Education

A personal note on the Ides of March

Featured image I ask readers to forgive me for repeating this personal note from last year. It is meant to pay tribute to my high school, my high school teachers — Latin teachers Lyman Hawbaker (who also taught ancient history) and Dave Sims in particular — and to my classmates. In the course of our high school years we were required to study Latin and dip our toes into Caesars’s Gallic Wars, »

Educatile Dysfunction

Featured image “We’re from the government. We’re here to help!” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona thinks President Reagan said that, but the actual quote is: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Commentators rightly lampooned Cardona but overlooked a couple of back stories. According to his official bio, Cardona earned a bachelor’s degree from Central Connecticut State University, and a master’s »

Teacher Stands With Israel, Students Riot

Featured image Hundreds of students rioted at Hillcrest High School in Queens on Monday, trying to assault a teacher who posted a photo on Facebook of herself with an “I Stand With Israel” sign: Hundreds of “radicalized” kids rampaged through the halls of a Queens high school this week for nearly two hours after they discovered a teacher had attended a pro-Israel rally — forcing the terrified educator to hide in a »

Civic Education, at the Highest Level

Featured image Some readers may recall my earlier announcement that next semester (starting in January) I’ll be filling the very large shoes of Prof. Ted McAllister at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. (Ted sadly passed away after a long illness last winter.) I gave a talk to the incoming class of graduate students back in August, which I turned into a podcast here (in case you were living in a cave »

They’re Coming For You

Featured image The Jews are just a warm-up. Many people have made this observation, but this is a nice data point: earlier this year, Minnesota’s legislature enacted a statute that requires “Ethnic Studies” to be incorporated into every single class from kindergarten through 12th grade. Including math and biology. And Minnesota is not alone. The “Ethnic Studies” dodge started in California, but it is expanding across the country. And “Ethnic Studies” is »

Hamas’s Ideology Infects the Public Schools [Updated]

Featured image The people who endorsed Hamas’s decapitation of infants, mass murders, gang rapes and so on are scattering like cockroaches when the light goes on. One wonders: how could they possibly have been so stupid? The answer is that they are slaves to an ideology that, while preposterous, is common in institutions of “higher” education and other leftist precincts. And, now, in America’s K-12 public schools. My colleague Bill Walsh explores »

Meet the New Principal of John Glenn Elementary School

Featured image Fox News reports that the Western Heights School District in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, has installed a drag queen as principal of the John Glenn Elementary School. Fox has confirmed that the new hire, Shane Murnan, is “a drag queen who goes by the name of Shantel Mandalay.” Although Mandalay’s Facebook account has since been deleted, the article provides screenshots of him in his full drag glory. According to Fox, Murnan »

Kids Have Stopped Going to School

Featured image Pretty much everyone now agrees that shutting down our schools during the covid epidemic, at the demand of teachers’ unions, was one of the most catastrophic policy decisions of modern times. As I have said before, it is unfortunate that some old and very sick people had their demises hastened by covid, but what government did to our children, for no good reason, was a crime. Having skipped school for »

America’s Public Schools Are Terrible

Featured image America’s public schools are almost unbelievably bad, to a degree that poses an existential threat to the republic. That’s the bad news. The good news is that most Americans are figuring it out. Rasmussen finds that a 36% plurality say that our public schools are poor. That is a remarkable finding. A sadly misinformed 9% think our schools are excellent. But that disproportion is revealing. The teachers’ unions aren’t fooling »

Math For Dummies

Featured image It is an inconvenient truth that various ethnic groups do not, on average, perform equally well on objective measures of intellectual accomplishment. Mathematics is particularly problematic, in that results are hard to fudge–basically, answers are either right or wrong. Liberals have responded to this conundrum by dumbing down one discipline after another. Their theory is that if they lower standards far enough, they will arrive at a point where racial »

Consequences of Eroding Meritocracy

Featured image In the U.S., college admissions have become a political battleground. In the wake of the Harvard and UNC decisions, many schools–probably most–have vowed to do away with all objective test requirements so that they can continue engaging in race discrimination. What will the consequences be for the quality of post-secondary education? A clue comes from the U.K., where a much less severe erosion of meritocracy has had malign consequences, as »

Left-Wing Professors Leaving Florida

Featured image Under Ron DeSantis’s leadership, Florida has attained the enviable status of the state that liberals most like to hate, and to denigrate irrationally. Thus it is no surprise to see this headline: Pro-woke professors leave Florida universities in protest. The Tampa Bay Times reported on a July meeting of the Florida Board of Governors. During the meeting, a number of professors expressed concern about the political climate in Florida. Professors »

Down With Education!

Featured image Well, possibly not all education. But down with colleges and universities, anyway. It seems that their net effect is to make their students dumber. A case in point: American college students think their country is going downhill. Not in the ways it actually is going downhill, but in the ways it isn’t. This was the question: Based on what you have learned in college so far, do you think that »

Woke Kindergarten

Featured image That is actually what they call it. Catrin Wigfall lifts the lid on a program that is even worse than what you probably expect from the public schools. In this case, we are talking about Minnesota’s Department of Education, but the same thing is going on across the country. It starts with bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, but transitions quickly into hard-core leftism: The Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) is encouraging a divisive »

Don’t Drop the H-Bomb?

Featured image I’m filing this one under Great Moments In Self-Delusion. The London Times warns: “Harvard graduates advised to keep quiet about it.” But not for the reason you might think! They call it “dropping the H-bomb”. For decades, graduates of Harvard have wrestled with how best to mention that they went to a university with a reputation so splendid that some alumni fear to speak of it directly with friends and »

Our Illiterate College Students

Featured image How bad is America’s education system? Worse than you can possibly imagine. At George Washington University (annual cost $78,335, although probably no non-Chinese citizen actually pays that, as college tuition numbers are fraudulent), students protested against the school’s teams being called the “Colonials.” George Washington University changed its “Colonials” moniker to “Revolutionaries” after facing scrutiny from students who deemed the school’s mascot as offensive. Revolutionaries! I suppose we should be »

First Thing, Let’s Fire All the Teachers

Featured image Well, probably not all. But when did public school education become, on net, a force for evil? At some time after public sector unions were legalized in, as I recall, the 1960s. One of the worst mistakes in the history of our democracy. Now, the teachers’ unions have mobilized teachers as left-wing activists, and a great many of those who were not comfortable with that politicization have left the profession. »