Free Republic

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.”

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,...

But if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you. Therefore, brethren, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live after the flesh.For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live. (Romans 8:11-13) What is the current state of the Christian? How can it be that there is no condemnation for us, when we know...

(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...

Nearly half of American history teachers believe it is less important that their students understand the common history, ideas, rights, and responsibilities that tie the country together as Americans than that they learn to celebrate the unique identities and experiences of its different ethnic, religious, and immigrant groups. Advocates of radical "social-justice" multiculturalism in many university schools of education -- the places where most K-12 teachers are trained -- continue to oppose assimilation with a common culture while instead seeking to radically transform an "oppressive" America. A new survey of public high-school social-studies teachers done for the American Enterprise Institute...

Gay groups and women's group are calling on Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to apologize for comments he made Friday about who should and shouldn't be in classrooms. At a 2004 debate, DeMint declared that openly gay people should not be teaching public school. "We need the folks that are teaching in schools to represent our values," he said. DeMint later added that he "would have given the same answer when asked if a single woman, who was pregnant and living with her boyfriend, should be hired to teach my third grade children." At the time, the Senate candidate apologized: "[S]ometimes...

Concern over a new hip-hop curriculum that refers to the founding fathers as "old dead white men” has delayed the program's rollout for at-risk students, Oklahoma City Public Schools Superintendent Karl Springer said. "We're making sure that whatever we do, first, we do no harm,” Springer said. "The science behind the concept is wonderful. There may be some things, though, that are inappropriate that we need to be careful about.” Known as Flocabulary, the program is a music-based educational tool that uses raps, rhythms and rhymes to help students learn and memorize everything from vocabulary and English to math and...

The American universities, or at least a number of departments within them, became like GM long before GM became like GM. The Economist recently asked what it calls a “mischievous” question: Are the vaunted American universities going the way of GM? It’s a serious question, but The Economist’s sense of timing leaves something to be desired, just like when the magazine predicted the housing collapse in San Francisco five years too soon. This time, The Economist is years late. The American universities, or at least a number of departments within them, became like GM long before GM became like GM.The...

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies). And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school. Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely...

"Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.  The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed. I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are...

Summary: The Education Commissars have long used TV as a whipping boy, an all-purpose excuse for their own incompetence. Consider the irony. More and more, television is the country's real educator. Public schools get dumber. But the History Channel, etc. know how to teach, and they want to teach. Who could have predicted it? Television rescues us from our Education Establishment! Of course, the point of mentioning this is to shame these fairly shameless people into doing a better job.

"Retreat from Learning--Why Teachers Can't Teach / A Case History" was published in 1955. Following review tells volumes about how schools got so dumb today.=========== [start review] Another of those excellent, poignant books written during the 1950s to explain why our public schools went to hell. Joan Dunn was smart, tough, loved teaching, loved her kids; but after about three years in the Brooklyn school system, gave up and wrote this first-person account, published in 1955, to explain her exit. Dunn mentions reading in a daily paper about the Korean War. That time, roughly 1953, was the high watermark of...

Like the traditional family, America's school calendar is old-fashioned, says Education Secretary Arne Duncan. "In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year." Go ahead -- re-read that. I'll wait. Are you convinced yet? Are you finally convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that America is under the leadership of not just left-wingers, but communists. You should no longer be afraid to use that word. Not after this. "The days of telling kids to go home at 2:30 and having mom there are gone,"...

“In all seriousness, I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months of the year,” Duncan said. “This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ESL classes.” He continued by explaining that the American school calendar is antiquated and must be modified so that American students can compete at the highest levels internationally.

A recent Boston Globe story reveals the destructive effects that Al Gore and global warming activists are having on American education. According to the story,