Contrarian reader George Gore liked the video if Guillaume Blanchet, The Man Who Lived On His Bike, because: I lived for four months on a bicycle in the fall of 2006 and spring of 2007, riding from Chester to Ciudad Victoria, in Mexico, and then up the Rio Grande valley from Matamoros to Alpine. Gore also shares my non-hostility toward Amazon: In 1961 I was a twenty-one year old college freshman partially supporting myself by working in a bookstore. The store manager was Bobby Berg, who was the best bookseller I have ever encountered, and I shared that opinion with a lot of...

12 February, 2012

Readers have responded quickly to my challenge for new ideas to deal with the real crisis in provincial education funding, and the dominant theme so far is school size. Stephen Moore wants to eliminate small schools: My suggestion, though it will likely be unpopular, is to close smaller schools. There are many schools with extremely small classes sizes (and some instances of miltiple grades in one room). I agree that small classes can be beneficial and that small schools are a resource for rural communities; however, these are communities with declining enrollments and an aging demographic....

27 January, 2011