Free Republic

MINNEAPOLIS – A sex education teacher has drawn the ire of parents after taking students on a field trip to an adult novelty store in Minneapolis. Gaia Democratic School director Starri Hedges took about a dozen middle- and high-school-aged students to the Smitten Kitten last week. Hedges told the Star Tribune that she wanted to provide a safe and welcoming environment for students to learn about human sexual behavior.

I have often maintained that threats to freedom of expression in this country come predominantly -- probably exclusively -- from the political left. The censoring of a pro-life student club in a Las Vegas high school is a recent egregious example. Angelique Clark, a sophomore at West Career and Technical Academy in Las Vegas, says the Clark County School District denied her application to charter a pro-life club as a chapter of Students for Life of America, the nation's largest youth pro-life organization. The district, according to Clark, said, "It was too controversial, and it would be too exclusive, and...

Levin is not just a person who likes to look at pictures of children having sex; he is a sexual sadist who enjoys at least hearing about pain inflicted upon small defenceless children On Friday, former Ontario deputy minister of education, Ben Levin, was sentenced to three years in the penitentiary. In March, Levin pleaded guilty to one count each of possessing child pornography, making child pornography, and counselling the commission of a sexual assault. Four other child porn related charges were withdrawn by the Crown. At the time of his arrest in July 2013, Levin was a world renowned...

Despite the left’s efforts to convince us that Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was irrelevant... the facts that prove otherwise are plenty and can no longer be ignored. To understand the agenda (and lies) at the core of our new national standards, you have to go back to why many on the right were concerned about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers to begin with – their work on education reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a progressive education reform model rooted in the social justice pedagogy of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, was expanded by President Obama and communist...

“Was George Washington any different from Palestinian terrorists trying to protect their country?” “Was Jefferson a hypocrite? Did he really think of a slave as a sub-human while writing the Declaration of Independence?” These questions were written for use in the classroom by Grant Wiggins, a Pearson Education author, partner, and Common Core professional development trainer. In partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, Pearson Education provides lessons, texts, professional development, and other resources to states implementing the Common Core State Standards.

The exposure of one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent memory... (Snip) Over and over again, throughout the scientific community and the media, LaCour’s impossible-seeming results were treated as truth, in part because of the weight Green’s name carried, and in part, frankly, because people — researchers, journalists, activists —wanted to believe them. (snip) ...Broockman was consistently told by friends and advisers to keep quiet about his concerns lest he earn a reputation as a troublemaker, or —  perhaps worse — someone who merely replicates and investigates others’ research rather than plant a flag of his own. (snip) This might...

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is spending nearly $2 million to see if courts run by teenagers can be a viable tool to fight school bullying. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) tasked WestEd, a San Francisco-based education research group, late last year to study the effectiveness of “youth courts,” where the roles of judge, jury, defense, and prosecution are filled by students, who can then administer punishment in middle and high schools. “Reports of violence, bullying, and other offenses have resulted in concerns about school safety,” according to the NIJ grant. “Administrators, anxious to restore order, have adopted policies...

A group of students at Los Altos High School want California history textbooks revised, claiming the current textbooks don’t tell the whole story. The students claim the version of American history taught in California classrooms is at best incomplete and at worst biased and inaccurate: failing to adequately cover the experiences, accomplishments and frequent mistreatment of communities of color and women. “There’s definitely value at looking at the good things we have done, there’s definitely value at being proud of those things, and there’s even more value in acknowledging what we haven’t done correctly,” one of the students said. Members...

As a speaker was about to begin her lecture criticizing gay marriage Tuesday on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, about 30 students seated in the front rows stood with signs, turned to face the rest of the audience and let loose.

Watching PBS? Might want to ask the kindergartners to leave the room. In a May 27 piece for tax-funded PBS, NewsHour producer Saskia de Melker argued “The case for starting sex education in kindergarten.” In her piece, she held up the Netherlands as an example for the United States in “sexuality education” – for those as young as 4-years-old to learn “honest conversations about love and relationships.”

A Northwestern University professor was accused of retaliation and investigated after students claimed an article she had written had a “chilling effect” on students’s ability to report sexual misconduct.Writing on Friday in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis describes an academic climate in which professors lay awake at night in fear of losing their careers over a single careless word or missed trigger warning. A new academic culture is rising in which hurt feelings are considered evidence of an attack. This hypersensitivity is being abetted by an expanding process of Title IX charges which allow anyone with an agenda...

Bahar Mustafa, a diversity officer at Goldsmiths University, will retain her position at the school despite a number of inflammatory statements. Ms. Mustafa was first embroiled in controversy after she banned white men from a campus event: In response to criticisms of her racist acts, Mustafa responded that she cannot be racist, saying, “There have been charges laid against me that I am racist and sexist towards white men. I, an ethnic minority woman, cannot be racist or sexist towards white men, because racism and sexism describe structures of privilege based on race and gender, and therefore women of color...

On Saturday evening, November 8, 2003, I addressed a free-standing feminist “networking” conference of mainly African-American and Hispanic-American women at Barnard College. The conference was sponsored by WERISE (Women Empowered through Revolutionary Ideas Supporting Enterprise), which was described as a grassroots, multi-cultural, multi-generational, and multi-disciplinary organization for women in the arts. The women ranged in age from 20 to 65 and were dressed in corporate business suits, colorful African and ethnic attire, and youthful jeans. A few days before the conference one of the organizers asked me about my most recent book and I told her it was The New...

In her sexy, stormy, spiritual memoir, Honey in the River, Marsha Scarbrough explores the contemporary relevance of ancient African wisdom teachings, wrapped around a love affair with a married African shaman. The mythology and metaphysics of Ifa, the indigenous religion of the Yoruba people of West Africa, is woven throughout her fast-paced tale that combines spiritual text with descriptions of her experiences in rhythm, dance and deep trance. As she blends archetypal drama and epic soap opera, Marsha reveals and befriends her personal shadow. I interviewed Marsha about her book and what it was like become so deeply involved with...

In December, Science published a paper claiming that people could change their minds about same-sex marriage after talking for just 20 minutes with a gay person. It seemed too good to be true — and it was. (snip) Most science and health reporters rely on the top journals for news leads. They tend to move in a pack, descending on a small handful of news items each week. When the papers in those journals have the fillip of a hot topic, like sex or race, the frenzy is even greater. And yet many reporters fail to do the necessary due...

In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions. Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body...

Sacramento State University will now allow an anthropology course to fulfill the school’s general education history requirement, a decision that has prompted fierce debate, with history scholars noting it effectively allows students to take a “history” class that doesn’t even mention either World War, among other important topics.As it stands, the anthropology class will reportedly focus on “the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality; the political economy of institutions and ideas, such as racism, classism, sexual stereotyping, family, religion, state, color blindness, multiculturalism, etc.; and, discourses of cultural diversity in the U.S.”

Asian Americans have finally had enough. They’re tired of working harder, achieving more academically, then having that held against them as they try to fulfill their educational dreams in our nation’s most elite universities. To gain entry into top private schools such as Harvard or the best public schools such as the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, no one has to do better than Americans of Chinese or Japanese or Korean descent. To make room for black, Latino, and — yes — white students, deserving Asian Americans are pushed aside. And they’re tired of it. So last week a coalition...

College should be a place of new ideas and challenging views. Instead, liberals have made it a place of fear and intimidation. The root of nearly every free-speech infringement on campuses across the country is that someone—almost always a liberal—has been offended or has sniffed out a potential offense in the making. Then, the silencing campaign begins. The offender must be punished, not just for justice’s sake, but also to send the message to anyone else on campus that should he or she stray off the leftist script, they too might find themselves investigated, harassed, ostracized, or even expelled. If...

An incoming Boston University professor says she regrets racially charged tweets she made disparaging white men. Black professor Saida Grundy called "white college males" a "problem population" in a Twitter account that's now private. She also declared "white masculinity is THE problem for America's colleges." She says in a statement issued Tuesday she regrets that her passion led her to speak "indelicately."