Free Republic

Most people thought the Falcons had beaten the Patriots. Including the leading newspaper in Boston. Via Field Yates of ESPN.com, an early edition of the Boston Globe declared victory for the Falcons with a headline that proclaimed: A Bitter End. Appearing under that was a photo of Falcons defensive back Robert Alford returning an interception from Patriots quarterback Tom Brady to the end zone for a touchdown that put Atlanta ahead 21-0 in the first half. New England eventually would trail 28-3 in the third quarter. Inevitably a collector’s item, the erroneous conclusion proves the danger of declaring any sporting...

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington. This task is especially urgent in that large, malodorous part of the swamp known as Education. The Education Establishment makes everything murky and unproductive by an endless spew of jargon, incoherent theories, goofy methods, phony research, and new names for failed ideas. Finally, no two Americans can talk constructively about anything in education. It's as if they are talking across vast linguistic and cultural barriers, not over coffee at Starbucks. Education is now the fog-shrouded domain of dumbing down. Pervasive murkiness is a big part of the reason why so much...

Before the election, Newsweek sent bookstores advance printed copies of its magazine declaring Hillary the winner, but no such advance printed copies declaring Trump the winner With major sporting events, like the World Series or the Super Bowl, companies that manufacture t-shirts will manufacture separate shirts delcaring both teams as the winner before the event takes place. As soon as the winner is declared, they immediately start selling the shirts with the winner, and put the shirts with the loser into the trash.Before yesterday’s election, Newsweek printed up advance paper copies declaring the winner and sent them to bookstores. But they...

In her book “Credentialed to Destroy,” Robin Eubanks concludes: “In tracking both the reading wars and the math wars, it became undeniably clear that there was a consistent conscious pattern to reject what had been proven to work well for most students.” I would add, not just in reading and math but in ALL academic subjects. Apparently, our Education Establishment won’t rest until they have achieved total mediocrity, all the while pretending they have given us higher standards. Do you need Thomas Paine to tell you there is a “Crisis”? Do you need a weatherman to say which way the...

Suppose someone wanted to dumb down a country. How would they accomplish this? In fact, no research is required. We don't need to speculate about what the most brilliant Pavlonians might do. American public schools have been dumbing down students for most of a century. The best techniques have been discovered, refined, and locked in place for many years. All that’s required is frank admiration for professionals who know their job. Simply apply their methods full-strength, and wait. You will have dumber schools, dumber kids, and a dumber society. First and most important, using any possible pretext, eliminate academic content....

The crew of the USS Dewey have honored the dying wish of a Pearl Harbor survivor by allowing him on board the latest version of the destroyer he served on in the Second World War. Electrician’s Mate Second Bud Cloud was due to begin hospice care, when his friend Jennie Haskamp reached out to the Dewey's crew and asked if he could see the ship in San Diego. But when they arrived at the dock, the sailors carried the 90-year-old veteran on board and attentively listened as he shared his memories from the war.

He won re-election as a Republican governor by almost 60 percent of the vote. He loved to talk about what he called the “Teamwork Government” he had brought to his state capital — especially when it came to contrasting what he and his tight-knit band of advisers deemed as the wild success and popularity of his Teamwork Government with the chaos of Washington. He boldly went where other Republicans would not go, winning an unprecedented pledge of neutrality from the deeply liberal labor movement. Stunningly, of the 24 members of the American Federation of Labor’s endorsement board, 22 wanted to...

Wade through several hundred discussions about education. You finally realize it all comes down to one question: did all this crazy bad stuff happen by accident, or do the people at the top get up every morning scheming to keep kids semi-literate, unable to do much arithmetic, and ignorant in any direction you look? I'm fascinated by this question because, for one thing, the crazy bad stuff seems too vast to be accidental. You can’t take your eyes off it. Watching Rome burn must’ve been a similar experience. The waste, the incompetence, the reckless malice. Whatever the exact cause, finally...

[SUMMARY: All levels of education influence each other. College professors can greatly help higher education by joining the fight to improve secondary education.]-- No school is an island; each school, each sector of education, is connected to the others. Influences flow between them. It’s reasonable to think a nation’s educational institutions will rise and fall together. College professors may hope they can retreat to an ivory tower, untouched by the mediocrity in our public schools. Some professors may believe they are an intellectual aristocracy, and as such cannot be contaminated by the rabble below. However, the contamination relentlessly spreads and...

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959 We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true....

Joseph Stalin had been General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for six years in 1928, when John Dewey, "the father of modern education," toured Russia with a group of educators. Later that year, The New Republic published Dewey's Impressions of Soviet Russia and the revolutionary world. This polemic stands as a remarkable testament to progressivism's disdain for mankind, reason, and truth. It is also Dewey's most honest and concise primer on the principles of his progressive education method. Anyone prepared to defend the idea of government-controlled schooling after reading this work is perhaps beyond reach of rational argument. Dewey's...

Barack Obama did not bring us to this first circle of hell on his own. He was aided and abetted by 1) an education system with a relentless propaganda agenda, 2) a media oligopoly that has completely abrogated its First Amendment responsibility and 3) a celebrity dominated culture that is largely a product of the first two. We begin today with a look at: I. The Education System In a previous post I covered how the public education system fell under the thrall of postmodernism – simply a new name for all the old socialist/communist/relativist claptrap. Some of the...

Why has the American society changed so drastically in the past few decades? How did the feminist movement get started? How did Obama get elected? Why are there so many single parent families? Where is God?

In "Liberalism and Social Action" (Excerpts only), John Dewey explains the following: The idealistic philosophy taught that men are held together by the relations that proceed from and that manifest an ultimate cosmic mind. It followed that the basis of society and the state is shared intelligence and purpose, not force nor yet self-interest. The state is a moral organism, of which government is one organ. Only by participating in the common purpose as it works for the common good can individual human beings realize their true individualities and become truly free. The state is but one organ among many...

The beginning of a new year is often a time to look forward and look back. The way the future looks, I prefer to look back — and depend on my advanced age to spare me from having to deal with too much of the future. If there are any awards to be given to anyone for what they did in 2012, one of those rewards should be for prophecy, if only because prophecies that turn out to be right are so rare. With that in mind, my choice for the prediction of the year award goes to Bret Stephens...

Education is a mystifying field. You can study it for years but remain forever on the surface. The media, for example, endlessly discuss every aspect of public education. But nothing improves; and nobody explains why we spend so much money but get mediocre results. (Note: many pundits believe the public schools are now so bad they are a threat to this country’s survival.) Here’s my main theme these days. We must look deeper. Until we grapple with the underlying causes, nothing will improve. We have to move inside the machine and figure out how it works. One thing we know...

It is a rare Midwestern morning when a major candidate can conjure up to comparisons to three candidates from a single past presidential election. But Mitt Romney’s bizarre recent Ford Field appearance somehow managed to remind historians of not one, not two, but three major contenders in 1948’s historic presidential contest: the over-confident Thomas E. Dewey, the scrappy Harry S. Truman and the dour conservative Robert A. Taft. Now, general Mitt Romney-Tom Dewey comparisons are nothing new. Both Romney and Dewey served as moderate-to-liberal Eastern Republican governors. Both featured bland, poll-driven messages. Both had repeatedly sought the presidency (Dewey in...

The crippled law firm Dewey & Leboeuf filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Monday night and will seek approval to liquidate its business after failing to find a merger partner, marking the biggest collapse of a law firm in US history. "During the first quarter of 2012, the firm was confronted with liquidity constraints that led to the precipitous resignation of over 160 of the firm's 300 partners by May 11," the New-York based firm said. Dewey listed liabilities in the range of $100m to $500m, according to the filing. It had already terminated 433 of its 533 New...

(CNN) -- Less than 10 months from the general election, Barack Obama appears to be laying the groundwork for a reprise of Harry Truman's populist 1948 campaign. Running for a second term with a soft economy, the president's ready to tie the Republican nominee to what he characterizes as an extreme, do-nothing Congress serving the interests of the wealthy elite at the expense of the broad middle class. But if Obama is Truman, does that make GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney the next Tom Dewey? Maybe -- at least as far as public persona goes. There are several striking similarities between...

They arrive now with monotonous regularity. Another day, another announcement by a New Hampshire politician of his or her endorsement of Mitt Romney for President. Former Governor John Sununu. Former Governor and U.S. Senator Judd Gregg. Senator Kelly Ayotte. Umpteen members of the New Hampshire House and Senate. Romney's the one. A businessman. A leader. The one who will create what all America wants — jobs, jobs, jobs! Overseas, seas, seas. Yet the Romney record suggests he'll be creating the jobs overseas, seas, seas, and that's what we'll be hearing from the Obama camp from here to reelection. Oh, how...