Parenting the Instagram generation

Can kids be encouraged to let go of the virtual world – occasionally – and engage in the real one? Can they stop posting selfies long enough to think of someone else? The answer is yes. But there are bound to be some anxious moments for parents along the way.

Jake Lee, a tanned California teenager in baggy shorts and a T-shirt, is lounging on the floor of his parents’ midcentury home. They live in a suburban Silicon Valley enclave of tech workers, cyber-savvy kids, and the occasional Google self-driving car that whirs past along pristine, eucalyptus-lined streets. He flicks through his iPhone, his fingers moving with the speed and dexterity of a jazz pianist, as he answers the sporadic text message.

“I’m on social media every waking moment of my life,” he says, with no particular pride. “I could be, like, Snapchatting and Instagram messaging the same person at the same time.” Continue reading →

It would seem that this might not be the proper web-site to post the following commentary, however in my opinion – it exactly the correct place to post this thought provoking piece. After all – Father’s are equally as necessary in the education and upbringing as are Mothers. It’s called family. ~ J.B.

As an active and involved dad, a parent advocate, and author of 12 parenting books, I appreciate that every third Sunday in June is reserved to celebrate fatherhood. However, it frustrates me to watch how, in the succeeding 364 days, conversations about fatherhood revert to misrepresenting fatherhood as well as devaluing a dad’s role as a parent.

Ironically, leading the campaign of how dads fall short of their responsibilities are organizations such as the National Fatherhood Initiative and the National Center for Fathering, both of which debuted in the early 1990s. Continue reading →

Parents in a northern California community aren’t happy with a kindergarten teacher for discussing transgender issues with students – something one family advocate saw coming years ago.

According to CBS 13 in Sacramento, the incident happened at Rocklin Charter School Academy just before students left for the summer break. Concerned parents went to the school board meeting Tuesday night to speak out on the issue. They say a kindergarten teacher, who stands by her actions, read “gender identity” books to her class before a student changed clothing as part of an effort to reveal that student’s “true gender.” Continue reading →

With more schooling options available, millions of parents are choosing non-traditional education options for their children.

Parents are fed up. As mass schooling becomes more restrictive, more standardized and more far-reaching into a child’s young life, many parents are choosing alternatives. Increasingly, these parents are reclaiming their child’s education and are refocusing learning around children, family, and community in several different ways. Continue reading →

When a government monopoly is threatened by the ability to compete and improve.

Get rid of Common Core, and it is replaced by the same thing with a different name. Shift to charter schools, and the government will use the financial purse strings to dictate curriculum. The only way to stop this is to cut the federal financial ties to the education of our children. Then, each state will answer to the parents. To save America, we must save one child at a time. It starts with the education of our children. Join the cause. ~ Rosemary Stein, M.D.

College Professor’s Epic Class Introduction Went Viral

Originally published in August of 2015 – but well worth the read. ~ J.B.

Author’s Note: The following column is comprised of excerpts taken from my first lectures on the first day of classes this semester at UNC-Wilmington. I reproduced these remarks with the hope that they would be useful to other professors teaching at public universities all across America. Feel free to use this material if you already have tenure. Continue reading →

Brainwashing of Academia, Hollywood, Communist foreign infiltrators, and the mainstream media

As a parent who struggles to pay the tuition for their child at the average university in America, or goes into debt borrowing the money, consider what your child must face in order to finish a four years of college education, which may or may not help them get a job.

The American campus is no longer the place of learning, to discuss and exchange ideas, it has become a place of indoctrination, of fear, a place where your children are further indoctrinated, and are not prepared to deal with or function in real life and in the job world. Continue reading →

One Room Schoolhouse

Just about everyone from left to right believes in the power of more education for more Americans, that more education for all will open up opportunity, raise standards of living, and reduce economic inequality. Some scholars, however, are skeptical.

They have at least three related arguments. One is that the content of education–perhaps beyond basic literacy and skills– does not matter for individuals’ economic attainment, that what matters is the person’s relative level of education. When few people have graduated high school, doing so will make a big difference, but when most people have a high school diploma, then real success then requires going to college. Employers just up their requirements as educational attainment spreads, so what is important is being ahead of the pack. Continue reading →

It’s two lose, Lautrec! ~ (pun intended)

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Yes, of course, it’s the former. Millions of Americans can’t tell, thanks to the public schools and their waste of your money.

So here’s where we end up. Many allegedly educated Americans cannot avoid the simplest grammatical and spelling mistakes. Clearly, they have never been taught right from wrong, linguistically speaking.

Here are the most common examples now disfiguring blogs and comments by the billions: it’s or its? Who’s or whose? Know or no? Your or you’re? Too, to, or two? Their, there, or they’re? Loose or lose? Continue reading →

Liberals, Progressives, and Socialists are leading America to re-fight the War Between the States. The blood of 600,000 Americans killed in war from 1861 to 1865 is insufficient to cleanse the sin of enslavement. And it is in that context that you should find Mr. Williams comments both highly interesting and instructive:

The victors of war write its history in order to cast themselves in the most favorable light. That explains the considerable historical ignorance about our war of 1861 and panic over the Confederate flag. To create better understanding, we have to start a bit before the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Continue reading →

When in doubt, cry racism. It’s the left’s go-to weapon when the facts are against them. School choice advocates, then, should be heartened: Progressives lately have had to stoop low, get dirty, and hurl mudballs in our direction, because that’s all they’ve got.

This month progressives let fly three separate volleys, hoping the “racist” argument would somehow find its mark. The New York Times, the Center for American Progress, and the American Federation of Teachers all argued that educational choice is “racist,” rooted in “slavery,” and a cover for “segregation.” (One commentator also blames “anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism.”) Worse, they declare authoritatively, “choice” will spell the end of democracy, as we know it. Continue reading →

We were warned over 175 years ago that education could become a tool of indoctrination. Now it is undeniably being used as such.

The above image is that of a jacket worn by a teacher in a West Virginia public school

The father of America’s public education system, Horace Mann, famously quipped: “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax.”

Mann knew that education was never a “value-neutral” proposition. It has always been and always will be a process that shapes not only a child’s abilities, but more importantly, the child’s worldview based upon the values of the educator. It was for this reason that many Americans pushed back, though unsuccessfully, against the kind of public, compulsory education Mann was championing in the early and mid-1800s. Continue reading →

… so students can change their grades, opt out of group work and only hear positive reinforcement when doing in-class presentations

Professor ‘Satisfier’

A University of Georgia professor has enacted a ‘stress reduction policy’ aimed at allowing students to choose their own grades in hopes of soothing those who ‘feel unduly stressed’ by their earned ones.

Professor Dr. Richard Watson is teaching two fall business courses and has introduced the policy because ’emotional reactions to stressful situation scan have profound consequences for all involved.’

In an emailed response, Dr. Watson who said that his syllabus haven’t been solidified so the policy isn’t currently listed. ‘There is no such policy on the current web site,’ he said in the email. Continue reading →

Ten years ago, psychologist Sue Palmer predicted the toxic effects of social media. Now she sees a worrying new danger…

When the little girl pointed at the sweets at the checkout, her mother said: ‘No, they’re bad for your teeth.’ So her daughter, who was no more than two, did what small children often do at such times. She threw a tantrum.

What happened next horrified me. The embarrassed mother found her iPad in her bag and thrust it into her daughter’s hands. Peace was restored immediately.

This incident, which happened three years ago, was the first time I saw a tablet computer used as a pacifier. It certainly wasn’t the last. Since then, I’ve seen many tiny children barely able to toddle yet expertly swiping an iPad – not to mention countless teenagers, smartphone in hand, lost to the real world as they tap out texts. Continue reading →

The U.S. House Subcommittee on Preschool, Elementary, and Secondary Education recently held a hearing titled “Opportunities for State Leadership of Early Childhood Programs.” Although some on the subcommittee made an effort to focus on the duplicative and fragmented nature of the 44 different preschool programs, there was only one brave effort to discuss the preponderance of evidence that government preschool programs are not only ineffective but also, in several cases, harmful.

That courageous member, Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-Va.), who will be quoted in a moment, was a refreshing oasis in a desert of outrageous statements, such as this one by subcommittee Ranking Member Jared Polis (D-Colo.): Continue reading →

Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.

Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labor accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary work force. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America’s colonial masters.

These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London’s back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America’s first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others. Continue reading →

It’s no secret that the American education system is failing. The evidence is plain as college students extol socialism but then can’t describe what it means. SAT scores are tanking even as high school grades are on the rise thanks to the “everyone gets a trophy” mentality of many teachers.

Of course, critics of higher education culture have known this for years. But how did we get here? Following are three of the largest problems facing the system that is meant to prepare young adults to run the world but is instead turning out intellectual dwarfs.

Ideological Intolerance
The world is not a “safe space”, and universities shouldn’t be either. Anyone who is serious about learning history and economics will need to wade through at least one or two books from classical writers such as Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek. Banning such books from reading lists limits student perspectives to a single point of view, making it hard for them to understand the world at large. Continue reading →