Free Republic

In the age of COVID, parents are taking a stand against public school identity politics and indoctrination by removing their kids. December 19, 2020 (FRC Action) — With school shutdowns, logistical complexities with online classes, and rampant uncertainty due to the coronavirus, it's been a monumentally difficult year for students, their parents, and teachers. But there has been a silver lining in all of this: more and more parents are having their eyes opened to the leftist agenda that has embedded itself in many of our nation's public schools. Just last week, a school board in Fairfax County in northern...

Researchers from the Heartland Institute and Stopping Socialism created a list of the 50 most conservative colleges in the United States. Information such as surveys, cost, and enrollment were all considered when making the list with the goal of preventing indoctrination "with far-left ideas like socialism."Factors considered when compiling the list included surveys from Niche.com, which ranks colleges; Young America’s Foundation, Princeton Review, and experts at the Heartland Institute. Researchers also looked at enrollment and admissions information from various schools, and the cost of attendance.The top five are as follows:1.) Hillsdale College2.) Grove City College3.) College of the Ozarks4.) Liberty...

Public schools reported a decrease in the number of students for the first time in 30 years, many of them in early grades. Enrollment in Colorado public schools dropped by close to 30,000 students this school year — the first year-to-year decrease the state’s public school system has reported in more than 30 years. ... The overall drop in enrollment equates to a 3.3% decrease, with some of Colorado’s 178 school districts suffering dips of nearly 10% from enrollment during the 2019-20 school year. That could have serious consequences for the state’s public education system and districts budgets, which are...

The book (title above) by Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, was reviewed by Samuel Blumenfeld for WND, and his article: https://www.wnd.com/1999/12/2877/ was published on December 2, 1999. The source URL goes to Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt's website.

Several years ago, Project Baltimore began an investigation of Baltimore’s school system. What it found was an utter disgrace. In 19 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, out of 3,804 students, only 14 of them, or less than 1%, were proficient in math. In 13 of Baltimore’s high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math. In five Baltimore City high schools, not a single student scored proficient in math or reading. Despite these academic deficiencies, about 70% of the students graduate and are conferred a high school diploma—a fraudulent high school diploma. The Detroit Public Schools Community District scored...

Joe Biden's education transition team lead has a long history of praising China's school system—a system the Chinese Communist Party designed to indoctrinate students. Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor and the president of the California State Board of Education, has praised the Chinese Communist Party's education system for its "magical work" in establishing a strong teacher-government presence in student life. In her 2017 book Empowered Educators: How High-Performing Systems Shape Teaching Quality Around the World, she explained the centrality of the teacher to Chinese students' lives. "Teachers in China are revered as elders, role models, and those whom parents...

Consultants cash in on radical changes to curricula nationwide In July, the leadership of Los Angeles's elite Harvard-Westlake School issued a 20-page confessional about the school’s role in perpetuating "racism and injustice" and promised changes. The school, which sends dozens of kids to the Ivy League every year, will now teach 11th-grade U.S. history from a "critical race theory perspective." And diversity consultancies, which routinely charge six figures for their services, will facilitate the school's transformation at every step. On the East Coast, the wealthy Fairfax County public school district shelled out $20,000 for an hourlong speech from critical-race commentator...

Rather than dumbing down the curriculum, advisers proposed that first and second graders study ancient China and Rome and learn the names of capitals. October 22, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) -- Earlier this week, Canadian media outlets broke what we are supposed to believe is a hugely upsetting story. Curriculum advisers handpicked by Alberta’s government, they reported, had made a series of unthinkable recommendations. Professors were called upon to condemn the proposals; commentators struggled to catch a breath; the New Democrats in opposition were frankly hornswoggled. The new recommendations, it turns out, include teaching seven- and eight-year-olds about ancient Rome, ancient China,...

A French teacher who had recently shown students cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed was beheaded outside his school on Friday, in what President Emmanuel Macron called an "Islamist terrorist attack". The assailant, whose identity has not been established, was shot by police as they tried to arrest him and later died of his injuries, police said. The attacker shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greatest") as police confronted him, a cry often heard in jihadist attacks, a police source said.

Public concern about higher education is clearly widespread. The causes are many: ugly treatment of visiting speakers, a stifling political uniformity resulting in ideological extremism and hatred, and fringe radical ideas seeping out of the campuses into the wider world. Less publicly visible are numerous recent studies that tell us how little most recent graduates have benefited from higher education. They record astonishing deficiencies in reasoning, writing, reading, basic knowledge, and civics. But with all this, the public is still uncertain. Most see the symptoms but don’t quite know what to make of them, and so continue to send their...

HONOLULU (AP) — Zan Timtim doesn’t think it’s safe for her eighth-grade daughter to return to school in person during the coronavirus pandemic but also doesn’t want her exposed to a remote learning program that misspelled and mispronounced the name of Queen Liliʻuokalani, the last monarch to rule the Hawaiian Kingdom. Timtim’s daughter is Native Hawaiian and speaks Hawaiian fluently, “so to see that inaccuracy with the Hawaiian history side was really upsetting,” she said. Even before the school year started, Timtim said she heard from other parents about racist, sexist and other concerning content on Acellus, an online program...

A schoolteacher whose body, face and tongue are covered in tattoos and who has had the whites of his eyes surgically turned black said he was prevented from teaching at a French kindergarten after a parent complained he scared their child. But the teacher, Sylvain Helaine, 35, still teaches children from the age of 6 up and said that after an initial shock when they see him for the first time, his pupils see past his appearance. “All of my students and their parents were always cool with me because basically they knew me,” said Helaine, who estimated he has...

America stands in crisis today with urban rioting and political division. The crisis in America is at root a crisis in our educational system. As President Abraham Lincoln once said, "the philosophy of the school room in one generation with be the philosophy of government in the next." Taking Lincoln's quote forward 150 years, the theories of structural racism, critical race theory, Marxism, gender theory, revisionist history, queer theory, etc., are rapidly coming to bare in America's streets and the halls of government. The crisis in education has two facets: a crisis in civics and a crisis in science, technology,...

One hundred and fifty years after Maria Montessori’s birth, tens of thousands of teachers around the world still hail her innovations and educational philosophy. One of Italy’s first female doctors, Montessori applied her training as a scientist to teaching children in new ways. She upended conventional thinking about education by, among other things, letting kids freely choose from an array of classroom activities to foster their independence. Many of Montessori’s original ideas are commonplace today, especially in preschools and kindergarten classrooms: child-sized tables, hands-on games and other opportunities to play at school. Even the common practice of letting children sit...

So much hangs in the balance with this upcoming election. One crucial area of concern is the threat to recent alternate institution–building by conservatives, traditionalists, and right-libertarians. Clearly, many longstanding institutions, such as universities, no longer serve our needs; rather, they often undermine our visions of the good life, liberty, and the well ordered state. If leftists win in November, they will assuredly not just prevent further institution-building on the right, but also dismantle whatever conservatives have already built. If Trump wins, we get four more years to create, build, and prepare against whatever further erosion of our rights to...

Their professional purposes were handicapping the ordinary populations of Europe and America, to render them helpless, to ensure easy control, to regiment them for mass military service and factory employment, to eliminate competition for the accumulation of investment money, competition posed to the great financial families by average farmers, practical engineers and small entrepreneurs. We know why the deliberate dumbing down process was planned and implemented by "Educationists" in the period of 1880 to 1900, at the founding of mandatory, universal public education–with an unannounced agenda of propagating students’ educational failure–a design calculated to “crush the imagination” of school children....

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” quipped Thomas Jefferson, one of the principal advocates for then-controversial public education. The American public school system was born, not from the need for a highly-trained workforce, but from this seed of purpose. Man may be born with natural rights, but it takes education to teach him to be a responsible, self-governing citizen of a republic. By this fundamental measure, America’s public system, even before the virus upended schools across the nation, is a dismal failure. Out...

Teach About Marxism’s Evils We cannot allow another generation to emerge from our schools so ignorant of communism's horrors that they see no problem in courting, dabbling with, or even passively accepting one of history’s most noxious ideologies.
 My child’s Catholic school sent home a letter to parents this week recommending “conversations about white privilege” to encourage “compassionate hearts and confident minds.” Regurgitating the radical-left bile that fuels the fires of resentment and division will not enrich students emotionally or intellectually. Instead, Catholic schools should teach students about the evils of Marxism.Marxist apostles are orchestrating the chaos and violence plaguing...

Hello Dear Freepers! My little grandsons are almost 7 and 10. They attend a private Christian school, but we remain concerned about what is required history -- or rather what is not required. Do any of you have suggestions for age appropriate materials for teaching at home so it's fun and interesting? They are both very bright and the oldest is all about some Trump and likes to talk politics. I just don't want their history taken from them. Thanks in advance! PPM

Rather than risk another year of subpar education for your children, this fall may be the time to make a move to real homeschooling. Thanks to the coronavirus, millions of American parents have spent the last two months overseeing their children’s education from home. That experience, however, was a far cry from homeschooling, as governments merely co-opted mom and dad to execute public school curricula and schedules. True homeschooling boasts flexibility, creativity, and real education—not the social-engineering and feel-good assignments handed out in most public schools.Now so-called experts, such as Michael Chertoff, who is advising D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser on...