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Kanawha County Textbook War and How It All Started For Me
Forty five years ago this year an event occurred in Kanawha County, West Virginia that seems to have had more far-reaching ramifications than many of us who became involved in it could have imagined at that time. All I can say is thank the Lord for those who possess a historical perspective that far outdistances mine.
Back in 2004, on the 30th anniversary of this event, I wrote an article called The Thirty Years War which was posted on a website that has long since become extinct. This dealt with the Kanawha County, West Virginia Textbook Protest (war). Actually, I guess the term “war” would be more appropriate, as the politically correct cultural Marxists of that day had declared war on the mostly Christian culture of West Virginia and upon that culture’s children, via the government schools. Their weapon of choice was the textbooks for Kanawha County’s government (public) schools. Continue reading
Are Teachers Trained How To Break Your Child’s Will?
Big Brother Or Eugenics?
Our American children are being conditioned to blindly accept a planned global economy. That means American ideals as patriotism and love of country must be deleted from what is taught to our children. Traditional education and the definition of family must go. Competition and rugged individualism must be erased from their personalities. But how will the globalists stop parents from teaching American ideals to their children? Students will be challenged everyday at school. Psychological and conditioning techniques are being used in the classroom to instill a more docile, compliant global citizen that reflects team efforts, group goals, and empathy. A global citizen controls their emotions and a compliant global citizen doesn’t ask questions and does what they’re told. Parents are now “engaged” in their child’s education. They are going along, to get along. Continue reading
Cato: School choice is great – unless feds are funding it
A bill introduced in Congress would offer $5 billion in federal tax credits for state-based education scholarship programs. An analyst at a libertarian think tank, however, argues that’s not the way to go.
Under the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act proposed in late February by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Representative Bradley Byrne (R-Alabama), states would participate voluntarily and would have full control over the scope and purpose of their scholarship programs. Continue reading
Who can find time to read?
Books are good for your brain
Turn yourself into a bookworm. These techniques will help you read more.
Reading books can exercise your brain and even boost your emotional intelligence. Despite this, about a quarter of all Americans haven’t read a book in the last year and our overall book-reading time is on the decline.
In the new year, it’s time to buck this trend. But how do you find the time to read full-length books—and why should you bother in the first place? Continue reading
Grade-Changing Scandal: Judge Orders Baltimore City Schools To Release Documents
A Baltimore City Circuit Court judge has demanded Baltimore City Public Schools to hand over all documents Fox45 requested after Project Baltimore filed a lawsuit against the school system to get documents they believed would provide bombshell evidence of a massive grade-changing scandal.
“When I saw the ruling, I was elated because I believe in accountability, and government cannot run amuck,” says Scott Marder, of Thomas & Libowitz, the attorney who represented Fox45 in this lawsuit. Continue reading
Homeschooling Produces Better-Educated, More-Tolerant Kids
Politicians Hate That
Government officials should use the success of the competition as an educational moment.
There’s no better sign of success than an escalation in attacks by your enemies. Based on such evidence, homeschooling is enjoying a boom, as growing numbers of families with diverse backgrounds, philosophies, and approaches abandon government-controlled schools in favor of taking responsibility for their own children’s education. As they do so, they’re coming under assault from officials panicking over the number of people slipping from their grasp.
There’s little doubt that homeschooling is an increasingly popular option. “From 1999 to 2012, the percentage of students who were homeschooled doubled, from an estimated 1.7 percent to 3.4 percent,” reports the National Center for Education Statistics. While the government agency suggests that growth has leveled off since then, other researchers say data is hard to come by, since many states simply don’t count people who homeschool. Continue reading
Educating Ourselves Into Oblivion
How badly are we in hock to college? According to Bloomberg News, $1.46 trillion. That’s 1.46 thousand billions, or 1.46 million millions. And in the last quarter of 2018, seriously late or unpaid student debt was over $166 billion.
Those are colossally bad numbers, and no one seems to know how to make them any better. Somehow, sitting in college classrooms for five years and getting a degree in Gender Studies doesn’t translate into a viable income. College grads don’t earn enough money to pay off their debt; and their parents are borrowing to pay their kids’ expenses. Sort of a gift that keeps on giving.
The cost of what we laughingly call “higher education” has doubled in the last 20 years. Continue reading
NEA-LGBT alignment out of the closet, recruitment agenda clear
The president of the National Education Association and a man who identifies as a woman recently teamed up to teach kindergartners transgender ideology.
It was “Read Across America Day” on March 4, and NEA president Lily Eskelsen García and transgender Sarah MacBride of the Human Rights Campaign read the kindergartners’ books on being transgender at Ashlawn Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia. The books were I Am Jazz and Julián Is a Mermaid. According to Breitbart.com, the teacher in that Ashlawn kindergarten classroom is Jaim Foster – “a gay man who lobbies for LGBTQ causes.” Continue reading
Evidence Suggests Some Schools are Finally Freeing Students from the Bonds of Mediocrity
By now, many parents know there is something seriously wrong with the average American school. Time and again, children go into the school system as bright bundles of energy, curious about the surrounding world, and time and again, they stagger through the system frustrated and losing their interest in learning. Unfortunately, parents have firsthand knowledge of what former New York teacher John Taylor Gatto explained in his book, Weapons of Mass Instruction:
“After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.”
That’s easy enough to say, but is it actually possible to do? Continue reading
Charles Dickens and an Incomplete Ideal
Through reading the works of Charles Dickens, we may be inspired to take a closer look at our own priorities and come to a deeper understanding of our inability to embody perfectly our own ideals…
Buss, Robert William; Dickens’s Dream; Charles Dickens Museum, London; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/dickenss-dream-191221
Throughout the career of the esteemed literary giant Charles Dickens, selfless love as opposed to selfishness served as an underlying theme in his novels. In the characters of Nicholas Nickleby, Lucie Manette, Bob Cratchitt, Cissy Jupe, and many others, Dickens illustrated the proper understanding and execution of selfless love. On the other hand, in story after story, he condemned those who prioritized their own gain over the good of providing aid to others; Ralph Nickleby, Josiah Bounderby, and Wackford Squeers are a few examples. Continue reading
America’s Massive ‘Misedukation’ Problem
Federal Report Finds U.S. Department Of Education A Massive Failure *
Plato
Bad oversight, data quality, and evaluation methodologies have plagued the department since its creation in 1867. We still don’t know what we’re getting for billions in dollars spent, besides meddlesome federal mandates.
A new report raises questions about how the U.S. Department of Education monitors the performance of its wide-ranging elementary and secondary education programs.
The department currently receives $38 billion for its major K-12 education programs. Yet the assessment says those programs are plagued by “complex and persistent” challenges, many of which have been identified previously, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the official “congressional watchdog” charged with ensuring taxpayer dollars are spent efficiently. Continue reading
What Is Education?
It is necessary for the perfection of human society that there should be men who devote their lives to contemplation. ~ St. Thomas Aquinas
The trouble with mere pragmatism is that it doesn’t work. ~ G.K. Chesterton
What is education? I emphasize “is” because I am not here asking what education is thought to be, or what it should be according to a particular educational theory, however sound and persuasive. These are good questions, but they are secondary. What education is, in fact, comes first. Let us, then, look at education. Continue reading
So what BOOK have you read today?
Teacher: Stroking Egos Does Nothing for Students. Raising Expectations Does.
Armed with a bachelor of science in elementary education, I charged into my career as a teacher. I was immediately exposed to students at three levels of public schools:
1. A rather wealthy district with an average IQ of 120.
2. A classic, middle-class school.
3. A school that is best described as a mini United Nations.
In the “UN” school, approximately 25 percent of students were new immigrants, 30-35 percent were American-born blacks, and the remainder were 40-45 percent Caucasian. The economic structure ranged from welfare to upper middle class. Continue reading
The Founding Fathers of the Public (government) School System in America
Horace Mann
Alex Newman has written an excellent article in the February 4th issue of The New American magazine entitled From Educational Excellence To Mediocrity in which he brings up several issues I have also dealt with in the past.
He noted that the Puritans in Massachusetts were “outliers in America” in the area of having the government start to enact governmental education laws. For all the good things the Puritans may have done, in this one critical area, the promotion of governmental education laws was a horrible mistake. In fact, labeling it as a grievous error would not be an exaggeration. Continue reading
Why Johnny Still Can’t Read…
In 1955, prompted by the reading problems experience by the child of a friend, Rudolf Flesch wrote the book Why Johnny Can’t Read. The book became a huge bestseller and is still in print today.
Flesch realized that the reason many children were not learning to read was because of method of reading instruction they were exposed to in school. Hirsch called the popular method of his time the “look-say” method. The look-say method was just one of many whole word or whole language or word-guessing methods of teaching reading that have plagued students since the early twentieth century. Continue reading