Free Republic

Keith Flaugh is a retired IBM executive living in Naples, Fla., and a man with a mission. He describes it as "getting the school boards to recognize ... the garbage that's in our textbooks." Flaugh helped found Florida Citizens' Alliance, a conservative group that fought unsuccessfully to stop Florida from signing on to Common Core educational standards. More recently, the group has turned its attention to the books being used in Florida's schools. A new state law, developed and pushed through by Flaugh's group, allows parents, and any residents, to challenge the use of textbooks and instructional materials they find...

After the United Nations was exposed last year indoctrinating vulnerable Arab children at UN schools to wage jihad on Jews, the scandal-plagued global body is now meddling in the selection of textbooks for American students. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.Of course, in America, school textbook selection has traditionally been a responsibility of individual teachers, schools, or perhaps a local school district elected and controlled by the community. Yet as the UN increasingly seeks more control and influence across every area of life, education and the minds of children are just the latest target — albeit an...

As America looks back on the September 11 terrorist attack that changed the nation, the direction of education in the country seems on track to ensure that U.S. students either forget that day entirely or view it as a result of America’s own failure to be open and accepting of other cultures. Signs of the promotion of a “borderless” country that fosters unfettered multiculturalism could be seen decades ago in progressive school textbooks read daily by American students. “Culture war” commentator Stanley Kurtz tells Breitbart News that the situation is likely only to grow worse with the left-leaning Advanced Placement...

(CNSNews.com) -- The National Association of Scholars (NAS) has published a study arguing that the College Board’s Advanced Placement European History exam (APEH) “warps and guts the history of Europe to make it serve today’s progressive agenda.” “It [APEH] mentions neither Christopher Columbus nor Winston Churchill,” a NAS press release points out. “APEH’s distortions turn Europe’s extraordinary history and unique contribution to the formation of our world into a generic narrative of modernization,” says NAS director of communications David Randall, who authored the study entitled The Disappearing Continent: A Critique of the Revised Advanced Placement European History Examination. “We do...

A recent blockbuster expose on the Pakistani public school system has some eye-opening news for the non-Muslim world. In the wake of the Easter bombings in Lahore, Pakistan the people of the world complained that the Pakistani government wasn’t doing enough to push back against the Muslim extremists in their country. In response, the government has promised to crack down on militant terrorism that has entrenched itself in certain corners of their country. Here’s the problem with these promises… the “extremism” isn’t just found with the radical terrorists. In Pakistan, radical Muslim “extremism” isn’t actually that extreme. In fact, it’s...

It turns out that Common Core's creators might be demonstrating the same ethos Cuba Gooding's character demonstrated in the film Jerry Maguire when he said, "Show me the money." "An undercover journalist for a nonprofit organization captured candid video of a national textbook company's sales executive making inflammatory remarks about federal Common Core standards and textbook companies' support of them," Andrea Dillon reported in School Reform News, which is published by the Heartland Institute. "Project Veritas, a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to 'investigate and expose corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct,' interviewed now-former Houghton Mifflin Harcourt...

Hello all, I am a junior high SS/Religion teacher in one of the Cincinnati Catholic Schools. We are using an updated textbook from Prentice Hall (Pearson). To be blunt, I hate this textbook! It's all over the place on our American historical roots as well as very biased against American ingenuity and foresight. My principal and parish priest are very open to using resources that have not 'revised' the world's history. Can anyone suggest a textbook company that is not revising history? The textbook we use now is called "America, History of our Nation."

Students hitting the college bookstore this fall will get a stark lesson in economics before they've cracked open their first chapter. Textbook prices are soaring. Some experts say it's because they're sold like drugs. According to NBC's review of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data, textbook prices have risen over three times the rate of inflation from January 1977 to June 2015, a 1,041 percent increase. "They've been able to keep raising prices because students are 'captive consumers.' They have to buy whatever books they're assigned," said Nicole Allen, a spokeswoman for the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.

All about the Barack Hussein Obama Muslim connection to Common CoreIn the last few years we have seen a movement in our country to nationalize our educational system, to implement Common Core in all schools. Inside the schools, the most drastic change has been an overwhelming influence of Islam and Sharia law. Education publishing giant, Pearson, whose biggest investor is the Libyan Investment Authority, is a major supplier of Islam-oriented text books for American schools. As is the nation of Qatar.Pearson owners are deeply involved in the Muslim Brotherhood and linked to CAIR. “Muslim Brotherhood documents seized by the...

Regimes -- especially those guided by apocalyptic, violently intolerant, supremacist, megalomaniacal, non-compliant, deceitful, hate-education vision - intensify chaos, fueling nuclear war Iranian school textbooks, such as The Qur’an and Life (Grade 12, p. 125) prepare Iranian children for the Ayatollahs’ sublime goal: the apocalyptic, horrifying, millenarian, military battle against the USA and other “arrogant oppressors of the world,” which are ostensibly led by “idolatrous devils.” While the “savior”—the infallible, immortal, divinely ordained and eventual global leader, the Mahdi—has not surfaced yet, Iranian children are taught that the battle is already raging throughout the world, awaiting their sacrifice. School textbooks of...

(Snip) The framework requires that all questions take up sweeping issues, such as “group identity,” which leaves little place for transcendent individuals. Men and women who were once studied as inspirational figures have become examples of trends, and usually not uplifting ones. The immigrant story that the exam tells is of oppressed people escaping to America only to find more oppression. That many came seeking the Promised Land—and found it here—is no longer part of the narrative. (Snip)

Joseph Ratzinger, better known as Pope Benedict XVI, in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity and Islam, details the rising tide of secularism that seeks to banish Christianity from European history and the public square. While the situation in Australia appears nowhere near as dire, it is the case here that Christianity is often misrepresented and undermined. This happens especially in subjects such as history and in relation to what American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington terms the “clash of civilisations”. The expectation is that school textbooks present a balanced, objective and impartial view of ideas, beliefs and events. Such...

PHOENIX (AP) — A Phoenix-area school district will not edit a high school honors biology textbook to remove content to comply with a state law on abortion-related instructional material. The Gilbert Unified School District board agreed during a meeting Tuesday to find an alternative solution that does not involve redacting the textbook, the Arizona Republic reported (http://bit.ly/1z4FP7y ). Superintendent Christina Kishimoto had asked the board to reverse its request, saying editing the copyrighted book could open the district to legal issues. At issue is a chapter in the textbook, "Campbell Biology: Concepts & Connections," that discusses abstinence, birth-control methods, tubal...

BROOKLINE (CBS) — Some parents of fifth-graders at Brookline Public Schools are outraged over a page in their children’s US social studies textbook that suggests some slave owners living during the 17th-century America were compassionate toward their slaves.

All textbooks on iPad at my child's high school, computers for all from K-12 in the school district where I live. This even though most kids already have one and some have more than one computer of their own, the schools private and public have purchased from Apple zillions of MacBook Airs and iPad Airs to bestow upon their students. Students are to use a program called Noteability to write on the screens with the stylus that came with the "device" and use Google connect to send in to their teachers. Did anyone ask the parents for input on any...

Hamas has taken issue with new textbooks introduced by the UN’s relief agency and which recognize “the Zionists.” […] “We denounce the publication and distribution of syllabus in UNRWA-run schools without the approval of the ministry of education and higher education,” the ministry said in a statement quoted by Ma’an. The statement added that such curricula “do not fit the culture of our Palestinian society, and its meant to brainwash Palestinian students and convince them to accept the Zionist enemies while they continue to kill our people, carry out more oppressive procedures, Judaize the holy city (Jerusalem) and build the...

The State Education Board has refused to replace 11 of Alabama’s approved social studies textbooks that feature a chilling overemphasis on Islam at the exclusion of any and all other religions. Most of these textbooks are funded by the Saudi government and distributed free of charge to U.S. schools.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) - At Archbishop Stepinac High School, the backpacks got a whole lot lighter this year because nearly every book - from freshman biology to senior calculus - is now digital, accessible on students' laptops and tablets. "The last couple of years, this would have been like 30 pounds," says sophomore Brandon Cabaleiro, whose load nowadays includes just his iPad, his lunch and a jacket. snip The online history books, for example, include videos on subjects ranging from Woodrow Wilson to Malcolm X. The science books show scientific processes in motion. The English books grade an essay...

Saturday the 7th of December will mark the seventy-second anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. The commemoration of that “date which will live in infamy” brings up memories of more than Pearl Harbor but of the entire American effort in World War II: of the phenomenal production of planes and tanks and munitions by American industry; of millions of young men enlisting (with thousands lying about their age to get into the service); of the men who led the war, then and now seeming larger than life—Churchill and F.D.R., Eisenhower and MacArthur, Monty and Patton; and of the...

New York Times reports that Hamas has introduced its own textbooks into Gaza schools, as part of effort to spread its ideology • Books do not recognize Israel and describe Palestine as encompassing all land between Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. Hamas has introduced its own textbooks into schools in the Gaza Strip this fall, as part of an effort to spread its militant ideology among Palestinian youth, The New York Times reported on Sunday. According to the report, the books do not recognize modern Israel, or mention the Oslo Accords that Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization in...