Donald B. Hawthorne
I endorse John’s words in the Comments section of Justin’s post entitled Children Are Their Life? No, Children Are Their Leverage.: Maybe someday in RI a school committee will have the guts to fire striking teachers, replace them with new ones, and say to the union, “see you in court.” I have no doubt where…
As a former member of the East Greenwich School Committee, I read Justin’s post about Pat Crowley’s comments on the Burrillville teachers’ strike with a certain bemusement. Justin touches on one of the really big issues about RI teachers’ union contract negotiations: It is my experience that it was the teachers’ union who demanded that…
Duncan Currie writes in The Libel Tourist Strikes Again: How to Kill a Book You Don’t Like: In late July, Cambridge University Press announced it was destroying all its remaining copies of Alms for Jihad, a 2006 book exploring the nexus of Islamic charities and Islamic radicalism. At the same time, Cambridge asked libraries around…
In response to the horrific story reported in the Pure Evil post, Victor Davis Hanson writes: …But what is strange about reading Michael Yon’s graphic descriptions from Iraq is that al Qaeda (or its kindred) seems almost in a single generation to be outdoing a millennium of savagery present in Greek history and myth. You…
Sometimes you read a story which shakes you to your core. Michael Ledeen’s Why Do The Iraqis Hate the Terrorists? did it for me: The horror of the terrorist onslaught rarely is brought home to the American public. Indeed, it is sometimes so grisly that not even American troops in the field can even talk…
Expanding on some of the ideas previously discussed in The Cultural Consequences of Offering Endless Quantities of Meaningless Praise, the latest piece (available for a fee) from Jeffrey Zaslow of the Wall Street Journal is entitled Blame It on Mr. Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled: …Fred Rogers, the late TV icon, told several…
It is common for most of us to experience periodic painful events over the course of our lives. I am going through such a time in my life, an unfortunate and deeply sad life event which I never expected to experience. Like many unexpected and unhappy developments, it is often difficult to maintain perspective when…
Rhode Island has an economically unsustainable infrastucture problem, a problem only magnified by a lack of will to face and fix the problem. In discussing its troubled status, Ed Achorn writes about how There’s no sense in driving out R.I.’s taxpayers and offers these concluding words: There is one thing everyone should remember: Whatever opinions…
In a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled The Most-Praised Generation Goes to Work (subscription required), Jeffrey Zaslow writes: You, You, You — you really are special, you are! You’ve got everything going for you. You’re attractive, witty, brilliant. “Gifted” is the word that comes to mind. Childhood in recent decades has been defined by…
Continuing the conversation begun in an earlier post, Rediscovering Traditional Unstructured Play for Children, here are excerpts from a related Wall Street Journal article (subscription required) entitled Helping Overbooked Kids Cut Back: …Written about and discussed for decades, the problem of overscheduled children still looms large. Many parents keep children busy believing that stimulating activities…