Free Republic

LAUSD discouraged students from celebrating Thanksgiving, instead pushing division to erode the quintessential American holiday and undermine our traditions.The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest public school district in the nation with more than 640,000 K-12 students enrolled, discouraged students from celebrating Thanksgiving this year, instead offering an alternative holiday in its place.The LAUSD Office of Human Relations, Diversity & Equity prepared a number of presentations called “Advisory Lessons” that push left-wing beliefs and are intended to be shown to students. The website also describes the need for teachers to talk to students about “power, privilege, oppression, and resistance.”Deconstructing...

Lack of representation in corporate boardrooms is not because of mythical white privilege. It is due to the breakdown of the black family.We haven’t yet reached the spectacle in which woke workplace zealots demand that NBA teams suit up at least one black, one white, one Asian, and one Hispanic player in their starting line-ups, but some private workplaces are coming close. The human resources protocols of one of the world’s largest financial investment firms are taking woke quotas to a surreal new level.According to the Times of London, hiring managers at State Street Global Advisors will need to seek...

Absent parent pushback, an updated guide used in public schools nationwide will promote abortion and gender confusion and expose kids to sordid, explicit sex education.This article contains adult-level information about sex and genitals.Last year, three leftist nonprofits created the National Sex Education Standards, a blueprint for the “sex education” of K-12 children. In practice, the standards serve as an indoctrination camp in extremist sexual ethics designed to destroy children’s innocence and undermine their attachment to the traditional, Judeo-Christian understanding of sex and marriage.About 40 percent of school districts had adopted the earlier, less extreme 2011 version of the National Sexuality...

Sad to say, the Reading Wars continue in the USA. Millions of children are made to memorize sight-words, a proven road to illiteracy. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites, continue to assert things that are the opposite of truth. For example, we are told that English isn’t a phonetic language and students have no choice but to memorize the vast English language one sight-word at a time. Nonsense, as Rudolf Flesch famously explained in his 1955 bestseller "Why Johnny Can't Read.” Why does this destructive charade go on? The official experts continue to disorient the public with incorrect theories, fake research,...

A school district in Maryland revamped its eighth grade U.S. history curriculum after reviewing how it approached topics like slavery. Eighth graders at Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the largest districts in the nation, now mostly use primary sources like letters and speeches to learn about U.S. history, instead of relying on textbooks alone. "It was really important to us to make sure that we are telling an inclusive narrative of American history," said Tiferet Ani, social studies curriculum specialist. "And so to get away from sort of the dominant narrative that's focused on presidents, on generals, you know,...

Lots of people who study K-12 education end up looking for a metaphor, a parallel, to explain the unnecessary stupidity of our public schools. Don't bother. Ayn Rand has run ahead and done the job. In 1970, Rand published a long [17k words] essay titled "The Comprachicos" (which roughly translates to the child-buyers). It lovingly examines a bit of history mentioned in a Victor Hugo novel. He wrote about vicious exploiters who mutilate and transform children into all sorts of freaks, dwarfs, gymnasts, and novelties. The techniques are analogous to those used by bonsai masters. You cut, twist, break, deprive...

Rudolf Flesch, writing in 1955, noted that “things have changed in the last 10, 20 years. For the first time in history, American parents see their children getting less education than they got themselves. Their sons and daughters come home from school and they can’t read the newspaper; they can’t spell simple words like February or Wednesday; they don't know the difference between Austria and Australia. The fathers and mothers don’t know the reason for this, but they know that something terrible has happened to their most precious dreams and aspirations…” Isn’t it beautiful the way Flesch perceives the decline...

Reflect for a few minutes on your experience in school, especially if you went to a public school. Were you taught as much as you could have been taught? Were your schools set up to increase your learning and your mastery of basic skills? When you were in elementary school, did the school teach you to read right away? If a store was selling something for $10 and now there is a 15% discount, do you know what the new price is? If you read in a book that the Civil War occurred in the middle of the 19th century,...

From John Dewey circa 1915 to Bill Ayers a century later, we hear the same progressive spiel. There must be drastic change, and perhaps much destruction and death, in order to create a more just society. A dubious trade if you stop and think about it. Lenin gave the same deal to the hapless Russians. Dewey was a professor of education; Ayers, once a famous terrorist, is now also a professor of education. So what will be the impact of their philosophy on the classrooms of America? The short answer is that children will get a lot more indoctrination, and...

When you talk about wasted talent, people immediately think of an individual wasting his or her talent. It’s always a sad story but an individual story. A person makes bad decisions. Little by little that person is on a road where he will not be able to develop his talents to the fullest. But what about a society where children have their talents wasted for them? Not by a lobotomy or by drugs. No, their talents are squandered by systematic planning and careful effort. The technical name for this is social engineering. A more popular name is “deliberate dumbing down.”...

An interesting theoretical issue in education from the beginning has been, who needs this stuff and how much of it do they need? Let's imagine a farmer sitting behind a mule plowing his field. Does he need an education? Is it wasted on him? Would life be better or worse if he knew some history, could sing some opera, or do puzzles in his head. What if he knows some Shakespeare and, as he’s going around the fields, regales the mule with speeches from Hamlet? Would this make life a little more interesting? Or would having such knowledge be a...

Local newspapers in the US don't cover education in any depth. Maybe they'll tell you superficial and trivial stuff (for example, that a superintendent was hired or fired, that there will be a meeting next month of the school board). But you won't find anything about the nuts and bolts that determine whether you child learns to read, or learns anything at all. At first glance, this non-coverage can seem to be a mystery. Everybody's interested in education, especially parents and grandparents with kids in K-12. Probably one of the most valuable things that you could tell these people is...

Okay, this is the day I do a favor for Universal Pixs. Here, free of charge, is a bold new concept for a cartoon action comedy. Not just a concept, mind you, but a high concept. That's what Hollywood loves. Okay here it is. You have this gang of no-goodniks who want to destroy the public schools in Typical Town, USA. Not just destroy the schools but get rich for doing it! Crime-wise, that's thinking big-big-big. In the opening scenes, we can clearly see that these are bad hombres with cold hearts. Their crooked grins suggest a lifetime of larceny...

What a wonderful world it would be if, for example, the people in charge of our public schools really believed in knowledge. If, for example, the National Council of Teachers of English, really loved English. If the National Council of Teachers of Math, really loved math. Alas, that does not seem to be the case. A lot of boring things are being taught in boring, incoherent ways, with the result that children learn almost nothing. Then the Education Establishment comes up with so-called “authentic assessments” to prove that the children learned a little something. There’s an easy way to tell...

Common Core is full of pretentious little gimmicks, each a potential Pandora’s box of nasty surprises. For example, there is one called Close Reading, which says that children in elementary school should read the same difficult passages over and over. I didn’t trust this thing from square one, so I wrote an analysis called “Close Reading is close to a con” (link below). This article was meant to be a strong indictment but to my surprise one of the comments was even stronger. “Domo,” the commenter, clearly has experience in the trenches. Note all the weird little twists. The Devil...

A new book, “The Art of Rube Goldberg,” has just been published. Even though Goldberg died four decades ago, his name and fame are as great as ever. His comic genius was to show simple things made immensely complicated. This image of a nuclear bomb to kill a fly, as it were, perfectly captures a lot of the evils in our modern world. Things are over-designed, over-legislated, over-regulated, over-dictated, over-everything. Except successful. Which brings us by perfect segue to our public schools. People are always saying we don’t spend enough money. Probably we’re spending twice as much as we need...

Subtitle: And Intellectuals Are Really Dumb----- The topic for today is one world government. The main group of people who claim to think this is a swell idea are intellectuals. That’s how you know intellectuals are not that intelligent. As George Orwell noted, “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.” The theory, much hyped throughout the 20th century, is that the world would be better off if it had only one government managing everything. Instead of dispersing power to many parts of the world, there would be a central tribunal composed of superior humans, wiser and more...

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...

Observe your child carefully. Does he have trouble reading even simple materials? Does he struggle with elementary arithmetic? Does your child seem to be learning very little basic knowledge? Is your child anxious and unhappy? Is he reluctant to go to school, to the point where he seems to be sick a lot? 0h oh, your child has it bad. Schoolitis. Remember that excitement and optimism when you child first went off to school. Everyone just assumed that children can quickly learn to read, write, and the rest. Then, one by one, the lights went out. Children are designed to...

(Summary: In many ways, public schools seem deliberately organized to diminish intellect, not to enlarge it.) An acquaintance sent this note: “My sister tells of teaching math to college freshmen. The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y? And no one could answer!” Remember, these students have been admitted to a community college. Presumably,...