Ah, the first day of school. It always reminds us of this Staples ad.

But for those of you who aren’t enthused about the return of classes, we have some good news. It’s not your fault school is boring! From the Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss (emphasis ours):

[T]he problems may lie beyond your child. According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, it could be the school that is boring the heck out of your child.

A professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Willingham studies how people think and learn by looking at the biological and cognitive basis of learning. His conclusions about what this all means for your child sitting in class for eight hours a day may cause you to rethink how your child is being educated.

The conclusion we’ve come to after reading articles about Facebook in the New York Times and Washington Post this weekend is that people are leaving the social networking service because they don’t know what to put under their religious views. In all seriousness, the religious views question is one a lot of people do struggle with. From William Wan’s Post story:

For the longest time, the question just sat there on his screen. Cursor blinking. Waiting quietly, like a patient priest in a confessor’s box. Religious Views: _____.

Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn’t expected something so serious. Hunched over his laptop, he had whipped through the social network Web site’s questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.

“It’s Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?” said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. “But a question like that kind of makes you think.”

Such public proclamations of beliefs used to require a baptism in water, or a circumcision, or learning the five pillars of Islam. Now Facebook users announce their spiritual identity with the stroke of a few keys. And what they are typing into the open-ended box offers a revealing peek into modern faith and what happens to that faith as it migrates online.

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