Contents

Freedom Exposé

New Year, No Resolution

Congress is currently working to overhaul the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, which has been widely criticized for overemphasizing standardized test scores while tying school performance to federal funding. The proposed new legislation, called Every Child Achieves, has renewed the debate.

Cover Story

Reading Between the Lines

Nation

Curiouser & Curiouser!

World

Lotus Blossoms

Scientology News

Big in Japan

Contents

Editorial

Achieve This

It’s about time — really, it’s time—that we do something about the state of American public education. It’s easy to suppose this is a 21st-century problem, brought on by screens dominating daily life, reality TV, the Republicans, no the Democrats!—whatever. But it’s not.

News Briefs

News Briefs

No Fly List fails can bring a chuckle—like when Senator Ted Kennedy was repeatedly blocked from boarding an aircraft in the spring of 2004. Or when an 18-month-old baby was removed from a JetBlue flight in 2012, at which Forbes quipped, “They didn’t stop and think about whether a one-and-a-half-year-old posed a security threat, or whether it could possibly be a case of mistaken identity.

Cover Story

Reading Between the Lines

Signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2002 following bipartisan passage in both the House and the Senate, No Child Left Behind was intended to make schools and teachers more accountable for student performance. But the law has been criticized for overemphasizing standardized test scores while tying school performance to federal funding.

Media & Ethics

The Nature of the Beast

False information has a life of its own. If a falsehood is told often enough, and widely enough, it becomes fact in the minds of many.

Nation

Curiouser & Curiouser!

Civil forfeiture empowers law enforcement to seize cash and property alleged to be the proceeds or instrument of a crime, without having to convict or even charge anyone with wrongdoing. In theory, it targets ill-gotten gains. In practice, it enables the state to grab assets fairly indiscriminately and spend them with little accountability.

Into the Field

Lotus Blossoms

The bitterest pain among humans, the Greek historian Herodotus said, is to have much knowledge but no power. The truism has long been felt keenly in India, where 68 percent of the nation’s 1.2 billion people still live in rural areas, the majority of them on less than $1 a day.

Pontus Westerberg On Future Building

Westerberg, a native of Sweden, coordinates Block by Block, an innovative partnership between UN-Habitat and Mojang, the makers of Minecraft, a popular ‘sandbox’ computer game in which players create and break apart three-dimensional worlds built from cubes.

The Road Ahead

Nowhere is this more evident than in Dhaka, which has a population density of 20,000 people per square kilometer. And with such cramped conditions comes grinding poverty. The per capita annual income of Bangladesh is just over $1,300 and roughly a quarter of its citizens live below the official poverty line.

L. Ron Hubbard essay

Be Competent. Practice.

Learning bears fruit when it is applied. Wisdom, of course, can be pursued for its own sake: there is even a kind of beauty in it. But, truth told, one never really knows if he is wise or not until he sees the results of trying to apply it.

What is Scientology?

The Reactive Mind

L. Ron Hubbard discovered that the mind has two very distinct parts. One of these—the part that you consciously use and are aware of—is called the analytical mind. This is the portion of the mind which thinks, observes data, remembers it and resolves problems. It has standard memory banks which contain mental image pictures and uses the data in these banks to make decisions that promote survival.