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Here’s an amusing article about a school in Britain that has started using classical music to punish misbehaving students. It’s normal practice of course to punish such students by giving them detention, but the school is apparently aiming at making detention more unpleasant by piping in classical music into the hall. According to the headmaster, [...]

A little late this month because I made more posts last week than I’d originally planned for but here are three articles for September, all of them related in some way with human nature and with two of them related to video gaming. Two of the articles are from The Economist. I suppose I should [...]

Just a quick link to the news that the Texas school board is voting this week on a new curriculum that would challenge the principle of evolution. It’s pretty depressing that the chairman of the school board is someone who believes that God created the Earth less then 10,000 years ago. So again, for anyone [...]

My wife and I are currently working our way through all five seasons of Babylon 5. It’s one of the most highly acclaimed science-fiction shows ever produced for television, so not having watched it was seriously hurting my street cred as an sci-fi geek. Anyway, in one of the first season episodes, The Geometry of [...]

I know I’ve defended vernacular schools in Malaysia earlier, but this latest move by Dong Jiao Zong puts me in a bit of a quandary. My libertarian instincts tell me that the schools should be free to teach whatever subjects in whatever languages they feel like and parents should be free to choose which schools [...]

In a recent review of a book published in The Economist, I noted something that I had suspected all along. In Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, author Don Tapscott argues that not only are the children now growing up in a world of networked computers more intelligent and well-informed [...]

This post grew out of comments that I made in a post on Jed Yoong’s blog which linked to another blogger’s post calling for all vernacular Tamil schools in Malaysia to be closed down. I think it’s worth taking the effort to explain that in this context, “vernacular schools” refers solely to primary schools that [...]