Free Republic

On August 5, German Catholic author Mathias von Gersdorff posted some important information about an upcoming event in Rome on his own website: “In the meantime, the liberal camp prepares another conference in Rome, to be held on 10-12 September 2015, and which is to deal with the themes of the Family Synod of this Fall.” And he continues: However, this time, it is not organized by the Germans, the Swiss, and the French. They had already convoked and hosted a similar conference at the end of May 2015, which had caused noticeable irritations. One even considered it to be...

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in education continue to crumble when they encounter reality. “Not a single junior at Seattle’s Nathan Hale High School showed up to take this spring’s Smarter Balanced tests (SBAC—one version of the COMMON Core standardized tests), according to a school district spokeswoman,” according to the editors at Rethinking Schools. “Earlier this year, a group of teachers, administrators, parents, and students had agreed to boycott the standardized tests, but Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Larry Nyland threatened teachers with the loss of their teachers licenses if they didn’t administer the test.” “Under this pressure, the school’s...

Despite the left’s efforts to convince us that Obama’s relationship with William Ayers was irrelevant... the facts that prove otherwise are plenty and can no longer be ignored. To understand the agenda (and lies) at the core of our new national standards, you have to go back to why many on the right were concerned about Obama’s relationship with Bill Ayers to begin with – their work on education reform. The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES), a progressive education reform model rooted in the social justice pedagogy of John Dewey and Paulo Freire, was expanded by President Obama and communist...

The new academic standards known as the Common Core emphasize critical thinking, complex problem-solving and writing skills, and put less stock in rote learning and memorization. So the standardized tests given in most states this year required fewer multiple choice questions and far more writing on topics like this one posed to elementary school students: Read a passage from a novel written in the first person, and a poem written in the third person, and describe how the poem might change if it were written in the first person.

THE two chairs of the government’s review into the national curriculum fear our schools are becoming too “kumbaya” and overrun with “progressive, new-age fads” that are hurting our children. Australia is sliding behind a number of countries in education standards including Singapore, South Korea, Finland and Hong Kong — a development which Professor Ken Wiltshire and Doctor Kevin Donnelly’s report blames on the fact students have been handed autonomy in the classroom and that wishy-washy ideals like “child-guided learning” and “collaborative negotiated goal-setting” are overtaking the traditional model of teachers imparting knowledge. ..... Professor Wiltshire said he was dismayed by...

Walker has courted the homeschool community for years and, as he inches toward a presidential run, those relationships could prove more important than ever. When Scott Walker talks about education—whether he’s in the parking lot of Office Products Co. in Eau Claire, Wisc. or on stage at Disney World in front of deep-pocketed, business-friendly donors—he mentions homeschooling. Perhaps more than any other 2016er, Walker is consistent and vocal in acknowledging that homeschooling is a valid form of education—and this support could pay huge political dividends in the Republican primary. He mentioned it in his 2015 budget address, in his 2014...

In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions. Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body...

Over the last decade, states have made massive cuts to higher education, with average state support falling from $9,729 per student in 2001 to $6,815 in 2011. While a large share of the blame for these cuts can be pinned on the financial crisis and subsequent recession, some of the decline is due to a deliberate effort to eviscerate public higher education. For instance, Bobby Jindal plans to savage higher education spending in Louisiana to the tune of $141.3 million, or about 12 percent of the state’s higher education budget, to pay for tax cuts. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is...

Traditional education has taken a real beating the last 75 years. The entire Education Establishment lined up to demonize everything that teachers and schools had done for many thousands of years. The result is the vastly dumbed down classrooms we have now in K-12 education.But how, at this point, can we resurrect a vanishing paradigm? As we will see, there is one example left, as if preserved in a time capsule.Apparently, giving children lots of knowledge is what our socialist professors hate about traditional education. So these ideologues came up with a parade of insults, all designed to stop schools...

"Cardinal Brandmüller: Advocates for changing Catholic teaching on marriage are ‘heretics’ – even if they are bishops" "...Can the Church deal with the topic of marriage in a pastoral manner that is different from the continual teaching of the Church? Can the Church at all change the teaching itself without falling herself into heresy? It is evident that the pastoral practice of the Church cannot stand in opposition to the binding doctrine nor simply ignore it. In the same manner, an architect could perhaps build a most beautiful bridge. However, if he does not pay attention to the laws of...

Under a new bill, California’s public high schools could be required to offer ethnic studies classes as part of an effort to build cultural understanding.

Dr. Sandra L. Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, recently said that Renaissance Learning’s latest report revealed that a large number of college freshman are reading at a seventh-grade level. Stotsky, who received her Ed. D. from Harvard, is a well-known and respected figure in the world of education. She served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10 and, along with colleague James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, refused to approve Common Core’s standards, which she called “inferior.” In a recent interview with Breitbart Texas, Stotsky said: We are spending billions of dollars trying to...

A Columbia High School biology teacher killed and slaughtered a rabbit in front of 16 sophomores to show them how livestock is processed into food, Allison Westfall, the Nampa School District spokeswoman, said Thursday. The matter has been turned over to the district’s human resources department, Westfall said. She would not speculate on what might happen to the teacher because it is a personnel matter. She said she didn’t have the name of the teacher. The teacher expressed remorse for his action in class on Monday, Westfall told the Idaho Statesman. “That is not part of the biology curriculum,” she...

It so happened that an 11-year-old boy came home from school one day and told his parents that the first European white people who came to America were so mean that they tried to kill the Indians by giving them blankets with smallpox germs. The boy’s father tried to use this as a teachable moment. He asked his son to think if that made sense, even if the first white settlers were that evil. How would they avoid getting smallpox themselves? The boy then let it be known that the American Constitution was written by the Iroquois Indians. The father...

Imagine a teacher asks you to solve this question: 568-293. Depending on your age you might do one of three things... ...Third, you might use the new common core was to subtract, which is much simpler, with only... 10 steps. First, you would take the 200 out of the 293, and save the 93 for later. Then you would take 568 and subtract 200 from it. Then you'd take the remaining 368 and you would subtract 60 from it, because you are taught that, for some reason, you cannot simply subtract 90 from 368. 368-60 equals 308. Then you subtract...

Every year it gets worse. It seems that the community college that both my daughters have attended is steadily becoming a hotbed of liberal teachers. This time it's an America hating, military hating, obama loving history professor. Im sick of this crap and I'm making a stand. I wanted to get with the freeper brain trust to plan the best course of action. I havent done anything. I suspect if I complain to the dean nothing will happen, because I think the nut doesn't fall far from the tree. I'm sure someone out there has experience dealing with this sort...

[Summary: Decline in American public schools is best explained by the far-left politics of our Education Establishment. These people prefer mediocrity.]-- Historically, Socialism and Communism were sometimes synonyms. But generally there was a sense that Socialism was softer. If you had enough power, you moved on to Communism, which was more coercive. One intellectual summed up the matter this way. Socialists persuade you with speeches. Communists persuade you with guns. In the days after the Russian Revolution, American leftists expended billions of hours trying to describe the perfect society. Fundamentally, all the debates turned on how much power the central...

ORLANDO – A federal judge has given a secular organization the green light to distribute more atheistic and anti-Christian materials to Florida public school students, in spite of the materials’ graphic content and offensive language. As previously reported, the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) learned last year that a Christian ministry had made Bibles available to Orlando high school students on “Religious Freedom Day.” To counter the Bible distribution, FFRF sought permission from the school district to give students a variety of atheistic and anti-Christian materials. According to reports, the Orange County School Board permitted FFRF to distribute several books...

Many view America's education as a failure, but in at least one important way, it's been a success -- a success in dumbing down the nation so that we fall easy prey to charlatans, hustlers and quacks. You say, "Williams, that's insulting! Explain yourself." OK, let's start with a question or two. Are you for or against global warming, later renamed climate change and more recently renamed climate disruption? Environmentalists have renamed it because they don't want to look silly in the face of cooling temperatures. About 650 million years ago, the Earth was frozen from pole to pole,...

Oklahoma recently took action to protect the state's children from the federal education bureaucracy by withdrawing from Common Core. Common Core is the latest attempt to bribe states, with money taken from the American people, into adopting a curriculum developed by federal bureaucrats and education "experts." In exchange for federal funds, states must change their curriculum by, for example, replacing traditional mathematics with "reform math." Reform math turns real mathematics on its head by focusing on "abstract thinking" instead of traditional concepts like addition and subtraction. Schools must also replace classic works of literature with "informational" texts, such as...