Free Republic

Mr. Gatto (along with Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt), blew the whistle on deliberate dumbing down (on the Prussian model, crushing the imagination of children because it caused them to lose to Napoleon). Mr. Gatto said that the children of the elites have no advantage over ghetto kids "who have never eaten off a tablecloth". The opposite: elite prep schools, the Groton, Brook, St. Albans, Episcopal High & Andover, produce the idiots who presume to rule us. (Thomas Sowell waxed eloquent about how stupid top experts are.) Point in fact (from Samuel Blumenfeld, "Crimes of the Educators"): John D. Rockefeller Jr. funded...

Both left and right use a kind of meme or cartoon of the idea of John Dewey. But when you drill down into who he actually was and what he did and did not do, it gets much stranger and messier than a simple stereotype. John Dewey was primarily a philosopher, proponent of a personal school he termed "instrumentalism", heir to mainstream American philosopher William James, whose school was "pragmatism". Dewey's philosophy had much more effect on common people than most philosophies, in that he did (initially) demote commonsense instruction in reading and math, and he did try, and succeed,...

Now that’s bad judgment. A Queens father-to-be is lucky to be alive after a judge allegedly ignored his pleas to be excused from a jury pool when he complained about searing pains in his chest, court documents reveal. Nyima Dorjee, 39, of Woodside was sitting in a jury pool on a gun possession trial last week when he told a prosecutor that he was having chest pains and difficulty breathing, according to a report filed by the officer. But when the court officer informed Justice Joel Blumenfeld of the emergency, the judge insisted to him and his supervisor that the...

The recent announcement by the New York Times that it might close down the venerable Boston Globe, unless the paper can cut costs and begin to make money, came as a shock to many Bostonians. The Times bought the Globe in 1993 for $1.1 billion because it assumed that in an area with Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College and other schools of higher learning, they would have lots of readers and make lots of money. But this much-touted Athens of America, which prides itself on its intellectual history, has become, like the rest of America, a victim of...

HILLARY’S GRAMSCIAN TAKEOVER OF RELIGIONJan 21, 2005 - FreeMarketNews.comby staff reports FreeMarketNews.Com, Jan. 21, 2005 - US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at a fund-raising dinner in Boston has come out forcefully on the issue of faith-based initiatives. Other members of her party have in the past, been critical of such efforts, especially when they have emanated from the White House. However, in this little-noticed speech, Hillary [her staff’s preferred nomenclature] claimed that respect for the separation of church and state and faith-based approaches to social problems had been plagued by a “false division.” The Boston Globe reports that in...

If you are an American Jew and are inclined to vote for Sen. Kerry, you will be doing what al-Qaida and all of Israel's enemies want you to do: Get rid of George Bush. While many Muslims voted for Bush in 2000, this year they are going to vote for Kerry. Why? Because Kerry is against the war in Iraq and may not "stay the course," as we know that Bush will. Israel's enemies want Kerry to win, and that includes Yasser Arafat, plus the former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir Mohamad who said that "Jews rule the world by proxy."...

A bill (HR 1170) to prevent schools from forcing parents to drug their kids diagnosed as having Attention Deficit Disorder was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on May 21 by a vote of 425 to 1. The legislation, the "Child Medication Safety Act of 2003" (SB 1390) was introduced in the Senate by Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., where it is being kept in cold storage. The House passed the bill overwhelmingly – and with good reason. The forced drugging of American schoolchildren has become pandemic, and it is time to put a stop to this psychiatric abuse of...