Test-driven? Or character-driven?

If you have anything to do with education, especially primary and secondary education, or the testing required by modern ideas of what education should be and the “No Child Left Behind” Act, go read this column by Colman McCarthy:

Test-Driven Teaching Isn’t Character-Driven
No Child Left Untested is politicians’ answer to better education. What about better people?

Tip of the old scrub brush to Is There Life After Breakfast?

Quote of the Moment: Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech

Winston Churchill delivering the “Iron Curtain” speech, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, March 5, 1946 – Photo by George Skadding

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

Sir Winston S. Churchill, in a speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, titled “The Sinews of Peace.”

Some historians mark the beginning of the Cold War from this speech, in which a respected world leader first spelled out the enormous stakes at issue, and also pointed out that Russian, communist totalitarian governments were replacing more democratic governments in nations only recently freed from the spectre of Nazi rule, in World War II.

Oh, why not: Below the fold is the speech in its entirety, from the transcript at the Churchill Centre.