Free Republic

Howard Zinn’s America Deborah Lambert, December 18, 2009 America-bashers are working overtime these days to divide our nation into enemy camps. One way to describe it is a war between the country that you and I love vs. Howard Zinn’s America. If you think that the 87-year-old Marxist professor/author of A People’s History of the United States is ready to shuffle off into the sunset, you would be wrong. In fact, Zinn is actively spearheading an effort to “change the way our pre-K through high school children learn American history,” according to Big Hollywood. His curriculum ideas focus on a...

Advanced Placement for Dummies by: Deborah Lambert, July 15, 2009 Should AP classes be available for everyone, regardless of their skill sets? Absolutely not, says Laurie Rogers, author of the book, Betrayed, who noted in EducationNews.org that she thought it was a “really stupid idea.” A theory among educators is that even if the kids aren’t qualified, “they’ll learn just by being there.” In fact, many educators think in terms of “equity,” “opportunity” and the fact that these classes are “challenging” the kids. Rogers disagrees, especially about math. While young children usually enjoy math and science, Rogers says that “by...

ALAMEDA — School district leaders have approved lesson plans for kindergartners through fifth graders that aim to curb anti-gay bullying. Trustees voted 3-2 on Tuesday to adopt the Safe Schools curriculum, which supporters say will help children of gay parents feel welcome at school and help end anti-gay teasing and bullying on the playground. The lessons also aim to provide a safe environment for children to learn, as well as to offer a framework for teachers to break down stereotypes and teach kids about different types of families. "The need for this is real," said Beth Kromer, a fourth-grade teacher...

Social Studies curriculum group had tossed out traditional American history to make room for left-leaning agenda The Texas State Board of Education on Wednesday came down with a reprimand on its social studies curriculum working group after a draft proposal of the group’s new curriculum came to light showing a series of far-left changes that education bureaucrats wanted to install in place of the traditional Texas social studies curriculum.

Globally Warm Schools by: Santiago Leon, May 28, 2008 As Global Warming becomes an issue in people’s lives, it has also become part of school’s curricula. I recently learned that my boss’s son had an assignment and quiz in his Spanish class on Global Warming. In many of the questions students had to translate sentences from Spanish to English but with a Global Warming theme. They even had to watch Al Gore’s movie, “Inconvenient Truth,” which has been a part of several school courses. Teaching Global Warming in schools is widespread across the nation, especially providing materials like Gore’s film,...

Nashville, TN (WRCB-TV/Associated Press) A controversial bill requiring Tennessee's public schools to offer an elective bible course is making its way to Gov. Phil Bredesen. The legislation unanimously passed the Senate last week and was approved overwhelmingly in the House Tuesday. If Gov. Bredesen signs the legislation, public schools will soon be required to offer bible as an elective course taught with an approved textbook. The Tennessee Department of Education would create a uniform bible curriculum. This legislation does come with some safeguards. It prohibits the use of any religious test when assigning teachers to the bible class. For many...

(IsraelNN.com) Education Ministry officials have decided to keep Arabic in the core curriculum for middle and high school students until further notice. Arabic was removed from the core curriculum earlier in the year as part of an attempt to streamline the curriculum and make it acceptable to the hareidi-religious community. Most hareidi-religious schools have rejected the core curriculum and prefer to operate as private schools with some government funding. However, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the government cannot fund high schools that do not teach the core curriculum, a decision that would leave many hareidi-religious schools facing a budget...

Behind the School Safety Movement by: Bethany Stotts, February 27, 2008 Many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, and queer (LGBTQ) organizations believe that promoting school safety is essential to their organization’s mission. Ally Action, the Anti-Defamation League, Gay, Lesbian, Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Out for Equity, Safe Schools Coalition, and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation all consider fostering safe gay-accepting schools a high priority.... The SSC’s “Guidelines on Bias” (pdf) eschews the term “minority” for “non-majority” and considers language labeling minorities as disadvantaged or needy “patronizing” and biased. In an ideal situation, “The right of non-majority people to decide what is...

Groundhog Day Curriculum by: Malcolm A. Kline, February 01, 2008 Somewhat like the character Bill Murray plays in the film Groundhog Day, college administrators rarely achieve real reform in resolving the crises in higher education because they keep on doing the same thing over and over again. “In class, many students are ready to talk, but they want to talk about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading,” Robert Newman, Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Utah notes in a U-Utah publication from last year. “They are happy to...

On thursday morning a group of seven Patriots gathered in front of the Boulder High School to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

No Culture Left Behind? by: Nirmala Punnasami, September 27, 2007 At this stage in the history of education in this country, most education analysts who focus on the federal No Child Left Behind Act prefer to “assess time allocation” and the strengths and weaknesses of this controversial piece of federal legislation, but Terry Stoops , the Education Policy Analyst for the John Locke Foundation, a North Carolina- based “think tank,” compares “course enrollment to student enrollment growth,”referring specifically to what is happening with education in North Carolina. For the academic year 2000 to 2001, North Carolina Public Schools offered students...

Some Oregon high schools are adopting Mexico's public school curriculum to help educate Spanish-speaking students with textbooks, an online Web site, DVDs and CDs provided free by Mexico to teach math, science and even U.S. history. The Oregon Department of Education and Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education are discussing aligning their curricula so courses will be valid in both countries... Mexico has made its national curriculum available to communities across the U.S. since 2001 to encourage Mexican adults and youths to continue an education often abandoned back home due to limited resources. "We wanted people to be aware that they...

Put Islamo-Fascism into the college curriculumSix years after 9/11 we are engaged in a global conflict in which we cannot name the enemy who has attacked us. The President has described the war we are in as a “war on terror.” But terror is only a tactic used by many. Our enemies are Islamo-fascists. They are religious fanatics who, as the President has said, “are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of...

With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites.... It's called the porn curriculum, and it's quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women's studies. Those specialists argue that graphic sexual imagery has become ubiquitous in society, so it's almost irresponsible not to teach young people how to deal with it.... Students agree...

ROCKVILLE, Maryland, July 9, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Maryland State Board of Education will not interfere with a local school board's efforts to insert curriculum material legitimizing homosexuality. The board agreed that while parents may have some say in what is taught to their children, that "right is not absolute. It must bend to the State's duty to educate its citizens." Parents in Montgomery County have been battling the school board on the insertion of homosexual material in schools for two and a half years. In November 2004 the parents won a delay in the courts after the Montgomery Board...

A Proposal to Write a Book "An (Internet) Alternative to College" Undergraduate College Curriculum of Internet-based Courses for Self-taught Students I spent four years earning a BA at a fairly good state university back in the early 1950s. Much of what I learned has been forgotten (although I can still recite the first 18 lines of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales). I could have learned (and retained) far more if given a curriculum to follow and access to a good library (and a final comprehensive exam in each subject to keep my nose to the grindstone) instead of the...

In recent years, Hamilton College has done little that would have pleased its namesake. It's hard to imagine that any of the founding generation's leaders—perhaps excepting Paine—could find much to their liking in the college's fawning treatment of radical icons or its fervent multiculturalism. It was Hamilton that sought to bring former weather underground member and convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, to campus as an instructor and "artist-in-residence", as it was Hamilton that launched Ward Churchill into world class notoriety by inviting him to speak. But it's good to discover that Hamilton is capable of learning something from its repeated embarrassments....

Are British parents prepared to be 24-7 role models for their children? They’d better be, since British schools have apparently decided to opt out of a large part of their previous responsibilities for educating students. It all started when a re-wording of the national curriculum statement revealed that the education establishment was no longer bound by pesky moral absolutes like right and wrong. Ostensibly created to “slim down” the rules and regs, the working draft’s new wording eliminated a previous statement saying that “the school curriculum should pass on enduring values. . .(and) develop principles for distinguishing between right and...

A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation. American History currently isn't a required course at any of the state's major public universities. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni has written letters to Gov. Janet Napolitano and 20 state lawmakers, asking them to pressure college regents and administrators to make the change. "The flag doesn't mean all that much if you don't know how it got there," trustees member Charles Mitchell said. "What use is the Constitution if you don't know how it was written?"...

Former Toyota President Shoichiro Toyoda has founded Kaiyo Academy, a $175-million school that he modeled after Britain's Eton Academy -- a school that boasts 19 British Prime Ministers among her alumni and the second-in-line to the throne, Prince William. In Japan there is dissatisfaction with the 'dumbing-down' of its curriculum. Four years ago, the government cut 30% of the workload off the elementary and junior high school curriculum. Toyota's Kaiyo academy is attractive for many reasons. 1. It is backed by Toyota. 2. It is focusing on developing kids who can do more than just pass exams. 3. It is...

Teacher's union begins plans to promote homosexual marriage in public schools The National Education Association is set to endorse homosexual marriage at their convention coming up in Orlando June 29 through July 6. The new NEA proposal essentially says schools should support and actively promote homosexual marriage and other forms of marriage (two men and one woman, three women, two women and three men, etc.) in their local schools. The new proposal, expected to pass overwhelmingly, is found under the B-8 Diversity paragraph: The Association... believes in the importance of observances, programs and curricula that accurately portray and recognize the...

A Senate committee approved a bill Wednesday that would require California's textbooks to include the contributions of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people to the state and nation's history. The bill outraged some religious and conservative family groups, which said it would indoctrinate students in what they view as an unacceptable lifestyle. The Senate Education Committee passed the bill by state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, 8-3, along party lines. It now goes to the full Senate. "Our community is invisible in all of the teaching material, so that our students are never, ever given any information about the fact...

The Global Education Conference held at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. last month was used to teach educators how to bring global issues into the classroom. But, when it came time to practice the logistics of coordinating a debate the political opinions of the teachers could not be suppressed. The organization that put together the conference, Americans for Informed Democracy (AID), claimed to be a non-partisan group established to “educate and engage Americans in global issues….[in order to] create a generation of Americans that will support a U.S. role in the world that is appropriate….” But what is appropriate? AID...

A RADICAL Muslim thinker who inspired al-Qa'ida is being served up as subject matter for high school students in NSW. Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian militant hanged in 1966 but still a powerful influence on violent Islamists, and the Pakistani fundamentalist Sayyid Maududi are the only two modern Muslim thinkers on a revised syllabus for studies of religion. Experts this week condemned the prominence of political Islam in the new syllabus, and especially the inclusion of Qutb. "I am surprised and dismayed that the NSW religion syllabus narrows modern Islamic thinkers to its totalitarians," said Daniel Pipes, whose US-based Middle East...

A Humanistic Curriculum: Solution for Philippine Moral Decline by: J. Reylan B. Viray The Problem Philippine society is faced with various problems such as economic, social and political. More and more Filipinos cannot cope up with the continuous increase of prices of basic commodities. Foreign debts servicing gets the biggest chunk of the National Budget. Oil prices in the world market rises to points where the Philippine Deregulation Law proved to be insufficient and futile. Trade markets are going down the drain. More investors, foreign and local, are pulling their investments from corporations for fear of unfavorable returns. Government agencies...

A magazine cover story about postmodern life on the American college campus depicts three monkeys in cap and gown, covering their ears, eyes and mouth, a parody of the hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil caricature. But students at many colleges actually get quite the opposite. They're required to hear, see, speak and study all about evil, as long as it's the evil oppression of everybody in American society. There's an emphasis on multicultural studies and few campuses have escaped the disease, ... students study the life and murder of Tupac Shakur, the "gangsta" rapper ...There's "Queer...

The achievement gap between minority and white students has long been a stain on the bright mosaic of culturally and racially diverse school districts.From North Jersey to Cleveland to San Diego, whites as a group generally score considerably better on standardized tests than their minority peers. Whites also tend to enroll in more honors classes, while minorities are more prevalent in remedial courses.Now, one Bergen County district is introducing a sweeping concept that it hopes will bridge its gap by addressing a wide range of possible roadblocks to academic success.The initiative includes dozens of ideas. Some are in the talking...

When it comes to the classroom, religious extremists have an ambitious agenda: to replace science with ideology at every opportunity. As if denying even that their own ideas can evolve, they've recently taken up their dusty arms against an old, familiar issue — the teaching of evolution in public schools. New Name, Same Agenda The supposed rival to the theory of evolution — creationism — now goes by the new name of "intelligent design." Just as with other phrases (like the Bush administration favorite, "culture of life"), the name change is merely the latest tactic in an ongoing strategy by...

White House senior adviser Karl Rove caused a firestorm last week after observing that liberals favor "therapy and understanding" to fight terrorism in a post-Sept. 11 world. Rove spoke the truth. But he barely scratched the surface. The left-wing Kumbaya crowd is quietly grooming a generation of pushovers in the public schools. At a time of war, when young Americans should be educated about this nation's resilience and steely resolve, educators are indoctrinating students with saccharine-sticky lessons on "non-violent conflict resolution" and "promoting constructive dialogues." Peaceniks are covering our kids from head to toe in emotional bubble wrap. They are...

Judge rules sex-education curriculum violates First Amendment rights Phyllis Schlafly townhall.com June 6, 2005 A federal judge in Montgomery County, Md., has issued a temporary restraining order to stop the teaching of a sex-education course because it violates the First Amendment. I can't remember any other case in the last 30 years in which a judge sided with parents against a curriculum adopted by a school board. This sex-education curriculum was scheduled to be taught in three high schools and three middle schools despite parental protests and petitions with 4,000 signatures. After the court decision, the board voted 7-1...

Arizona schools have added a fourth "R" to reading, writing and arithmetic — rifles. Students who choose to enroll in this new course learn the safe way to handle a gun and earn one credit — the equivalent to ceramics or photography electives. Critics are gunning the debate; they say handing teenagers loaded weapons equals trouble. “We learn life skills, like when we miss [a shot], not to get mad. You learn a lot of cooperation with your team members,” said student Kim Peters. And many parents argue they would rather their children learn how to handle a gun and...

“The social implications of Darwinism have been disastrous,” said Richard Thompson, the president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Nazi Germany used Darwin to justify a master race based on the idea that it’s survival of the strongest.” Thompson’s perception that teaching evolution is socially destructive is just one of the reasons why he volunteered to defend the Dover Area School District’s school board and administration against a lawsuit brought against them last December, he said. Eleven parents sued the district, saying a statement issued by the district to ninth-grade biology students that...

While American universities may proclaim diversity as an exalted value, a recent study shows that the only freedom of thought that really exists on campus is "to believe the dominant political ideology. Other ideologies are marginalized." (Klien and Western. For full text of study, follow links below.) But Phil Mitchell doesn’t need a study to validate what he has experienced for over 20 years. "The truth is, universities are the most hostile, narrow-minded and intolerant environment in society," Mitchell said. Mitchell, 57, is a former history professor at the University of Colorado (CU) and a deeply committed Christian. He was...

CONCORD -- For David Parker, the first alarm went off in January, when his 5-year-old son came home from his kindergarten class at Lexington's Joseph Estabrook School with a bag of books promoting diversity. Inside were books about foreign cultures and traditions, along with food recipes. There was also a copy of ''Who's In a Family?" by Robert Skutch, which depicts different kinds of families, including same-sex couples raising children. The book's contents concerned Parker and prompted him to begin a series of e-mail exchanges with school officials on the subject that culminated in a meeting Wednesday night with Estabrook's...

If you have a serious discussion with almost any public school teacher, principal, superintendent or trustee, you are likely to hear about the importance of local control and of protecting school curricula from outsiders who want to promote their particular set of values. Yet a new curriculum gaining steam nationwide, known as the International Baccalaureate program, confirms what critics of public schools have long suspected: a) educators embrace local control only when it suits them; b) they are more than willing to promote particular values, provided they are politically correct values. IB is an international K-12 curriculum designed to promote...

...As a new study on education standards world-wide shows, unlike in the U.S. and much of Europe, high school students in these countries actually learn something. In this country, the study's findings grabbed headlines for how poorly American students score.... Only a generation ago, U.S. high school students ranked No. 1. Today their performance has fallen below the OECD average -- except in reading, where Americans manage to eke out an "average."... Less publicized has been why U.S. scores are so low. The OECD researchers identified several key characteristics that most successful school systems share -- namely, decentralization, competition and...

William H. Schmidt, Michigan State University Papers and Presentations, Mathematics and Science Initiative Today the President addresses a serious issue in American education—How well we as a nation do in educating our children in mathematics. Dr. Loveless has addressed this issue using data from our nation's report card—NAEP. I will address the same issue but from an international point of view. The data are clear. Recent results from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) show that US eighth and twelfth graders do not do well by international standards—ranking below average in both grades and, in fact, near the...

Please see the press release below. Anyone worried about political correctness, private property rights, declining standards on college campuses - there are some odious things happening right now at Colgate. Visit our new website for the details you won't hear on campus! Please help us try to reverse the tide of PC stupidity at Colgate. www.sa4c.com Students & Alumni for Colgate, Inc. P.O. Box 30 Hamilton, NY 13346 www.sa4c.com NEWS RELEASE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, December 9, 2004 INFORMATION CONTACT: Christine Burtt, sa4c executive director 303.722.9958 cqburtt@att.net ALUMNI PROTEST COERCIVE PROPERTY TAKINGS AT COLGATE UNIVERSITY Colgate Demands Sale of Greek...

This approach would force students to study American history without consulting the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, every inaugural address, the bulk of writings by America's founders and much more. Taken to further extremes, it would deprive Stevens Creek students knowledge of the Roman Empire from Constantine on, the Crusades, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, most of the greatest artwork before the 20th Century, the oevre of English-language authors from Chaucer through Eliot (C.S. Lewis no doubt is strictly forbidden!), and the musings of great scientists who to this day puzzle over the existence of G-d. The result: a curriculum that...

Another great story in the Canada Free Press newspaper called Freedom and the American Campus: National Conference at North Carolina State University on Liberal bias in education. Here is the fifth paragraph from it to give you an idea of what it is about: David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture and chief editor of FrontPageMag.com, will also be making an appearance. Horowitz gained wide recognition for lobbying state legislators to adopt his Academic Bill of Rights, a document designed to take the political bent out of university curriculum and prevent liberal indoctrination. Recently, Coloradoís...

Military Kids Need Educators' Help in Overcoming Fears By Rudi WilliamsAmerican Forces Press Service WASHINGTON, Aug. 10, 2004 – Educators always try to help children overcome their fears. But when they work with military kids, they find all kinds of fears they hadn't encountered before, said a retired Marine major general and former astronaut at a recent conference. Former astronaut and retired Marine Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr. logged more than 6,000 flying hours, including more than 100 combat sorties in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, and spent more than 680 hours in space. NASA photo(Click photo...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

Hey....any Jazz musicians or Teachers who do curriculum development for Humanities need money???? The government has some for you in the way of grants from about $200,000 - $370,000+ .....READ THEM BELOW NEA JAZZ MASTERS ON TOUR ________________________________________ ________________________________________ General Information Document Type: Grants Notice Funding Opportunity Number: PS 04-05 Posted Date: Jul 28, 2004 Original Due Date for Applications: Aug 30, 2004 Current Due Date for Applications: Aug 30, 2004 Archive Date: Sep 29, 2004 Funding Instrument Type: Cooperative Agreement Category of Funding Activity: Arts (see "Cultural Affairs" in CFDA) Expected Number of Awards: 2 Estimated Total Program Funding:...

Can someone direct me to the thread that has links (possibly) of what you cirriculum some of you homeschoolers are using?

At Greenwich Country Day, a prestigious Connecticut private school, computers have all but replaced pencil and paper. Typing instruction starts in second grade, and laptops are mandatory by seventh. Essays are typed, and often class notes are, too. As an adult in today's work world, you don't write anything," said Carol Maoz, head of the upper school (grades 7-9), adding she couldn't think of an occasion students would write out a longhand essay. "You type everything. There really is no need for proper handwriting." Maybe not indeed, even notes get passed in class via text message these days. But next...

Same-Sex 'Marriage' Goes to School - Out of the Closet and Into the Classroom Mark Earley. If you're looking at the same-sex "marriage" debate and thinking it won't affect you, allow me to bring the truth home to you—before your own children bring it home themselves. Imagine finding out that your kindergartner's teacher read the story Heather Has Two Mommies or Daddy's New Roommate before nap time. Having two daddies or two mommies is just the same as having one of each, she explains. Or perhaps you'll learn over the dinner table that a special speaker visited your middle-schooler's health...

SEATTLE, MAY 3 – Recent California voters overwhelmingly support teaching the scientific evidence both for and against Darwin’s theory of evolution, according to two new surveys conducted by Arnold Steinberg & Associates. The surveys address the issue of how best to teach evolution, which increasingly is under deliberation by state and local school districts in California and around the nation. The first survey was a random sample of 551 California voters living in a household in which at least one voter voted in the November 2002 general election and the October 2003 special election for governor. When asked: “Which statement...

Dr. Throckmorton reviews a pro-homosexual curriculum that is being offered to High School students around the country. He suggested that the curriculum is deceiving and is not a balanced description of the homosexual lifestyle. The review in .PDF format is: Homo-sexual curriculum review

Board tells future school: Remove religion from lessons or lose charter Transcendental Meditation, Natural Law fuel controversy CRISTINA BREEN BOLLING Staff Writer A controversial Cabarrus County charter school that plans to teach Transcendental Meditation and Natural Law Curriculum when it opens this fall must remove all religion from its curriculum or lose its charter. That was the message Thursday from the N.C. Charter School Advisory Board to the leaders of the Carolina International School. The school has been challenged in recent months by local residents who believe its so-called Natural Law Curriculum and emphasis on meditation are rooted in...

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- The parents of a first-grader are fuming over the book their daughter brought home from the school library: a children's story about a prince whose true love turns out to be another prince. Michael Hartsell said he and his wife, Tonya, couldn't believe it when Prince Bertie, the leading character in ``King & King,'' waves off a bevy of eligible princes before falling for Prince Lee. The book ends with the princes marrying and sharing a kiss. ``I was flabbergasted,'' Hartsell said. ``My child is not old enough to understand something like that, especially when it is...