Free Republic

As "wise men" once understood that the sun revolved around the earth, a new business "elite" have come to understand inherent "bigotry" & "discrimination" in such once widely accepted personal classifications, as those by sex, ethnicity, race, age & common sense. With a staccato uniformity, we hear an endless iteration of the chant that such concepts have no place in the personnel management of an aspiring corporation. Aspirants are not content, only to show enthusiasm in rejecting "bigotry" in classifying humans. It has become, increasingly, a competition to act proactively; to condition personnel to recognize & reject efforts to consider...

President likes to refer to us as grown children and is quick to boast that because of his ObamaCare plan we can stay on our parents’ health insurance plans until we’re 26. But this is a generation that remembers typing papers on word processors and tearing the edges off dot matrix paper. We weren’t the first on the information super highway but once we got a license, we took over the road. Facebook has tracked every day of our lives since college and Twitter turned us into citizen reporters. We also have degrees – some of us multiple degrees- but...

Girls think they are cleverer, more successful and harder working than boys from as young as four, a study has found. Boys come round to this view by the age of seven or eight and assume that girls will outperform them at school and behave better in lessons, research from the University of Kent shows. The study – Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat – will be presented to the British Educational Research Association's conference tomorrow. The paper argues that teachers have lower expectations of boys than of girls and this belief fulfils itself throughout primary and secondary school. Girls' performance...

TWO big scientific debates have attracted a lot of attention over the past year. One concerns the causes of autism, while the other addresses differences in scientific aptitude between the sexes. At the risk of adding fuel to both fires, I submit that these two lines of inquiry have a great deal in common. By studying the differences between male and female brains, we can generate significant insights into the mystery of autism. So was Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard, right when he remarked that women were innately less suited than men to be top-level scientists? Judging from current...

Earlier this year the College Board buckled to political pressure and agreed to turn the SAT into an achievement test. Although that move has been defended as a heightening of standards, I have argued that an achievement test is far more susceptible to dumbing down and grade inflation than an aptitude test. It turns out we don't have to wait for proof of just how corruptible achievement tests are. At the very moment America is abandoning its unique and democratic test of academic aptitude, Britain's college entrance test has fallen into crisis. The British college-entrance exam — which is an...