Free Republic

The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand the kind of relentless assault on its character that we are witnessing day after day. I cannot predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our current direction is not changed and I don’t pretend to know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, will finally break the nation’s spirit. What I do know is this much: My generation, the so called “millennials” and younger, have been indoctrinated into believing that the root cause...

ST. PAUL, Minn. – Have the taxpayers of St. Paul spent nearly $3 million over the past five years to bring chaos and danger to their schools and students? Apparently so. In 2010, the St. Paul school district began a contractual relationship with the Pacific Educational Group, a San Francisco-based organization that tries to help public schools deal with achievement and disciplinary issues involving black students. PEG packages and sells the concept of victimization, for a very high price. It claims that the American education system is built around white culture, tradition and social norms – aka “white privilege” –...

The American spirit has not yet been destroyed, but it cannot withstand the kind of relentless assault on its character that we are witnessing day after day. I cannot predict the form or timing of the catastrophe that will befall this country if our current direction is not changed and I don’t pretend to know what concatenation of crises, in what progression of steps and across what interval of years, will finally break the nation’s spirit. What I do know is this much: My generation, the so called “millennials” and younger, have been indoctrinated into believing that the root cause...

If you love your child, and I know you do, it’s time to say “bye bye” to the social pacifier that is free universal preschool. I understand. It’s tempting. Whether you’re a destitute single mother or an affluent married father, you’re a parent. And parents often feel wiped out. Especially in this economy. Sure, Michelle Obama has christened this the era of a “huge recovery,” but she’s not in the trenches like you—juggling the stress of being a provider and a caregiver for a 4-year-old. No matter how vulnerable you feel when you hear a certain Disney sing-a-long on repeat,...

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else.”— Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. One of the nation’s largest, sharpest, and wealthiest school systems, Fairfax County, has announced a bright, new idea (to take effect in 2016) that will directly influence district students in grades seven through twelve. It’s not a faster way to learn math, a more creative way to write stories, or a better...

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...

We have previously mentioned the re-write of the AP guide for History. The new AP guide for teaching History is nothing less than (yet another) declaration of war against the very essence of America. Elizabeth Price Foley over at Instapundit has termed the MiniTru approved truth as “the oppression narrative.” An apt label for an education system that tears down American civilization as an “evil” and replaces it with a Howard Zinnified version of reality. As Foley notes: “How about just teaching our children about the founding, the Constitution, and the major historical eras? It isn’t a cultural anthropology or...

Those who follow campus politics say they are not shocked. "I'm not surprised that Boston University is hiring a racist to teach African American Studies," David Horowitz, author of “Reforming our Univerisities” told FoxNews.com. "Anti-white racism is rampant in Black Studies programs which are generally indoctrination programs in left wing politics." Boston University stands by the professor, who will start working at the college in June. “Professor Grundy is exercising her right to free speech and we respect her right to do so,” Boston University spokesman Colin Riley said. Grundy did not respond to a request for comment from FoxNews.com,...

If parents can't rescue their children from the indoctrination of public schools, we're headed down a dead end road as the march of Marxism through Western society will never be interrupted Dick and Jane, who used to teach children to read from the 1930s through to the 1970s in the United States, are no more. Wiped out from life in education, they’ve been transcended in class by the transgendered and other members of the LGBT ranks, who now become societal firsts. It’s a fast moving world, one in which the ideal of sending children to learn ‘readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmatic’...

Results of the “Nation’s Report Card” released this week by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show that only 18 percent of 8th-graders are “proficient” or above in U.S. history, and only 23 percent are proficient in civics. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars poured into education programs in the United States via the U.S. Department of Education, the “Nation’s Report Card” states that 8th-graders’ average NAEP scores in U.S. History, Geography, and Civics demonstrated no significant change since 2010 when students were last assessed. In geography, just 27 percent of U.S. 8th-graders performed at or above the proficiency...

Schools that do everything parents should are not schools. They're orphanages. The city fathers of Buffalo, New York are considering what they call “public boarding schools,” “where students as young as first or second grade would be assured proper meals, uniforms, after-school tutoring and activities.” “We have teachers and union leaders telling us, ‘The problem is with the homes; these kids are in dysfunctional homes,'” Buffalo school board member Carl Paladino told the Huffington Post. The “Buffalo Institute of Growth would supplement a college-style academic schedule with life skills and social activities that would keep students on campus seven days...

“Without Pharrell, our planet would not survive.” So says Marquis Jamont, one of 1,200 middle school children who, according to CBS News, trudged through the snow on the first day of spring to see musician Pharrell Williams talk about climate change at the UN. The event kicked off the meeting of the UN’s Open Working Group on new Sustainable Development Goals. No disrespect to Mr. Williams, but the planet could survive without him and his “Happy” song. Likewise, the world could sustain itself without the goals being cooked up by transnational envirocrats in their endless rounds of meetings. Pharrell’s appearance...

Why must history perpetually repeat itself? It is not news that virtually all American universities are decidedly leftist institutions. Few Americans, however, are aware of how inhospitable they have become to free inquiry and free discourse, and how hostile they are to anyone who stands up for Western values and against the global jihad – as some recent developments illustrate. What is happening in American universities today has a clear historical parallel. ... In his seminal history The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans explains how, in the early days of National Socialist Germany, the universities became centers...

Pennsylvania high schoolers wear matching flannel, hang hateful posters on ‘Anti-Gay Day' A band of Pennsylvania high schoolers in matching flannel shirts slapped hateful poster on gay students’ lockers and drafted a “lynch list” to mark their self-concocted “Anti-Gay Day,” students said.

Sydney Smoot might look like your average 4th grade girl, but she has taken such a bold stand against Common Core that she received a standing ovation from adults at least three times her age. The spunky student from Brooksville Elementary in Florida could barely reach the podium when she stood before the Hernando County School Board this month, but her presence could not have been clearer.Immediately addressing school officials, little Sydney never muddled her words as she described the dangerous impact that state standardized testing is having on students. “This testing looks at me as a number. One...

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...