The New Angst Over Grade Inflation

There are a few rules of life that anyone over 30 understands from experience. Among them is that making challenges easier for your children, your mentees, your employees, and your students will make them less capable of being successful after they’ve gone from your protective shield.

And yet, so many people that should know better continue to believe that lowering educational and other performance standards is a good thing because it will widen the circle of students that make it through school and emerge with diplomas.

The fact is, it is impossible to upgrade to a realm of equality for humanity in any respect. We humans are designed not just to be unequal because of the equipment we are supplied with at birth and the environment (culture) we grow up in, but also because each one of us develops his own point of comfort along the range of competence in any and every endeavor.

Lowering standards does not change the bell curve. At all. It only lowers the achievement levels of everyone on it, from top to bottom.

This article addresses the point with only a minimal understanding of what I’ve just said. But it nevertheless (and perhaps unwittingly) displays the impossibility of ever improving performance by lowering standards.

Big Win!

Good news for my family and all Americans building structures on land that they own. In the last several decades, state and local municipalities have begun to charge such landowners so-called “permitting fees” (cash fees and/or partial land compensation) for building on properties they may have owned for years. In the case in question, a homeowner was charged a permitting fee for an imagined future impact that was neither real nor even planned.

One thing that governments do well is to figure out ways of raising their budgets by inventing new fees and taxes. But this decision was 9 to 0 against that. Click here.

Debates That Work the Way They Are Supposed to Work

The Oxford Union debates have become increasingly popular in recent years because they require the debaters and the audience to follow strict codes of conduct. That discipline creates an actual “safe space” for participants to make their arguments and their rebuttals in a structured way that allows for both sides to fully air their views.

Click here to watch an example: Winston Marshall debating Nancy Pelosi on whether populism is a threat to democracy.