Briefly, my wife attended a job fair for a well-respected and high-performing private elementary school. Before she could even sit for her interview, though, she had to fill out a pre-employment questionnaire. This isn't all that unusual, but the questions definitely were. I'd post the whole thing, but there's a copyright on the bottom and there are some litigious mofos on the internet these days, so instead I'll just summarize:
The questionnaire was a liberal-hunt. The questions it asked ranged from stuff like "should a parent pay her kids an equal amount of allowance if they don't do an equal amount of work?", to making a determination of what's more important to our nation's health: Globalization or Sovereignty (A word that I've never spelled correctly without spell-check), to an incredibly subtle "In two sentences describe the benefits of socialism".
In my opinion, such a questionnaire is ridiculous. First of all, just because a person thinks that it's OK for a mother to redistribute wealth among her children doesn't mean that person necessarily thinks that we should live in a communist state. Second, (and I'm just guessing that there are right and wrong answers to the questionnaire, which seemed to be the case) it seems misguided to want an entire staff to share the same political views. How are those students supposed to develop real critical thinking skills if they only see one perspective throughout elementary school? Especially when you consider that most parents who would consider sending their children there probably have the same perspective, I don't think that "brainwashed" is an inappropriate term to be throwing around.
I'm sure that the other authors will have something to say about this, and I'm looking forward to an interesting and disrespectful conversation.
Finally, to test this more than anything, I'm including a link to the Football Outsiders Almanac, from Amazon. At about $15, it's cheaper than it would be direct from the Football Outsiders website, and it's an amazingly insightful book for a serious football fan. Instead of the superficial crap you see in all of the fantasy football magazines (Tom Brady is accurate, Chris Johnson is fast), they take a look into a lot of subtleties of the game. They have a lot of cool stuff going on, but the most interesting thing is that they try to measure the performance of non-marquee positions, and they also use unconventional stats. For example, when you're watching a game, you know that a carry of 3 yards on a crucial 3rd and 2 is better than a carry of 5 yards on 3rd and 7. They measure and adjust for that. So, without boring you more- spend the $15 and buy the book.
