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I like to pick up old textbooks from the 1950s and 1960s at yard sales. They are less politically correct. I recently bought a set of children's encylopedias published in 1966. The entry on "communism" was so devastating that I couldn't help chuckling -- I can't imagine it being published today in a reference work. If anyone is interested, I can type in a few paragraphs from the article on communism. All of it is still true.

ABC News' Teddy Davis and Lindsey Ellerson Report: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told Planned Parenthood Tuesday that sex education for kindergarteners, as long as it is "age-appropriate," is "the right thing to do." "I remember Alan Keyes . . . I remember him using this in his campaign against me," Obama said in reference to the conservative firebrand who ran against him for the U.S. Senate in 2004. Sex education for kindergarteners had become an issue in his race against Keyes because of Obama’s work on the issue as chairman of the health committee in the Illinois state Senate. "'Barack...

There's a splendid controversy brewing at the University of Chicago--at least we'll consider it splendid so long as it has a happy ending, which now seems likely. The U of C may be best known these days as home to the law school where Barack Obama used to lecture on constitutional law (twice a week!), but in simpler times it was most famous as the academic perch of the great free-market economist Milton Friedman, who died in 2006. So when a prestigious university wants to name a research center after its most celebrated (Nobel prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, etc.,...

When Wendy Gonaver was offered a job teaching American studies at Cal State Fullerton this academic year, she was pleased to be headed back to the classroom to talk about one of her favorite themes: protecting constitutional freedoms. But the day before class was scheduled to begin, her appointment as a lecturer abruptly ended over just the kind of issue that might have figured in her course. She lost the job because she did not sign a loyalty oath swearing to "defend" the U.S. and California constitutions "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." * The loyalty oath from the California...

Earlier this month, the makers of Absolut Vodka issued a public apology for running an ad with an early 1830s map of North America with the words "In an Absolut world" emblazoned across the front. The retraction came as a result of a threatened boycott initiated by conservative talk radio and Web sites. Who was Absolut apologizing to and why? The ad itself ran in Mexican magazines and was aimed at an international audience. I would never have even come across it had it not been brought to my attention by this controversy. The complaints seem to range from concern...

With businesses and individuals fleeing California for states with lower tax burdens, the senate in Sacramento is taking up a pressing issue: allowing the Communist Party access to the state's public schools. Sure enough, a Democratic state senator from Long Beach, Alan Lowenthal, who is longtime professor of "community psychology" at Cal State Long Beach, has introduced a bill to allow Communist groups to use space in the schools and to allow Communists to teach in the schools. A Communist regime still exists in the planet's most populous nation, China, which operates espionage rings in this country. A Stalinist with...

While many on the left are super-sensitive when it comes to any inference of voter disenfranchisement or coercion, their thin skins have emerged when it comes to the ongoing charge of liberal indoctrination in academia, demonstrated by the current rise of all things Obamanation. How else to debunk a conspiracy theory on liberal indoctrination in schools? Try a survey conducted by academics. According to the Associated Press, “The research, to be published later this year in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, analyzes separate surveys on the attitudes of about 6,800 students at 38 universities and how they changed...

In California, your child's neighborhood bully is likely to be the state. And if the state government can't successfully mandate absolute allegiance to its dictates, then a judicial buddy can do the dirty work.

A new plan by a California lawmaker would allow schools to be used to promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, and let teachers in public district classrooms "inculcate in the mind of any pupil a preference for communism," according to a traditional values advocacy organization. "Just when we thought the indoctrination in California's public schools couldn't get any worse, state lawmakers introduce bills that will further brainwash innocent children," said a statement from Capitol Resource Institute, a traditional values and family advocacy organization based in California. "We're in California. Of course it has a chance of succeeding," CRI spokeswoman...

Among the statements made by the teacher: What part of the country has the highest murder rate? The South. What part of the country has the highest rape rate? The South. What part of the country has the highest … church attendance? The South. Oh, wait a minute. You mean there is not a correlation between these things … You know, you go down to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, all these states that are as red as they could possibly be, as right-wing Republican as you could possibly be. When you first present these people with the economic policies of the...

Fifth-graders still several years away from becoming part of the workforce protested union relations at Beth Israel Deaconnessas part of a school program designed to teach them social advocacy. Lisa Gallatin of the Brookline-based Workmen’s Circle, an organization founded in 1900 that considers social justice a core part of what it means to be Jewish, said the protest supported union elections for hospital workers throughout Boston and coincided with topics the fifth-graders were learning about in Sunday school, including immigrant history. “Each of the children wrote a letter to a hospital CEO explaining why they felt that the workers were...

This is an excerpt from a column I wrote for WorldNetDaily.com last week. It is about how politically correct sex education is harming girls' health. The full version can be reached through the link above. As an intern at the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, I’ve been working with our Senior Fellow, Miriam Grossman, M.D., author of the book Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student. Dr. Grossman has garnered media attention because she exposed the fact that health educators often risk students’ well-being in order to promote a particular ideology -- usually...

Take the poll at the top right of the site when you go there. Below is an excerpt from the poll's accompanying story. Roosevelt High School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota allows a socialist club to meet and discuss socialist ideals every Thursday morning, and many are uncomfortable with the situation. The school, however, feels the student club is protected by the Equal Access Act passed in 1984. It states that no school administrator can pass judgment on school clubs. Schools must allow additional clubs to be organized, as long as:

A new plan approved by the California Legislature could be used to ban the words "dad" or "mom" in all public schools as being discriminatory against "partner 1"' and "partner 2" in same-sex relationships, according to critics. The legislation, in fact, seeks to impose a "radical homosexual indoctrination" on the young children in the state, according to Karen England, the executive director of Capitol Resource Family Impact, a new affiliate of Capitol Resource Institute. The plan, SB777, has passed the state Assembly on a 43-23 vote and it now moves forward to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who previously vetoed another similar...

Any number of examples can be found these days to illustrate the poor or destructive education received by our children in the United States today. All across the country our children are being slighted by Teacher's Unions and organizations who don't wish to teach but wish to indoctrinate our children with their brand of political activism. From the whitewashing and PCing of our history textbooks to the failed "new" concepts in teaching being so regrettably foisted upon our little ones as an "education," the examples are legion and can be found with ease. That activism is almost universally in the...

They've learned about global warming from animated penguins and woolly mammoths. Are cartoons and toys turning them into stewards of the environment? Forget "Mommy, where do babies come from?" These days, kids can explain how penguins kiss and make mini-penguins. Or how the polar ice caps are melting. Or how your SUV guzzles too much gas, Mom! Saving the world is chic with the PB&J set. And for every environmental morsel taught in school, there's a TV show or movie with an elementary take on the natural world. The characters are snuggly animals or audacious kids. They're happy-go-lucky -- even...

Government tinkering has torn the content out of the school curriculum in state schools and replaced it with politically correct dogma, a damning report by an influential think-tank warns today. Civitas claims issues and knowledge vital to education have been junked in favour of trendy subjects and fashionable causes. No major subject area has escaped the battery of political interference which has left the system bruised and corrupted, the study claims. The report, called 'The Corruption of the Curriculum', says an educational apartheid is opening up between state and private school pupils, who have not yielded to fad subjects. It...

Students at New York City's Beacon School are getting a real education this week: The law is for chumps. Teacher Nat Turner and about a dozen of his Beacon students traveled to Cuba this month to check out life in a workers' paradise - in contravention of a Department of Education directive and in violation of federal law. Beacon - a so-called alternative public high school that caters to the bright and the privileged - dotes on teachers like Turner, who festoons his classroom walls with Che posters as he pines in public for a revolution that will never come....

Maryland Superintendent Nancy S. Grasmick yesterday denied a request from three citizen groups to halt field tests of new sex-education lessons about sexual orientation in six Montgomery County schools and said she was convinced of "the value of going forward" with the pilot program. With Grasmick's endorsement, there is nothing to stop the field tests from proceeding. Opponents of the new curriculum, approved in January by the county Board of Education, say they look forward to the decision of the Maryland State Board of Education on whether the curriculum should be overturned. [...] That the field tests are happening --...

The nature of God will no longer be part of an atheist teacher's American literature class at Lake Stevens High School.

Artifact: A Chilling Tale of Global Warming Katherine Mangu-Ward | February 2007 Print Edition The United Nations has ventured into children’s publishing with a scary story about a small boy who loses a dogsled race because of global warming. In November the odd little picture book cum policy brief, Tore and the Town on Thin Ice, made the rounds at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Kenya.The night after he loses the race by falling through a weak place in the ice, Tore has a dream in which he sees the Inuit goddess Sedna, who warns him that “rich...

As a new School of Ed student hoping to become an English teacher, I'm perfectly used to left-wing academic claptrap. I've already suffered through four years of it as an liberal-arts literature-major undergraduate. Deconstructionism and Derrida ruled the day. But now I'm with the School of Education folks and it's a rather different strain of pseudo-Marxist hogwash. The problem is this: with the Literary Liberals, it was just a zoo of academic dimwits up in the ivory tower babbling to each other. These Education Liberals are the ones teaching the people who will be teaching the children of America; they...

Children will be taught race relations and multiculturalism with every subject they study -from Spanish to science - under controversial changes to the school curriculum announced by the Government. In music and art, they could have to learn Indian and Chinese songs and instruments, and West African drumming. In maths and science, key Muslim contributions such algebra and the number zero will be emphasised to counter Islamophobia. And in English, pupils will study literature on the experiences of migration - such as Zadie Smith's novel White Teeth, or Brick Lane, by Monica Ali. One critic accused Education Secretary Alan Johnson...

FEDERAL WAY, Wash., Jan. 24 -- Frosty E. Hardiman is neither impressed nor surprised that "An Inconvenient Truth," the global-warming movie narrated by former vice president Al Gore, received an Oscar nomination this week for best documentary. "Liberal left is all over Hollywood," he grumbled a few hours after the nomination was announced. Hardiman, a parent of seven here in the southern suburbs of Seattle, has himself roiled the global-warming waters. It happened early this month when he learned that one of his daughters would be watching "An Inconvenient Truth" in her seventh-grade science class. "No you will not teach...

U.N. threatening to trump U.S. Constitution By Olivia St. John As the political cauldron heats up for the coming 2008 presidential election, few Americans seem to realize that their personal freedoms secured under the Constitution are perilously close to being trumped by the United Nations. Preposterous, you say? Not if a Democrat Senate and Democrat president ratify U.N. treaties, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, aimed at dangerously weakening national sovereignty. A case in point is the European Convention on Human Rights, an offshoot of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is currently...

GENEVA - Everyone has the right to an education. That's one of the 30 articles in the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted Dec. 10, 1948. And it was also something that West Street Elementary second- and third-graders learned about Friday when the Geneva Human Rights Commission presented its Human Rights 4Kidz program. The program was the GHRC's way of celebrating Human Rights Day 2006. Executive Director Karen Baer told students about the basic ideas of human rights and some of the articles in the universal declaration. She used an umbrella to explain who the declaration...

 The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) might finally be learning that bashing Israel isn’t a job for teachers. It is no secret that the teachers union did everything in its power to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and his educational reforms during last year’s special election in California.  What wasn’t as widely known until this month was that UTLA has also been doing its part to bring Israel, a country many of UTLA’s radical leaders detest, to her knees.   Not until it was bombarded by complaints from concerned citizens did UTLA cancel its decision to host a meeting sponsored by the...

Conservatives, welcome back to campus, that bastion of hostility toward your faith, politics and lifestyle, where Marx is revered, common sense eschewed, and multiculturalism matters more than mathematics. Are you ready for the semester—ready to stand up for those principles, to fight for your right to express opinions that are unpopular, and ready to make a difference for the conservative movement? Brendan Steinhauser, a former executive director of the Young Conservatives of Texas at Austin, wants you to fight and win battles against liberals on your campus and in order to help you he has some advice. His advice is...

The history of the United States is a tale of constant oppression— a story of a checkered past where political leaders and economic moguls continually acted in their own self-interest… or so many left-leaning history authors would prefer modern Americans to believe. American history has been hijacked by the left wing, where the mistakes of America’s past such as slavery, disenfranchisement, and class warfare are overemphasized, while Franklin D. Roosevelt is simultaneously glorified as the savior of the twentieth century with his New Deal policies. While most textbooks of that nature may cast American history in a bad light and...

Legislation Would Dictate Gay and Lesbian Teaching Materials Written for the web by Marcey Brightwell, Reporter Conservative groups are blasting a bill that would dictate the way public school teaching materials reflect gay and lesbians. The State Assembly passed Senate Bill 1437 Monday, prohibiting classroom instruction materials that reflect "adversely" on a person's homosexuality. "We're just the latest community to come along and say, 'Look, we're now the targets, we need protection,'" said the bill's author, Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Los Angeles. Kuehl said the bill is needed to help protect gay and lesbian students from discrimination and prevent hostile learning...

Dan Holden, a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Stuart Middle School, burned two flags Friday as part of a lesson on freedom of speech, said Jefferson County schools spokeswoman Lauren Roberts said.

This lady tells Franklin Graham, who proves daily he is a very small man, a very small man, that he is full of shit. via the best blog on the net: http://mainstreambaptist.blogspot.com/ from: http://ethicsdaily.com/article_detail.cfm?AID=7762Franklin Graham Bashes 'Godless' Schools A Kentucky educator criticized evangelist Franklin Graham for bashing public schools in a letter promoting a program aimed at equipping youth to share their faith. Graham, president and CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, began a June letter promoting a new ministry called "Dare to be a Daniel" like this: "Are you saddened as you watch our country's public schools systematically...

I must confess that I had trouble following David Parker's rambling version of the events surrounding the schoolyard fight between his child and his child's friend (with whom he had a play date later that week). However, a few questions clearly remain unanswered: Why is Mr. Parker subjecting his young child to nationwide publicity through the press releases of a fringe political group? How does this help his child to have normal school relationships (or even a normal childhood)? How can he use his child to gain maximum publicity for his cause and at the same time decry the fact...

From baynews9.com: Hearing both sidesSunday, July 16, 2006For the past year, the former president of Tampa Bay Veterans for Peace, Dwight Lawton, has been trying to spread a message to Pinellas County high school students."For students, it is that they have equal access to information so that they can make decision based on understanding the pros and cons of going in the service," Lawton said.Lawton, 75, was drafted into the Navy and fought in the Korean War. He says although he had no choice in serving in the military, kids today do. He's pushing for the Pinellas County school board...

A children's school book titled Let's Go to Cuba depicts Castro's fiefdom as a combination Emerald City and Willi Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Some American parents of Cuban heritage noticed it and filed a complaint with the Miami-Dade school board, who voted to remove the book from the public school library. The ACLU claims to be scandalized and filed suit to retain the book. [...] "The Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world." rhapsodized the ACLU's founder, Roger Baldwin about the Soviet Union. "Today I saw fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers...

Education: The ACLU is defending the right of school officials to force-feed American students with pro-Communist propaganda about Cuba. It's perfectly in line with the group's Marxist origins. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association filed suit in U.S. District Court in Miami last week to keep the Miami-Dade School District from removing children's books depicting life in Cuba under Fidel Castro as a bed of red roses. The school board had voted 6 to 3 to oust from all 33 school libraries Alta Schreier's book "A Visit to Cuba," written for 5-, 6- and...

The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal judge to stop the Miami-Dade County school district from removing a series of children’s books from its libraries, including a volume about Cuba which depicts smiling kids in communist uniforms. The ACLU and the Miami-Dade County Student Government Association argued in a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Wednesday that the school board should add materials with alternate viewpoints rather than remove books that could be offensive. Last week, the board voted 6-3 to remove “Vamos a Cuba” and its English-language version, “A Visit to Cuba” from 33 schools,...

ABC News reporter John Stossel once did a show called "Tampering With Nature" in which he quizzed schoolchildren on their perceptions of the health of the environment. He asked the children "whether America's air and water were getting more polluted. The kids loudly agreed that they were," recounted Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute in a July 2001 article. "When Stossel told the kids that Environmental Protection Agency monitoring shows the air and water getting rapidly cleaner, they shouted 'No!' One little boy yelled 'They lie!'" Not much has changed. Environmental alarmism remains dominant in the popular culture. But there's...

The First Amendment to the Constitution is arguably the most important. This amendment, packaged with the nine following it as the Bill of Rights, grants citizens the freedoms of press, speech, religion, peaceful assembly and a right to "petition the government for a redress of grievances." Freedom of speech cases are often some of the most hotly contested in the country. Recently, a case involving a high school social studies teacher has been given national media attention. The case involves Denver teacher Jay Bennish, who was put on paid leave from Overland High School after comparing President George W. Bush's...

Jay Bennish is a teacher who collects paychecks for teaching Colorado high school students about geography. Here is a sample from one of Bennish’s classes: “Do you see how this economic system [capitalism] is at odds with humanity? At odds with caring and compassion? It is at odds with human rights. Anytime you have a system that’s designed to procure profit, when profit is the bottom motive, money, that means money is going to become more important potentially than what? Safety, human lives, etcetera.” According to Tustin Amole, Public Information Officer for the Cherry Creek School District, the above statement...

Pre-school children attending two nurseries in Oxfordshire are being taught a new version of Baa Baa Black Sheep - Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep. Critics say altering the words of the traditional nursery rhyme is an example of political correctness gone too far. But the charity running the nurseries, Parents and Children Together (Pact), said the move was educational, not motivated by racial concerns. Pact said children were encouraged to use a wide range of words in songs. Baa, baa, black sheep, Have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, Three bags full; One for the master, And one for the...

What Did Your Child Learn At School Today? Joseph Kyle, 37, a Parsippany High School teacher is having President Bush tried for "crimes against civilian populations" and "inhumane treatment of prisoners" in his senior advanced placement government class. Students are arguing both sides before a five-teacher "international court of justice" during the weeklong trial. The panel's verdict could come as soon as Friday. Kyle declined to discuss his opinion of Bush, the war in Iraq or the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He said he isn't trying to show up the president. "President Bush is...

Here's Hillary Clinton going bananas over school vouchers, via FNC's Hannity and Colmes: Download and watch the video (Windows Media file). Hillary screeches that providing inner-city and poor students with more choice in education will lead to a a "school of the Church of the White Supremacist " and a "School of the Jihad." Transcript: CLINTON: Suppose that you were meeting today to decide who got the vouchers. First parent comes and says 'I want to send my daughter to St. Peter's Roman Catholic School' and you say 'Great, wonderful school, here's your voucher. Next parent who comes says, 'I...

In this war freedom should come first not after! In New Hampshire the Motto is Live free or Die! I don't need Bush spying on law abiding americans and taking our freedoms. Anyone who surrenders a square inch of freedom to the government in the name of saftey is a traitor and should be treated like one! Let the Bush Fashists all drop dead! Filthy Commys! LET FREEDOM RING!

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- For more than a year, some children at North Side Elementary School learned about the health dangers posed by candy and empty snacks. So when Monique Manigat's gifted class of fourth- and fifth-graders was asked to sell chocolate bars, potato chips and hard candy to fund class trips, the 19 children decided that would be hypocritical and refused. "If they tell us to don't eat junk food and then after school we sell it, that disobeys what they said," said Daphnie Auguste, the 10-year-old ringleader. She hasn't raised one dollar toward her personal $455 goal. "I'm...

BENNINGTON, Vermont (AP) -- A high school teacher is facing questions from administrators after giving a vocabulary quiz that included digs at President Bush and the extreme right. Bret Chenkin, a social studies and English teacher at Mount Anthony Union High School, said he gave the quiz to his students several months ago. The quiz asked students to pick the proper words to complete sentences. One example: "I wish Bush would be (coherent, eschewed) for once during a speech, but there are theories that his everyday diction charms the below-average mind, hence insuring him Republican votes." "Coherent" is the right...

<p>A letter-writing campaign by third-graders at Allis Elementary School encouraging an end to the war in Iraq was canceled because it violates School Board policy, district officials said Tuesday.</p> <p>Julie Fitzpatrick, a member of the 10-teacher team that developed the project for the school's 90 third-grade students in five classes, said the assignment was intended to demonstrate citizen action, one of the district's standards in social studies.</p>

Lexington, Mass. — David and Tonia Parker are asking their neighbors in this liberal town for one consideration: Tolerance. The Parkers believe homosexuality is immoral. So they were appalled when their son brought a picture book home from kindergarten that showed families with same-sex parents. To ensure his "spiritual safety," they demanded the right to pull him out of class whenever homosexuality was discussed. To deny them that right, they say, would be intolerant of their faith. School administrators offer a different take on tolerance. They say it's their job to expose children to the world's diversity. Supt. Paul B....

October 4, 2005 Release No. 05-019 Contact: Oliver Wolf, (412) 760-5482 Nathaniel Walton, (781) 248 0808 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Lewiston High School Student Threatened with Suspension for Exercising First Amendment Rights LEWISTON - The Maine College Republicans are expressing strong support of Lewiston High School senior Brent Bowen, whose First Amendment rights were violated by a member of the school's faculty during an unfortunate incident there last week. The incident occurred last Monday when Bowen, who founded the first Teenage Republican chapter in Maine, was handing out copies of the official Maine College Republican newspaper, The Pachyderm Press, in the...

The purpose of this lesson is to satisfy the California State Language Arts Standards for use of electronic and internet sources, reading comprehension, writing, and analysis of public debate; and Social Science Standards for democracy in action, the American political process, and participation in public debate.