Pot legalization—the one topic that gets a college classroom riled up. I have seen no other issue that is more capable of making the guy dozing off as the professor talks suddenly become red-faced and articulate. Do not underestimate the power of this issue to get teenagers and young adults (and old adults wanting their [...]

Teach Social Justice–Or Else By Mark Bauerlein A frequent allegation against efforts to inculcate “dispositions” in student-teachers is that they are fuzzy and un-quantifiable. Especially in a high-accountability climate, the rise of “disposition” outcomes is particularly hard to sustain. Here’s a study in The New Educator that answers the objection. Authored by educators at Boston [...]

This week, Kathleen McKinley passed along a story from texasgopvote.com about a disturbing curriculum being used in a San Antonio high school classroom. Teacher Barbara Geerdes’ lessons on the philosophical difference between conservatives and liberals could not have been more one-sided and inaccurate. It even incorporates a cartoon of an angel to represent liberals, while conservatives [...]

The current president of the AAUP, Cary Nelson, is also a well-known political activist, author of Manifesto of a Tenured Radical. During a debate at a conference in 2007, Professor Nelson said: “You cannot take politics out of my classroom anymore than you can take it out of life. It’s [...]

Indoctrination is not just about a radical professor abusing the classroom.

When I was nineteen years old, I sat in a classroom in France and was taught that the Jews control the entire world. My conservative teacher was deeply influenced by far-right French extremists and Holocaust Deniers who hated America and, of course Israel. I had always been interested, more like obsessed, with the history of [...]

When I was at college — at Boston University, in the mid to late eighties — I took an education course that required students to give a mock lesson to the rest of the class. An aspiring social studies teacher chose a controversial topic (I don’t recall what it was) for his lesson, and the [...]

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and once in a great while, conservatives must face the harrowing prospect of siding with liberals—even Barack Obama.  Fortunately, the source of Obama’s latest criticism, Bill Maher, makes the idea a little easier to swallow.
You may recall Frances Gallo, the Rhode Island superintendent who fired the [...]