Free Republic

 All that's necessary to assure our compliance is shaming us into silence.  Our best hope for substantial political change in the past generation was Sarah Palin. When she self-imploded during her Iowa Freedom Summit address last January, what we saw was, not just a personal failure of nerve, but the sure-thing, efficient result, the calculated application of ridicule as one of the key techniques of thought reform. The more one examines this field of study, the more pessimistic one becomes about the prospect for any meaningful resurgence of American democratic republicanism. When Sarah jumped the shark, she was showing understandable...

Alec Dent, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, broke the story in The College Fix [1]: An English class offered at UNC Chapel Hill this fall called “Literature of 9/11″ explores the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from the perspective of radical Islamists and those who view America as an imperialist nation. The course represents virtually everything wrong with American academia today.The reading list consists entirely of writings by Leftists who view the War on Terror as a massive exercise in American racism and imperialism. Most of the other writings are by Muslims who …...

Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them. “These readings offer points of view that justify terrorism, paint the United States and its government as wholly evil and immoral and desecrate the memory of the victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,” the UNC College Republicans said in a recent letter to Chancellor Carol Folt.

“Though additional work always remains, the physical sciences have completed their core task when it comes to climate change,” says Bill McKibben... "What we don’t know is how to stop ourselves from harming the climate, which is why this book and the social sciences are so important.” Edited by environmental sociologists Robert J. Brulle, PhD, a professor in Drexel University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and Riley E. Dunlap, a professor at Oklahoma State University, the book highlights new things by presenting climate change as a completely social phenomenon, implanted in behaviors, institutions and cultural practices. “We need to develop...

A report from the Centre for National Security in New York paints a surprisingly diverse portrait of the growing number of U.S. residents becoming foreign fighters for ISIL or plotting domestic attacks in its name.But the report, released Thursday, also provides insight on the motivations driving youths in both Canada and the U.S. to engage in terrorist activities, and strategies to deter them, as the number of homegrown extremists in both countries continues to rise.Since March 2014, a total of 56 people have been arrested and charged in U.S. federal court with supporting ISIL, and another three were killed by...

--SNIP--As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.” So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.” The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development...

It may be possible to reduce biases regarding race and gender while a person sleeps, according to a new study published in the journal Science. Prior research has shown that biases can be reduced with a technique called counter-stereotype training. Neuroscientists at Northwestern University wondered whether sleep might bolster the effect. Study participants were shown images “that are opposite to what they might have been exposed to when growing up,” said Ken A. Paller, one of the study’s authors. These included images of women and African-American men. When participants were shown images of women alongside scientific words, and African-American men...

Saying that children “instinctively” understand the importance of the environment, President Obama said Thursday that climate change should be taught in schools and “weaved” into science and social studies classes. During a Twitter question-and-answer session, the president responded to about a dozen tweets, most about climate change. One tweet asked Mr. Obama how he believes children should be educated on environmental issues such as global warming.

 A Lioness in the Streets   In the 1930s, someone heard Adolph Hitler being screamed at behind closed doors by the head of the German Central Bank, Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. Who could get away with screaming at Hitler and live? Someone fronting from a group so powerful, it could have ordered that Hitler be made into Hoffaburger. It turns out that when Hitler first assumed power, he went with hat in hand to make his case to the heads of German industry that his gangster militias could deliver labor peace.  The big talking heads are mum about all this, so let this...

Apparently according to a homework sheet being given to our 2nd graders in this country about how to be good citizens, the government *gives* us our rights. Did you know that?

This year the movie God Is Not Dead preyed on every Christian parent’s fear of sending a child off to college only to have their family’s faith and values undermined by an atheist college professor espousing some form of moral relativism. The movie hinges on a certain cliché, but the cliché is a cliché because many of us took a class with “that professor.” He might not have been so over-the-top, but his prejudices were evident. The American university tends to be fairly hostile to the conservative movement. One of the core tenets of conservatism is the Judeo-Christian teaching that...

Where does all this stuff that you’ve heard about this morning – the victim feminism, the gay rights movement, the invented statistics, the rewritten history, the lies, the demands, all the rest of it – where does it come from? For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic. We call it “Political Correctness.” The name originated as something of a joke,...

As conservatives, we seek to build on past successes wherever we can rather than start anew. Fortunately, when we look at the question of education, the next conservatism quickly finds a lot to build on. The existing conservative movement has done some things right in this area. The most important achievement is the home schooling movement. Today, over a million American children are getting real educations at home instead of being propagandized in the public schools. Unfortunately, a new problem has cropped up which the next conservatism needs to take on now, before it gets bigger. Political Correctness, which is...

(D)escriptions, written by Twin Cities area high school teachers, of how their schools teach literature classes. This one comes from Edina High School, which was once known as an excellent institution: Acceptance and inter-cultural understanding can be fostered through the use of powerful texts, discussion, analysis, and exploration in the classroom. An English curriculum grounded in social justice rests on a belief based in equity—that each person should have access to resources regardless of race, gender, ability, age, socio-economic status, or sexual orientation.

How many times do I have to write about the problems discovered in Common Core teaching? This time it deals with Pearson Education, one of the leading companies that helps develop and train Common Core teaching. According to their website: “As the leading education services company, Pearson is serious about evolving how the world learns. We apply our deep education experience and research, invest in innovative technologies, and promote collaboration throughout the education ecosystem. Real change is our commitment and its results are delivered through connecting capabilities to create actionable, scalable solutions that improve access, affordability, and achievement.” [Emphasis mine]...

Over twenty years ago, I had an intermittent conversation about homosexuality with an gay man at work. Although he persistently brought up the subject, he would periodically fly into a rage and call me a bigot when I disagreed with him. That man went on to become a key homosexual organizer in my city. Five years ago I wrote a letter to the editor of my newspaper concerning how the paper was becoming an organ of gay advocacy. I forwarded the letter to a group who received regular mailings from me. One man responded and disclosed himself as a gay....

Brainwashing Children to 'Suppress' Design Intuition by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. * The Wall Street Journal praised psychological research on kindergarteners that demonstrates how a picture-rich storybook could replace children’s intuitive inferences of design with Darwinian natural selection.1 Is this a good way to apply child psychology? Boston University psychologist Deborah Kelemen has led the latest National Science Foundation funded research to help teach evolution. Her technical report appears in the journal Psychological Science. The aim of her research was to intentionally “suppress” children’s “commonsense ways,” and to “explain why animals have functional traits and show signs of apparent...

What would you think if your 8-year-old came home and told you that “white privilege is something that white people have, meaning they have an advantage in a lot of things and they can get a job more easily”? You would have heard that at the recent 15th annual White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin, attended by 2,500 public-school teachers, administrators and students from across the nation (http://tinyurl.com/lkoqj9b). The average parent has no idea of the devious indoctrination going on in classrooms in many public schools. What follows are some of the lessons of the conference. In one of the...

It was reading, writing and religious brainwashing at this top Connecticut high school. Staffers at Avon High indoctrinated three once-happy girls into a death-obsessed religious cult that had them speaking in tongues and acting like zombies, a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by their parents charges. Three Spanish teachers and a guidance counselor “taught students to believe in superstition, magic and a non-scientific, anti-intellectual world view,” the suit says. “They lost their humor and their empathy. They began speaking in a bizarre new language. They became unable to think critically or independently. They became dependent on the school teachers and...