ARTICLES
The Invention of Foreign Language “Learning Disability”
Richard L. Sparks, Mt. Saint Joseph University
Research by education specialist Richard Sparks and others on what has been termed “Foreign Language” disability offers strong evidence that the growth in the “learning disability” (LD) diagnosis owes more to its usefulness in masking educational underachievement than to evidence of real deficiencies.
Cave Speak: The Cacophony About Gender
Gene Fendt, University of Nebraska, Kearney
Turning to Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” philosopher Gene Fendt demonstrates that ideologues who define gender as “one’s internal knowledge of one’s own gender” rise no higher than Plato’s “level of imagination,” and never leave the cave to see what is real.
What Everyone Should Know About Science—but Doesn’t
Henry H. Bauer, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (emeritus)
Until recently, at least in the West, science had been revered as the font of the most reliable information about the physical world. Over time more people have discovered that science is fallible, influenced like other human endeavors by interested parties and conflicts of interest. Scientist Henry Bauer describes his own transition “from complete faith in science to regretful caution.”
Free Speech and Religion: Lecture in Honor of Isaac Meyers (1979-2008)
Daniel Johnson, Standpoint magazine
In the 2022 Isaac Meyers Memorial Lecture in Jewish Classics, distinguished British author and editor Daniel Johnson posits that the West’s reverence for free speech was conceived and cultivated in its religious tradition.
Defining White Supremacy Up . . . and Academic Freedom Down
Seth Forman, National Association of Scholars
An attack on three acclaimed scholars by two progressive authors reveals a broader effort to marginalize liberal values, including academic freedom, which the authors contend are crucial components of “white supremacy.”
REVIEW ESSAY
Citizenship in Crisis
David Randall, National Association of Scholars
Two prominent conservative critics offer incisive evaluations of what ails the American republic. Both agree that the vital ingredients for a healthy republic are in steep decline. But both also exhibit an “embarrassed unwillingness to conceive of the American nation as something worth defending for its own sake, or even defining.”
SHORT TAKES
In Honor of Roger Scruton: Reflections on Beauty and Photography
Daniel Asia, University of Arizona, Tucson
Composer and professor of composition Daniel Asia admires the late philosopher Roger Scruton but thinks he had photography all wrong.
Why Americans Destroy Their Own History
Wight Martindale, Jr.
Wight Martindale, Jr. observes that America’s unique character and idiomatic birth make it susceptible to forgetting its history.
FOR THE RECORD
AQ presents for the record a recent letter from two scientists to the National Academy of Sciences. The letter challenges the scientific deception that undergirds the “Linear No-Threshold” precept, a critical building block of the expansive regulatory state.
