tell me something, tell me something I don't already know I went to the library last night and came home with a stack of books. Most of them are for my philosophy class, but I got a few for personal interest, too. So I've already started reading "Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement" (is that what I have?). In the introduction he's giving an overview of the "dumbing-down" of society in general and I found this part particularly interesting:

Standards and test scores for our public schools lag behind not only other nations but behind where they used to be. Psychologists were alarmed, for example, when a revised form of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a test often used in hospital settings to diagnose serious mental illness, was released in 1998. The old version, from 1948, required patients with a sixth-grade-level reading comprehension; and the new version required an eighth-grade reading level. The ensuing controversy about the higher reading level was diffused only when the revision task force announced that the two versions actually require identical reading abilities, since what was considered sixth-grade level in 1948 is now considered eighth-grade level.

  | ¶ 12:35 p.m.