Free Republic

A member of the local school board told me, “In the 21st century they’ll have to be able to work in groups, so we may as well teach them how to do it.” He was so confident in his pronouncement, and seemed to think there was nothing else to say. His confidence had the opposite effect on me. I heard nothing but sophistry in that little comment; and I realized, with some regret, I had to write an article explaining why Cooperative Learning is just another tawdry gimmick. First, let’s stand back and ask: did something happen in the universe,...

What Students Learn and Don't Learn By Phyllis Schlafly If you are attending college to get teacher certification, you will probably be required to attend classes on "multicultural education." This is supposed to bring diversity to the classroom and prepare teachers to teach pupils of various ethnic or national backgrounds. The textbooks in these courses typically include Teachers as Cultural Workers by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian socialist who preached that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed. Other required readings teach that Americans are an institutionally racist society and are designed to train teachers to create political radicals to...

The Khan Academy has its roots in a series of educational YouTube videos that founder Sal Khan began making several years ago to tutor his cousin. The videos struck a chord among those who came across them, Sinha said. As the videos became increasingly popular, the organization got a big break last fall, when it received a total of about $3.5 million in grants from Google and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The nonprofit Advertisement now has a Mountain View office and a half-dozen staff members. It's still attracting attention -- NBC Nightly News recently featured the program and...

The Grand Rapids Press recently interviewed public school teachers who asserted that their profession is losing respect and they are treated like scapegoats. Michigan Capitol Confidential looked at some of the comments made by the teachers and then examined what the typical compensation and benefits are for educators in their district with similar years of experience. Caledonia Public Schools: Quote to newspaper: “It used to be that teachers were treated with respect,” said Pat Gillies, a physical education teacher and coach at Caledonia High School. “I've been doing this 15 years, and I've seen a lot of changes. I just...

Andy Ferguson, one of America’s most engaging and perspicacious journalists, has not — as André Malraux said of Whittaker Chambers — returned from the hell of college admissions with empty hands. In Crazy U, his chronicle of his son’s senior year of high school — a year of college visiting, applications, essay writing, open-house attending, interviewing, financial-aid seeking, and waiting, waiting, waiting — is by turns hilarious, shrewd, and revealing. The “crazy” in the book’s title refers to our national obsession with college — a little piece of insanity to which Ferguson is more prone than most. Preoccupied by his...

A recent post about a new book by Denise Eide called “Uncovering the Logic of English” prompted more than 80 comments. One person in particular objected that phonics was not the entire answer, and argued that Sight-Words were easy to learn, and that many people read this way. I don’t think so. So I am always trying to figure out CLEVER NEW WAYS to explain this mess to all the confused parents out there, and the confused teachers in the schools. This new article points out quite simply that reading, as described and prescribed by the so-called experts in Whole...

Unionized teachers outnumber other government workers and run the schools in every state; why do we keep on accepting their decades of miserable results? A careless airline pilot, a lazy waitress, a crash-prone cabdriver, an unproductive salesman, an innumerate cashier will all have to find other work; poor teachers keep teaching and receiving raises as years go by and kids don't learn. Of course; they, with their unions, run the show. Adam Smith prophesied when he wrote The Wealth of Nations, saying of professors in 1776: If the authority to which he is subject resides in the body corporate, the...

The last two years have been another reminder that education is not equivalent to competence, intelligence or experience, let alone wisdom, as an administration of people who have hardly held actual jobs outside of academia have proven that they are very good at assigning blame and conducting internal rivalries, and absolutely terrible at everything else. William F. Buckley famous opined that he would "sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University". We have spent the last two...

Don’t Tell the Children: Homeschoolers’ Best-Kept Secret BY SHERRY EARLY Homeschoolers are a rather independent lot, almost cantankerously so. So to say that all homeschoolers do, well, anything, would be a mistake. However, I would venture to say that most homeschoolers love books. For most, books are the primary educational resource, although computers are running a close second these days. But don’t tell the children. You see, my homeschooled children and those of my homeschooling friends haven’t been let in on the secret that Books Are School. They sort of think our house is furnished with wall-to-wall books just...

Anne Gebhardt’s kids are learning about geography -- in her dining room in Bedford, Texas. It’s not your typical schoolhouse, but it’s one that Gebhardt says is serving her six children well. "We can teach our religious values to our children freely,” says Gebhardt. “We can teach anything that we want." Gebhardt is part of a growing trend. Across the county, an estimated 1.5 million children are home schooled and that number's growing. In the span of eight years, home schooling has grown nationally by almost 75 percent. The reasons parents choose to home school vary. According to the National...

“This is a very disturbing video about how our high school students are being brainwashed by Moslems in favor of Islam because our textbook publishers, school principals and teachers do not have the knowledge about Islam to know what is true and what is false. The textbooks are loaded with false positive statements about Islam and false negative statements about Christianity and Judaism.”

Actively recalling information from memory beats elaborate study methodsPut down those science text books and work at recalling information from memory. That's the shorthand take away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. "Our view is that learning is not about studying or getting knowledge 'in memory,'" said Purdue psychology professor Jeffrey Karpicke, the lead investigator for the study that appears today in the journal Science. "Learning is about retrieving. So it is important to make retrieval practice an integral part of the learning process." Educators...

Forget America’s spending crisis. Ignore America’s education crisis. The latest teaching tool to show up in America’s classrooms is the Apple iPad, a product that many educators seem to view as the magic potion that will ignite a lifetime of learning for our nation’s students. At Roslyn High School on Long Island where the first 47 iPads were handed out to students several weeks ago, the school district apparently aims to provide iPads to all 1,100 students, according to the New York Times. “It allows us to extend the classroom beyond these four walls,” noted English teach Larry Reiff, who...

AZ's ban on racist and treasonous "ethnic studies" courses in schools takes effect Jan 1st. NPR talks to both sides but fails to tell viewers what is actually taught. Find out in this expose by former (Hispanic) teacher John Ward of what La Raza and MEChA did to the Tucson schools: http://bit.ly/hrHPJY. Kudos to AG-elect Tom Horne and Jan Brewer for stopping this anti-American travesty. YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIhjTHq-DgwStand With Arizona Facebook Page

A Conservative’s Radical Reform Plan for American Education - Three Modest Proposals "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected." – G. K. Chesterton In 1984, following the publication of A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, a publication of the National Commission on Excellence in Education, I attended an education seminar in which speaker after speaker kept demanding more to address the problems outlined in the study: more money, more school days during the year, longer school days. Then one speaker got...

There are two ways to teach children to read. 1) Whole Word enthusiasts say that children must memorize the shapes of words one by one, just as the Chinese memorize their ideograms. This is the wrong way. English has far too many words for this approach ever to be considered. Even if an industrious child could memorize 2,000 word-shapes (which is extremely difficult and takes MANY years), that child would still be functionally illiterate. The vast majority of the English language remains unknown. Just as bad, words the child supposedly knows are rarely known with automaticity. Sight-word readers typically stumble,...

A New York Times "Learning Network" graphic informs us that under the proposed Obama-GOP tax and spending compromise, "rates will not change for at least two years for anyone." Wow. Somebody at the Learning Network needs to tell the Old Gray Lady's beat reporters, editorial board, and opinion columnists. Just today, reporter Helene Cooper, in noting how Vice President Joe Biden is playing a "bigger role" in the administration (translation: picking up the pieces from President Obama's disastrous ongoing alienation of anyone and everyone, friend and foe alike), twice refers to the compromise as involving "tax cuts." Cooper's defenders may...

November 19, 2010 'Reform Math' By Jason and Genevieve McNew Pay attention to what our children are being taught. Not even simple arithmetic is safe from progressive stupidity. Apples and peaches make great neighbors. Here in "upper" Adams County, Pennsylvania (also the seat of Gettysburg and the battlefields), there are twenty thousand acres of fruit trees. Many businesses are closed on Sundays, and "traffic" consists of getting stuck behind a combine or waiting for the flock of mallards that live behind the 7-11 to finish crossing Route 394. I have often compared it to Mayberry. We moved here in June...

(Television series proposal, submitted to History Channel, Discovery Channel, A&E, Learning Channel, Disney, et al, by Word-Wise Productions.) Marketing context: American public education has been dumbed down, neutered, rendered dull and boring. Little is taught. One thing especially is not taught. History. There is thus an unfed hunger for History real, raw, and revelatory. Everything that makes children and adults love History has been eliminated from History. Starting in the 1920s, progressive educators used a gimmick called Social Studies to constrict the teaching of History. Less was taught, and taught in a less interesting way. Throughout the 20th century History...

It is news to no one that our educational system sucks. American students are consistently out-performed by students in other countries year after year. Why? Liberals, progressives, socialists, communists, “compassionate” conservatives (i.e., neocons, RINOs, liberal Republicans) , teacher unions, and other leftist groups would like you to believe that it is some combination of bad schools, teachers, and financing. The solution, as they see it, is to engage in a game of Three Card Monty where students are shuffled from schools that are “failing” them, to schools that will allow them to “succeed” –as though success is a magical elixir...