Whither Logic

Reason: The Idle Fool Is Whipt At School: Liberal bias in the ivory tower: "A young woman who is a graduate student at a Midwestern university and a liberal Democrat told me in a recent e-mail exchange that after the 2004 election, the unanimous opinion among the professors was that Americans who voted for Bush were ''either too stupid to know they 'should' vote for Kerry, or a bunch of right-wing bigots.'"

The idea that the public school system is an Industrial Age artifact, a dreary factory (or prison) of learning, is a staple amongst education critics, including many corporate reformers. It's also what the latter like best about it. "The trend these days is really to intensify standardization, to intensify the curriculum. It's like the children are resources like gold or oil that need to be developed," observes education consultant Patrick Farenga, whose own approach to homeschooling follows that of his mentor, the late John Holt, who coined the term "unschooling" and popularized the idea of unregimented, child-directed learning in influential books such as How Children Fail and Instead of Education.