Pakistan’s population less bookish than such poverty-stricken countries as [...]
“Speed Like the Wind”
July 24th, 2009 · 7 Comments
After receiving word that a team of Notre Dame pigskin alums will soon take on Japan’s national football team, we got to wondering about the uniquely American sport’s history in the Land of the Rising Sun. Our natural assumption was that it was brought over during the post-World War II occupation. But it was, in [...]
How Hard is the GED?
June 30th, 2009 · 1 Comment
Back in our high school days, we often fantasized about ditching the classroom routine in favor of taking the GED test. (This daydream was usually strongest during double-period Calculus AB, by far the dreariest educational experience on the planet.) But the fantasy was always short-lived, in large part because of some negative stereotypes. The folks [...]
The Downside of Reading
March 5th, 2009 · 7 Comments
In scanning the World Health Organization’s latest compilation of suicide rates, you can’t help but wonder why self-slaughter is so prevalent in Eastern Europe. All of the highest rates occur in countries from the former Soviet Bloc, such as Lithuania (68.1 males per 100,000) and Belarus (63.3). The rate in the United States, by contrast, [...]
Tags:Eastern Europe·education·psychology·Soviet Union·suicide
