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The MP3 file is here. (80 minutes, commercial-free)
Additional links
Mark discusses a horrible case of anti-Jewish bigotry in an Ontario school, in the first hour. You can read more about that story here while you listen. I can’t believe that this story is true, it’s so disgusting.
What’s the best way to help children do well in school?
On the one hand, social conservatives on the right favor the traditional family structure, complete with a father who lives in the home and is an involved parent. Parents have an incentive to help children do well in school because they are biologically linked to the children and they are paying all the bills at home. They are making sacrifices and they want to see some results.
On the other other hand, social liberals on the left favor raising taxes on working families, and funneling the proceeds to unionized public school teachers. Do teachers get paid more for improving the quality of education for students? Or do they get paid more for contributing to Democrats who will increase their salaries? Do they have an incentive to make children learn?
Parents vs teacher unions: Who does the best job?
Consider this research paper from Christine C. Kim of the Heritage Foundation, my favorite think tank.
Excerpt:
American taxpayers invest heavily in education. Last year, spending on public K–12 education totaled $553 billion, about 4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2006. For each child enrolled in a public elementary or secondary school, expenditures averaged $9,266 that year—an increase of 128 percent, adjusted for inflation, since 1970.
Despite this increase in public spending, student achievement and educational attainment over the last four decades has remained relatively flat. In 2007, a significant portion of students, disproportionately from disadvantaged backgrounds, scored “below basic” in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Sadly, in many of the nation’s largest cities, fewer than half of high school students graduate.
While academic research has consistently shown that increased spending does not correlate with educational gains, the research does show a strong relationship between parental influences and children’s educational outcomes, from school readiness to college completion. Two compelling parental factors emerge:
- family structure, i.e., the number of parents living in the student’s home and their relationships to the child, and
- parents’ involvement in their children’s schoolwork.
Consequently, the solution to improving educational outcomes begins at home, by strengthening marriage and promoting stable family formation and parental involvement.
The PDF is here. In the rest of the paper, Christine supports her conclusions using evidence.
Consider this post from Matt Flanagan of MandM. (H/T Thinking Matters New Zealand)
Flanagan cites Jeffrey Burton Russell’s book “Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians”. Dr. Bussell is a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Dr. Russell writes:
[W]ith extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat. A round earth appears at least as early as the sixth century BC with Pythagoras, who was followed by Aristotle, Euclid, and Aristarchus, among others in observing that the earth was a sphere. Although there were a few dissenters—Leukippos and Demokritos for example–by the time of Eratosthenes (3 c. BC), followed by Crates(2 c. BC), Strabo (3 c. BC), and Ptolemy (first c. AD), the sphericity of the earth was accepted by all educated Greeks and Romans.
Nor did this situation change with the advent of Christianity. A few—at least two and at most five—early Christian fathers denied the spherically of earth by mistakenly taking passages such as Ps. 104:2-3 as geographical rather than metaphorical statements. On the other side tens of thousands of Christian theologians, poets, artists, and scientists took the spherical view throughout the early, medieval, and modern church. The point is that no educated person believed otherwise.
So where did this myth come from? And why has it persisted so long in school textbooks?
Click through and read the rest of Matt’s post to find the surprising answers.
My view is that stories like global warming and evolution are really just the latest round of flat-earth myths which have no basis in fact but are believed solely because they are useful for powerful people who want to undermine traditional moral values by misleading children in government-run schools. The elites want to act sinfully, but they don’t want anyone to judge them. They think that if they can trick enough people to believe lies about God, that God might cease to exist because we voted him out. Unfortunately for them, building a consensus of people who are mistaken doesn’t change objective reality. And God doesn’t grade on a curve.
Those who reject Christianity need to be careful about letting their feelings determine what they believe.
What should atheists be doing instead of believing myths?
Instead of just calling people names and making jokes, they should investigating the actual scientific evidence:
Then, perhaps a philosophical investigation on some common objections to belief in God:
But for most atheists, the purpose of life isn’t to find the truth.
Related books
WINTERY KNIGHT 