Nine years ago, controversy erupted regarding a Christian school in the UK (Emmanuel College, Gateshead), which openly challenged the theory of evolution in its lessons and taught creationism alongside evolution.  

One of the school’s defenders, journalist Melanie Phillips, quoted  Emmanuel’s head teacher Nigel McQuoid and the former head John Burns, who stated that ‘the school should teach both evolution and creation theory [my italics], and that both are ‘faith positions [my italics].’[1]

You may think that this issue is now old hat, a storm in a tea cup that has long subsided.  You may well be mistaken; if opinion polls are to be believed, such views appear to be gaining traction in the UK. One recent … Read the rest

State governments and (Republican) Governors currently are going through paroxysms of false hand wringing and despair.  They pretend not to know why state budgets are so wildly out of balance.  In mock anguish they lament the need to cut education budgets, renege on public employee pensions and cut health benefits for these groups.

Something has to be done to balance state budgets.  But the nation can’t simply eliminate all the give-away programs and policies for the wealthy and the big corporations.  These are the people and businesses that provide the hand-full of jobs in the U.S. that haven’t yet been moved abroad or phased out in essential cost saving measures.

But wait……there may be yet another (Republican) way out after … Read the rest

My time in Pakistan was glorious.  I taught bright, beautiful and hopeful students who saw the world not as a series of entitlements but rather as a steep staircase to be climbed, littered with challenges set up by a crooked government that lunged from disaster to catastrophe.  It is easy in such circumstances to forget that Pakistan was founded on a crest of hope that soon dissipated into old rivalries, pissing contests between elites, indifference to the mountain men of the Pashto borderlands, suspicion (much of it justified) of eastern and western geopolitics, and an infrastructure that in every decade after 1950 fell further and further behind its more progressive western neighbor and rival–India.

But that is history.  Pakistan treated … Read the rest