Liberal, feminist (in the classic sense), college professor Camille Paglia is at it again, triggering America’s leftwing crybabies with her blunt honesty and her perceptive commentary about the ills in modern America.

In a recent conversation with conservative philosopher (and educator) Christina Hoff Sommers, Paglia reveals that many of our current problems on the college campus really began in public elementary and secondary schools.

“It’s really started at the level of public school education. I’ve been teaching now for 46 years as a classroom teacher, and I have felt the slow devolution of the quality of public school education in the classroom.”

Paglia argues that the vast majority of today’s college students have no sense of history, no sense of geography, and no understanding of how things work or why they are the way they are. Continue reading →

For those of us paying attention to what’s happening in the world around us, the coming collapse is a foregone conclusion. All signs point to the inevitable: that an event, or series of events, will soon lead the world into what can be described as a modern period of the Dark Ages. Food will become scarce, violence will thrive, disease will spread, governments will turn on their people, and the fragile social fabric that has maintained relative peace throughout the Western world will unravel.

As Todd Sepulveda writes in his latest e-book, Education After the Collapse:

It’s only in the movies, apocalypse. I hope so. But what if?
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…but students will need PERMISSION slips to read it

NOTE: The following is a follow up – and reversal – of a previously published piece, Mississippi school district removes To Kill a Mockingbird.

A Mississippi school district will resume teaching ‘To Kill A Mockingbird‘ after the book was pulled from a junior high reading list.

The Sun Herald reports that Biloxi School District administrators removed the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum earlier this month after the district received complaints that some of the book’s language ‘makes people uncomfortable.’

School officials said they’ll begin teaching it again in class starting Monday. Students, however, have to ask to participate and return a permission slip signed by a parent.

The school district had become the focus of a national public outcry when it pulled the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee, which deals with racial inequality in a small Alabama town. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, schools tried to improve the character of their students. Be neat. Be punctual. Be accurate. Do your homework. Don’t copy anyone else’s work. Dot your is and cross your ts. Remember, practice makes perfect.

In a similar way, the Boy Scouts urged boys to be little gentlemen. Scout Law dictates: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.”

For much of American history, few questioned these values. Benjamin Franklin declared the prevailing view: “nothing is of more importance for the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue.” Continue reading →

                     John Brown, 1859

It is unsurprising that one of the Antifa groups that have been making the news lately identifies itself with John Brown, the revolutionary abolitionist who was hanged shortly after leading an attack upon Harper’s Ferry in 1859.

Brown’s career embodies the progressive fixation with being on the ostensibly “right” side of history, and as the attempted massacre of Republican senators by an unhinged Bernie Sanders activist suggests, Brown’s spirit is alive and well in 2017 America. Antifas and James Hodgkinson’s failed rampage are not the only signs of said spirit’s continuing presence, however. The ongoing purge from the South of Confederate symbols also reflects the triumph of Brown’s totalitarian utopianism over novelist-historian Shelby Foote’s “Great Compromise.”
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The Sun Herald reports that Biloxi administrators pulled the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum this week. School board vice president Kenny Holloway says the district received complaints that some of the book’s language ‘makes people uncomfortable.’

‘There were complaints about it,’ she said. However, the school board did not vote on the decision

Harper Lee, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, died in 2016 at the age of 89. Published in 1960, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee deals with racial inequality in a small Alabama town.

A message on the school’s website says, “To Kill A Mockingbird teaches students that compassion and empathy don’t depend upon race or education.” Holloway says other books can teach the same lessons.

The Sun Herald received a email that said the decision was made ‘mid-lesson plan, the students will not be allowed to finish the reading of To Kill A Mockingbird …. due to the use of the ‘N‘ word.’ Continue reading →

“Comrades! We must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.” ~ Nikita S. Krushchev

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” ~ Vladmir Ilyich Lenin

The teachings of the Left include discrediting the Bible and replacing religion with social justice, dishonoring America and family, controlling the schools and curricula, and normalizing promiscuity. The Left has set about “deconstructing” (breaking down) the child’s psychology, removing every facet of life that provides the sense of security needed to create a mature, stable, responsible, independent, confident, and productive adult who will contribute to a free society. And it is through today’s schools that they are deconstructing our children in order to destroy the free society. Continue reading →

Minnesota is Ground Zero in the Left’s efforts to brainwash young people

In places like Edina, Minnesota, the Left has transformed K-12 schools into indoctrination factories whose overarching purpose is to train students to be reflexively racist and anti-American.

Educators in Edina, a wealthy Minneapolis suburb, don’t even try to conceal their sinister goals. Elementary school students there are subjected to an A-B-C book titled A is for Activist. Among the alphabetized propaganda points are these gems:

“A is for Activist. Are you an Activist?”

“C is for … Creative Counter to Corporate vultures.”

“F is for Feminist.”

“T is for Trans.”

“X is for Malcolm as in Malcolm X.”

When Donald Trump won the election last November, anarchy and partisan bullying paralyzed the high school. Continue reading →

The local “education” improvement efforts follow in the footsteps of multiple national “education” strategy programs over the decades, e.g. Dewey’s Progressivism, School to Work, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Common Core, and for good reason. It comes from a Consulting company, Cambridge Strategies, headed by Kevin Castner who in 2010 served as a Race to the Top (Obama’s version of education reform) Peer Review Panelist for the U.S. Department of Education.

The footsteps being followed are those of the destruction of challenging academics, of merit, of individualism, of achievement, et al via the adoration of emotions, irrational goals, egalitarianism, and collectivism. All in the sacred name of “Social Justice”—which has nothing to do with rigorous academics, the true job of schools. A brief summary of their goals follows… Continue reading →

Teachers across the country retire, their pensions are being subsidized by newly hired teachers to a surprising degree. Teachers’ pension plans have always rewarded long-serving veterans at the expense of short-termers. But now, as more and more plans develop shortfalls, states have been imposing cost-cutting measures, and recent research shows that the newest hires are bearing the brunt of the changes, raising questions of fairness. Continue reading →

Robert Chandler in his 2008 book SHADOW WORLD tells how Plato explained the differences between images and reality in their simplest and perhaps purest form some 2,400 years ago. He selected the shadows made by a fire in a cave to explain the difference between what we see and the reality surrounding us in the sunlight outside the cave. Shadows are only imitations of really living things, the Greek philosopher observed. The shadows on the wall of the cave present the appearance of material things, not their true nature.

From the beginning premise, doubtlessly drawn from his own observations, Plato takes a second step, which helps us to understand deception in the modern world. If one held people as prisoners in a cave, Plato surmised, with chains preventing them from turning their bodies and heads, the fires behind and above them at some distance would cast shadows on the wall. Since restraints would hold the prisoners in place, the shadows could be used to manipulate and shape their perceptions, which would naturally lead to a phenomenon in which the images cast on the cave wall would become truth in the eye of the beholder. “To them,” Plato concluded, “the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” As a result, the prisoners, once in the world of sunlight outside the cave, would find that they believe the “shadows of the images” more than the living creatures and actual things in the world around them. Continue reading →

Schools Become Mental Health Clinics

~ Foreword ~
With all the CRAP that is being taught in the public schools (and some private schools) I have to ask WHY any parent would continue to send their children to them. The insane subject matter – the sex fueled teachers who think their students are their sex toys – the pushing of this trans gender garbage – and the FAILURE to teach the basics like Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Civics, – all the subjects that used to be the norm – have been taken over by the global/demonic indoctrinators. I stopped voting for all school levies in the mid 60’s when the Federal Way, WA public school teachers went on their ILLEGAL strike and they weren’t fired and sued for their ILLEGAL strike. I saw a change in the way my children were being taught and I refused to support any $$$ – granted few other parents understood what they were supporting so they voted yes on those extortion levies.

Split up the families to make it easier to train more protestors. ~ Jackie Juntti
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The 49th Annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward Public School was released. It finds that those surveyed apparently don’t realize what school is for – education, not social services.

92 percent of Americans support after-school programs.

The Atlantic reports:

“When it comes to judging a school’s quality, what matters most? A new poll suggests the American public puts a premium on offerings outside of traditional academics, including career-focused education, developing students’ interpersonal skills, and providing after-school programs and mental-health care.”

Education reformers have been pushing career technical education (CTE) and social-emotional learning and now we have a poll that shows Americans are eating the crap sandwich with a smile. Continue reading →

Bolshevism where the “equality” utopia will reign supreme except for the elites who will continue to live their debauched and obscene lives

“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?” ~ Mad Hatter, character in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

If you wondered about the deplorable state of American mis-education, all you have to do is look at the historical revisionist indoctrination in the textbooks, the classroom-forced Islamization of students, the Common Core standards that are dumbing down students across the board, and the Bolshevik-style cultural purge of Civil War monuments and heroes that are taking place around the country with the full approval and instigation from academia, the MSM, politicians, the current administration, and American citizens. Continue reading →

Educators must remain engaged and autonomous in order to do their jobs well and avoid burnout.

My co-teacher and I met in the parking lot before school and stared into my car trunk at the costumes and props we had gathered over the weekend. We were giddy with excitement and nervous because neither of us had tried anything like this before. We also taught in the kind of school where one wrong move in the classroom could lead to disastrous results because of our students’ intense behavioral and learning needs.

The co-teacher, Alice Gnau, had found a book called Teaching Content Outrageously by Stanley Pogrow, which explained how secondary classrooms can incorporate drama into any content to engage students in learning—incorporating the element of surprise, for example, or developing role-play or simulation experiences to teach content and standards. The book inspired us to change how we taught our seventh-grade language-arts students in a high-poverty school that struggled with test scores, especially reading and math. Continue reading →

The Four ‘R’s?

(Photo TOBIAS SCHWARZ/AFP/Getty Images)

The National Science Foundation is spending over $130,000 on a study that asks four-year-olds about their “internal sense of gender identity.”

A grant for a two-year study was awarded to the University of Washington this summer. The project will interview 250 children aged four to six, and their parents, asking a series of questions about “gendered behavior.”

“Prominent theories of gender development have discussed the degree to which gender identity results from an internal sense of gender and socialization processes,” according to the grant. “However, tests of these theories have been limited because, for most children, internal gender identity and environmental socialization substantially overlap, rendering it impossible to distinguish the relative impact of each factor on gender development.” Continue reading →

AAAAw, Jeez – here we go again! How dumb can we go? Every time we touch the system – it goes further downhill – even though they promise it will make things better. The following post is from the archives of Kettle Moraine, Ltd – originally published on the Federal Observer, March 10, 2010. Tell me – what has changed? (Ed.)

A panel of educators convened by the nation’s governors and state school superintendents proposed a uniform set of academic standards on Wednesday, laying out their vision for what all the nation’s public school children should learn in math and English, year by year, from kindergarten to high school graduation.

The new proposals could transform American education, replacing the patchwork of standards ranging from mediocre to world-class that have been written by local educators in every state.

Under the proposed standards for English, for example, fifth graders would be expected to explain the differences between drama and prose, and to identify elements of drama like characters, dialogue and stage directions. Seventh graders would study, among other math concepts, proportional relationships, operations with rational numbers and solving linear equations.
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The following post is from the 2010 archives of Kettle Moraine Publishing (the Federal Observer). Although now retired, Linda Schrock-Taylor – is/was an extremely gifted and talented teacher and marvelous writer. Metropolis Café is proud to republish her work – for in the scheme of things – little has changed in the Public Fool System. ~ J.B.

When our son would tantrum – as all toddlers do at least once, we would calmly carry him to his room; explain that we did not want to see or hear such ugliness; and give him permission to rejoin us in the common areas of the home once he “finished.” Soon…then sooner…then soonest, he finished and the tantrum phase ended. Toddlers are much more sensible than many teachers. These public tantrums of public school teachers proves my point.

Unfortunately, the media is leading the way in giving attention to, and becoming too distraught over, badly behaving teachers. We cannot carry the teachers to their rooms let alone force them to actually teach but we can ignore them. Like toddlers, they should soon notice that no one is paying any attention to their fits and spurts. But on second thought…they have shown that they are not as sensible like toddlers. Continue reading →

Why does the government controlled education system keep trying to reinvent the knowledge wheel? The more they manipulate, the more distorted & unwieldy it becomes.

For Pete’s sake, some of the most esteemed educators in the history of the world taught in the 300’s B.C. Socrates set up a basis for learning by the use of hypothesis & questioning until a non-contradictory answer could be reached…a method used in science & law studies for centuries. Then there was Plato and his student Aristotle (the father of Reason & individuality) and his Lyceum (place of lectures & learning). How many students can even tell you who they were?

These efforts/achievements finally led to the Age of Enlightenment (e.g. John Locke), hence advancement in every field of endeavor, through the Industrial Revolution which lifted the standard of living for the masses within its sphere. Continue reading →