Free Republic

In the first ever international assessment of financial nous among the young, China’s most populous city leads the field “by a wide margin” compared with teenagers in the US, France, Italy, Australia and elsewhere, informs “Armenpress”, in reference to Financial Times. The study was made by the OECD, the club of mostly rich nations, which tested 15- year-olds on basic financial concepts such as bank accounts, savings rates, managing finances and tax. Shanghai teens clocked a mean score of 603 points, 103 above the OECD average and 62 points ahead of the next best performer, Flemish Belgium. Five other economies...

Martin Luther’s emphasis on literacy helped make modern day journalism possible. Rise of the Corruption Story Unnatural Acts In America, we expect journalists to have some independence from government and other leading power centers. We are not surprised to glance at the morning newspaper or television news show and see exposure of wrongdoing. We assume that the press has a responsibility to print bad news as well as good. And yet, that which seems ordinary to us is unusual in the history of the world, and even in much of the world today. How did the unnatural act of independent...

For the fourth straight year, Washington, D.C. is the most literate city in the United States, according to a recent study on literacy. The study, by Central Connecticut State University (CCSU), examined how well Americans used their literacy skills in the nation’s largest cities. Rounding out the top five were Seattle, Minneapolis, Atlanta and Pittsburgh. CCSU ranked the cities based on six categories: bookstores, residents’ educational attainment, newspaper circulation, use of online resources, the library system, and periodical publishing resources. The most literate cities were largely in the Northeast, and they generally had a well-educated and well-paid population.Click here to...

A new development in education is deciding what "literacy" should be in the 21st century. With a swirl of technological breakthroughs all around us, elite educators are gaga at the plethora of excuses for pooh-poohing subjects routinely taught in the dark age known as the 20th century. The National Council of Teachers of English recently announced: "Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy." These people give good sophistry. Presto, literacy can now be defined any way they want. When these Teachers of...

Some may laugh and others may joke about it. Others will blame it on a system that needs more money. But for those (this essayist included) who have been speaking out against America’s steady degradation of education, Rachel Jeantel is the poster child for exactly what we’ve come to expect from public education. Jeantel was advertised as the star prosecution witness in the George Zimmerman trial. You know – the one where “a white Hispanic brutally gunned down an unarmed African-American simply because he was black.” (Excuse me while I throw-up.) At least once every year we witness teacher strikes...

As if more evidence were needed about the tragedy of black education, Rachel Jeantel, a witness for the prosecution in the George Zimmerman murder trial, put a face on it for the nation to see. Some of that evidence unfolded when Zimmerman’s defense attorney asked 19-year-old Jeantel to read a letter she allegedly had written to Trayvon Martin’s mother. She responded that she doesn’t read cursive, and that’s in addition to her poor grammar, syntax and communication skills. Jeantel is a senior at Miami Norland Senior High School. How in the world did she manage to become a 12th-grader without...

Keeping with its mission to deepen the community’s understanding of adult illiteracy in the region, the San Diego Council on Literacy (SDCOL) today released Voices and Faces: Literacy in San Diego. This dramatic new documentary tells the story of 13 adults, whose inability to read kept them from meeting their personal and professional needs and achieving their life goals. These 13 people represent the hundreds of thousands of adults in San Diego County and the countless more in America who go through life facing unimaginable obstacles. Often times, they are too embarrassed to tell anyone and live with a painful...

EARLIER this week, I spotted, among the job listings in the newspaper Reforma, an ad from a restaurant in Mexico City looking to hire dishwashers. The requirement: a secondary school diploma. Years ago, school was not for everyone. Classrooms were places for discipline, study. Teachers were respected figures. Parents actually gave them permission to punish their children by slapping them or tugging their ears. But at least in those days, schools aimed to offer a more dignified life. Nowadays more children attend school than ever before, but they learn much less. They learn almost nothing. The proportion of the Mexican...

Update: Two small adjustments to this story were made to clarify the relationship between Common Core and school districts. A parent in upstate New York is claiming there is some disturbing information being taught to his child as a result of a Common Core-aligned lesson on government and human rights. (Common Core is the controversial standardized curriculum program being advocated for by the federal government.) The latest example, he says, is that his daughter and her classmates are being taught a section on the 30 “universal human rights” declared by the United Nations in 1945. Those rights include: • The...

It’s an education bombshell. Nearly 80 percent of New York City high school graduates need to relearn basic skills before they can enter the City University’s community college system. The number of kids behind the 8-ball is the highest in years, CBS 2′s Marcia Kramer reported Thursday. When they graduated from city high schools, students in a special remedial program at the Borough of Manhattan Community College couldn’t make the grade. They had to re-learn basic skills — reading, writing and math — first before they could begin college courses.

E. D. Hirsch, Jr. A Wealth of Words The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary. WInter 2013 A number of notable recent books, including Joseph Stiglitz’s The Price of Inequality and Timothy Noah’s The Great Divergence, lay out in disheartening detail the growing inequality of income and opportunity in the United States, along with the decline of the middle class. The aristocracy of family so deplored by Jefferson seems upon us; the counter-aristocracy of merit that long defined America as the land of opportunity has receded. These writers emphasize global, technological, and sociopolitical trends in their analyses. But...

If you happen to care about grammar and spelling, then in these post-literate times you can expect to be considered a pedant by the semi-literate, and a "grammar nazi" by the illiterate. My blood pressure rises when I see misuses of the apostrophe, pluralization with an apostrophe, "impact" as a verb, "pro-active" in all its uses, "there is a lot" and "there is many", "He would have if he would have", among other errors familiar to the readers among whom I don't expect to see makers of such errors. Still, I realize that the battle has been lost now. Here...

If there is one true cancer in the land of education, according to our Education Establishment, it’s the torture known as “drill and kill.”Progressive educators always hated Drill and Kill. It hurts the child, we are told, and is the end of genuine learning.For the last hundred years, our Education Establishment condemned the direct transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. These elite educators are constantly in a rage that students might be forced to prepare for a test in the traditional sense, that is, they know facts. And yet, when it helps their agenda, the commissars will turn on...

In the public schools in Detroit, Mich., according to the U.S. Department of Education, only 7 percent of the eighth graders are grade-level proficient or better in reading. Some public school teachers in the City of Detroit and around the state of Michigan are reportedly taking a vacation or a sick day today to protest right-to-work legislation likely to be approved by the state legislature. Under current law, Michigan public school teachers must pay dues to the teachers’ union. If the right-to-work law is enacted, Michigan public-school teachers will be free to join the union and pay dues to it...

.... From there the regression into abandoning the teaching of reading to children was rapid. Teaching “reading” came to be viewed by many to be the act of repeatedly showing children flash cards in an effort to get them to recognize words by rote memorization as opposed to actually reading the words. Fortunately for my eldest, this had not reached the elementary schools by the mid-90s and she was taught how to read and write. My youngest, though, was met with this like a freight train and the results were comparable with a train wreck. My youngest was a hard-working...

A reading teacher commented on the Internet: “The situation in the local public schools is getting worse. This year they switched to Guided Reading. Take a look at Pinnell & Fountas. This is a perfect example of 'how not to teach reading.'" Curious, I asked a teacher in Chicago what she knew about Guided Reading. Here’s her indignant response: -------------- “HA!!! Fountas and Pinnell!!!!! They created Guided Reading (I think). These are two women who are obvious whole language experts. They publish their stuff at Heinemann. Let me explain how Guided Reading goes. You know, Bruce, in a whole language...

Braking hard ...

Statistics on book sales at Amazon show that conservative titles are out-selling liberal titles by a 56% to 44% margin. Fearing that this may create the impression that conservative ideas are winning, Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod cautioned that “we not leap to unwarranted conclusions based on these numbers.” “Reading is an activity favored by intellectually curious and verbally oriented people,” Axelrod argued. “This is neither a majority of the population nor a strong Democratic demographic. It does not represent the sizable contingent of persons who respond emotively to more pictographic stimuli.” Axelrod pointed out that “since the more viscerally...

<p>The company that persuaded hundreds of thousands of parents to buy Your Baby Can Read products is going out of business, citing the high cost of fighting complaints alleging its ads were false.</p> <p>Your Baby Can LLC announced the decision on its website.</p>

When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company. "I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says. Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many...