Free Republic

Last month's exercise in democracy in a Pittsfield, Mass., classroom was enlightening in an important way neither the teacher nor students comprehended. Susan Barnes had her fourth-graders at Morningside Community School re-enact America's founding by writing a classroom constitution. As one might expect, with kids running the world, the lesson quickly degenerated into "what's in it for me?" orgy. Their constitution included the right to free computers, the right to extra recess, the right to change desks and the right to eat candy in class. Still, Ms. Barnes seemed satisfied by the outcome: "We explored how what runs our country...

The University of Wisconsin-Madison did relatively well in a 50-college test of how much students learned about history and economics during four years of college, but students in Wisconsin and nationally knew little when they came in and not much more when they left. No college did better than a D-plus on the Civic Literacy Test released Tuesday by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a nonpartisan conservative educational organization that stresses the values of a free society. The national average was F.The test of 14,000 randomly selected students revealed that some of the most expensive Ivy League universities, with the highest-paid...

Seniors at UC Berkeley, the nation's premier public university, got an F in their basic knowledge of American history, government and politics in a new national survey, and students at Stanford University didn't do much better, getting a D. Out of 50 schools surveyed, Cal ranked 49th and Stanford 31st in how well they are increasing student knowledge about American history and civics between the freshman and senior years. And they're not alone among major universities in being fitted for a civics dunce cap. Other poor performers in the study were Yale, Duke, Brown and Cornell universities. Johns Hopkins University...

One of the reasons I decided to home school my kids was to save them from the politically correct indoctrination of the monopolized government-run schools. We selected a highly-rated curriculum from the highly regarded Calvert School which I had hoped would keep the PC crud to a bare minimum. Oh, how I was wrong. Get a load of what’s included in what amounts to the curriculum’s 2nd-grade history/civics course, “Explore Your World II.” The last few daily lessons have been on topics titled, “Good Citizens,” “Determination,” “Citizenship Traits,” “Authority Figures,” “Leadership,” and “Service.” Fine subject material, to be sure. But...

A name is more than a combination of letters. It represents an identity, a belief and, ultimately, a prophecy. So it should be no surprise that Nathan B. Forrest High School in Jacksonville is failing. The school, named for a Confederate army general and prominent Ku Klux Klan participant, is not performing to the academic standard set by the state's educational authorities.

The vast majority of American historians no longer regard American culture as an essential area of study. Instead, what they care about is social history -- the struggles and hard-won accomplishments of women, workers, African Americans, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans in a country often inhospitable to the poor and the powerless.

Colorado Springs - Douglas Bruce is known as a frugal man, not a giver of gifts. But when he tried last spring to give pocket- size copies of the U.S. Constitution to high-school seniors, two Colorado Springs-area districts said "no, thanks." snip Bruce said he made it clear that copies of the Constitution were to be given to seniors, but "I said nothing about giving them at graduation or interfering with the ceremony or my being there. That was a contrived excuse by Lewis-Palmer School District."

A reader emails us the following: So waiting for the Dolphin swim at Discovery Cove in Orlando, my daughter Nikki and I were seated with a Brit family--mom, daughter and son. After small talk about the great value of the pound vs the dollar etc, I mentioned that Churchill was one of my heroes. The son, no more than 16 countered that he really liked Hitler, and his sister Gandhi. I was stunned and sickened. According to him, Hitler was a great leader and did great things for the German people. He brought them out of depression. His quest for...

American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads. The lessons have left out a lot. Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s. Now, more of these and other lesser-known facts about American minorities are getting...

Our history curriculum needs a complete makeover, suggests Kevin Donnelly AND you thought the English curriculum was bad enough. Think again. The cultural Left has also sabotaged the Australian history curriculum in schools. In his analysis of the history wars, Stuart Macintyre summarises the various approaches to teaching Australian history that have prevailed during the past century. Macintyre argues, as a result of the cultural revolution of the '60s, that historians questioned more conservative views in favour of a "left-wing" perspective. Historians, he notes, embraced approaches such as: Marxist history, labor history and women's history. Macintyre describes this as "history...

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?"...

CANBERRA, July 7, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Australian federal Education Minister Julie Bishop has announced the government’s plan to end the marxist-inspired history curriculum that has been standard fare in Australian schools. Bishop said she will press the states and territories to adopt “traditional Australian history” along the lines of that adopted in New South Wales by former premier Bob Carr. The Australian reports that the government is planning on forcing the issue, saying that refusal would mean the change would be included in the next funding agreement. Bishop said, “I want to work with the states on this. I want...

    Memorial Day was first called Decoration Day, when the women of Columbus, Miss., decorated the graves of fallen Confederate soldiers, many of whom had been killed at nearby Shiloh Church in the first great blood-letting of our Civil War. Union wives and mothers soon followed the example, many to sing of kneeling "Where Our Loves are Sleeping."     For generations schoolchildren learned as a Memorial Day recitation the lines written by Col. John McRae, a Canadian doctor, as he took a break at a field hospital beside a cemetery at the Ypres salient in 1915: "In Flanders fields the poppies blow/between...

Sydney high school history teacher Gregory Haines, in Quadrant magazine, laments the state of his profession ACADEMIC history has been under threat and perhaps in decline for some time. In part, this is due to an overall decline in arts faculties and a consequent search for relevance, funding and position in enterprise universities which are increasingly geared for vocational training rather than broad education. But there are other factors at work. The rise of postmodernism and theory in arts faculties, later in Australia than elsewhere, where the decline has commenced, has discredited what little education there is on offer. Australian...

Tales of Iraq Soldier brings treasures, history to school By JOHN MOLSEED Messenger staff writer Fair Oaks Middle School sixth-graders learning about Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, had a special guest Friday — someone who had been there. Sgt. Tony Echevarria shared his experiences and visits to historic sites while stationed in Iraq with the students — one of them his son, Zak Echevarria. ‘‘This is believed to be the birthplace of Abraham,’’ Sgt. Echevarria said describing a Powerpoint slide showing the ancient brick structure. ‘‘He is the father of Judeo-Christian belief that we have today.’’ Echevarria has spent eight...

How Should Textbooks Treat the Clinton Scandal? by Larry Schweikart, University of Dayton Almost any student who has ever sat through a history class in high school or college will nod with familiarity when I discuss how many teachers cover the last 20 years of history: “well, of course, you know what happened next.” For me, the history that inevitably was left out was the late 1950s or the Kennedy/Nixon years. As I entered the history profession, I found most students had never “gotten up to” the Vietnam War. If the past is any guide, the likelihood of survey classes...

History lessons for British teenagers place too much focus on Adolf Hitler, according to a new report produced by the government’s curriculum watchdog. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority annual report found that as a result pupils aged 14 and over were not getting a proper overview of history. The report stated: “There has been a gradual narrowing and ‘Hitlerisation’ of post-14 history. The option choices made by schools and colleges in GCSE and AS/A level mean that the content of post-14 history continues to be dominated by topics such as the Tudors and the 20th century dictatorships.” QCA Chief Executive...

The Associated Press's Ben Feller has written an article entitled "School Textbooks Tackle the Clinton Impeachment." For people who think of tackling as the kind of head-on tackling seen at football games, tackling is the wrong word. Mr. Feller's article indicates that the school textbooks are obfuscating (making obscure or confusing) instead of "tackling." The kind of contribution to the Hillary in 2008 campaign that will not be officially reported, because it is not money or property, but will be appreciated by the Clintons, each of whom indisputably misled the American people. One more scandal involving the Clintons. (If Hillary...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The impeachment of former President Bill Clinton is in a gray area of history, too long ago to be a current event, too recent to be judged in perspective. Yet history is already judging Clinton in the place where millions of students get their information about him - textbooks. Seven years after he was impeached in a scandal of sex, perjury and bitter politics, Clinton has become a fixture in major high school texts. The impeachment is portrayed in the context of his two-term tenure, a milestone event, but not one that overshadows how Clinton handled the...

Looks like I'll be on with Bridget Quinn and John Scott "debating" Alan Lichtman over the place of the Clinton impeachment in textbooks. Among other things, I'll demand fairness, that as the second impeached president he gets every bit as much attention as the first---Andrew Johnson. I'll also insist that he was acquitted only because the Senate refused to do its job. And it was not about sex.