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EDUCATION

School Bans Students from Raising Their Hands to Answer Questions Why not let teachers decide what method works best for their classrooms? By Katherine Timpf

Samworth Church Academy, a high school in Nottinghamshire in the U.K., has banned its students from raising their hands to answer questions because it is unfair to students who do not raise their hands.

In a letter explaining the policy, Samworth principal Barry Found called hand-raising an “age-old practice.”

“We find that the same hands are going up and as such the teaching does not challenge and support the learning of all,” he said, according to an article in the Daily Mail.

Samworth teachers have been instructed to forbid hand-raising in their classrooms and instead call on students at random to answer questions — which is completely and totally ridiculous.

Now, I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with calling on students at random in itself. When I was in school, most of my teachers used a combination of both hand-raising and random call-outs, depending on the situation. If they — being the professionals that they were — noticed that the same students were raising their hands over and over again, they would usually say something along the lines of “Does anyone else have the answer? You’ve been quiet back there, how about you?” and that seemed to work pretty well. Honestly, I really can’t see any benefits to banning hand-raising completely — but I certainly can see some problems.

First of all, as Jane Crich of the U.K.’s National Union of Teachers told the Daily Mail, an administrator’s making a blanket rule prevents the teachers from being able to decide how to best teach their own groups of students.

“Any professional teacher should be trusted to teach a particular topic in a particular style according to the class they have,” Crich said.

Virginia School System Considers Banning ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ By Stephen Kruiser

A key component in the ongoing effort by American public education to make kids dumber is the removal of entire chunks of relevance from various curricula to craft a narrative more conducive to, and comfortable for, the liberal version of things. It is most often done in the history books, where the more integral stories are excised and replaced with a focus on fringe events or people.

Literature is another convenient target. Book banning is generally considered the kind of thing that totalitarian societies run by tyrannical fascists do, but every fascist has to get his or her start somewhere:

Two classic American novels have been temporarily pulled from book shelves in Accomack County Public Schools.

Superintendent Warren Holland confirmed to 10 On Your Side that a parent filed a complaint about “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

Earlier this month, a parent voiced concerns to the school board about racial slurs in both of the novels.

“Right now, we are a nation divided as it is,” the mother is heard saying in an audio recording of the meeting on Nov. 15. She tells the board that her biracial son, a high school student, struggled getting through a page that was riddled with a racial slur.

“So what are we teaching our children? We’re validating that these words are acceptable, and they are not acceptable by any means,” the parent said.

Victoria Coombs, a mother of two, told 10 On Your Side she agrees that books with offensive racial slurs should not be read in schools.

“It’s not right to put that in a book, let alone read that to a child,” she said.

But other Accomack County residents told 10 On Your Side that banning a classic for offensive language can be a slippery slope.

“I don’t want to see it happen because if you start with one racial word in a book and have to go on and on and on and pretty soon you’ll be burning books left and right,” R. Kellam said.

How to get ‘higher education’ without getting a college degree By Mike VanOuse

Although I don’t have a college degree, I did attend college for a couple years. An associate’s degree in machine tool technology was requisite for an experimental position at my workplace. Halfway through my schooling, the experiment fizzled, and with that, my academic career. Although I was working at the factory seven days a week and teaching the Bible twice a week at one of the bigger churches in town, I maintained a 4.0 GPA. For contrast, I graduated high school with a 1.75 GPA.

But I was striving for a position, not a piece of paper. When the position evaporated, so did my academic stint.

AT carried an article on Wednesday, November 30, 2016, titled, “The Decline and Fall of Higher Education,” by Michael Thau, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy for 13 years, in which he lamented both what college students are not learning and what they are learning: poor work ethic, low goals, and prioritizing partying over performance.

Anyone can throw rocks at what academia is producing. It bears weight when the hurler is an academic. It’s an excellent read.

I love reading American Thinker. I strongly suspect that I get more education here than I did while in college – or at least the information is more valuable.

I’d like to compare the GDP of academia to the GDP of the blue-collar arena. The orchestrators in academia are the faculty. They set the standards. In the sweaty-stinky world, the standards are set by the parents, foremen (managers), and commanders (military).

My manager at the factory is an excellent example of doing it right. He falls into that rare category of managers who, even though they invest 60-plus hours a week doing their job, spend their off-time coaching their kids’ softball/football/soccer/etc. team. Sports coaches understand congenitally that success requires excellence.

Tony Thomas Teach ‘em Green, Raise ‘em Stupid

According to the latest international comparison, Australian kids are falling further behind, despite ever-larger sums of taxpayer cash being poured into the Chalk-Industrial Complex. One reason we’re raising another generation of dolts: propaganda passed off as wisdom.
Green/Left lobby Cool Australia, backed by Labor’s teacher unions and Bendigo Bank, is achieving massive success in brainwashing school students about the inhumanity of the federal government’s asylum-seeker policies, the evils of capitalism, and our imminent climate peril. The Cool Australia’s teaching templates are now being used by 52,540 teachers in 6,676 primary and high schools (71% of total schools). The courses have impacted just over a million students via 140,000 lessons downloaded for classes this year alone. Students’ uptake of Cool Australia materials has doubled in the past three years.

Teachers are mostly flummoxed about how to prioritise “sustainability” throughout their primary and secondary school lessons, as required by the national curriculum.[1] Cool Australia has marshaled a team of 19 professional curriculum writers who offer teachers and pupils easy templates for lessons that include the sustainability mantra along with green and anti-government propaganda.

Teachers have grasped at the organisation’s labor-saving advantages. As one teacher enthused, “I love the fact they take some of the leg work out of my lessons and allow me to spend more time working on the outdoor gardens etc.” A coordinator (hopefully not of English courses) wrote that the lessons gave her “piece of mind”.

Much of the Cool material, such as lessons advocating recycling and energy-saving, is largely harmless, even beneficial. But material on hot-button political topics is designed to turn students into green activists and anti-conservative bigots.

On asylum seekers, the basic “text” is the film “Chasing Asylum” by activist Eva Orner, whose intention is to shame Australia and mobilise international pressure against the Pacific solution. At least eleven different lessons for Years 9-10 feature her cinematic agitprop, billed as a “documentary”. The film hardly conforms to the professed “apolitical” nature of Cool Australia courses. The film’s descriptor reads:

Chasing Asylum exposes the real impact of Australia’s offshore detention policies and explores how ‘The Lucky Country’ became a country where leaders choose detention over compassion and governments deprive the desperate of their basic human rights. The film features never before seen footage from inside Australia’s offshore detention camps, revealing the personal impact of sending those in search of a safe home to languish in limbo. Chasing Asylum explores the mental, physical and fiscal consequences of Australia’s decision to lock away families in unsanitary conditions hidden from media scrutiny, destroying their lives under the pretext of saving them.

The Decline and Fall of Higher Education By Michael Thau

Nearly everyone outside academia knows that America’s colleges and universities are doing a poor job of preparing their charges for adult life. Undergraduate education, nonetheless, continues to enjoy tremendous prestige. Few upper middle class parents would prefer a gainfully employed child to one attending university; indeed, for most affluent parents, the former would be a source of embarrassment. Higher education’s social esteem makes it hard to fully assimilate its well-known failings but it also completely hides the worst. For, you see, the biggest problem isn’t the facts and skills students don’t learn, it’s the bad habits they do.

I was a philosophy professor for 13 years and, at the beginning, I noticed that my colleagues weren’t requiring much from students and the deleterious effect of this on the latter’s work habits. So, I tried making my students work to get good grades. But, regardless of the penalties I imposed, it was impossible to get all but a tiny minority to seriously apply themselves. The most active response I got from students was extreme resentment. Most students stared at me incredulously when I explained that they’d have to work hard to get a decent grade. A few times I heard a shocked student complain – without intending or even noticing any irony – “But this is harder than high school!”

I tried telling my classes that some work was required even though I wouldn’t be checking it and, literally, almost no one could comprehend what this meant. They immediately heard “won’t be checked” as “isn’t required” because almost all of them prioritized entertainment and socializing far above learning. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of students who major in the humanities do so precisely because they have no reason for being in college besides avoiding work and because humanities classes require far less of it than the sciences. But, even outside the humanities, the typical student views the person in front of the classroom, not as a teacher, but merely as an obstacle to getting a B or better.

Of course, students couldn’t stay in college with no desire to learn if their professors weren’t cooperating. And here we come to the second reason that college is such a crippling experience for so many: virtually no professors at an even minimally distinguished college or university regard their real job as teaching. Indeed, if you work at a prestigious college or university, you do so little teaching that it would be almost impossible to do so. I was an assistant professor in UCLA’s philosophy department from 1996-2004. Philosophy faculty taught four ten‑week courses a year, each meeting four hours a week. Salaries, however, by no means reflected our minimal teaching duties. Upon leaving, my annual salary – one of the lowest in the department – was $65,000 plus about $4,000 a year in (untaxed) “research” money for travel; the most senior department members had six figure salaries plus five figure travel budgets. Teaching loads and salaries at Princeton, where I earned my PhD, and Temple, where I worked next, and similar institutions are comparable. For a successful academic, teaching is just a cover story – it’s what you say you do to justify your generous pay. What you really do – what gives you self-respect, pride of accomplishment and takes up most of your time – is produce “research.”

Academic research calls to mind beneficial technological advancements. But, even most scientific research has no practical value. It’s mostly, at best, the accumulation of tiny facts that will never affect anyone outside a handful of aficionados. Even in the sciences academic research is mostly academic. But research in the humanities is entirely academic. That’s not to say that the great humanist texts have no value; the humanities’ canon does have very important things to say about how to live a good, productive, and happy life. But these practical lessons don’t generate the kind of papers required for success in academia. The writing of a successful professor must be couched in the most abstract terms – it must be completely inaccessible to all but a few like-minded colleagues. Accessibility and practical import are the hug and kiss of professional death; they mark your work as unsophisticated and you as not very clever.

Our Hypocritical “Educators” Tufts administrators in denial.

Editorial note: Tufts University was one of twelve campuses on which the David Horowitz Freedom Center placed posters this Fall targeting the campus hate group Students for Justice in Palestine and exposing the financial and organizational ties that link the student organization to the anti-Israel terror group Hamas. At all twelve campuses, administrators ordered that the posters be immediately torn down, while proclaiming their ardent support for the principle of free speech. The following letter from David Horowitz exposes the absurdity and hypocrisy of this administrative stance and responds directly to accusations from two Tufts deans (posted below David’s letter) that the Freedom Center’s posters violated Tufts’ “community standards” and poster policy and “are not welcome on our campus.”

*

November 29, 2016

James M. Glaser
Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, Tufts University
Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering, Tufts University

Gentlemen,

I have just received your letter of November 14, conveying your “serious concerns regarding the posters placed on the Tufts University campus on October 19, 2016,” for which we took responsibility. The posters in question identify a hate group – Students for Justice in Palestine, which is sponsored by your institution. SJP calls for the destruction of the Jewish state, receives funding from the terrorist organization Hamas, and sponsors campus resolutions to boycott Israel, which liberals ranging from Larry Summers and Alan Dershowitz to Hillary Clinton have condemned as anti-Semitic. The statements in our posters are factual, or are reasonable opinions based on the facts.

Your “serious concerns” are summed up in two claims. First that “the posters in question violate our community standards” and, second, that they “violate our poster policy which requires notification and authorization by a university office or recognized student group prior to placing posters on campus.” You ask us in future to seek such permission.

Really. The two of you have already sent a letter to every member of the Tufts student body warning them that the university condemns our posters and that, “The university will be sending a statement to the posters’ sponsors in order to make clear that such materials are not welcome on our campus.” Now what student or student group, knowing that the university condemns these ideas, and has taken the extraordinary step of warning the entire student body that our ideas are unwelcome, would be willing to risk authorizing our posters? Which is why we took the step of putting up our posters without asking permission, since we are well aware that institutions like Tufts seek to be “safe places” for a politically correct orthodoxy and can be ruthless in acting to hermetically seal off dissenting ideas like ours.

Flunking Higher Education By Glenn Fairman *****

Peace Studies, Black Studies, Womens’ Studies, Ethnic Studies, even Marijuana Studies. These “Sensitivity Degrees,” from 40K plus a year universities, are coming home to roost — as our youth begin taking their surly bite out of the “reality sandwich.” Having initially lusted after those glossy course catalogs, what a cold slap in the face it was to learn that an engineering degree actually required spending nights burning the midnight oil, rather than the bong. How comforting it was to switch majors after the freshman term and saunter into the lukewarm waters of sub-mediocrity. How natural it felt to re-enter the progressive womb and be “Born Again” as a smart-phone toting infant — where the ability to emote (and bullshit) was valued over the cruel, patriarchal, intolerant, and narrow world of science and its unforgiving mistress: mathematics.

And even if one still wished to cultivate the traditional loosey-goosey creative life, these days the disciplines of: Philosophy, English, and Political Science are more representative of Progressive indoctrination than that once blessed golden path of diving deep into the human condition. Now, the liberal arts or social sciences are indispensable to a cultured society, but only in the last few generations has our moribund culture succumbed to the delusion that such knowledge was sufficient, in and of itself, for obtaining gainful employment. Little did they know that “The Technical City” has little need of such pleasantries, and this cruel revelation hit working class parents perhaps the hardest. Indeed, how many scrimping couples mortgaged their golden years so that little Heather and charming Max could swig and cavort to the dulcet tones of Higher Education — that velvet-lined Hamster box of learning? Having handed over their treasures to the longhairs, Mom and Pop were handed back sniveling toddlers. And if we have learned anything from this vast transfer of wealth, it is that an expensive dumbed down liberal arts education only increases the difficulty of dynamiting the entitled little bastards out of the basement before we qualify for Medicare.

Listen. America has surpassed its solubility limit for the number of parasites it can absorb and coddle. A knowledge of Foucault or Betty Friedan may impress in the decadent salons of Manhattan, but not so much in cleaning storm drains or in inquiring whether a patron would prefer a refill of his beverage of choice at that petit’ bourgeois establishment — Le’ Burger King.

What have we learned, class? You’re taking too damn long to grow up here in America! And while the philosopher contemplates his indigence and the psych major has her head examined, the principle on that student loan ain’t budged a lick. How’s that for some fundamental transformation?

Kevin Donnelly Donald Trump’s Class Warfare

Poor American kids, like their Australian counterparts, continue to slide in assessments of educational achievement even as the sums poured into government schools soar. The president-elect’s endorsement of vouchers, choice and competition is the last, best hope to reverse that decline.
The current school-funding model is about to end and the federal, state and territory ministers of education are soon to meet and begin the process of deciding what will happen at the start of 2018. Crucial to the new funding model will be whether it continues the same old approach of governments controlling taxpayers’ money going to schools and thus forcing them to follow the ordained and endorsed policies in regard to curriculum, teacher employment and accountability.

That’s on this side of the pacific. In America president-elect Donald Trump offers an alternative called “school choice”. Trump has just appointed a school-choice advocate, Betsy DeVos, as Education Secretary and committed $20 billion towards “private school choice, magnet schools and charter laws”. That DeVos is already being denounced by all the usual suspects is an encouraging sign.

School choice involves local autonomy versus centralised, bureaucratic control, plus vouchers that see the money follow the child to whatever school his or her parents decide is best. In addition to being inherently good, the belief that parents should have greater control over where their children are educated signals to schools, both government and non-government, that if they are ineffective and fail to meet parental expectations enrolments will suffer. Instead of being run for the benefit of teacher unions, their executives and the thousands of bureaucrats employed at head office the focus is on giving schools the freedom to best reflect the needs of their communities.

Innovations such as charter schools and vouchers involve local control over curriculum and staffing and ensure that parents, especially those in disadvantaged communities, have the financial means to choose between privately managed schools and those controlled by the state. Florida, Washington and Milwaukee pioneered charter schools and the movement has gone international, with conservative and progressive governments in New Zealand, England and Sweden introducing a more market-driven model represented by school choice and increased local autonomy.

While not giving schools the same degree of autonomy and flexibility as charter schools in the US, the Australian government’s Independent Public Schools initiative is also based on the belief that local control leads to greater innovation and improved educational outcomes. As detailed in James Tooley’s book The Beautiful Tree, privately managed and funded schools are also increasingly popular in India where, because they achieve stronger results compared to government schools, poor parents are going without to pay the cost of enrolling their children.

Trump Picks School-Choice Advocate Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary The former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman would be the second woman named to join the administrationBy Michael C. Bender

President-elect Donald Trump selected Betsy DeVos to be his secretary of education, putting a well-known Michigan philanthropist and school-choice advocate in charge of the agency tasked with promoting student achievement.

Ms. DeVos, 58 years old, a former Michigan Republican Party chairwoman, would be the second woman named to join the Trump administration. South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley was announced earlier on Wednesday as Mr. Trump’s choice to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

“Together, we can work to make transformational change to ensure every student has the opportunity to fulfill his or her highest potential,” Ms. DeVos wrote Wednesday on Twitter, adding that the “status quo” in education is “not acceptable.”

The post is subject to Senate confirmation.

She is chairwoman of American Federation for Children, a Washington-based group that advocates for the use of school vouchers and scholarship tax credit programs. Ms. DeVos’s husband, Dick DeVos, was the Republican nominee for Michigan governor in 2006. The DeVos family, heirs to the Amway Corp. fortune, are major donors to Republican Party candidates and conservative causes.

Ms. DeVos, a prominent charter-school advocate, would enter the office at a time when traditional public schools are fighting charter schools for students, as enrollment drives state and local funding. Some school districts, including the Los Angeles Unified School District, have reported losing thousands of students and millions of dollars.

Charter schools, publicly funded campuses that are mostly privately run, are the fastest-growing educational option. Enrollment in charters rose 219% from 2004 to 2014 to more than 2.5 million students, while school-district enrollment dropped by 1%, according to an analysis of the latest data from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Advocates for charters, which are usually not unionized, have often clashed with teachers unions.

Columbia University Plans to Provide Sanctuary, Financial Help for Undocumented Students By Debra Heine

Fearing a “crack-down” on illegal immigration in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, Columbia University has declared itself to be a safe space for undocumented students.

According to the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university plans “to provide sanctuary and financial support for undocumented students as many face concerns about immigration policy under President-elect Donald Trump.”

Via The Hill:

Provost John Coatsworth said in an email sent to students and teachers Monday that the university would not let immigration officials onto its campus without a warrant or provide the information of undocumented students to authorities without a court-ordered subpoena.

If the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is terminated — as Trump has threatened to do — the university said it would increase financial aid and other support to undocumented students who lose the right to work.

Trump’s victory has “prompted intense concern for the values we hold dear and for members of our community who are apprehensive about what the future holds,” the provost said in the email.

“The experience of undocumented students at the College and Columbia Engineering, from the time they first seek admission through their graduation, will not be burdened in any way by their undocumented status,” he said.

University President Lee Bollinger said the university is in a period where it doesn’t know what will happen to “a lot of students and faculty and staff with respect to immigration policy.

“There are lots of areas that are uncertain and it’s a deeply puzzling and concerning time,” he said in a statement.