In the fall of 2018, the trustees of Washington and Lee University voted to paper over parts of the university’s history…
On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on Institutional History and Community,” the board voted to close off the Recumbent Statue of Robert E. Lee in the university chapel that bears his name and to remove the name of John Robinson from an important campus building. Continue reading
~ Foreword ~
The following is posted in tribute to the wisdom of Neal Ross, Michael Gaddy and Al Benson Jr.. They have seen and written about what many have refused to recognize. ~ Ed.
That “goddamnedpieceofpaper”- again
What the Antifederalists predicted would be the results of the Constitution turned out to be true in most every respect.
Most school kids are left with the impression that the US Constitution was the inevitable follow-up to the Declaration of Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the exciting debate that took place after the war and before the Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal government at all. Continue reading
We have collectively become so programmed to believe that education and schooling are synonymous that we can’t imagine learning without schooling and become frazzled and fearful when schools are shuttered.
As the global coronavirus outbreak closes more schools for weeks, and sometimes months – some 300 million children are currently missing class – parents, educators, and policymakers are panicking.
Mass compulsory schooling has become such a cornerstone of contemporary culture that we forget it’s a relatively recent social construct. Responding to the pandemic, the United Nations declared that “the global scale and speed of current educational disruption is unparalleled and, if prolonged, could threaten the right to education.” Continue reading
A student letter to his teacher – during this “quarantined” period of our lives.
As the world scrambles to curtail COVID-19 with social distancing, millions of parents are facing the prospect of involuntarily homeschooling their children for the foreseeable future.
As of Monday, 45 states have ordered all schools to be closed. At least 54.8 million school students are now home. Though initial school closures have ranged from a few days to a month, many speculate it could be a lot longer before schools reopen, if they do at all for the rest of the academic year.
While it is disruptive to the economy, as well as public school children and parents, a whole lot of good will come out of school closings — beyond the obvious benefit of slowing the spread of the disease.
Here is what parents and the public as a whole should take away from the school closings. Continue reading
My son wants to attend vocational school in high school and I am all for it. (Twenty20 @Amandafisher)
I’m going to be completely transparent: When I attended high school in the ‘90s, if you were a student who took vocational classes, everyone thought it meant you couldn’t cut it in regular school. Continue reading
A group of prominent conservative black scholars, pastors and activists has unveiled an alternative to the New York Times’ controversial and highly criticized “1619 Project” with a history initiative of their own dubbed “1776.”
“I’m here for two reasons, I believe in America and I believe in black people,” said Glenn Loury, a professor of economics at Brown University, one of many to speak at a news conference at the National Press Club on Friday to announce the effort.
Loury said the authors behind the 1619 Project “don’t believe in black people.” Continue reading
Tennessee Middle Schoolchildren REQUIRED To Write “Allah Is The Only God”
The radical Left has infected public education like we’ve never seen before, and because of it, students in Tennessee are now being taught that ‘Allah is the only God.’
Parents at a middle school in Spring Hill, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville, are upset that their children have spent three weeks studying Islam and were assigned to write the Shahada profession of the Islamic faith: “Allah is the only god.” Making the situation worse, parents said the teacher skipped over the section on Christianity… (Continue to full article)
13 Times People Kept It Simple
Life can be complicated, especially when you’re trying to learn a bunch of things in school. So many subjects to pay attention to and so little attention to do it with!
Luckily for these kids, they didn’t panic and they kept it together and went with a really simple approach. Looks like it paid off… (Continue to full article)
Lincoln to slaves: Go somewhere else!
You have heard us say it for years, “Lincoln may have been the Nation’s first Politician.“
The issue of slavery divided the country under Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency. The national argument was simple: either keep slavery or abolish it. But Abraham Lincoln, known as the Great Emancipator, may have also been known as the Great Colonizer when he supported a third direction to the slavery debate: move African Americans somewhere else… (Continue to full article)
Social Justice Revisionism Comes for Washington and Lee
On the recommendations of Washington and Lee’s “Commission on Institutional History and Community,” the board voted to close off the Recumbent Statue of Robert E. Lee in the university chapel that bears his name and to remove the name of John Robinson from an important campus building.
A group of alumni were concerned by those decisions and started to dig deeper. They discovered that those weren’t the only attempts to de-emphasize their school’s history. Over the preceding year, the school ended prayer at public ceremonies, temporarily removed a stop in the interior of Lee Chapel from campus tours for prospective students, and even briefly banned a children’s book on Lee’s horse, Traveller… (Continue to full article)
Reading, Writing, Arithmetic or SEX, What’s in Your school?
Should the federal government subsidize Planned Parenthood’s radical sex education curriculum?
In 1963, Rep Herlong (D FL) read 45 Goals of Communism into the congressional record. This was 53 years ago when the Democrat Party actually stood for decency and understood the dangers of communism. Today the majority of those goals are being practiced… (Continue to full article)
The value of owning more books than you can read
I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.
The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This leads to occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes spilling across my shelves. Sound familiar? But it’s possible this guilt is entirely misplaced.. (Continue to full article)
During the last couple of decades, new types of parents have emerged. From the anxiously involved helicopter parents to the pushy tiger mums, these differing styles all have one thing in common: they tend to involve over-parenting. This is where parents micromanage their children’s lives – giving them little autonomy, putting too much pressure on them to achieve academic and personal success, while allowing few chances for their children to experience failure and frustration. Continue reading
NORTH CANTON, Ohio – A purse discovered behind a locker at North Canton Middle School in Ohio is giving modern-day students a glimpse into the life of a high schooler in the late 1950s. Continue reading
Today’s schools teach only the ugliest parts of US history, turning students off from civic engagement. Shutterstock
When he was young, Thomas Jefferson carefully copied those words — a quote from the great political philosopher Montesquieu — into his “commonplace book,” the private journal he kept as a student for future inspiration.
“Everything, therefore, depends on establishing this love in a republic,” the passage continued. “And to inspire it ought to be the principal business of education.”
Thomas Jefferson thought teaching children American History, at an early age, should be a central focus. Continue reading
America is in crisis. The citizenry is fragmented, polarized, and angry. The media, Hollywood, and academia hate the President, who doesn’t care much for them either. This elite trifecta, along with the coastal, urban upper class, not only loathes Trump, but is contemptuous of Middle America and its traditional virtues. But the battle to preserve these virtues and the very possibility of self-government among future generations of Americans can no longer be waged merely at the level of politics. It must now be fought on every college and university campus across the nation. Continue reading
“Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they never fail to imitate them.“ ~ James Baldwin
Most parents want the best for their children. They want them to grow up to be proud, strong individuals, capable of meeting most, if not all, of life’s challenges. They want their children to be good parents to their offspring, as well. Any of these desires depends almost entirely on what goes on at home and on the quantity and quality of both education and experience while they are growing up. But the hard truth is, children are like sponges and they soak up the environment in which they live, in most cases, mirroring their parents. They start filling up the “Little Black Box” of their brain from the day they are born.
If their parents are slovenly and lazy, children have a very high percentage of turning out slovenly and lazy. If parents are industrious, creative, responsible and self-reliant, their children are quite likely to take on these qualities. If their parents are involved in the community, children have a greater chance of also being involved. If the parents take an interest in and are a part of the political process, that experience will rub off on their children. But if the parents are apathetic and indifferent, their children will learn apathy and indifference. Continue reading
Back in the 60s and early 70s, some of the best minds were in the education field. These were veteran teachers, who had begun their careers in the 50s, some earlier, but their sole purpose was to TEACH, TO EDUCATE, not indoctrinate, not by rote or Common Core….. The methods taught by these teachers, by which we serious students learned to think for ourselves, grasped our studies in civics and government, how to figure math in our heads, learn to parse sentences, spell, read profusely, and use critical thinking skills, are probably verboten or not used any more. Continue reading
“Deep Equity”, developed by the Corwin company, is quickly becoming the new standard curriculum being taught in our public schools. If you’ve never heard of it, you soon will. It’s in San Tan valley in Arizona, Chicago, Illinois, Louisville, Kentucky, the entire Cleveland, Ohio public school district, charter schools in California and many more American cities as well as Canada. Continue reading
Him and Her – or They and Zee?
When the National Education Association (NEA) partnered with a radical homosexual and transgender group known as the “Human Rights Campaign” to create “welcoming schools,” a lot of public-school teachers felt uncomfortable, if not outraged. But when the groups sent out a mass e-mail encouraging teachers to ask young children what “pronouns” they prefer — he, she, they, z, tree, and so on — that was a bridge too far for many.
In a video produced as part of the campaign, two transgender children discuss their preferred pronouns with each other. One of the children prefers the plural pronoun “they,” while the other, who claims not to be a boy or a girl, prefers “zee.” Seriously. After that, the two children discuss the alleged need to “educate” their own teachers, especially substitutes, on the supposed importance of using the newly invented pronouns that students choose for themselves. Continue reading
There is this idea Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad asking Malaysians to emulate Japan and Korea as models, of showing recordings of good teachers teaching. The 94-year-old prime minister liked it a lot and wants school to adopt and implement. I suppose his minister of education would also abide by the wishes, as a loyal party member. But I hope I am wrong. That this is not to be the solution to improve our education system, any for that matter. If this is so, I believe this is an idea whose time should never come. Continue reading
Gary D. Barnett, a retired financial advisor and estate planner, has an informative site on the internet, where he deals with various subjects – one of which – one of the most pertinent, is public education… Continue reading