Celebrating a Milestone For Homeschooling Freedoms

Pat Montgomery

The ubiquity and widespread acceptance of homeschooling as a valid educational option for American families can obscure the fact that homeschooling freedoms were hard-fought.

The ubiquity and widespread acceptance of homeschooling as a valid educational option for American families can obscure the fact that homeschooling freedoms were hard-fought.

Homeschooling didn’t become legally recognized in all U.S. states until the 1990s, with families who chose to teach their own children in earlier years often harassed and sometimes criminally charged with truancy. The DeJonge family of Michigan was among them. On a fall day in 1984, the DeJonges were visited at their home by the Michigan Department of Social Services telling them they were breaking the law by homeschooling. A year later, the parents were charged and convicted of educating their children without a state teaching license. Continue reading

The LIE that is the Gettysburg Address

On Nov. 19, 1863, at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, President Abraham Lincoln spoke these words:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. Continue reading

The 14th Amendment to the united States Constitution

Because of the US Supreme Court, the 14th Amendment’s greatest impact is not the protection of citizens’ rights, though it is cited for that purpose. It is and has been the granting of human rights to corporations – an exercise not founded in the Constitution itself nor in the Amendment itself, nor in any other part of the Constitution. It was an extension of power to corporations that the Court, without any explicit foundation, allowed to be promulgated in a summary of its 1886 decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railway by the Court’s reporter. Continue reading

Benson: The Planned Public School Perversion Of Our Children

An article on The Gateway Pundit for May 28th provided some information worth noting on what goes on in public schools and who is doing some of it. If you’ve had problems with Target over their “gay” pride merchandise you may find that is only the tip of the iceberg. The Gateway Pundit article tells us: “Retail giant Target has partnered with GLSEN (Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) for years… GLSEN is a group that provides sexually explicit books to schools, pushes gender identity throughout public school curricula, and advocates policies that keep parents unaware of their child’s in-school gender transition… It was Barack Obama who first pushed sex education to kindergartners back in 2007 – he even pushed sex education to kiddies legislation… the media mostly hid this from the American public.” Sounds like King Barack the first really did have a plan to “fundamentally transform the United States” but he didn’t want the public to grasp just what it was! Continue reading

Georgia Teacher Retires at Age 95

The kind of teacher that I used to have as a student…

Teachers often have thankless jobs — at least the teachers who aren’t trying to indoctrinate kids into everything leftist — and many of them leave their jobs out of frustration. So the story of a teacher who stuck it out until she retired at the age of 95 is impressive.

Grace Adkins, whose students affectionately call her “Ms. Grace,” retired from the Westwood School in Camilla, Ga., this month. She recently turned 95, and she taught for at least 75 years. Continue reading

Meet the Most Important Civil War Leader You’ve Never Heard Of

This NC man was one of the most important Civil War leaders…

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WTVD) – One of the most important African American leaders of the late 1800s was born in North Carolina, but his accomplishments and influence vanished from history for 100 years.

Abraham Galloway was a spy, an insurgent, a statesman, a fierce advocate of the working class and a warrior against oppression and tyranny. Continue reading

The Civil War Gold Hoax

The hoax’s never seem to end…

Gold speculators in New York. (image from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 7, 1964)

It was May, 1864. Grant was closing in on Lee in Virginia. New Yorkers were growing hopeful that the long, terrible ordeal of the Civil War would soon be over.

But their hopes were dashed when on Wednesday, May 18 they read in two of their morning papers, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce, that President Lincoln had issued a proclamation ordering the conscription of an additional 400,000 men into the Union army on account of “the situation in Virginia, the disaster at Red River, the delay at Charleston, and the general state of the country.” Continue reading

President James Monroe and Republican Virtue

James Monroe (c. 1819) by Samuel Morse (1791-1872)

Whatever his failings as an imaginative thinker, President James Monroe’s own convictions were rooted deeply in the spirit and the letter of the U.S. Constitution. As he entered the White House in March 1817, he had little (well, less) use for James Madison’s newfound love of nationalism. While he entered the presidency too late to stop the Second Bank of the United States from forming, he could and did make sure that the government’s role in creating public works was limited. If the people truly wanted the government building more canals and roads, he thought, they would need to get an amendment to the Constitution passed, as the Constitution of 1787 did not allow for such things, he believed. And, though a Virginian and in sympathy with many of the Old Republican beliefs of John Randolph of Roanoke and John Taylor of Caroline, he was not one of them, and he feared the creation of any parties or factions. Continue reading

Georgia and Arkansas Revive an Old-School Teaching Method

In his rousing keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala last month, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered an unexpected piece of advice: “Don’t throw away your hard-copy books.”

Unlike digitized books, films, and albums that can be canceled, rewritten, or vanished altogether, physical copies are “the enduring repository that cannot be disappeared.” Continue reading

Why I Love Homeschooling Our Eight Kids

This year I will graduate my first homeschooler. It seems like only yesterday I was teaching our oldest child to read, and now she’s an adult taking college courses. For the last 14 years I’ve been knee-deep in educating our eight children, recently as many as five grade levels at a time, in a one-room schoolhouse style approach. Sometimes it has felt more like being in the trenches – overwhelming and chaotic – but as my older children daily demonstrate, homeschooling is a great way to educate children and grow them into intelligent, connected, focused, happy adults. Continue reading

John Bozeman: The Frontier Entrepreneur Who Forged a Path to Montana

John Bozeman took two bullets to the chest and died in 1867 at age 32. One can only imagine what he would have achieved with another 32 years.

One of the most interesting exports from Georgia to Montana was the namesake for the latter state’s fourth largest city. His name was John Bozeman. His short life is a tale of risk-taking enterprise in the wilds of America’s western frontier. Continue reading

Marie Curie: We Lost This Scientist To Radioactivity In 1933…

…but her notebook still holds a serious threat!

Considered to be one of the most famous 20th-century scientists, Marie Curie is the only person to win two Nobel prizes in two different fields. Defying the expectations for what a woman should be during her time, Curie paved the way for our understanding of radioactivity. She also discovered two new elements, but not without paying a horrific price… Continue reading

Two Moms Create a Forest School and Reach Thousands

We want to be as big as Boy Scouts, be that kind of a household name.” ~ Barefoot University Co-founder, Madeleine Braden

It was a cool, muddy morning in March when I pulled into the empty parking lot of a sprawling forest and nature preserve about 40 miles outside of Fort Worth, Texas. Soon, cars began arriving, filled with exuberant children of all ages, and their parents, who were ready to spend a few hours together in the woods. Donned in rain boots and parkas, these nearly three-dozen nature-goers were part of Barefoot University, a rapidly expanding national network of forest school programs for homeschoolers that was founded by Madeleine Braden and Amber Brown in 2019. Continue reading

Keil: Bring Wonder Back to the Classroom

Why do school-age kids seem to be less curious than preschoolers?

We don’t encourage students to ask the same kinds of questions they did when they were younger. Here’s something I wrote recently about the topic for Character Lab as a Tip of the Week:

A few weeks ago, my 3-year-old granddaughter Frances asked, “Why don’t cardinals migrate?

Frances’ question surprised me, both because she knew enough to ask it and because I had no idea what the answer was. When I failed to find explanations on my cellphone, Frances got bored with me and wandered off, asking others how to make red paint.

Preschoolers love thinking about possible explanations of interesting things. They feel free to wonder about anything and they do so with joy and creativity. Continue reading

Math Instruction Isn’t Working. Could Better Teacher Training Help?

For those of our readers who feel that they wish to leave their children in the Public School system. There are things that you can be aware of to help and better assist your Kinder – and I don’t mean ‘gartners‘. ~ Editor

Is 2/7 larger than 4/11?

The REAL reason for Common-Core?

That’s the question the middle school class was struggling to answer. Fractions hadn’t really connected with the students, says John Barclay, a teacher in Richmond Public Schools in Virginia. The concept just wasn’t intuitive.

But one student piped up: She’d noticed that if you figure out how much you’d have to add to the numerator to get a whole number, then you can tell which fraction is larger.

That really wasn’t the rule that she was being taught. Continue reading

May 9, 2023: Village of the Damned

History and civics scores drop for U.S. eighth-graders on national test
Scores in U.S. history and civics for eighth-graders are down across the U.S., according to recent results from the assessment known as the “Nation’s Report Card.” This year’s history scores are the lowest recorded since the assessment began in 1994, and the new data mark the first-ever drop in civics.

U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement that the results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, further underscore the “profound impact the pandemic had on student learning.”

The results follow recent national declines in reading and math among students in grades four and eight… (Continue to full article)

7th-grade student fights back after school told him to change his ‘There are only two genders’ T-shirt
However, he says the response from his fellow classmates was overwhelmingly positive. “Everyone in my homeroom and everyone in my gym class had supported what I had done,” he told Fox News Digital. Morrison, 12, added that no fellow student directly confronted him about the shirt or said it offended them or made them feel unsafe.

However, he was pulled out of gym class on March 21 and told to remove the shirt because several students and staff had reportedly complained. When he respectfully declined to take the shirt off, school officials called his father to come and pick him up

I have a right to have a voice,’ Liam Morrison said… (Continue to full article)

War for Profit: A Very Short History

Munition workers painting shells at the National Shell Filling Factory No.6, Chilwell, Nottinghamshire in 1917. This was one of the largest shell factories in the country, circa 1917. (Photo by Horace Nicholls/ Imperial War Museums)

As they did over a century ago ahead of World War I, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded. Continue reading

Chicago Public Schools – A Microcosm of Our National Problem

Watching Fox News last evening (4/13) Tucker Carlson commented on the sorry situation in Chicago Public Schools. Tucker noted that lots of Chicago public school students can’t read, or can barely read, yet you can’t fail them. Why think of what they would do to their self-esteem! Lots of us have been saying for years now that public school students across the country have been taught almost nothing worthwhile, yet have been conditioned to think they are brilliant. Why any parent in Chicago, or anywhere else, would trust their children’s education to the public schools is beyond me. Continue reading

Peoria school board member tells parents to pull kids from public schools

School Board Member Rebecca Hill says she disagreed with the decision to reject a bathroom policy for transgender students

PEORIA, AZ (3TV/CBS 5) – The Peoria Unified School District board voted 3-2 to reject a policy that would make students go to the bathroom that aligned with their biological sex at birth. The vote happened Thursday night. At the end of the meeting, Continue reading

Lincoln’s Main Target Was “Anarchy” and Secession, Not Slavery

President Abraham Lincoln

In a recent column, I discussed an argument about secession made by Abraham Lincoln and sympathetically expounded by Michael P. Zuckert in his important book A Nation So Conceived. Lincoln maintained that a nation once formed could not allow secession because doing so would open it to unlimited fissiparous tendencies, culminating in anarchy. This argument did not address the problem of slavery, surely relevant to the concrete circumstances of the Civil War. Zuckert has a suggestive, though in my view mistaken, discussion of Lincoln’s view of secession and slavery, and in this week’s article, I’ll try to explain Zuckert’s position and the difficulties he faces defending it.

Zuckert’s position is this: Lincoln considered slavery to be morally wrong and contrary to the Declaration of Independence, which he took to state universally valid truths that were binding on the American nation. Continue reading