Public school enrollment has consistently declined across most states this academic year, and there are new signs that the trend will continue this fall. On Thursday, New York City’s education department reported that kindergarten applications for the 2021/2022 school year dropped 12 percent, from 63,000 to under 55,500 applications. Continue reading
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 child’s education will be back in the hands of the experts at school.
But before you rejoice, let me suggest that things have changed in the past year. No longer are parents clueless about what their children are learning, how they are learning it, or what approaches to learning work best for each child. Parents have seen it all, and therefore have little excuse to go back to the autopilot mode of pre-pandemic days. They are now the experts who have even more awareness of what’s best for their children. Continue reading
America’s public school students are the soon-to-be target of a grant program from the U.S. Dept of Education that plans to introduce children to the Marxism-inspired Critical Race Theory and the debunked 1619 Project, and a knowledgeable critic of both is asking parents when enough is enough.
According to an exclusive National Review story, the U.S. Dept. of Education has announced grant funding is available for programs in U.S. history and civics classes that “incorporate racially, ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse perspectives.” Continue reading
(Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
So I am at Walmart scanning and bagging my almost $300 worth of groceries while the employee that wants $15 an hour “monitors” and then this happened.
Her – why are you double bagging all of your groceries?
Me – excuse me?
Her – you are wasting our bags! Continue reading
In the February 2021 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, Professor Mark Brennan declares, “My students look at me in amazement when I tell them I read 8 to 10 hours per day. I look at them in amazement when they tell me they play video games 16 hours straight.” Brennan then went on to wonder if his book reading habits qualify him for “endangered species” status. Continue reading
Seemingly overnight, a large segment of America has gone insane. We’re not talking about the culture of paranoia and safety that has metastasized in the wake of COVID-19 hysteria. We’re talking about the ideological shift, particularly on cultural issues, that has occurred since the start of the Obama Administration.
To pick an easy example, it would have been fairly uncontroversial even five years ago to say that men should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports, regardless of what they might subjectively “identify as.” And yet, this is now a subject contention across a number of sports, including mixed martial arts and powerlifting. What’s more, having the wrong opinion and expressing it publicly might make you the subject of a public shaming, up to and including losing your job and being de facto blacklisted from your industry. Continue reading
One year ago, noting the increase in homeschooled children as a result of schools shutting down over the ChiCom Virus pandemic, it was impossible to predict just how drastic that shift would end up being.
Initially, the shift was a matter of necessity. As entire school systems remained closed for in-person learning, and virtual learning was shown to be largely ineffective, parents looked for ways to make sure their children didn’t fall behind. Unable to afford private schooling, many parents turned to homeschooling. Continue reading
San Diego is teaching undocumented migrant children in-person while the state’s six million public school students remain locked out.
If you have school-aged children and you’re living in a Democrat-controlled lockdown state, Kamala Harris is laughing at you. No, really, she is. Take a look.
That video, by the way, was from her trip last week to West Haven Child Development Center in Connecticut. By now, she’s probably ROTFL, given the decision of San Diego schoolteachers to provide in-person instruction to unaccompanied immigrant children being housed at the San Diego Convention Center — despite the alarmingly high COVID-19 infection rate among those children. Continue reading
William Bradford’s handwritten copy of The Mayflower Compact (1620) which declared plainly that the purpose of their voyage was to found a colony for the glory of God and the advancement of the “Christian” faith.
I have to tell you, I’m 65 years old and I’m pretty darn good with math. Always have been. In my day I used to get marked down because I didn’t always show my work. I got the answer right, but was marked down for not showing my work. Even at an early age I would challenge my teachers about this. I would ask, “Why do I need to show my work?” They would tell me that they needed to see my work to know I understood the problem. I would tell them that I though getting the answer right was a pretty good indicator that I knew how to solve the problem. Continue reading
The first few years of Plymouth colony were fraught with hardship and hunger. Economics had a lot to do with it.
Credit: George Henry Boughton
November 25, 2019 ~ Next year at this time, Americans will mark the 400th anniversary of the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and the subsequent founding of the Plymouth colony by English Separatists we know as the Pilgrims. They, of course, became the mothers and fathers of the first Thanksgiving. Continue reading
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, set in the superstate of Oceania, the government propagates the absurd equation 2 + 2 = 5. Through steady indoctrination, and under the ever-watchful Thought Police, the citizens accept it as an unquestionable truth. The equation symbolizes the extinction of free thought in repressive totalitarian societies: facts, truths and objective reality are subordinated to political will and twisted to serve the authoritarian goals of the Party and its leader, Big Brother.
Something similar is happening in many American schools. An eerie Orwellian shadow is being cast over math instruction. The focus is insidiously shifting from arithmetic, geometry, and algebra to critical race theory, ethnic studies, and intersectionality. Ridiculous as it may sound, an objective field of knowledge is being thrust into the realm of social experimentation. Students are being taught not how to think but what to think. Instead of developing critical thinking skills, today’s math classes stipulate that students hold particular views about the world and instruct them on how they must extinguish what is posited as “wrongthink.” Continue reading
Imagine that you’re a teacher. You’re sitting in your classroom and looking at the textbooks from which you are supposed to teach your students.
“If only I could get some better books,” you think. “Something that would engage them!”
As a teacher, you know that the thing stopping you from getting books isn’t that your school doesn’t have enough money. More likely it’s that your school wastes the money it has. Continue reading
I learned more after I barely graduated from High School. I thought I was dumb, but I was dumbed down, I thought I hated learning, and knowledge, but I craved it. I found I loved to read, and read many books, but a library that dwarfed my record collection. Years later, when I returned to my home town to visit my friends no one had grown, all were the products of the system, fat and happily ignorant of the world. ~ R.M. Ras
All our kids today get a good education,
Worldly education,
Third world education
All our kids today get indoctrination
And that’s the New Americana Way Continue reading
Growing up, I was a quiet kid who kept to himself and loved to write, draw and found I was really good at playing music. No one ever taught me that I could continue doing these things at a university or that I could possibly make a living doing it.
Instead, I was taught to get a job, maybe with the local Hallmark factory, keep drawing, and maybe someone would notice me. It was years later that I realized what some of my options were but I had put up my pen and paper and chased after a good paying job. Continue reading