Education

Charles Dickens Can Help Us Fight the Moral Madness

September 1, 2014September 4, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

by Anthony Esolen –
I recently observed that there must be something odd about someone who likes to play Naming of Parts with the children of strangers, whether it’s a slobbering bachelor down the street who’s friendly with one kid, or a minor governmental functionary who is friendly with two dozen. For suggesting that parents and not slobs or schoolteachers have the sole authority to teach their children about sex, I was called “bizarre.”

Get used to it, comrades. The collapse of moral values is now shifting into a mad inversion. It used to be considered evil to deprive a child of a mother or a father. It will now be considered evil to insist that a child should have a mother and a father. It used to be considered evil to walk naked in front of children. It will now be considered evil to demand that people stay clothed in front of children. [Read more…]

University Campuses: The Least Free Place in America

August 23, 2014September 4, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

by Greg Lukianoff
Once the vanguard of open debate and free speech, American universities and colleges have become a place where alternative thinking goes to die.

Question: Which American institution–one that prides itself on being open, democratic, and diverse–punishes its members severely for offering unpopular opinions, while it offers them a very narrow, limited worldview?

Answer: Universities. Once the vanguard of open debate and free speech, colleges have become a place where alternative thinking goes to die. Students who speak out on behalf of traditional American ideals, unfortunately, are often silenced by college administrators. Learn how the college campus, a place that should be an intellectual melting pot, has turned into anything but, violating the rights of those who have alternate opinions. [Read more…]

Christian Persecution: Kicking Evangelicals Off University Campuses

August 11, 2014August 16, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

Requiring campus student leaders to be converts to Christianity can get a ministry kicked off campus at some schools. Sadly, an increasing number of universities and colleges are requiring Evangelical campus groups to open their leadership roles to all comers, regardless of their faith commitments.

The Bowdoin Christian Fellowship, an InterVarsity chapter, has just lost official recognition after 40 years of serving students on the Brunswick, Maine campus. They found that meeting requirements of the Bowdoin College non-discrimination policy would make “faithful Christian witness impossible.”

In a recent update at First Things, Robert Gregory tells the Bowdoin Christian Fellowship story. [Read more…]

Politics Versus Education: The Left Sacrifices Children to Maintain Power

July 16, 2014July 27, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

by Thomas Sowell –
Of all the cynical frauds of the Obama administration, few are so despicable as sacrificing the education of poor and minority children to the interests of the teachers’ unions.

Attorney General Eric Holder’s attempt to suppress the spread of charter schools in Louisiana was just one of the signs of that cynicism. His nationwide threats of legal action against schools that discipline more black students than he thinks they should are at least as damaging.

Charter schools are hated by teachers’ unions and by much of the educational establishment in general. They seem to be especially hated when they succeed in educating minority children whom the educational establishment says cannot be educated. [Read more…]

Where Are the Students of Truth?

January 25, 2014January 25, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

by Joel Alicea –
“One cannot truly understand a legal argument on behalf of one client or side without thoroughly understanding and addressing competing arguments and objections,” said Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow at a recent Federalist Society conference on intellectual diversity in law schools.

Unfortunately, this foundational tenet of legal education is not realized in the nation’s leading law schools, including Ms Minow’s, where students learn a narrowly progressive view of the law from a predominantly leftist faculty. Our nation’s top law schools are failing their students, and in a country whose future will be shaped by those students, it is an urgent problem that we should demand law schools address. [Read more…]

Sex, Publics Schools and Social Suicide

January 17, 2014January 25, 2014 by Orthodox Editors

by Kevin Ryan –
If students attend schools which are run as sexual playgrounds, is it any wonder if they fail to learn?

Over the last three decades, social scientists, educational researchers, and pundits have probed for the reason why educationally the US on the fringe of being a Third World country. In particular, why does the academic achievement of American students begin to fall off during junior high and plummet during the high school years?

The “failure theories” are many: our schools are too big; our schools are too small; our school year is too short; our school day is too long; our teachers are too dumb or too lazy or under paid; our parents don’t care; we don’t give the schools enough money. Critics endlessly opine that our students don’t have enough arts, enough sports; enough science, enough math. They don’t have enough homework; they have too much homework. What is being missed from the analyses is the teenagers’ elephant in the room, their Kim Kardashian at the Sunday school picnic: sex. [Read more…]

‘Righty or Lefty?’ Quiz: Leftist Indoctrination of School Children

November 5, 2013November 5, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

by Kirsten Andersen –
A Colorado parent is outraged after she says her twelve-year-old son was given a detailed and biased political survey asking about his views on controversial issues from health care to same-sex ‘marriage.’

The political survey was called “Righty or Lefty,” and asked students to rank their views on a ten-point scale, with one being the “extreme liberal” end of the scale and ten representing “extreme conservative” views. Each question presented examples of the “extreme liberal” and “extreme conservative” position on a given topic before asking for the student’s opinion.

For example, regarding health care, the worksheet explained:

“Liberals believe that all Americans are entitled to health care when they need it. Since health insurance is very expensive, liberals believe that the government should help those who cannot afford it. Liberals believe that taxes should be increased, if necessary, to pay for health care. [Read more…]

School Has Become Too Hostile to Boys

August 20, 2013August 23, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

by Christina Hoff Sommers –
As school begins in the coming weeks, parents of boys should ask themselves a question: Is my son really welcome? A flurry of incidents last spring suggests that the answer is no. In May, Christopher Marshall, age 7, was suspended from his Virginia school for picking up a pencil and using it to “shoot” a “bad guy” — his friend, who was also suspended. A few months earlier, Josh Welch, also 7, was sent home from his Maryland school for nibbling off the corners of a strawberry Pop-Tart to shape it into a gun. At about the same time, Colorado’s Alex Evans, age 7, was suspended for throwing an imaginary hand grenade at “bad guys” in order to “save the world.”

In all these cases, school officials found the children to be in violation of the school’s zero-tolerance policies for firearms, which is clearly a ludicrous application of the rule. But common sense isn’t the only thing at stake here. In the name of zero tolerance, our schools are becoming hostile environments for young boys. [Read more…]

Cultivating Faith in Children

June 23, 2013June 25, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

by Evgeny Poselyanin –
There are children who have strong faith despite their parents’ disbelief in, even hostility towards religion. The beauty and order of the universe awakens faith in them, as it did in Great Martyr Barbara.

The writer and New Martyr Evgeny Poselyanin (his real surname was Pogozhin, 1870–1931) reflects upon the teaching of faith to children in his book, Faith, and the Path to Faith.

Such a mind [as Great Martyr Barbaras’] arrives on its own at an inevitable faith in the Creator and Caring Provider of all that exists.

Then, a person with a lively and deep mind and a nature distinguished by a sense of justice finds it necessary to investigate those strange attacks on religion, of which he has become a witness. He strives to make sense of it all. And it could be said that other people, who would have remained indifferent to nature in times when religion is not persecuted, turn to it with all their souls during times of persecution.

However, the path that I have just mentioned is the path of direct faith, and it is the path of a few chosen souls. [Read more…]

Queering Education: It’s Worse Than You Think

June 15, 2013July 14, 2021 by Orthodox Editors

by Robert R. Reilly –
The logic works like this: If homosexual acts are moral, as so many now insist, then they should be normative. If they are normative, they should be taught in our schools as a standard. If they are a standard, they should be enforced. And so it has come, and is coming, to be. Education is an essential part of the drive to universalize the rationalization for homosexual behavior; so it must become a mandatory part of the curriculum.

The infiltration of higher education by LGBT studies is well known. However, less attention seems to have been paid to the effort to spread LGBT propaganda in elementary schools and high schools. Because of the young ages of students K through 12, the introduction of pro-homosexual materials has required a special sensitivity from those who are trying to get away with it. They must avoid the explicit nature of the LGBT courses offered at the college level and disguise the effort in terms of something other than what it really is. Therefore, they use a stealth approach under the cover of issues such as school safety, diversity, and bullying. [Read more…]