Free Republic

While one can read recent works by respected academics such as Victor Davis Hanson, Thomas Sowell, and Walter Williams regarding modern Leftist speech codes, thought police, white privilege and other assorted and dangerous nonsense, I want to make the effort here, at the risk of using a Leftist term, to likewise show how truly regressive the modern Left is when it comes to simple reason and our freedom to think. Background. During England’s tumultuous 17th Century, the freedom to use one’s reason to sort out man’s relationship to God and country emerged in a whirlwind. This freedom collided with Stuart...

There’s nothing unprecedented about COVID-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain: scaled up for today’s population, the equivalent of 42,000, while the UK’s (statistically flawed) COVID death total now stands at 46,000. Globally, the Asian flu was vastly more lethal, causing between two and four million deaths. The Hong Kong flu of 1968-69 also slew up to four million people worldwide, including 80,000 Britons. Yet in both instances, life went on. What is unprecedented: never has a virus been so oversold. Why, I’d like to sign on with COVID’s agent. What...

Senator Chuck Schumer now says schools must open in the fall. This is after weeks of calling for schools to close.

Credential inflation refers to an increase in the education credentials required for a job—for example, a job that used to be done by high school graduates but now requires new hires to have a college degree. Credential inflation has been going on for decades. One of the earliest mentions of it is in professor Randall Collins’ book The Credential Society, published in 1979 and republished last year; two recent studies give a sense of how widespread it has become. The first, a study by Burning Glass, looked at the education level of current workers compared to the education level listed...

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned world leaders that the coronavirus pandemic has led to an unprecedented disruption in education across the world and impacting millions of children. Guterres’s remarks came in a recorded video released on Tuesday along with a 26-page policy brief over “education during COVID-19 and beyond.” “The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the largest disruption in education ever. In mid-July, schools were closed in more than 160 countries, affecting over 1 billion students. At least 40 million children worldwide have missed out on education in their critical pre-school year,” Guterres said. The U.N. secretary-general said that...

I haven't had a decent nights' rest in a long time, primarily because my mattress is old.

“A daily drumbeat of announcements from colleges – large and small, public and private, on the coasts and in the heartland – that they are postponing opening dates.” This is going to be such a mess. Students are going to have to make back-up plans in case schools change their policy at the last minute.

Convinced that the normal standards of grammar are racist, the Rutgers University English Department is revising its grading policy for student essays. Under the new rules any written paper containing any one of the 26 letters of the alphabet will earn a "D" grade. If any of these letters spell out a legitimate word the paper will earn a "C" grade. If any of these words result in a coherent sentence the paper will earn a "B" grade. If a paper contains more than one coherent sentence it will earn an "A" grade. The new standards have already been denounced...

Columbia University is holding a five week long series of lectures for white students on “deconstructing whiteness.� The workshop series is titled “From Ally to Accomplice at Columbia: Working Group for Examining and Deconstructing Whiteness to Mitigate Racial Trauma.� According to the Facebook page for the series, the aim is “for white-identified students to engage in exploration of their white identities and build community and accountability around deconstructing whiteness and white privilege to facilitate the development of an anti-racist lens.�The description adds that it “will not be a support group for white students. Nor will it be comfortable or...

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told a House Select Subcommittee hearing that "there are significant public health consequences if schools do not reopen this Fall." "The belief that young people are safer at home than at school is not scientifically correct," Redfield said. "The risk of COVID infection for the K through 12 student is far lower than the risk of having to do without face-to-face instruction. While the schools have been closed we've seen an increase in drug use disorder as well as suicide in adolescent individuals. We've also seen a rise in domestic abuse. On top of this...

Residents have been calling police after seeing college students outdoors at private homes not wearing masks and too close to each other, Town Manager Paul Bockelman told the Town Council during Monday’s meeting. “Many of our year-round residents are seeing smallish parties, by Amherst standards. But people are starting to call and say there’s a party at this private house and they’re not social distancing, and they’re not wearing masks,” Bockelman said. “Normally, that person might have just walked by or driven by that household as being a normal student party — but in this day and age it’s a...

When a political science lecturer at UCLA read to his class Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and showed clips from a documentary on racism, he found himself in hot water. The reason: Both the letter and the documentary included the N-word. Many students complained, which in turn pitted UCLA against the Department of Education. The latter said that targeting the instructor was a direct violation of UCLA’s own policies protecting academic freedom. But, instead of backing the instructor, UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office has launched a review, according to The Wall Street Journal. This is a rare...

49 Chicago police officers were injured by rocks, pipes, and fireworks while trying to defend the statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. Despite their valiant defense of the man who discovered America, Mayor Lori Lightfoot sided with the BLM mob and had the statue removed anyway. 3 law enforcement personnel with the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service may face permanent eye injuries after having lasers shined in their eyes by Black Lives Matter rioters. 12 police officers were injured in Seattle by attackers throwing rocks, bottles, and fireworks.

We are all this kid. There is not a single person reading this post right now who has not shared this experience. Some of us may have shared this experience longer ago than others, but the experience was still shared. You get your first job. For me, it was McDonalds. It's your first time making money outside of getting an allowance from your parents. It's your first taste of adulthood. You do the math in your head, multiplying how much you are making by how many hours you worked. Two weeks later, you get your first paycheck. You're happy. You're...

(snip) Via Citizen Free Press -- Oberlin Assistant Professor of Politics and Comparative American Studies Jenny Garcia: "Even when there’s violence, protests can make it a more salient issue and provide greater pressure on elected officials and candidates." "Protests matters and when we see the destruction of buildings, when we see violence either by police or by protesters themselves we actually see greater response by elected officials… what we do know is that elected officials respond to pressure," she said.

School systems can provide what they’re currently offering for well under half of their revenues. As the coronavirus pandemic continues, the discussion about returning to school is fraught, filled with questions about public health, what kids and families need, and how to operate socially distanced schools. Confronted with these challenges, nine of the nation’s 15 largest school systems, and thousands of others, have defaulted to full-time remote learning. At the same time, public-school officials have demanded massive additional financial support, whether or not their schools reopen. Setting aside the reopening debate for the moment, let’s focus on a smaller but...

I just finished a fascinating book, The Recovery of the West, by polymath Englishman Michael Roberts. Roberts became famous as a poet, but was trained as a scientist and spent much of his life as a teacher. Brief history of grading The book was published in 1941. A teacher in a typical English school at that time would be very familiar with individual differences in ability because grading practices were unforgiving. After every exam, pupils’ “marks” would typically be posted outside the classroom so that everyone could see just how good he or she was in relation to everybody else....

The Wisconsin athletic department is projected to lose $100 million in revenue if the 2020 college football season is not played amid the COVID-19 pandemic, per athletic director Barry Alvarez in a letter published on uwbadgers.com (h/t ESPN's Mark Schlabach). That $100 million figure is in addition to the $12 million that the department has already lost, per Alvarez, who laid out what the department has done to cut costs. "To this point, we have taken many steps over the past few months to minimize the impact of a cancelled winter postseason and spring season. We have instituted pay decreases...

On July 4 at Mt. Rushmore, President Trump praised Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, and Louis Armstrong; it was a significant political and cultural speech, comparable to Trump’s speech extolling Western civilization at Warsaw in 2017. Trump also ordered a federal project called the Garden of National Heroes, mandating the artwork to be classical and “not abstract or modernist.” On the same day, The Washington Post published an article by a professor urging Americans to consider the global legacy of 1776 as furthering “white supremacy.” The Post wasn’t the only one. While major news outlets focused on the evils of America,...

Wokeistan’s premiere propaganda organ, The New York Times, would like all you white parents to stop thinking about what’s best for your children. Really, don’t you know how RAAAACIST that is? Writer Clara Totenberg Green, described as a social and emotional learning specialist in Atlanta Public Schools, starts out noting the numerous school districts who have decided to keep schools closed, ostensibly because of covid19, and how parents are responding with forming small support groups among themselves. These groups, dubbed “Pandemic Pods”, are ad hoc responses to what many parents considered substandard instruction when schools closed over four months ago....