Free Republic

A bruising battle over academic freedom is being waged in Texas, where the legislature is poised to give the state power to screen faculty, programs and courses in one of the country’s largest public university systems, and experts say the outcome could reverberate for higher education nationwide.Conservative lawmakers, who control all levers of government, are advancing a measure they say would hold institutions more accountable and ensure curriculum is “free from ideological bias.” Faculty could be removed or face civil penalties for violations. Schools that fail to comply could be barred from spending state funds.“Higher education should be about teaching...

Kids aren’t reading anymore. That’s the conclusion of a recent article by The Associated Press noting that children are not only reading less for fun — only 14% say they do so daily compared to 27% in 2012 — but they are also not getting assigned actual books much in class either. Per the AP, “In many English classrooms across America, assignments to read full-length novels are becoming less common. Some teachers focus instead on selected passages — a concession to perceptions of shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare for standardized tests and a sense that short-form content will prepare...

Florida’s public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting “woke ideologies” in higher education. These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university system’s Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements. The state’s involvement in a curriculum process — which has historically been left to universities — is riling academics and students who oppose...

For almost 400 years America has seen its citizens educating their children and themselves, though both the scope, structure and quality of education has changed somewhat during that time. For much of the history of the United States, education of children took place primarily at home, often along with private schools for some, and locally managed and supported schools for others. Education included the general ethos of Christianity and Biblical morality as well as academic subjects. The New England Primer and later, the nation-wide McGuffey's Readers (120+ million copies) were the primary instruments of education, and in helping to form...

The local teachers’ union encourages students to resist “Zionist bullies.” Portland, Oregon, has earned its reputation as America’s most radical city. Its public school system was an early proponent of left-wing racialism and has long pushed students toward political activism. As with the death of George Floyd four years ago, the irruption of Hamas terrorism in Israel has provided Portland’s public school revolutionaries with another cause du jour: now they’ve ditched the raised fist of Black Lives Matter and traded it in for the black-and-white keffiyeh of Palestinian militants. I have obtained a collection of publicly accessible documents produced by...

The proposed curriculum overhaul was released a week after the Texas GOP proposed requiring the Bible to be taught in public schools. School districts that opt to use them will get more funding.

The United States Military Academy at West Point is introducing a new curriculum that includes courses on “deconstructing patriotism,” “cross-dressing in the military,” and other topics related to gender norms and representation. These courses are part of a broader initiative by the Biden regime to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) propaganda into the curriculum over duty, honor, and country. Former Navy SEAL and Representative Scott Taylor (R-VA) tweeted his concerns after the curriculum was reportedly shared with him, stating, “This was sent to me, classes at U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Quite sure China and Russia are not...

Supporters of Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner, members of the Orange Unified School District's Board of Trustees, who are targets of a recall campaign by a coalition of politicians and public employees' unions, rallied in Orange, California during the first weekend in March, 2024. Ledesma and Miner are conservatives who favor academically rigorous curricula, parent's rights and charter schools and oppose the ideological indoctrination of students. The rallies took place in Orange, on Chapman Avenue on Friday, March 1, and at the traffic circle in the heart of Old Town Orange the next day. On Sunday, March 3, they held...

The culture war has come to the streets of Anaheim, California, where two conservative members of the Orange Unified School District Board of Trustees are fighting an attempt to recall them. Rick Ledesma and Madison Miner are outspoken defenders of parental rights and of keeping parents informed about their children’s health and safety. They support the adoption of rigorous scholarly and academic curricula. They seek to prevent overtly racist and divisive ideology from seeping into the classroom and also to keep sexually explicit materials out of school libraries. And they support charter schools. In doing so, they have ruffled feathers...

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it.... But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.... Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and...

On January 13, 2024, more than a thousand people led by A. J. Hurley of the White Rose Resistance, a Christian activist group, gathered in Miller Park in Fontana, California to rally in favor of parents’ rights. They demanded that the Fontana school district adopt a parent notification policy in which children could not be socially transitioned without parental consent. They also called out Planned Parenthood for its sex education curricula related to sexual identity. After rallying in the park, the crowd marched through the streets of Fontana in a noisy but orderly demonstration.

Shelby Kretz, a teacher who runs an organization that helps teach K-6 children about social justice issues, has called parental rights laws “dangerous.” In a recent TikTok video shared online, Kretz said “parents rights in education can put LGBTQ+ youth in danger.” “Do you know if there are any bills or school board candidates in your area that are focused on parents’ rights in education? If so there’s a good chance they might be putting trans in LGBTQ plus youth in danger,” she says in the video.

One would have to be living under a rock to ignore the sickening carnage of October 7, the latest outrage in a horrific terrorism campaign that Hamas has been waging against innocent civilians in Israel for over thirty years. In 1993, all but a tiny sliver of American society, the containing its most radical and foreign elements, recognized Hamas as a monumental evil that must be eradicated without equivocation or regret.But thanks to the toxic brew of mass immigration and K-12 indoctrination, the America of 2023 is a very different place. Now, college professors applaud bestial acts of rape, murder,...

The following is adapted from a talk delivered on September 12, 2023, at the Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington, D.C., campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series. The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandize on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of “gender-affirming care.” The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story...

Over the Christmas weekend, Chicago surpassed the 750-murder mark for 2016. But as blacks lay dying on the streets of Chicago’s South and West Sides, a Black Lives Matter offshoot is more interested in traveling overseas to learn “resistance” from terrorists. The Dream Defenders bills itself as “an uprising of communities in struggle, shifting culture through transformational organizing.” But an investigation conducted by the Haym Salomon Center reveals the group’s embrace of anti-Semitism and collaboration with a State Department-designated terror group. In August, Black Lives Matter singled out Israel for condemnation, declaring it an “apartheid” state engaged in “genocide.” These...

The current education system is changing and many are of the opinion that it's not for the better. Parents are reconsidering their decision to send their children to school and are opting for homeschooling as a more convenient and quality alternative. A former teacher, who goes by @mindfull.mentor on TikTok, smartly shared a series of videos explaining what children would be missing out on if they were homeschooled. Contrary to the train of thought, the videos call out the exhausting practices and systems schools follow, indicating why homeschooling is the better pick. The former teacher said, “If you decide to...

The Biden administration has funneled more than $730 million to a United Nations organization for refugee assistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that harbored personnel who have incited violence against the Jewish people *** The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) has been accused in recent years of employing educators who “regularly call to murder Jews” and teach from textbooks “that glorify terrorism, encourage martyrdom, demonize Israelis and incite antisemitism,” according to a March joint report by the non-governmental organization UN Watch and the Israeli non-profit Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education. The...

In this video I discuss the new grading standards being pushed in Portland Public Schools which would essentially destroy education completely.

A Colorado public school diversity teacher said in private emails that he was struggling with the urge not to "burn things down" which didn't represent equity, according to records reviewed by Fox News Digital. Casey Menninger is a diversity teacher in Jefferson County Public School District's Foster K-8 school. Menninger was involved in crafting the curriculum for other teachers to present to their classes. Menninger wanted classes to be focused on bad things done by White people.

A divided Georgia school board upheld a decision to fire a fifth-grade teacher who read a picture book to her students about gender identity amid ongoing discussions nationwide about the content kids are exposed to in the classroom. Katherine Rinderle, who has been employed as a teacher for a decade, read the book My Shadow is Purple to her students at Due West Elementary School in Cobb County in March, prompting complaints from parents. The book uses colors to represent the concept of gender identity, as the main character's shadow is purple, but for others, their shadow is blue or...