David McElroy

Is it a good thing or a bad thing for students to master difficult material and move on to greater challenges? It depends on whether your goal is to educate children or to run a diploma factory churning out sheep.

It’s no secret that the U.S. school system does a lousy job with kids outside the norm. With kids who aren’t too bright and aren’t too dumb, the system can open their heads and pour in a basic, homogenized, dumbed-down version of an education.

But heaven forbid someone is different — especially if that person is particularly bright. And what if someone comes up with a way to accelerate kids’ learning in a certain area, say, math? Well, that’s a threat to the system, because the system is designed to move the cattle through a certain process at a certain speed in a certain order to produce predictably mediocre results.

A California man, Salman Khan, developed a system that’s become something of an online marvel. His Khan Academy is available for kids (and others) who want to learn math and advance rapidly — and it’s free. It lets students quickly advance beyond their peers who are using traditional systems. But according to a new article at Wired magazine, this scares some teachers:

Khan’s programmer, Ben Kamens, has heard from teachers who’ve seen Khan Academy presentations and loved the idea but wondered whether they could modify it “to stop students from becoming this advanced.”

These teachers claim that they wouldn’t know what to do with students who were learning so rapidly in math, but are stuck at lower grade levels in subjects in which they’re getting conventional instruction. But that’s exactly backwards. The question isn’t how to dumb this excellent system down. The question is why it took an outside non-educator to develop a system that blows away what the education bureaucracy can design — and why we aren’t finding ways to achieve the same sort of results in other subjects, instead of trying to put the brakes on what works.

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McDonald’s has just announced that it’s changing the menu of its well-known Happy Meal. The company is cutting the number of French fries by more than half and adding an apple. If you think it’s great that Ronald McDonald is responding to consumer desires for a healthier product, guess again. It’s because of politicians and health nazis.

Let me start by saying that I don’t think you should buy this junk food for your kids. I think the sugar and starch content are way too high for anybody. It’s just not very healthy food. Kids are better served by higher quality food. But it’s just my opinion. They’re your kids and it’s your decision.

And that’s the problem. Some people don’t believe it is your decision. They believe the power of the coercive state should be brought to bear on companies selling products — so that the real “market” pressure comes from politicians and busybodies, not from the people who plunk down their money for the products.

Notice what the Reuters story says prompted the change:

“…[McDonald’s] has been taking heat from parents, consumer groups and local lawmakers over the nutritional content and marketing of Happy Meals….”

Actual consumers put “pressure” on businesses by buying products other than the ones they don’t like. I’m sure some parents — probably pretty responsible ones, in this regard — don’t buy Happy Meals. But the real “pressure,” in this case, comes from the “consumer groups” and politicians.

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Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is a bright guy and he’s done some good academic work. But when it comes to political commentary, he’s both ignorant and arrogant. His latest New York Times column is an example of both.

Krugman called himself a liberal, by which he means that he’s solidly part of the “progressive movement.” These folks have a deep belief in using government to fix the things they see wrong in the world. I understand their theory. I understand their motivation. I just think they’re wrong. I wouldn’t care about them holding an opinion different from mine if they didn’t assert the moral right to control other people — including me.

In his latest column, Krugman talks about the current debt ceiling “crisis.” (I put the word in quotes because I don’t see it as a crisis, even though most others seem to.) He doesn’t see it as a disagreement between two sides with opposing opinions. Instead, he sees it as a battle between crazy people who want to cut the budget and the centrist Democrats who have been willing to do everything reasonable to prevent a crisis. He even calls Barack Obama a “moderate conservative.” (Yes, seriously.)

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