Why do third graders need to be tested by the state?

In every physics colloquium I attended in my youth, when there were virtually no female physicists, a researcher at the front of the room attempted to persuade his colleagues seated in front of him that his theoretical ideas illuminated nature or his experimental results were free from error. In the colloquium room where truth was pursued in public, an unstated premise was that each one of us had the freedom to judge whether something is true or false.

If scientists are nothing but a pack of neurons, and their joys, sorrows, memories, and sense of free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells, then intellectual insight is an illusion. If the thoughts of scientists are determined by neurophysiology, action potentials, and the endocrinology of neurotransmitters, then physics, biology, and psychology are meaningless. If every decision in science, as in ordinary life, is a “thoroughly mechanical process . . . determined by the results of prior mechanical processes,” as Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen claim, then truth is an illusion.

For science to be possible the human will must be free. A denial of free will renders the whole of science absurd.

It seems to me that Green and Cohen are trapped in the myth of determinism, a heritage of the Newtonian outlook; a clockwork universe obeys precise, rigid mathematical laws that determine its evolution; consequently, free will in this fictitious universe is impossible.

Most 8th graders are not that stooooppid.

First Graders should know this? Is this a joke?

In my district, we are working to make sure the population of gifted students more closely mirrors that of the population of our district. We are doing universal screenings of 2nd graders at schools with high populations of students on free and reduced lunch.

That was a fun video. Second graders are so interesting.