Free Republic

Thomas Sowell California --(Ammoland.com)- Dunbar High School in Washington is becoming a controversial issue again — and the controversy that is beginning to develop has implications for American education well beyond the District of Columbia.There has not been much controversy about Dunbar High School for a long time. Since sometime in the late 1950s, it has been just one more ghetto school with an abysmal academic record – and that has been too common to be controversial.What is different about the history of Dunbar is that, from its founding in 1870 as the first public high school in the country...

Don’t you just love classic Disney movies? Animated cinematic adventures that espoused the importance of life values, growing up, and racism… Well, that’s what some lefty professor is arguing at Syracuse University. Apparently, the Jungle Book is just chock-full of racism (and not because of “man-cub’s” strange desire to remain uncultured). Professor Robert Thompson told Yahoo Movies (um… this article was forwarded to me – like most people, I don’t actually visit Yahoo Movies) that the Jungle Book is racist because of something to do with Louie Armstrong. Apparently, when Mowgli meets the Ape King, young children are being brainwashed...

I recently published a post with various answers to the question: How hard is teaching? Here is one response I received by e-mail from a veteran seventh-grade language arts teacher in Frederick, Maryland, who asked not to be identified because she fears retaliation at her school. In this piece she describes students who don’t want to work, parents who want their children to have high grades no matter what, mindless curriculum and school reformers who insist on trying to quantify things that can’t be measured.

The controversy over a recent study on gay parenting illustrates a sociopolitical groupthink operating in the social scientific community. Scientists should go where the science takes them, not where their politics does. University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus’s study, “How Different Are the Adult Children of Parents Who Have Same-Sex Relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study,” published in the academic journal Social Science Research last year, caused a firestorm in the scientific community. Unlike most previous studies, Regnerus found that children of parents who had experienced a same-sex relationship fared worse than children of heterosexual parents on...

"................................Citing results that show attitudes among white people toward guns appear to be influenced by “illogical racial biases,” the study’s authors suggest that gun-control policies might need to be implemented “independent of public opinion.”

The academic boycott of Israel organized by the BDS movement claimed a big success when the Guardian ran an article yesterday, Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel. That report set off a furious response, since the academic boycott of Israel is anathema to almost all academics. In the U.S., only the disreputable actions of the Association of Asian American Studies, led by U. Mass-Boston Professor and Associate Provost Rajini Srikanth, have given any legitimacy to the boycott. The boycott, which singles out only Israel, attracts open and de facto anti-Semites and those in the leftist-Islamist coalition who seek Israel’s...

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president's conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres's 90th birthday. Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A former researcher at Amgen Inc has found that many basic studies on cancer -- a high proportion of them from university labs -- are unreliable, with grim consequences for producing new medicines in the future.

There's no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.SNIPLow-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

Students occupy UCSC academic building overnight, plan next stepsUpdated: Nov 29, 2011 2:29 PM EST By Matt de Nesnera SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- About 50 students spent the night sleeping in cubicles or on the floor of an academic building at the University of California Santa Cruz as part of a protest against rising tuition costs and university police, but they could be preparing to leave. Monday, students responded to a call from the Occupy University of California Davis movement for a strike across the 10-campus University of California system. Demonstrators prevented the roughly 100 staff members from entering the...

Education: As if Occupy Wall Street and its parasitic protesters weren't a bad enough example for children, now teacher unions and their enablers are getting into the act with disturbing ideas about "teaching" its tenets. Little noticed in the protest army sitting in against Wall Street, the educational establishment is more involved than you might think. From teachers disrupting school board meetings to classroom use of lesson plans about the "Occupy" protests to "teach-ins" that aim to educate the public about protest demands, we are witnessing a vast spread of economic illiteracy for political purposes. It started early this month...

This is Georgetown University. Is it any wonder we are raising a moronic, violent, jackbooted generation? And we pay for this, through the nose. There ought to be a national outcry. Instead. our nation's fine young minds are marinating in the toxic ooze. We are the big school donors, and I do not mean the Saudis. Is everyone is a coma? Look at the picture they are using to promote this Islamic supremacist garbage to our children. Note the flag -- it's not Egyptian (it's the flag of the Jewish genocidists). (pic hat tip Urban Infidel) CENTER FOR THE STUDY...

A disgraced academic forced to resign after publicly mocking a sex assault victim has landed a £50,000 job at a prestigious London university. Nir Rosen was handed the positon at the renowned London School of Economics a month after he made 'cruel and insensitive remarks'about CBS correspondent Lara Logan, who was beaten and molested while covering the Egyptian revolution. Mr Rosen, 33, announced at the weekend he is to start work as a research fellow at the university's global governance centre.

Professor Kaukab Siddique of Lincoln University thinks the Jews have "taken over America" by "devious and immoral means. What are the limits to academic discourse? Are lies and calumnies from academics protected speech outside the classroom, as well as inside? Does “protected” mean immune from criticism or from direct consequences? Are there distinctions between statements made within one’s “field of expertise” and those made outside? When do such distinctions become hairsplitting rationalizations or mere defensiveness, as opposed to valuable exercises in reasoning and in defense of a noble enterprise? Consider the case of Kaukab Siddique, professor of literature and communications...

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can't detect, that you can't defend against, that you may not even know exists. I work at an online company that generates tens of thousands of dollars a month by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students. I've worked there full time since 2004. On any day of the academic...

When college presidents and academic administrators pay their usual obeisance to "diversity" you know they are talking first and foremost about race.

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...

Last month, students at a Southern California high school were caught playing a late-night on-campus game of tag called "Beat the Jew." On the popular social networking site Facebook, a user named Alex Cookson launched an open invitation to an event called “Kill a Jew Day.” It was the fourth time that a call to murder Jews had been put on Facebook within recent days. In D.C., White House press doyen Helen Thomas was captured on tape nonchalantly opining that all Jews should go back to Germany. Implicit in her statement was her assumption that everyone felt the same way, so what's the...

Many Americans who elected Barack Obama thought George W Bush was too much the cowboy. After eight years of Texas swagger and a shoot-first-ask-questions-later foreign policy, voters craved the more considered, cerebral and often inspirational persona of a big city law professor. Now, in the midst of a real crisis, they are having second thoughts.

President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The same hypocrite who says our energy costs must “necessarily skyrocket” to fund his political ambition, is giving Marie Antoinette a run for her money when it comes to spending national treasure on personal luxuries. While much of the country is struggling to pay their bills, the President and First Lady are partying like rock royalty. The collection of talent that has made the pilgrimage to the White House to entertain Obama and friends is nothing less than amazing: Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Tony Bennet, Paul Simon, Marc Anthony, Herbie Hancock,...