Free Republic

OREGON—Oregon high schools have removed requirements to learn reading, writing, math, and basic social skills for kids graduating and moving on into the real world. The reason, according to one Oregon school board member, is to make sure they aren't influenced by far-right misinformation present in Thomas Sowell books, Jordan Peterson books, and other Nazi-adjacent authors. "We have to protect these kids," said Dr. Ethan Bremington (they/them), a superintendent of one Portland high school. "They were learning to read and going off and reading unapproved material. We really hoped they would use their reading skills to read The Communist Manifesto...

Over the last, terrible schoolyear, appreciators of educational freedom and excellence can at least take heart that their cause is winning the esteem of many parents. This owes not only to the poor behavior of American educrats and their unionized minions, but also to the spiritedness of school choice advocates—noteworthy among them, the masterly economist Thomas Sowell. When Sowell turned 90 a year ago, he concurrently published Charter Schools and Their Enemies, a superb book among a superb oeuvre. Lovers of free enterprise and public virtue should immerse themselves in the latter, and in Jason L. Riley’s splendid new Sowell...

Thomas Sowell is an icon. And, now, he has a biographer. While Sowell himself has written, by my count, 43 books, Jason Riley’s 2021 Maverick seems remarkably to be the first-ever major press biography of the heterodox African-American giant. Riley’s book sums up most of the key themes of Sowell’s thought, including the Anointed and Constrained visions of human behavior, the fact that the plain existence of racism does not explain most differences in group performance, and the idea of quantitative culturalism as an alternative to both “critical race theory” and genetic determinism. Sowell’s biographer also sums up two factual...

The economist Thomas Sowell distinguished himself in the early 1970s as a critic of the traditional civil rights leadership, but in earlier decades he had been optimistic about the direction of the civil rights movement. Sowell was born into an extremely poor family in rural Gastonia, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and raised in a New York City ghetto in the 1940s. Like many other blacks of that time and in those places, his family was uneducated. The men mostly worked as laborers or in the service sector, and the women typically were domestics. Racist laws had reduced opportunities...

Thomas Sowell is one of the towering American intellectuals of our time. An economist trained at the University of Chicago and a social theorist of the first rank, he has been a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University since 1980. He has written an astonishing fifty books (if you count revised and expanded editions), numerous essays, and a long-running, twice-a-week newspaper column. Extraordinarily wide ranging, he has covered everything from the rudiments of economics to race relations, the housing crisis of 2008 to late-talking children. His best known book, Basic Economics (2000), a best-selling, chart-, graph-, and...

CHICAGO, IL—Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was seen running for her life this afternoon. Observers said that Lightfoot exploded into a frantic sprint after she saw Thomas Sowell approaching to interview her. According to sources, Lightfoot had recently said she "would only grant one-on-one interviews to journalists of color." Moments later Thomas Sowell crashed through a nearby wall in a fashion reminiscent of the Kool-Aid Man. Lightfoot, living up to her name, went into a mad dash and has not been seen since. People at the scene said Sowell brushed the drywall dust off of his corduroy jacket and said, "It...

In troubled times such as these in which we now find ourselves, it is rewarding to reread the words of great individuals who offer comfort and hope. One of those greats is the economist Thomas Sowell. He has said and written so many undeniable truths that it is daunting to select a few that stand out. Nevertheless, I will try. "Ours may become the first civilization destroyed not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous ignorance they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial...

The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. .. When COVID-19 first came to our shores, it presented policymakers and elected officials with a crisis like nothing in living memory. In the year since, states have taken markedly different approaches to pandemic policy. Some, like New York, embraced sweeping government lockdowns and top-down mandates while others like Florida and South Dakota took a more humble, hands-off government approach, trusting individuals to make the best decisions for themselves. The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw...

Many Americans today continue to talk past each other in their discussions of justice. Progressives often see conservatives as insensitive and lacking compassion for the poor and oppressed. They march and protest in the streets for justice and view conservatives’ lack of protest as signs of their racism and privilege. Meanwhile, many conservatives cannot understand how progressives can see their tactics as just. They watch the protesters loot and burn cities and gape at the lawlessness of these social “justice” warriors. The reason why there can be no actual conversation between these groups is that they do not share the...

This is a video documentary on Thomas Sowell that I highly recommend.

In this video, Thomas Sowell schools Joe Biden on Affirmative action.

Walter Williams loved teaching. Unlike too many other teachers today, he made it a point never to impose his opinions on his students. Those who read his syndicated newspaper columns know that he expressed his opinions boldly and unequivocally there. But not in the classroom. Walter once said he hoped that, on the day he died, he would have taught a class that day. And that is just the way it was, when he died on Wednesday, December 2, 2020. He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I...

Most Americans would probably be shocked and angry if they knew all the dirty tricks used to sabotage charter schools that are successfully educating low-income minority children. This is not "systemic racism." It is plain old selfishness on the part of traditional public school officials and teachers unions protecting their own vested interests. Most of us might see charter schools that succeed where traditional public schools have failed as welcome news, especially in minority communities where there is so much bad news. But, when there are a million public school students on waiting lists to get into charter schools nationwide,...

“Economic Facts and Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell came out in 2008, but like many of Thomas Sowell’s other books on economics, it remains a classic. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this book? How does it compare to his other major works?

“Discrimination and Disparities” is a 2018 book by Thomas Sowell. While it addresses racism and class bias, it delves into many other disparities and forms of discrimination. It discusses the literal social and economic costs of disparities and actual discrimination while explaining how most disparities are not due to actual discrimination. What are the points in favor and against this Thomas Sowell book? What can you learn from this book that hasn’t been addressed in his many other works?

“Economic Facts and Fallacies” by Thomas Sowell came out in 2008, but like many of Thomas Sowell’s other books on economics, it remains a classic. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this book? How does it compare to his other major works?

Measured by his contributions to economics, political theory, and intellectual history, Thomas Sowell ranks among the towering intellects of our time. Yet, rare among such thinkers, Sowell manages never to provoke, in the reader, the feeling of being towered over. As Kevin Williamson observed, Sowell is “that rarest of things among serious academics: plainspoken.” From 1991 until 2016, his nationally syndicated column set the bar for clear writing, though the topics he covered were often complex. “Too many academics write as if plain English is beneath their dignity,” Sowell once said, “and some seem to regard logic as an unconstitutional...

Thomas Sowell is a truth seeker who grew up in Harlem and is one of the wisest men of our times. In his new book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies — published on June 30, 2020, his 90th birthday — he exposes the hypocrisy of our politicians, teachers’ unions, and public school bureaucrats. To do so, Sowell compares New York City’s charter schools to its public ones. For example, Success Academy (47 New York City schools) and KIPP Academy (15 NYC schools), both public charter schools, have established the best K-12 schools in Harlem and have demonstrated the ability to...

Mark Levin, host of “Life, Liberty & Levin,” described the 2020 election on Sunday as one of the most important in American history. Beyond looking at the candidates, Levin said the election pits the ideologies behind the 1619 project against the 1776 project, “and you can see where the Democrats have tied into the 1619 project, and many of the Republicans are trying to defend the founding in the 1776 project.” Speaking with economist Thomas Sowell, Levin asked if he saw the election that way. “What I see is if the election goes to Biden then there is a good...

Fifty-five-plus books on the table and more on the way. Charter Schools and Their Enemies, another bestseller, is hot off the press. The Thomas Sowell corpus stands as one of the rare and most impressive monuments of massive and meticulous research ever erected on this earth by one person. He came up from 1930s poverty-stricken Jim Crow North Carolina, a high school dropout, a stint with the United States Marine Corps, scraping and clawing his way through the streets of post-Renaissance Harlem and then the halls of Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago (Ph.D.), and now he has four...