Must read article in The Atlantic.

Excerpt:

In December 2012, an Icelandic woman named Thorlaug Agustsdottir discovered a Facebook group called “Men are better than women.” One image she found there, Thorlaug wrote to us this summer in an email, “was of a young woman naked chained to pipes or an oven in what looked like a concrete basement, all bruised and bloody. She looked with a horrible broken look at whoever was taking the pic of her curled up naked.” Thorlaug wrote an outraged post about it on her own Facebook page.

Before long, a user at “Men are better than women” posted an image of Thorlaug’s face, altered to appear bloody and bruised. Under the image, someone commented, “Women are like grass, they need to be beaten/cut regularly.” Another wrote: “You just need to be raped.” Thorlaug reported the image and comments to Facebook and requested that the…

This is one of the silliest, most embarrassing articles I have read in a very long time. It was allegedly written by two teachers as a rebuke to Carol Burris, the experienced high school principal who has made a hash of Common Core in her many writings for Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet in the Washington Post.

The teacher who says she teaches kindergarten wants to make sure that her 5-year-old students are “college-and-career-ready.” Really? So if a 5-year-old can’t count to 100, they won’t have a career or go to college? Surely, she jests.

Has she ever heard of “Defending the Early Years,” an organization of early childhood experts who believe the Common Core standards are indeed developmentally inappropriate. In this article, Professor Nancy Carlsson-Paige says that it is “ridiculous” to expect little children to count to 100. So what if they learn to do it next year or…

The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this Friday to India’s Kailash Satyarthi and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai for their struggles against the suppression of children and for young people’s rights, including the right to education. That is great news, and it might almost mean Nobel Peace Prize makes sense again, after being awarded to Barack Obama in 2009 “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, and to European Union in 2012 “for over six decades contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe”.

Still, there is something that really troubles me. How come we (meaning the West) always recognize the “devils” of the East, the torments children like Malala had to and have to go through (in her case, with the Taliban), but always fail to recognize our own participation in creating those “devils”? How come we never…