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... I went to see Interstellar mainly because I was tickled by the fact that the bad guy is called "Dr Mann". But I took along my kids, and I'm glad I did because it's a good film to see with children or parents. Underneath all the saving-humanity space-travel stuff, the only relationship that matters in the movie is between dad Matthew McConaughey and his daughter. I'm tiptoeing around the startling evolution of that relationship, but let's just say that the, ahem, role reversal of their final scene together had my boys talking all the way home. Interstellar is directed...

The Biden regime has devised a deceitful scheme to shut down citizen efforts to remove schoolbooks containing LGBT themes, obscenity, or explicit sexuality. How do they plan to accomplish this? The Department of Education’s (DoE) Office of Civil Rights is now monitoring book challenges across the country for “discriminatory” actions, specifically related to books with any “LGBTQI+” content. But here’s the problem with their plan: There is no federal law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender identity, queer identity, intersex identity, or plus identity. So, there is no solid basis for the DoE’s intervention in what should,...

Keller Independent School District outside Fort Worth returns "Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaptation" after controversy The Texas school district that ordered a version of Anne Frank's diary to be removed from its shelves last week says it has added the book back into its schools after igniting a media firestorm... Board president Charles Randklev lashed out at the media and outside critics of the school district during the board's public meeting Monday. "The media has done an absolute(ly) terrible job on covering what's happened over the last week within Keller ISD," he said in a statement, to applause and...

A school district in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, has ordered its librarians to remove an illustrated adaptation of, “The Diary of Anne Frank,” from their shelves and digital libraries, along with the Bible and dozens of other books that were challenged by parents last year. ..... “It’s disgusting. It’s devastating. It’s legitimate book banning, there’s no way around it,” Laney Hawes, a parent of four children in the Keller district, told JTA about the order. “I feel bad for the teachers and the librarians.” “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,” by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman and illustrator David Polonsky, is...

Despite recently passing laws to protect parental rights and prevent the sexualization of young children, some Florida schools are still carrying pornographic books. This was so concerning to one parent that he attended a school board meeting to discuss the matter. When addressing the issue and attempting to read a passage from one of these books, Florida school board members cut off the father's microphone and have yet to properly remedy the situation..... The Florida board members attempted to excuse this act by claiming that since the meeting was being broadcast, reading such content would violate federal and state laws,...

What do Cuba and Florida have in common? Book-banning, censorship — and, added into the mix this week, state-mandated school indoctrination for political purposes. They’re hallmark practices of the Communist Party-led regime in Cuba, tools used for six decades to keep Cubans isolated and in the dark about information that falls outside of what the ruling party’s ideology commands people to believe. Ironically, after this year’s GOP-dominated legislative session, the same manipulative tactics are now pillars of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ public education system. Math textbooks and literary books are being banned because some comité a la Cuba — aka “Moms...

--SNIP--As the 55 distinguished members of the National Association of Scholars explained this week, the teaching of American history faces “a grave new risk.” So-called “reforms” by the College Board, which holds a virtual monopoly on AP testing across the country, “abandon a rigorous insistence on content” in favor of downplaying “American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective.” The framework eschews vivid, content-rich history lessons on the Constitution for “such abstractions as ‘identity,’ ‘peopling,’ ‘work, exchange and technology,’ and ‘human geography’ while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning and development...

Regimes -- especially those guided by apocalyptic, violently intolerant, supremacist, megalomaniacal, non-compliant, deceitful, hate-education vision - intensify chaos, fueling nuclear war Iranian school textbooks, such as The Qur’an and Life (Grade 12, p. 125) prepare Iranian children for the Ayatollahs’ sublime goal: the apocalyptic, horrifying, millenarian, military battle against the USA and other “arrogant oppressors of the world,” which are ostensibly led by “idolatrous devils.” While the “savior”—the infallible, immortal, divinely ordained and eventual global leader, the Mahdi—has not surfaced yet, Iranian children are taught that the battle is already raging throughout the world, awaiting their sacrifice. School textbooks of...

Students at PS 106 in Far Rockaway, Queens, have gotten no math or reading and writing books for the rigorous Common Core curriculum, whistleblowers say. The 234 kids get no gym or art classes. Instead, they watch movies every day. “The kids have seen more movies than Siskel and Ebert,” a source said. The school nurse has no office equipped with a sink, refrigerator or cot. The library is a mess: “Nothing’s in order,” said a source. “It’s a junk room.” No substitutes are hired when a teacher is absent — students are divvied up among other classes. A classroom...

Turkish schoolchildren in Istanbul received a series of books denouncing scientific figures, including one denying the theory of evolution and describing Charles Darwin as a big-nosed Jew, the Financial Times reported Friday. According to the paper, the books were distributed last week to hundreds of students in the Maltepe district of Turkey's capital after the government-affiliated local education authority approved their content. The book on Darwin reportedly states that the evolutionary biologist “Had two problems: First he was a Jew; second, he hated his prominent forehead, big nose and misshapen teeth.” Darwin was not Jewish. A separate book on Albert...

Nurit Peled-Elchanan, a senior professor of language and education at Hebrew University, and a founder of the far-left Bereaved Families for Peace, has in recent weeks caused a stir overseas with a book she has written describing how Israel's education system “educates for apartheid.” Her book Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education, is being translated into English, and presents findings from what she says are “years of research” showing Israel has portrayed Arabs as second-class people. Peled-Elchanan says that she researched schoolbooks used in the Israeli school system between 1996 and 2009, and found, she said...

AUSTIN, Texas – A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade. Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation's Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a "constitutional republic," rather than "democratic," and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment...

This is how the 2005 edition of “A History of the United States,” a high school history textbook by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, relates the cataclysmic attacks of 9/11 for a new generation of young adults: “In New York City, the impact of the fully fueled jets caused the twin towers to burst into flames. The fires led to the catastrophic collapse of both 110-story buildings as well as other buildings in the area. The numbers of people missing and presumed dead after this assault was estimated to be 2,750.” The language is...

THE 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed published by a Danish newspaper which have caused outrage in the Muslim world are to be used as a teaching aid in schools, an educational publisher said in an interview published today. They may also be displayed in a museum. "What is happening at the moment has so great a significance that you cannot brush them under the carpet," Peter Mollerup, head of the academic section of the Danish publisher Gyldendal, told the newspaper Politiken. "It is essential that future generations know about these drawings," he said. He said it was not Gyldendal's...

Pakistan deletes 'pro-Bush' poem Mr Bush (left) is a key backer of President Musharraf Pakistan's government is to remove a poem from a school textbook after it emerged the first letters of each line spelt out "President George W Bush".The anonymous poem, called The Leader, appeared in a recent English-language course book for 16 year-olds.Critics say it praises Mr Bush. Its rhyming couplets describe someone "solid as steel, strong in his faith".Officials cannot explain how the poem entered the curriculum. Pupils are to ignore it ahead of a reprint next year.Not deliberate'The BBC's Zaffar Abbas in Islamabad says it...

NEW DELHI - Israel is planning to protest a western Indian state's move to include references in school books that glorify Adolf Hitler, a news report said Friday. The Israeli Embassy is planning to communicate its displeasure to Gujarat state, appalled that the school textbooks "sing praises" of Hitler, the Indian Express reported. The state is ruled by the Hindu rightist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Israel's Consul general in Bombay, Daniel Zonshine said the representation of Hitler in Gujarat's textbooks was "misleading". "Personally, I feel offended, and publicly, the representation has caused anger and unhappiness at the twisting of facts,"...

Laurie Taylor didn’t set out to become a controversial public figure. Yet, before she could say "hardcore porn made available to my young daughter," her concerns over sexually inappropriate books in Fayetteville’s school libraries had made her an easy target. And now, this pixie-like and articulate Christian mother says she has been labeled by authentic extremists as everything from a "homophobe to a bigot, a vile pig and even a Nazi." The truth that few seem to understand is that she is, plain and simple, a reasonable, devoted mother who wants only to maintain informed and effective parental influence over...

<p>An Indian tribe has forced distributors of an Arab studies guide for U.S. teachers to remove an inaccurate passage that says Muslim explorers preceded Christopher Columbus to North America and became Algonquin chiefs.</p> <p>Peter DiGangi, director of Canada's Algonquin Nation Secretariat in Quebec, called claims in the book, the "Arab World Studies Notebook," "preposterous" and "outlandish," saying nothing in the tribe's written or oral history support them.</p>

November 14, 2003 No.22 2003 Palestinian Authority Textbook Calls for Jihad and Martyrdom Following the Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Authority began to devise new schoolbooks that showed a relative change in content and direction. MEMRI's 2001 study of Palestinian schoolbooks, "Narrating Palestinian Nationalism," found that the Palestinian textbooks produced after Oslo reflected a general attempt to lessen the virulence of anti-Israel venom, as direct incitement significantly declined while a serious effort was made to enhance values such as democracy and freedom. [1] By 2003, however, a newly-printed textbook produced by the Palestinian Authority Ministry of Education titled "Islamic Culture," intended...

This present report, undertaken with the cooperation of the American Jewish Committee, presents the official Saudi worldview to which school students between the ages of 6-16 are exposed. 93 books taught in grades 1-10, mostly from the years 1999-2002 have been examined. Special emphasis is placed on the Saudi Arabian attitude to the "other", namely, Christian, Jews and the West as well as on the Middle East conflict, the concept of government , women's status in society and children's status in the family.