OrthodoxNet.com Blog

The Totalitarian Global Warming Cult Following Democrats in California tried, yet again, to impose their unfounded religious beliefs and leftist dogma on the entire public education system.

Mercury News | John Boudreau | July 26, 2008

California public students will stick to reading, writing and arithmetic, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger decided as he vetoed a bill late Friday that would have required climate change be added to schools’ curriculum.

The measure, sponsored by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, also would have required future science textbooks to include climate change as a subject. Continue Reading »

Investor’s Business Daily | Phyllis Schlafly | July 25, 2008

The nation’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association, attracted 9,000 delegates to its annual convention in Washington, D.C., over the July Fourth weekend. Delegates sported buttons with provocative slogans such as “Gay marriage causes global warming only because we are so hot,” “Hate is not a family value,” “The Christian right is neither” and “Gay rights are civil rights.”

The delegates passed dozens of hard-hitting resolutions that now become the NEA’s official policy. The resolutions authorize NEA members and employees to lobby for those goals in the halls of Congress and state capitols. Continue Reading »

Salvo Magazine | Karen Swallow Prior | Spring, 2008

In 2005, according to an annual survey of college freshmen by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute, “only” 54.5 percent of first-year students agreed that “abortion should be legal.” What this tells us is that when college kids first arrive on campus, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed with idealism, they exhibit a relative enthusiasm for life—that is, until the leftists and secularists who overwhelm academia dig their claws into them. Once this happens, research indicates that even the sizable minority who go so far as to actually count themselves pro-life is doomed to diminish. (And this surely can’t be the result of learning per se, since virtually all of history’s great thinkers—from Hippocrates to Maimonides to Mary Wollstonecraft—have opposed elective abortion.) Continue Reading »

American Thinker | AWR Hawkins | Jun. 7, 2008

Watching young people compile and try to display knowledge in a college classroom is similar to watching an epistemological famine. I can say this as an adjunct professor in college and university systems since 2002.

Their lack of knowledge is not a reflection on any one college or university but on the overall political and intellectual climate of late 20th and early 21st centuries. Continue Reading »

Free Congress.org | Paul M. Weyrich | May. 29, 2008

Alabama State Senator Scott Beason has turned out to be the principal opponent of a new textbook, THE BIBLE AND ITS INFLUENCE, backed by liberals for schools which want to teach about the Bible. Writing in Worldnetdaily.com, Beason outlines not only the background of the chief architect of the book but details how the book undermines belief in God. Continue Reading »

WSJ | Alan Charles Kors | May. 27, 2008

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the ’60s” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question. Continue Reading »

Townhall.com | Phyllis Schlafly | May. 5, 2008

Ben Stein is known to many as an actor on Comedy Central. But the funniest part about his recent movie “Expelled” is not any clever lines spoken by Stein but the hysterical way liberals are trying to discourage people from seeing it.

Stein’s critics fail to effectively refute anything in “Expelled”; they just use epithets to ridicule it and hope they can make it go away. However, it won’t go away; even Scientific American, which labeled the movie “shameful,” concedes that it cannot be ignored. Continue Reading »

Townhall | Brent Bozell III | Apr. 18, 2008

Everyone should take the opportunity to see “Expelled” — if nothing else, as a bracing antidote to the atheism-friendly culture of PC liberalism. But it’s far more than that. It’s a spotlight on the arrogance of this movement and its leaders, a spotlight on the choking intolerance of academia, and a spotlight on the ignorance of so many who say so much, yet know so very little. Continue Reading »

AFP | Apr. 1, 2008

Three out of 10 US public school students do not graduate from high school, and major city school districts only graduate one out of two students, according to a study released Tuesday. Continue Reading »

Acton.org | Chris Banescu | Mar. 12, 2008

Declaring that “parents do not have a constitutional right to home school their children,” the Second District Court of Appeal for the state of California recently issued a ruling that effectively bans families from homeschooling their children and threatens parents with criminal penalties for daring to do so. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) this court decision has made “almost all forms of homeschooling in California” a violation of state law. Once again our judicial system moves to restrict religious and personal liberties, severely limit parental rights, and significantly increase the power, scope, and control of the state over our lives. Continue Reading »

WorldNetDaily | Bob Unruh | Mar. 7, 2008

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger today blasted a court ruling that endangered homeschooling and homeschoolers statewide.

“Every California child deserves a quality education and parents should have the right to decide what’s best for their children,” the governor said in a prepared statement. “Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education.” Continue Reading »

SFGate.com | Bob Egelko, Jill Tucker| Mar. 7, 2008

A California appeals court ruling clamping down on homeschooling by parents without teaching credentials sent shock waves across the state this week, leaving an estimated 166,000 children as possible truants and their parents at risk of prosecution. The homeschooling movement never saw the case coming. Continue Reading »

WorldNetDaily | Bob Unruh | Feb. 29, 2008

A California court has ruled that several children in one homeschool family must be enrolled in a public school or “legally qualified” private school, and must attend, sending ripples of shock into the nation’s homeschooling advocates as the family reviews its options for appeal.

The ruling came in a case brought against Phillip and Mary Long over the education being provided to two of their eight children. They are considering an appeal to the state Supreme Court, because they have homeschooled all of their children, the oldest now 29, because of various anti-Christian influences in California’s public schools. Continue Reading »

Townhall | Dennis Prager | Mar. 4, 2008

Before you take out a second mortgage or otherwise deplete your savings in order to pay for your child’s college education, you might want to ask the colleges to which your child is applying some questions.

1. Can one obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree at your college without having read a single Shakespeare play, one Federalist Paper or one book of the Bible? If so, why attend such a college? Continue Reading »

Townhall | Dennis Prager | Feb. 19, 2008

Question 2: Which of these three options is more likely to prevent further murderous rampages: a) making universities closed campuses and increasing the police presence on campus (as the president of NIU has promised to do); b) making guns much harder to obtain; or c) enabling specially trained students and faculty to carry concealed weapons on campus?

Because political correctness has replaced wisdom at nearly all universities, colleges are considering options a and b. But the only thing the first option will accomplish is to reduce the quality of university life and render the campus a larger version of the contemporary airport. And the second option will have no effect whatsoever since whoever wishes to commit murder will be able to obtain guns illegally. Continue Reading »

Manhattan Institute | Patrick J. Deneen | Feb. 21, 2008

Overwhelming evidence attests to the liberal tilt on our college campuses. Studies show that the faculty at most mainstream institutions are overwhelmingly registered with the Democratic party and give a disproportionate share of their political donations to left-leaning candidates. A recent study of donations by faculty at Princeton University during the current Presidential election season shows that every faculty donation went to a Democratic candidate. Were such unanimity to manifest itself for conservative candidates at an academic institution, one can be certain that our leading academics would decry the lack of diversity. Continue Reading »

FrontPage Mag | Nicholas G. Hahn III | Jan. 24, 2008

If you were to tour DePaul University’s campus asking students about free speech, you would notice the hesitation in their answers. For the past couple of years, the DePaul administration has earned a reputation as a foe of controversial ideas, especially those that offend or challenge the status quo. This has tarnished DePaul’s academic standing as a quality institution. To remedy this problem, President Rev. Dennis Holtschneider created a Free Speech and Expression Task Force and charged it with creating a policy for free speech that would hopefully rebuff any claims that DePaul isn’t a friend of the free marketplace of ideas. Continue Reading »

FrontPage Mag | Jamie Glazov | Jan. 21, 2008

We are being bombarded by so many ideologies that it is almost impossible to keep up with them. Some of the underlying and unspoken goals of those ideologies are to attack the pillars of Western culture, namely Christianity. My task in those books is to expose them for what they are. I also want to give reasoned responses to them because they are irrational, unnecessary, and ultimately detrimental to Western societies. Continue Reading »

FIRE.org | Dec. 6, 2007

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) released its 2007 report on campus speech codes, revealing that American colleges and universities are teeming with restrictions on students’ freedom of expression.

For the report, Spotlight on Speech Codes 2007: The State of Free Speech on Our Nation’s Campuses, FIRE reviewed policies at 346 American colleges and universities and found that 75 percent of schools surveyed maintain policies that clearly restrict speech that—outside the borders of campus—is protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Continue Reading »

FrontPage Magazine | Dennis Prager | Dec. 4, 2007

We live in the age of group apologies. I would like to add one. The baby boomer generation needs to apologize to America, especially its young generation, for many sins. Here is a partial list:

First and perhaps foremost, we apologize for robbing many of you of a childhood.

Continue Reading »