Day: 2006-09-25

Public schools not challenging enough?

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In all the angst about education, the Literature Wars and the History Wars and is public education running down beyond hope, I find this excerpt from my son’s state high school newsletter encouraging.

These are the research projects chosen by the 6 students doing Extension History for their HSC this year:

    Does the evidence from the ancient town of Pompeii support that it was built for the wealthy?
    Explain the philosophies of Michel Foucault and their impact on the development of Post-Modernism
    Assess the effects of Gorbachev’s reforms on the collapse of the USSR
    Evaluate the differing interpretations of the causes of Alexander the Great’s death.
    Does History end with Liberal Democracy?
    What are the differing interpretations of the 1951 seventeen point agreement?
    What are the objectives of historians who have written about the Holocaust?

How to squander goodwill amongst the liberated

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Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, summarising part of his book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, argues that one large contributor to the current distrust and militancy amongst Iraqis is the way that the Bush Administration chose people to oversee the transition from dictatorship to democracy under the aegis of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Jim O’Beirne of the Pentagon vetted who went, and the people he passed as suitable were mostly not qualified experts in the Middle-East or post-conflict reconstruction, but they were known Bush loyalists:

A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance — but had applied for a White House job — was sent to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though they didn’t have a background in accounting.

The decision to send the loyal and the willing instead of the best and the brightest