Articles

Craig Biddle introduces the Fall 2007 issue.

After the avowedly mediocre philosopher Steve Gimbel launched an envious attack on human excellence in general and Ayn Rand in particular—in which he pricelessly attempts to intimidate those who revere excellence into revering mediocrity instead—he and some mediocre followers found themselves engaged with a few Objectivists whereupon they further demonstrated…

Unmoved by the mass suffering and death caused by socialism throughout the last century, states such as Wisconsin continue to enact socialist programs, shrouding them in the now-invisible garbs of “compassion” for the poor. The unarguable fact that the consequent rationing of goods and soaring costs cause a decline in…

Jack Shafer of Slate has written a superb article on the notion of “loophole” titled “Shut Your Loophole.”(Thanks to Brad Malestein for bringing this piece to my attention.) Here’s an excerpt: Upon entering the English language in the late 16th century, the word loophole defined the narrow opening in a…

I am proud to note that my article, "No Substitute for Victory: The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism," has been transmitted into Hebrew. It appears in Nativ: A Journal of Politics and the Arts, vol. 20, n. 3.116 (May - June 2007). Nativ is published by the Ariel Center for Policy…

"Cut off the head of Salman Rushdie!" chanted a crowd of Islamists in Pakistan yesterday as calls to murder the “blasphemer” were renewed following his knighthood in Britain. Such barbarism is to be expected from religionists—not just from Muslims, but from any religionists who are neither restrained by a rights-respecting…

The print edition of the Summer issue of TOS is at press and will be mailed shortly; the online version will be accessible to subscribers on June 20. For promotional purposes, we are making Lisa VanDamme’s “The False Promise of Classical Education” available early and to all. Here are the…

Dr. Paul Hsieh has written an excellent op-ed opposing efforts to socialize medicine in Colorado. It begins: The Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform recently selected four health care reform proposals for eventual consideration by the Colorado legislature. Although they differ in their details, these differences are dwarfed…

In my recent newsletter "The Failure of Field Trips," I explained what is wrong with traditional school outings. The typical field trip is irrelevant to the students' education, either because they have been unprepared to appreciate it by their schooling (e.g., City Hall or the opera) or because it is…

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP), the average high school student is an incompetent writer. To evaluate their writing ability, testers asked high school juniors to write a paragraph based on notes they were given about a haunted house. The performance of half the students was…

Examines the allure of classical education, considers both its religious and secular forms, and shows that—although its advocates claim it to be the solution to today's educational wasteland—classical education only contributes to the crippling of children's minds.

Shows how altruism and egalitarianism—combined with guilt caused by these same factors in regard to World War I—led to British appeasement and compromise in the late 1930s, which, in turn, enabled the rise of Nazi Germany and necessitated World War II.

Surveys the manifest failure of neoconservative foreign policy, which is alleged to be in America’s “national interest,” zeros in on the fundamental reason for that failure, and calls for the only moral and practical alternative to it: a foreign policy of genuine American self-interest.

Craig Biddle introduces the Summer 2007 issue.

Many educators stress the importance of field trips: opportunities to get students out of their desks and away from their books, and to give them direct, vivid, sensory experience with the world around them. Reflecting on my own education, these excursions off campus are indeed some of my most memorable…