Word: flints
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...nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school," wrote the partly home-educated George Bernard Shaw. "It is a prison (where teachers) discourse without charm on subjects they don't understand and don't care about." Shaw's sentiment lives on in Sydney mother Mujahidah Flint, who withdrew two of her daughters from their Muslim school before the older one had finished Year 2. Flint felt the school wasn't honoring Islamic values, among other failings. Later, her view of school soured as she read the works of the American John Taylor Gatto, a former prizewinning...
...school. Those who've forgotten umpteen mathematical formulas and the periodic table are generally none the worse for it. Though there's much to be said for a broad education, there's also merit in the view that children should be free to explore what interests them. Mujahidah Flint's daughter Tahirrah reads encyclopedias and dictionaries for fun. "I don't like dumb, funny books," she says. "I like the classics . . . Dickens, Kipling." At 10, she wrote her first book; her latest follows a troubled teen whose parents decide to homeschool her. Tahirrah has a clear picture of her future...
...matter of practice, seems happy to agree. More likely to start an argument is the author's novel proposition that the imperative to link cause and effect derived directly from our earliest hominid ancestors' discovery of tools as many as 2 million years ago. The ability to fashion a flint spear, he speculates, promoted a kind of causal thinking that was beyond other species: take a certain type of stone, hit it in just such a way, and it will leave a cutting edge. The later development of another tool, language, enabled early humans to explain the technology...
...hour event staring into the audience, Summers occasionally prodded the scholars to a more aggressive debate on issues of tax policy, budget deficits, and globalization. Summers urged the economists, who kept returning to nuanced policy discussions, to come up with more practical political advice. Referring to Flint, Mich., where workers’ jobs are being outsourced, he challenged the academics to come up with a realistic suggestion for the Buick-city mayor. “That’s the political reality,” said Summers, pointing to former Senator Bob Graham D-Fla. in the audience...
...Davos we tend to focus, and rightly so, on issues of global integration,” Summers said. “But I would suggest to you that issues of local disintegration—whether that means Flint, Michigan, whether that means failed states, whether that means struggling middle classes caught in binds everywhere—are of equal importance.” His mention of Flint was an allusion to the fact that General Motors laid off employees in that city during the 1980s and 1990s as the automaker shifted jobs overseas...