Free Republic

WASHINGTON — A 17-year-old transgender youth, Leelah Alcorn, stunned her friends and a vast Internet audience in December when she threw herself in front of a tractor-trailer after writing in an online suicide note that religious therapists had tried to convert her back to being a boy. In response, President Obama this week will call for an end to such psychiatric therapies aimed at “repairing” gay, lesbian and transgender youth, White House officials said. His decision on the sensitive issue is the latest example of his continuing embrace of gay rights. In a statement to be posted on Wednesday evening...

(Snip) The framework requires that all questions take up sweeping issues, such as “group identity,” which leaves little place for transcendent individuals. Men and women who were once studied as inspirational figures have become examples of trends, and usually not uplifting ones. The immigrant story that the exam tells is of oppressed people escaping to America only to find more oppression. That many came seeking the Promised Land—and found it here—is no longer part of the narrative. (Snip)

An op-ed piece titled "Conservatives, Please Stop Trashing the Liberal Arts" appeared last week in the Wall Street Journal. But it is not conservatives who trashed the liberal arts. Liberal professors have trashed the liberal arts, by converting so many liberal arts courses into indoctrination centers for left-wing causes and fads, instead of courses where students learn how to weigh conflicting views of the world for themselves. Now a professor of English, one of the most fad-ridden of the liberal arts today, blames conservative critics for the low esteem in which liberal arts are held. Surely a professor of English...

".....John Dewey,a great philosopher of the last century,stressed this key point. Democracy should be the goal of education,he wrote,and education for democracy requires a community of learning in which members learn from each other. Educational institutions should be shaped to nurture communal values,abilities,and understandings. This can happen only if students are constantly collaborating with others both within and outside their places of learning. In the process,a democratic community of learning is created that provides education for a lifetime of civic engagement.These are truths for all institutions of education,but particularly for colleges and universities. Those institutions have unique roles in our...

Students at Pine Bush High School in Pine Bush, New York, knew right away there was something not quite right about the Pledge of Allegiance. That’s because the pledge was being recited in Arabic. “One nation under Allah,” the student body president announced over the intercom system on Wednesday. Reaction in the upstate New York high school was swift, and so was the backlash, The Times Herald-Record reports. Furious students tried to shout down the recitation in their classrooms. Other students sat down in protest. School Superintendent Joan Carbone told the newspaper that the Arabic pledge “divided the school in...

Nonetheless. Fraser shortchanges the popular democratic spirit that, however disappointed and subdued it may have become, continues to run through American life and – let’s face it – helped to fuel the explosive rise of the Tea Party. In the first Gilded Age, Americans fought back against inequality and the oligarchs who threatened democracy. Over the past few decades, it seems like we’ve given up. Reading Steve Fraser’s new book brought to mind a note that a young woman student had appended to a final essay exam in one of my classes some twenty-five years ago. After doing a splendid...

TLC is becoming the latest network to explore transgender life. The cable network has handed out a straight-to-series order for All That Jazz, a docuseries following 14-year-old transgender activist Jazz Jennings, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The 11-episode series will feature Jennings — dubbed "The New Face of Transgender Youth" — in her daily life, juggling her foray into high school while navigating how a transgender teen approaches dating and sleepovers all while avoiding male puberty. Jennings, who has been featured on 20/20, The Rosie Show and was named one of the 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014 by Time...

Allah is the name of the moon god of Mohammed's Quraysh Tribe in Arabia. The religion that Mohammed dictated under the influence of Allah, Islam, is a perverse totalitarian homosexual death cult. The views espoused by Muslims are virtually identical to that of modern progressive liberals. Among those victimized by Islam, besides its enemies which are routinely sodomized prior to getting their heads cut off, are women and kids who are viewed as just a necessary nuisance to make more little sodomite death cult members. Islam merely takes every vial deed that depraved men commit and codifies it. Progressive liberals...

And so it begins... Net neutrality is already being leveraged by the illegal regime to push leftist diversity propaganda. The video, purportedly by the "Ad Council", a liberal outfit, celebrates sodomy among other things. It's titled "Diversity & Inclusion – Love Has No Labels" and will make you sick with its advocacy of perversity. Worse yet, they recruited young children for this campaign. Now that hussein has seized control of the FCC, there will doubtlessly be an edict to make television stations play it.

A teacher describes how the death Trayvon Martin made ger scrap her lesson plan and work on something more relevant with students.Brit in the Bronx teacher created her portrait of Trayvon Martin using red Skittles wrappers and cream and turquoise Arizona drinks labels.Sometimes the people you teach and the events that change their lives can take you to places you weren’t expecting. In 2012, my students had a Hoods Up For Trayvon Martin day in protest against the failure to arrest former neighbourhood watchman George Zimmerman for killing the Florida teenager. They came to class with their hoods up, many...

A Wisconsin father is outraged about a homework assignment given to his son that bashes the Republican Party on the issue of illegal immigration. An 8th grade social studies class at Shattuck Middle School had to complete an assignment that suggested Republicans were destroying the “pathway to citizenship” for immigrants. The teacher, Grace Davis, used a political cartoon that featured a Democrat laying bricks to build a “pathway to citizenship,” while a Republican character removed the bricks to dismantle the immigration process. …

The White House Science and Technology Advisor, says an initiative is underway “with the goal of ensuring a climate smart citizenry in the United States.” “In December of last year the White House Climate Education and Literacy Initiative was launched--with the goal of ensuring a climate smart citizenry in the United States,” Dr. John Holdren says in a White House video released last week. “Whenever I can I use opportunities like this ‘Ask Dr. H’ initiative to communicate about climate change and the strong scientific underpinnings of our actions to combat it.” “Based on our scientific understanding of climate change...

An anti-cop racist poster hangs in the school with the full approval of the Principal stating “students need to be able to express their feelings” and calling the poster an “expression of free speech”. Compare and contrast this example to a Georgia Teacher who was suspended for writing “all lives matter” on a facebook post. "We can’t let these whites win." Full title: School Principal Supports Racist Anti-Cop Student Poster: “We Can’t Let Whites Win” – Then Becomes Angry When Questioned About The Inherent Message

Teenagers at a California high school were publicly shamed for disagreeing with speakers allowed to push an LGBT agenda during an English class, according to several upset parents. The Queer Straight Alliance at Acalanes High School, in Lafayette, lectured students in several ninth-grade English classes on Jan. 29 about LGBT issues, according to Brad Dacus, president of the Pacific Justice Institute, which is representing the parents. During the class, the students, ages 14 and 15, were instructed to stand in a circle. Then, they were grilled about their personal beliefs and their parents’ beliefs on homosexuality, PJI alleges.“The QSA...

WEST ALLIS, Wis. – An 11th grade U.S. Government and Politics student believes only a fascist would make the statement: “We should not help the poor, it’s a waste of money.” But the Nathan Hale High School student – who answered that on a quiz – found out he was “wrong.” According to the quiz, it’s a conservative who believes that. “When I picked my son up from school, he asked me what political party did I think thought ‘We should not help the poor, it’s a waste of money,'” the student’s mother, Heather Bronnson, tells EAGnews.

California-school mind control: grades for “Gratitude” By Jon Rappoport January 30, 2015 http://www.nomorefakenews.com The Sacramento Bee has the story. 1/27/15, “Grit and gratitude join reading, writing and arithmetic on report cards,” by Loretta Kalb: “Across the state, report cards are undergoing a sea change in how students are measured for academic performance. Where teachers once graded students [only] on traditional math or English skills, they now judge attributes such as grit, gratitude or being sensitive to others…Districts are changing their report cards to reflect the new Common Core State Standards…” “…when it comes to attributes such as grit or being...

The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round, just like the endless cycles of big, bad government programs to federalize preschool and daycare. On Wednesday, the White House Summit on Early Education will unveil nearly $1 billion in new "investments" to "expand access to high-quality early childhood education to every child in America" from "birth and continuing to age 5." It's a retread of President Obama's 2013 State of the Union school-spending plan, which was a repackaging of his 2011 Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge program. Those Obama initiatives are knockoffs of moldy-old Democratic policy chestnuts, such...

Author’s Note: If you’re wondering why this column begins with “#6” just go to my archive. This is Part III of a series. Parts I and II described a new College Prep Course that is being offered by www.CrossExamined.org. Frank Turek, J. Warner Wallace, and I will be traveling the country offering the course starting in the summer of 2015. This column series provides an overview of my ten-step plan to help Christian kids prepare for life in college. 6. Getting Into the Driver’s Seat in Class. I appreciate the folks who made the movie God’s Not Dead. But the...

It’s one thing for conservative pundits to question the Obama Administration’s latest higher education subsidy. It’s quite another for a writer in The Atlantic to start asking inconvenient questions. “President Obama wants to provide free tuition at community colleges, a proposal that could benefit as many as 9 million students, according to a White House outline of the plan released Thursday,” Fawn Johnson wrote on the Atlantic blog. “But there's one big caveat in the proposal: There isn't plan to fund it, other than to ask Congress for the money.” “Without that crucial piece of the program, which would be...

As someone who has spent over 15 years teaching at community colleges, I cannot think of a worse idea than President Obama’s proposal for the federal government to provide “free” community college tuition nationwide. Here’s why: Nothing in life is “free”: The lesson we should be teaching our students is that nothing of value is free. “Free community college” for students translates into “a tax increase for somebody else.” Who is going to pay for the billions of dollars it will cost to provide “free” tuition at community colleges, which are heavily subsidized by taxpayers already? College should be affordable,...