Here is the most dramatic quote you will read in the newspaper today, from the organizer of a summer camp for girls that teaches them how awesome "manufacturing" is: "Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation. You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.” READ MORE

The Chilean student demonstrations are really amazing—at least 527 or possibly 552 or could be 800 people all told were arrested yesterday (often, let's say, not nicely), and students occupied state TV offices to get the message out in a traditional fashion. The higher education system is now predominately a group of for-profit businesses, and the students are organizing on the principle that going permanently into debt for education is not a way a country's education system should be run. How about that. Today, student organizers are turning down a vague proposal from the government that increases some public funding. Good!

The editorial board of The Daily Pennsylvanian is extremely disappointed with its fellow students! You see, "A group of students stormed out of Irvine Auditorium in protest while [Newt] Gingrich was still speaking. One of them shouted as he left." HOW UNCOUTH. What's more? Someone called him a "salamander" and "some students hung posters of the politician’s face and some of his controversial quotes on doors of bathroom stalls and above urinals." What in the world is going on at UPenn that these children are so remarkably measured and polite in their demonstrations against a visiting antisocial fraud-adoring grifter?

The other day, 19-year-old Dylan Sodaro was in line to register for classes at American University in Cairo. The Egyptian woman processing forms asked Dylan if he was Jewish. All week, people had been taking to the streets to criticize Hosni Mubarak, widely considered a friend to America and Israel. "Won't this hurt your people?" the Egyptian woman said. Dylan shrugged—at this point, he wasn't sure what the protests meant. READ MORE

Earlier this month, students across the UK began protesting against planned increases in tuition fees and the cutting of university services. Today, students have been occupying buildings in Birmingham and hurling snowballs in Edinburgh and marching in London. All of this thoughtful demonstrating—which is winding down in arrests and some clubbings and the offering of mince pies to politicians—takes place against the dramatic backdrop of the first demonstrations on November 10th, when tens of thousands of young people stormed London. At the end, in Millbank, in central London, some demonstrators smashed windows; fires were set; and an occupation of Conservative headquarters by a few hundred ensued (from that building, an 18-year-old threw a fire extinguisher off the roof). Further, the second wave of demonstrations, on November 24, went off with some hitches when some small violence against property ensued and the police cornered and arrested a number of marchers. READ MORE

Maybe the kids are alright! "A crowd of more than 500 demonstrators rushed Covel Commons on Wednesday to protest a proposed 32 percent student fee increase."

It is amusing that Columbia's undergraduate English class schedule included a course called "The Book Review," which taught students... how to review books. Also amusing is that it is now canceled, according to the Observer, due to the death of much of the nation's book reviewing pages. Thing is, Columbia has this all backwards. Now is exactly when students should be taught how to perform criticism! What better time than the Internet age to teach people the Big Three Do-Not-Dos of critique? (I'd tell you what they are, but then you will never buy my book, "The Big Three and the Twelve Lesser Do-Not-Dos of Critique," which I am going to self-publish sometime in 2012, if I do not starve to death first.) Anyway, this book-reviewing class, if properly taught, would actually give great benefit, because it would prevent the young people from making the same mistakes over and over again, because with each generation (and by "generation," I mean each crop of kids every two years that starts blogs and has no idea that anyone has ever blogged before) comes the same common mistakes. ("The Four Classic Mistakes of the New Blogger" is my chapter four, so, you know, see you in 2012 with that.) Why is Columbia tying its educational program to the death of print? Fortunately, Columbia has the future financial health of its students in mind, as, according to its roster, it still offers classes named "Comparative Modern Texts: Competing Isms' Modernism and the Avant-Garde" and "Caribbean Disaporic Literature," though apparently at least one of those course titles is incorrectly punctuated and the other includes an obvious misspelling.