TIME magazine reports that increasing numbers of colleges and universities are offering academic courses in pornography — complete with pornographic films, materials, and paraphanalia.

Ruth Gledhill, religion correspondent for The Times [London] reports that religious educators in Great Britain plan to use Superman as a way of getting school children to think about Jesus.

Charles C. Haynes of the First Amendment Center offers an analysis of the controversy between the University of California and Calvary Chapel Christian School of Murrieta, California [see background here] in “War of Worldviews: Christian Schools vs. University of California.”

The Washington Times reports that students in an East London school are no longer to raise their hands in order to ask or answer a question. “No Hands Up” signs have gone up in each classroom.

Judge John E. Jones of the U.S. District Court in Pennsylvania handed down his decision in the now-infamous trial over the teaching of intelligent design in the public schools. In a written opinion, Judge Jones ruled that the Dover School Board had acted unconstitutionally in mandating that science teachers be required to read a brief statement about Intelligent Design and evolution before addressing evolutionary theory in the classroom.

Author Ralph Schoenstein once described the culture of the
overly-ambitious as “a world where parents are competing to see whose
child can be pushed out of childhood first, a world that moved one
cartoonist to show a mother asking a father, ‘But if everyone’s
children achieve, how will we know ours are superior?’.”

Christopher Orlet writes: A popularity contest for public intellectuals seems about as silly as a beauty contest for dogs. Still both are done. The latest — and as far as I know the only — was conducted by the journals Prospect and Foreign Policy. Editors compiled a list of their top 100 intellectualoids and Web readers were asked to select their top five. More than 20,000 people voted. The winner? Noam Chomsky — by a landslide, no less.

Several listeners have asked about the comments I made on the air about the rise of commercial tutoring programs for preschoolers. The article I cited, “Preschoolers’ Prep,” was published in The Wall Street Journal back in July and many missed it during the summer season. It shouldn’t be missed.