Free Republic

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has launched a wonderful little feature that will run until Barack Obama takes the oath of office next month. They are calling it "Dear Mr. Obama" and it is a heartwarming exercise in child indoctrination and brainwashing. The Post-Gazette will be publishing letters from local students to Obama asking him for all sorts of global warming fixes, Iraq war enders, and big government programs. Sadly, it appears that the government schools these kids have been subjected to have failed to teach their charges about anything like the American system, federalism, even science seems neglected. But they SURE...

PARMA, Ohio -- A kindergarten student with a freshly spiked Mohawk haircut has been suspended by school authorities who said the hair was a distraction for other students. Michelle Barile, the mother of 6-year-old Bryan Ruda, said nothing in the Parma Community School handbook prohibits the haircut, characterized by closely shaved sides with a strip of prominent hair on top. "I understand they have a dress code. I understand he has a uniform. But this is total discrimination," she said. "They can't tell me how I can cut his hair." An administrator at the suburban Cleveland charter school first warned...

A tussle that began with a condom and a banana has morphed into all-out war at a New Jersey high school, with some parents trying to end a peer-to-peer sexual-education course taught in about 45 other public schools statewide. Parents opposed to the classes at Clearview Regional High School, in Mullica Hill, say that kids shouldn't be instructing kids about sex ---snip--- Do you want a 16-year-old boy teaching your 14-year-old daughter how to put on a condom by using a banana?" asked Lisa Westermann, whose son said the course had made him uncomfortable

In California, a summit has been called to "close the achievement gap" in government schools. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/12/MNH8T5LTC.DTL California government school warden Jack O'Connell thinks that minority students are performing poorly because of teachers' "widespread cultural ignorance." In other words, the white teachers can't relate to the black and Latino students. Now enters a man by the name of Glenn Singleton, who runs the Pacific Education Group in San Francisco. He is a consultant for government schools. They take thousands of dollars of taxpayer funds and give those dollars to this man in return for his words of "wisdom." He is the...

The National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME) is having its annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland starting today through Sunday. Now taxpayers in every state, listen up. Your money is paying for K-12 teachers from all 50 states to attend the NAME convention. The teachers can sit in on any of the workshops and determine which multicultural propaganda they would like to indoctrinate their government school with upon their return. Let's take a look at some of your workshop options: ***"The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: Dismantling White Privilege and Supporting Anti-Racist Education in Our Classrooms and Schools." Designed to help educators...

NOW @ SDSU's bake sale charges men more for the same goods Imagine going to McDonald's and hearing that, because you're a white male, you pay full price for a Big Mac. Meanwhile, the girl behind you pays three-quarters of the total amount for the same thing. NOW (National Organization for Women) @ SDSU brought that reality to San Diego State yesterday at the Aztec Center by holding a pay equity bake sale. The prices for cookies reflected the difference of pay between genders and races. "It's just to raise awareness," NOW @ SDSU Co-President Amanda Whitehead said. "A lot...

In last month's column "Academic Cesspools," I wrote about "Indoctrinate U," a recently released documentary exposing egregious university indoctrination of young people at prestigious and not-so-prestigious universities (www.onthefencefilms.com/movies.html). I said the documentary only captured the tip of a disgusting iceberg. The Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a frontline organization in the battle against academic suppression of free speech and thought, released information about what's going on at the University of Delaware, and probably at other universities as well, that should send chills up the spines of parents of college-age students. The following excerpts are taken from the...

The University of Iowa's history department and Duke's history department have a couple of things in common. Both have made national news because neither has a Republican faculty member. And both rejected the application of Mark Moyar, a highly qualified historian and a Republican, for a faculty appointment. Moyar graduated first in the history department at Harvard; his revised senior thesis was published as a book and sold more copies than an average history professor ever sells. After earning a Ph.D. from Cambridge University in England, he published his dissertation as "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965" with Cambridge University...

When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy. I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends -- most but not all of them white -- whom I've chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached...

Liberals are tremendously attached to the idea that we are apes, but are unwilling to face the fact that we humans still retain an awful lot of our ape programming. This is what led to the Christian concept of Original Sin and the Jewish concept that we are all born with both the urge to good and the urge to evil. And this programming is not identical for men and women, because behavior that enables a male chimp to pass his genes on might get a female chimp a new home in a saber-toothed tiger's stomach. Sometimes when I read...

It takes a big man to teach small children. At 6 feet 5 inches tall, Josh Reineking towers over his kindergarten students at Stephens Elementary School, but it's actually his large heart and patient, steady manner that keep his lively charges learning, and in line. It doesn't hurt that he finds it easy to laugh, and thinks on his feet. Oh, and he also doesn't mind folding up like a Swiss Army knife to fit in a kindergarten-size chair. "My friends, my friends. Hands up for a message," Reineking says quietly and firmly as his class of 5-year-olds begin squirming...

Global warming lecture at CSUF stirs controversy Science weighs against philosophy on campus By: Sylvia Masuda Issue date: 10/18/07 Section: News Posted: 10/18/07 Controversy erupted in the Cal State Fullerton science community over Tuesday's global warming lecture in the Titan Theater. Research professor and climatologist Patrick Michaels presented "Reducing the Effects of Global Warming in Southern California," a presentation which explained why global warming is not an imminent problem. The Economics Association organized the event. Over the years, science organizations have criticized Michaels for exaggerating his credentials and for pushing what they feel is a political agenda. CSUF science...

It’s not the score of a Hawkeye football game. It’s the number of Democrats versus the number of Republicans in the University of Iowa history department, and it has Iowans in an uproar. So, too, do charges published by Mark Bauerlein that left-wing bias has influenced the department’s hiring process. In response to the revelations, department chair Colin Gordon announced that the department had committed no wrongdoing, and neither he nor the university has expressed any concern about the total absence of intellectual diversity. Rarely have the hypocrisy and mendacity of academia been so thoroughly exposed as in the history...

In 1997, the National Association of Social Work (NASW) altered its ethics code, ruling that all social workers must promote social justice "from local to global level." This call for mandatory advocacy raised the question: what kind of political action did the highly liberal field of social work have in mind? The answer wasn't long in coming. The Council on Social Work Education, the national accreditor of social work education programs, says candidates must fight "oppression," and sees American society as pervaded by the "global interconnections of oppression." Now aspiring social workers must commit themselves, usually in writing, to a...

WASHINGTON -- The latest smack-down of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers should extinguish any remaining doubt that political correctness is the new McCarthyism. Summers, you'll recall, was driven out of his university post in 2005 after he suggested at a conference that gender differences might account for an underrepresentation by women in science, math and engineering. Never mind that scientific evidence suggests as much. One simply doesn't say -- ever -- that men and women aren't equal in every way. Summers' remarks were seized upon, taken out of context and misinterpreted by many, including one female biologist from MIT, who...

Whether one is on the left or right, it cannot be denied that the left has had an enormous impact on the major institutions of American society -- specifically journalism, education and the judiciary. In every poll I have seen, liberals overwhelm conservatives in academia, including the teachers' colleges, which are quite far left, and in journalism. And few deny the leftward tilt of the Supreme Court for most of the last 40 years. Former U.S. vice president Al Gore accepts the award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Interactive Television during the 59th Primetime Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, California...

Joel Klein vows probe of Queen's school's 911 edict BY JESS WISLOSKI, CARRIE MELAGO and ERIN EINHORN DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS Tuesday, September 11th 2007, 4:00 AM Schools Chancellor Joel Klein yesterday vowed to investigate a Queens high school policy that may have cost a teen girl her health. The Daily News reported yesterday an official at Jamaica High School barred school deans from calling 911 in an emergency - just weeks before 14-year-old Mariya Fatima suffered a stroke her family says could have been less devastating. Klein called this a violation of Department of Education policy and instructions he...

Like many public school parents, my wife and I spent the last days of summer sorting through our kids’ complicated school supply lists: Color-coded binders, color-coded notebooks, color-coded index cards. But even we were surprised how far things have gone at Lawrence High School: Color-coded kids. Superintendent Wilfredo Laboy has divided the students into six separate “schools” based on curriculum. The dress code goes even further, requiring students in each “school” to wear matching shirts. Kids studying the arts wear red, for example. The math kids are brown shirts while the “humanities and leadership development” (whatever that is) wear white....

No Child Left Behind has seen better days. Under attack from both the right and left, President Bush’s signature education achievement might not survive if some members of Congress get their way. House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) offered a 435-page legislative draft last month that rewrites several provisions and guts the few measures in the law that limited-government conservatives support. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants to go one step further and rename the law to something other than No Child Left Behind.So not only does the Bush administration face the prospect of significant policy changes, it could...

An article in my local newspaper recently covered the story of a young 14-year old Muslim girl, Yasmeen Flamra from Cliffside Park, N.J., with a heading "Schools become Muslim friendly." Yasmeen had a simple request: All she wanted to do was to go off by herself for a few moments to pray. I checked with Google and found that this story had been covered pretty much throughout the nation. Her family contacted a Muslim advocacy group, The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asked the school district to reconsider its initial denial of the request. When Christian children cannot bend their...