Free Republic

Samuel Blumenfeld is one of the country's few great educators. His book of essays explains just about every aspect of our problems. Highly recommended. ---------------------------------------- "Concerned About Education? Read this! (Review is for "The Victims of Dick and Jane"): --------------- I urge everyone to read at least one book by Samuel Blumenfeld; and this may be the best place to start. There are 18 essays, mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s. You can read them in any order. You will find that this book is an excellent guide to the treacheries and nonsense everywhere evident in education. Blumenfeld is...

"My Amazon reviews are mostly of books that try to explain the problems we see in public schools...I've kept the comments here really brief, so this list can be a gateway for people who want to learn more about education....If a book seems tempting to you, please see my 'customer review' and the other customer reviews, and decide from there."--------- A Listmania! list by Bruce Deitrick Price (Improve-Education.org/Norfolk, Va.)

The Texas Curriculum Massacre What a conservative rewriting of history tells us about how Texans view the world, which is, for them, Texas. Texas Stands Alone 165 years after it joined the U.S., Texas remains forever ruggedly individualistic By Evan Smith | NEWSWEEK Published Apr 16, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Apr 26, 2010 Given the redness of my home state of Texas at the moment—more crimson than rosé—you'd be forgiven for dismissing the recent headline-making flap over revisions to our high-school social-studies curriculum as pure politics. A near majority of the duly elected 15 members of the State...

Are teachers unions to blame for failing schools? This was the question debated last week on NPR's Intelligence Squared. At the beginning of the debate, less than half the audience believed teachers unions should be faulted for poor-performing schools, but by the close of the program, an astonishing 68 percent believed school employee unions contributed to the problem.

Last week I posted background on FreeRepublic about a column published elsewhere titled “Education as Neurotoxin.” This column tries to explain why the US has 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Were these people born this way? Or had bad education methods produced the impairments? Someone left a half-dozen irate comments insisting I was “delusional,” “illogical,” “irrational,” “nonsensical,” etc. I’m not sure which part offended him most, 1) that sight-words cause mental problems; 2) or that the far-left could knowingly promote the use of destructive educational methods. This commenter embraced the Dolch Dogma that kids must memorize 300...

The US is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. Why? Explaining this is VERY difficult. My cynical view is that the professors of education came up with bogus theories, and then wrapped them inside many layers of sophistry and deception. To the point where even intelligent people could make little sense of the problem or what to do next...I’ve put a dozen graphic videos on YouTube that try to explain the craziness that is reading. Of course, homeschoolers know most of the problems. It’s the rest of the country we need to inform. The newest video (link) does a pretty...

TIKRIT –The presence of U.S. Soldiers at Tikrit University is nothing new. But these days the Soldiers aren’t there to secure the campus, but rather to interact with Iraqi students as part of the "Soldier to Student" chat program. The original goal of the program was to help the students learn English, but the weekly chats have the added benefit of providing American Soldiers a glimpse into the daily lives of Iraqi college students and a forum to dissolve cultural and language barriers. "I learned that [Iraqi students] are very similar to my college friends,” said Navy Lt. Allen E....

I listen to BBN Radio as much as I possibly can. It is a glorious source of Joy, Praise, Worship, Biblical Teaching (Erwin Lutzer, J. Vernon Magee, Adrian Rogers, Wisdom of the Heart, many others), and unbelievably beautiful music to lift our hearts, to reach those who are lost with the Gospel, and to bring us into the presence of God while here on earth. It is the radio broadcast from heaven!

Graphic video provides a quick look at most of the bad ideas now undermining public schools. Takes four minutes. The video's main purpose is to clarify the debate and to provide a checklist of what the video calls "the usual suspects." Arresting these bad actors is how we improve the schools. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F9kNtdSfCLo Video created by Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org

Some people call them “wiggers” but I just call them “idiots”. I used to wonder where they learned to be so racially condescending - presuming that dressing and “talking black” was a cool thing to do. But now I suspect that many of them have taken a course under Maurice Martinez, an education professor at UNC-Wilmington. The class “Teacher, School, and Society” (EDN 200) is required of all education majors. When students take Maurice Martinez for the class they get a special treat. Maurice teaches them “Black English.” In 2003, he even copyrighted course materials to make white future teachers...

I struggled with whether or not to discuss this topic. Our Haitian neighbors are suffering tremendously. I am extremely proud and thank God that we, America, were first on the scene, doing what we always do: come to the rescue of people in need. I questioned, "Lloyd, are you making much ado about nothing?" Well, you be the judge. I am confident that Indianapolis Colts football player Pierre Garçon meant no disrespect to the USA when he waved the Haitian flag after the Colts' victory over the Jets in the AFC championship game. However, I must confess that it rubbed...

Raleigh, N.C. — A new proposal for the history curriculum in North Carolina public schools is causing uproar. Among the biggest concerns is covering U.S. history only from 1877 to the present in the 11th grade. “There's nothing on the Confederacy, nothing on Robert E. Lee, nothing on Abraham Lincoln, nothing on any battle, nothing on reconstruction, nothing on the causes of the war, nothing on slavery. Nothing on slavery anywhere in the curriculum,” said Dr. Holly Brewer, associate professor of Early American History at North Carolina State University. Brewer opposes the curriculum change and says students would not learn...

English universities' teaching budgets were slashed today for the first time in a decade as part of savage government cuts to higher education. The cuts come amid unprecedented demand for places, with an expected seven applications for every place at a top university. Some £215m will be shaved off universities' teaching budgets in the academic year 2010-11, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), which funds universities on behalf of the government, said in a letter to vice-chancellors. The £4.7bn that institutions will receive for teaching is 1.6% less in real terms than the amount they received the year...

The proposal to put the science-lab cuts on the table was approved recently by Berkeley High's School Governance Council, a body of teachers, parents, and students who oversee a plan to change the structure of the high school to address Berkeley's dismal racial achievement gap, where white students are doing far better than the state average while black and Latino students are doing worse.The full plan to close the racial achievement gap by altering the structure of the high school is known as the High School Redesign. It will come before the Berkeley School Board as an information item at...

IT WAS the kind of student conference I hate. “I’ll do better,’’ my student told me, leaning forward in his chair. “I know I’ve gotten behind this semester, but I’m going to turn things around. Would it be OK if I finished all my uncompleted work by Monday?’’ I sat silent for a moment. “Yes. But it’s important that you catch up completely this weekend, so that you’re not just perpetually behind.’’ A few weeks later, I would conduct a nearly identical conversation with two other students. And, again, there would be no tangible result: No make-up papers. No change...

To boost the economy out of the recession, President Obama has chosen to spend an additional $100 billion on public schooling over the next two years. His education secretary, Arne Duncan, is touring the nation to promote this education "stimulus." However well-intentioned, their effort isn't just futile; it's also counterproductive. Far from being an engine of wealth creation, the education system is bleeding the economy to death. The U.S. spends 2.3 times as much per pupil in real, inflation-adjusted dollars as it spent in 1970, but the return on this ballooning investment has been less than nothing. Student achievement at...

I AM often asked to talk at schools and almost always ask students three questions about a film that lies about the "stolen generations". First: "How many of you have been shown Rabbit-Proof Fence?" Answer: every one. Second: "Have you been shown the movie as a great piece of film-making, or as a history lesson?" Answer: in every case as history. You know, like you learn America's history from John Wayne movies. And third: "How many of you have checked whether the film is actually true, by, say, reading the book on which it's based?" Answer: of thousands of students,...

There is no evidence supporting auditory and visual learning, psychologists sayAre you a verbal learner or a visual learner? Chances are, you've pegged yourself or your children as either one or the other and rely on study techniques that suit your individual learning needs. And you're not alone— for more than 30 years, the notion that teaching methods should match a student's particular learning style has exerted a powerful influence on education. The long-standing popularity of the learning styles movement has in turn created a thriving commercial market amongst researchers, educators, and the general public. The wide appeal of the...

<p>In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll [explitive deleted] you on your [explative].”</p>

"Nick, I will get to you in a minute. Just have a seat. I have to check out some other matters first," I explained, pointing for him to take his seat. Of course Nick darted toward his chair, only to jump from it in a few seconds. Again, in my face. Nick ruled the world.