Education

We're a part-time literary blog, so we feel obligated to bring you this: a 30-foot-tall sculpture, "the Writer." It's on display in London's Hampstead Heath. Italian artist Giancarlo Neri says the sculpture is "a monument to the loneliness of writing."

First toy guns, now toys: > Children at playschool in Austria are having their toys taken away in the belief it will help them fight drug addiction and alcoholism later in life. > The project called 'toy-free kindergartens' will see groups of youngsters forced to go without their

Good rant at Lew Rockwell this morning about today's school textbooks. Link [http://www.lewrockwell.com/taylor/taylor105.html]. Excerpt: > America was once a nation of literate, thinking, people. This level of education was brought about, despite the fact that there was (fortunately) a dearth of huge

The ridiculous debate about college Indian names rages on. The NCAA is preparing to meet next week to discuss a total ban on such names by its member schools. Whenever totalist solutions are proposed, the Leftist totalist vision usually wins, so we were expecting the NCAA to ban the names

> Despite overwhelming evidence kids are receptive to an abstinence-only approach and that increased abstinence-only education are largely responsible for a drop of 8 percentage points (from 54 percent to 46 percent) since 1991 in high-schoolers who have had sex, the government continues spending $12 on "safe sex"

> This year's 406-member graduating class at Garfield High School features 44 valedictorians. Forty-four students with perfect 4.0 grade-point averages who, over seven semesters of mostly honors and Advanced Placement classes, have never earned less than an A. Link [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002336475_garfield15m.

This time, in India: > Students of M.Sc. nutrition class of a famous girls' college doing their internship in the medical university were allegedly asked by the Assistant Professor to remove their aprons during a lecture demonstration. Although some of the girls complied, others refused as they found

> A Valley Springs teen who was home-schooled is being rejected for admission in a program at Southeast Technical Institute [in South Dakota] because the school requires a high school diploma. > Based on his ACT score, Jordan Scott probably would be accepted at several colleges or universities in South

Public schools already have too much power and a lack of accountability. Bush's decision to increase the federal government's role has made matters worse: > Since 2001, when the No Child Left Behind Act tied federal school funding to performance on annual tests for students in