A house full of books is a house full of blessings, so don’t be afraid to let them pile up A few years ago, another bookshelf made its way into my bedroom. As the ample built-in bookshelf that had already graced the area was starting to acquire a sort of double-stacked look, and extra books […]

It’s time to fill our children’s minds with the good, true, and beautiful. Between gender wars, deviant sexual education, declining academic achievement, and plain old safety issues, today’s schools have turned into landmines for parents and students. But while parents are increasingly seeing the problems their children are facing in school, it’s also hard to […]

I received a rather frantic email from a friend when school started last fall. Panicking over the number of parents posting first day of preschool pictures, my friend wondered if she had made a mistake by not sending her four-year-old to school. “When did preschool become so popular?” she asked in dismay.

With inflation, prices, and bank failures all on the rise these days, many of us are looking anxiously toward our pocketbooks and wondering what we’ll do when the financial crisis inevitably hits. Will we have to start over with our retirement fund, or will we be impoverished in a matter of months? There may not […]

“I was so worried my son wouldn’t pass his kindergarten entrance exam,” one of my friends recently told me, noting that he hadn’t attended preschool. “That is my pet peeve!” another friend sputtered at the mention of preschool. She had noticed that many schools today want to make sure kids know their letters before entering […]

It continually amazes me to see the proliferation of good coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly regarding its effects on the education system and the students in it. Yes, the attempt to somehow transfer the traditional classroom to an online environment was a disaster that left many students bored … but another story has […]

A recent viral video from the YouTube channel Fleccas Talks showed several man-on-the-street interviews testing young people in New York City on their knowledge of basic facts. Some of the questions focused on American history and civics, while others were simple, numerical-based ones. The results were depressing, as the following samples demonstrate…

In the months before COVID hit, a number of my friends began a new phase of motherhood by starting careers as homeschool teachers. They expressed normal trepidation, concerned they would fail, and by extension, their children would. Then the pandemic hit, homeschooling became the new way of life, and my friends were suddenly homeschool veterans, […]

“Our children need to learn more history and civics!” is a regular rallying cry for those who want to see America returned to its moral and common sense roots. That a greater emphasis on history and civics is needed is evident from The Nation’s Report Card, which finds only 24 percent of American high school […]

It’s been one short year since parents suddenly found themselves the chief overseers of their children’s education due to the pandemic. “Short” isn’t the word to describe it, I can almost hear many parents retort, relief in their voices as they realize that soon they will be off the hook, for the responsibility of their […]

A smile came to my face as I drove past a school this morning. No longer was it a desolate ghost town; instead, I had to navigate a long line of cars and buses waiting to turn into the parking lot to drop children off. While it’s good to see kids going back to school, […]

One of my favorite field trips as a child was my annual summer visit to a one-room schoolhouse where I spent the day dressed in an old-fashioned dress and bonnet, scratching away on a slate and learning lessons out of old McGuffey Readers. At the time, my delight in the McGuffey Readers stemmed from the […]

By now you’ve probably heard of Harvard Professor Elizabeth Bartholet, whose name catapulted into the public’s view when she called for a “presumtive ban” on homeschooling. Ironically, her call for a homeschooling ban came right when the entire nation was forced to homeschool due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

When it comes to discussion of public schools, all too often battle lines seem to be drawn between those on the inside and outside of the system: the teachers and the parents. The teachers understandably want to defend the job they do, while the parents want to ensure that their child doesn’t become another dismal […]

It’s funny how homeschooling – that once-upon-a-time fringe movement of education – has now become the norm. Everyone’s doing it out of sheer necessity. For some, it’s going great! What was at first a stressful and uncertain task is now becoming routine. In fact, a recent poll conducted by EdChoice found that over half of […]

My sixth-grade visit to the Pavek Museum of broadcasting was the most memorable field trip of elementary school. The live radio broadcast my fellow students and I produced while there was probably why. As part of the broadcast, several students were instructed to write a news bulletin. The gist of it? The governor of Minnesota […]

According to new research from the Department of Education, the switch to computer-based writing tests shows a decided decline in the writing ability of fourth–grade students, particularly for low or average performing students. As Jill Barshay from the Hechinger Report explains, “Last year, more than half of U.S. states gave computer-based writing tests to children […]

Have you ever wondered how the American Founders were able to spew forth such wisdom and establish a new country at such young ages? I have. The mere fact that 10 of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were under the age of 35 blows my mind. But as I learned recently, these men […]