Free Republic

How we educate our youth plays a critical role in whether they are active, engaged and demanding citizens-such as democracy requires. The famed Brazilian education advocate Paulo Freire railed against the "banking concept" of education, where students are filled up with knowledge. Rather, he argued, the classroom must feature dialogue between students and teachers invested in a common task of inquiry. To put it otherwise, the classroom is a microcosm of a democratic society, where students instinctively learn to behave as democratic citizens.The NRA wants us to live in fear: The demented, highly profitable and deeply cynical logic behind arming...

It's a not-so rosy report card for the nation's schoolchildren. Math scores slipped for fourth and eighth graders over the last two years, and reading grades were not much better, flat for fourth graders and lower for eighth graders, according to the 2015 Nation's Report Card. ... Education Secretary Arne Duncan urged parents, teachers, and others not to panic about the scores as states embrace higher academic standards, such as Common Core.

A mother from Illinois was concerned when her daughter came home from school inquiring about the 9/11 attacks as well as having some disturbing questions about the QURAN, ALLAH and other Muslim… stuff. After looking into the situation the mother found that the students were being taught things about the 9/11 attacks that were totally unacceptable. That’s what these liberal teachers do. They pollute our children with their sick ideals. No facts. All garbage. I would yank my kid out of school in a heartbeat rather than be ‘taught’ by some Obama loving liberal scumbag. Mary Cooley at the Belleview...

Michelle Obama unveiled a new social media site on Monday where teens can swap practical information and stories about continuing education after high school, an initiative backed by more than 20 media, business and nonprofit groups. […] BetterMakeRoom.org will be a place for students ages 14-19 to get information on such matters as signing up for the SAT and ACT exams, filling out federal financial aid forms and applying to college, aides said. Students will also be able to share stories about their goals, their progress and what’s inspiring them to go to college. …

Perception is everything. Wars are often won or lost based on how the actors perceive one another’s strengths and weaknesses, not so much how strong or weak they are in reality. So it goes with any agenda item. When people sense a shift in public opinion on an issue, a fair number will shift right along with what they perceive. Thus, power elites can shape behaviors and attitudes by applying various techniques of crowd psychology, focused on propaganda and silencing dissent. ... Effective propaganda also keeps you in the dark about the fact that you are being manipulated. You Can’t...

USING OUR TAX DOLLARS TO DO IT [COMMENTS FROM DONNA GARNER — And we wonder why there is so much racial violence in America…we are teaching hate in the public schools and using our tax dollars to do it. Please see the list of the four large public school districts in Texas (posted at the bottom) that are using our tax dollars to purchase this outrageous, hate-filled, divisive, racially discriminatory, anti-White program to indoctrinate thousands of school children. Please notice that the Oct. 10 PEG conference is coming to Baltimore, the site of mass racial violence.] “Interrupting Whiteness: National Education...

"The traditional view is simply stated: the purpose of public education is to take each child as far as each child can be taken. Who can disagree with that?" "H. L Mencken famously proclaimed: “The erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply...

The US Navy's Bureau of Medicine & Surgery is now teaching its members about the dangers of "male privilege," giving examples of ways that men use such privilege to get what they want. The document outlining "male privilege" can be found on the US Navy's Bureau of Medicine & Surgery's official page. It details, "common phrases victims use when describing their abuse," which includes "male privilege." Here is one of the statements that "victims" of male privilege included by the Navy: “When he came home yesterday, he was driving a brand new truck. I told him we needed something the...

October 5, 2015 (BreakPoint) -- The way to win over a culture is to capture the minds and hearts of its young people. The gay-rights movement has certainly learned that lesson, which helps explain a current trend in youth literature. Anyone who reads books for teens these days will tell you that portrayals of gay relationships and characters are rapidly increasing.

Well, this kinda turns the "liberals demand equal results" meme on its head... So, if the fat kid at the lunch table decides he needs a piece of the other kids lunches...he gets to have it? That's how "fair" is being defined here isn't it? Or maybe it's the other way around, the fat kid's lunch gets redistributed among the skinnier kids who need the fat kid's calories more than the fat kid does...But isn't that "fat shaming" the poor little thing? Is that a need now too? What a fantastic way to destroy the difference between "need" and "want"...

I started working last week at my old college in MD. Guess what came in the e-mail? Michelle is visiting us - tomorrow. What a way to start my job. Sorry so late but I've been SOOOO busy it's been hard to even read FR! Messages actually came out last week. If any local FReepers are interested....well, here you are.

I can’t say precisely how similar Canadian families are to American ones, particularly when it comes to parents with small children. Some things seem to be universal though and this might be one of them. Canada recently implemented a plan where they would be expanding sex education for their students, starting off with some big, need-to-know items for first graders. Who could possibly have predicted that anything would go wrong with a plan like this? Well, when it came time to send the kids to class, as many as 90% of the parents in some areas kept their kids home....

Maury County, Tennessee is in the heart of the Bible Belt. So it’s understandable why the local church ladies got all shook up when they discovered that school children had been forced to declare, “There is no God but Allah.” Seventh graders at Spring Hill Middle School spent three weeks covering Islam in a Social Studies class – enraging some parents who say the lessons crossed the line into indoctrination and proselytization. “I am not pleased that my 12-year-old was taught the Islamic conversion prayer,” parent Brandee Porterfield told me. Could you imagine the outcry from liberal activists if the...

UNC spokesman claims they "challenge students," and don't "advocate one viewpoint over another." So, will they accept my offer to come debate any professor on the topic, free of charge? Alec Dent, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, broke the story in The College Fix: 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...

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.

The first San Francisco elementary school to make bathrooms gender neutral has proudly removed the circles, triangles, and stick figure signs from the kindergarten and first-grade bathrooms that delineate the differences between the sexes.Principal Sam Bass of Miraloma Elementary said the change at the beginning of the school year was prompted by the needs of six to eight students who are outside calling themselves simply boys or girls, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Bathrooms for children older than first grade will be altered in coming years, even outside bathrooms that have multiple stalls.Bass told the Chronicle, “There’s no need...

In February 2015, Columbia University—currently ranked the fourth most distinguished academic institution in the United States by U.S. News and World Report—announced that all its students, undergraduate and graduate alike, would be obliged to take part in a “Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative.” This “new, required programming,” the Columbia bureaucracy explained, was designed to explore “the relationship between sexual respect and community membership.” Columbia’s students were given a menu of “participation options.” They could watch a minimum of two preselected videos about “rape culture” and gender identity and write a “reflection” about what they had learned. They could attend...

This mild summer is winding down. Professors across the fruited plain are preparing for another fall semester of spewing half-baked progressive ideologies at gullible undergrads. It’s time, then, for The Daily Caller’s second annual, highly definitive list of the worst professors in America. All the professors on the first annual definitive list remain terrible, of course. But we won’t bore you with some rehash. (RELATED: Last Year’s List Of The Worst Professors In America) Instead, here are a dozen professors from this past school year who stole the headlines for being the most leftist, goofy and downright absurd.

Conservative scribe Dinesh D’Souza has to perform a lot more community service for breaking campaign-finance laws than he thought, with a federal judge saying Monday that D’Souza has to do eight hours each week for the entire five years he’s on probation and not just the eight months he was confined to a halfway house. The judge also read aloud a report from a court-appointed psychologist who calledD’Souza “arrogant”and “intolerant of others’ feelings.” Powerhouse defense attorney Ben Brafman was surprised when Manhattan federal court Judge Richard Berman clarified the sentence he handed down after D’Souza pleaded guilty last year, which...

Among the great ironies surrounding the state of academia is the continued insistence on hearing more and more “marginalized voices” and increasing “diversity” on campus, as if there is some kind of archaic conservative establishment making that difficult to do. One would likely be hard-pressed to find a more left-leaning group than college professors and admissions officers, who prioritize pulling marginalized groups out of their marginalization and adding people of diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds to campus conversations. Yet in their efforts to achieve a more egalitarian conversation, left-wing academics and their students completely ignore (at best) and marginalize (at...