Recently, I was visited by a mother frustrated with her son's education and looking for something more.She informed me that mid-way through his kindergarten year, they were still learning their letters--most recently, they had been studying the letter "P." And in...
Nothing should be surprising any more about the Duke University rape case. Still, it is a little staggering that, after all these months, District Attorney Mike Nifong has still not interviewed either the accuser or the accused. Rape is a felony with serious...
Another consequence of the rampant violation of hierarchy in science education, available to both teachers and students alike, is that students find learning about science boring.When I ask people about their experience studying science in school, particularly...
This year, I have the pleasure of teaching literature to our school's Elementary 1 students, children in second and third grades, a class that includes my own seven-year-old daughter Lana. Their uninhibited enthusiasm for learning, their eager quest to see...
Several years ago, a teacher from my school was tutoring Kevin, then a freshman in high school. One day, Kevin came to their session asking for help in preparing for a test on protein synthesis. The tutor went over the information Kevin had been presented, helping him...
Science education is a frequent topic in the news these days. Earlier this month, Microsoft announced a campaign to improve math and science education in the Seattle area. According to Brad Smith, a senior vice president and general counsel for Microsoft: "We're very...
Imagine what would happen if a first-grade teacher, instead of teaching her students addition and subtraction, attempted first to teach them algebra--or, even worse, in the name of intellectual rigor and in an effort to offer a program of exceptional quality--decided...
Physics is the fundamental natural science. Its birth in the 17th century heralded man's coming of age as a rational being. The discovery of the basic laws of nature led to the industrial revolution and modern technology, demonstrating the enormous practical power of...
With little exaggeration, the whole of contemporary education can be described as a process of encumbering the student’s mind with as little knowledge as possible.
As if things weren't crazy enough already in the Middle East, here's the officially sanctioned message in sixth-grade Palestinian textbooks for 11- and 12-year-old kids: "The noble soul has two goals: death and the desire for it." The goal isn't to build magnificent...
For many years I have argued that America's intellectuals--those learned people with the greatest ability to understand our virtues and articulate a moral defense of our way of life--have long abandoned America. Another piece of evidence of this betrayal can be found...
Colleges and universities will start their fall semester soon. You might be interested in what parents' and taxpayers' money is going for at far too many "institutions of higher learning." At Occidental College in Los Angeles, a mandatory course for some freshmen is...
Responsibility for the tragic deaths of scores of Lebanese women and children in Qana, Lebanon falls primarily on Hezbollah and its backers, Syria and Iran, not on Israel. To initiate a war against Israel and then use children as shields is so evil and disgusting that...
According to the Seattle Public Schools, if you're an individualist, you're a racist. On a web page that lists various forms and definitions of racism, the school system defines "Cultural Racism" as: Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value...
The worst thing said in the case involving rape charges against Duke University students was not said by either the prosecutor or the defense attorneys, or even by any of the accusers or the accused. It was said by a student at North Carolina Central University, a...
If there is a smoking gun in the Duke University rape case, it is not about the stripper who made the charges or the lacrosse players who have been accused. The smoking gun is the decision of District Attorney Michael Nifong to postpone a trial until the spring of...
P.E.T. will be described in terms familiar to everyone, not in technical jargon. Some parents may find themselves initially disagreeing with some of these concepts, but very few will find themselves not understanding them. Since readers will not be able to express...
If NYU seriously believed that there were security risks involved, they ought to have provided sufficient security.
"Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers." I wrote those words days after September 11, 2001, and have been criticized for them ever since. But an...
Jonathan Kay [National Post, "From The Academy, Portraits In Pathology", March 13] is shamefully generous toward leftist academics such as Ward Churchill and Noam Chomsky who venomously attack the West and Western values. Such creatures are not motivated by a "sense...
Bennish is free to let loose his diatribes on his own time, but he has no right to demand a captive audience of high-school students.
The resignation of Lawrence Summers as president of Harvard University tells us a lot about what is wrong with academia today. When he took office in 2001, Summers seemed like an ideal president of Harvard. He had had a distinguished career in and out of the academic...
It’s time to start realizing the full potential of our greatest natural resource by making schools accountable to parents.
There's so much talk of "attention deficit disorder" in children today. The unquestioned, never disputed premise is that brain chemistry causes young people not to pay attention. Yet attention deficits were never such problems in earlier eras. What gives? A major...
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