Education

The Soul Abstracted from Life

June 5, 2013June 14, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

Public School Indoctrination Brainwashing by Daren Jonescu –
Modern civilization willingly consigns almost all of its children to the living hell of forced retardation. Everyone knows the educational establishment is beset with problems, corruptions, and the downward ratchet of lowest common denominator standards. And yet parents continue to send their children to government schools, hoping, perhaps even half-believing, that this will not significantly harm the children’s adult lives. They are dead wrong. What follows is an anatomical diagram of mankind’s greatest shame.

The primary purpose of all government-controlled education — regardless of how this is expressed by particular defenders of the enterprise — is to produce the kind of citizens the government sees as best suited to its established form of governance. By “the government,” I mean those people and factions within the political infrastructure who are in a position to determine the long-term structure and interests of the community as a whole. [Read more…]

The Abolition of Sex

April 15, 2013April 22, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

Gender Spectrum Destroying Children Souls by Fay Voshell –
The Massachusetts public school system has taken the tired mantra “You can be whatever you want to be” to new heights of absurdity. It is now possible for any student to declare what his sex is regardless of whether it is the biological opposite of what she was born as. The new transgender manifesto, which includes punishments and counseling for students who object to the idea of changing one’s sex by fiat, can be found here.

The basic premise is that a student has the right to decide what sex he or she is, and the school is required to support the child’s self-proclaimed identity in every respect. According to the aforementioned document, if a boy decides he is a girl, he is to be addressed as “she,” and school records are to reflect his new preference by recording his feminine name of choice. Thus, “John” is to be known hereafter as “Jane” if s/he so desires, and parental assignation of nomenclature be damned. Schools are to promote gender neutral clothing. It appears that standard graduation garb such as blue gowns for boys and white for girls is to be scrapped along with any requirement that girls wear dresses to the prom. [Read more…]

Please Do Not Adjust Your Child

April 6, 2013April 12, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

Indoctrination of Children by Daren Jonescu –
Of all the arguments public-school advocates have used to hoodwink generations of parents into condemning their own children to years of state-controlled subservience training, one of the most successful is that without public schools, children cannot be properly “socialized,” and will therefore be ill-prepared for life in the “real world.” Not only is this argument absurd on its face, but that face also reveals the ugliest intention of compulsory schools: the deliberate retarding of human moral and intellectual development.

The basic premise of the argument for public schools as necessary tools of socialization is that learning to get along, or fit in, with children one’s own age is a vital life skill. Is it?

Childhood, contrary to the worst tendencies of democratic thought, is not [Read more…]

Tearing Down Public Education

February 1, 2013February 19, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

Education communist brainwashing by Daren Jonescu –
On the subject of public schools, some conservatives and libertarians are inclined to speak as though they cannot wait another moment to spring into action — and then act as though they need the hand of God to point the way ahead before they do what we all know in our hearts must be done. This is not meant as harsh criticism. These good people embody an innate human flaw defined for all time in one of our greatest archetypes: they are Hamlet.

At a moment as historically important as this one, two all-too-human dangers lie in wait for those who understand the seriousness of the situation. The first is that they should undermine their own cause with reckless outbursts and the resulting disarray. The second is that they should cocoon themselves against the clear imperative to act by lamenting the lack of a perfect plan. [Read more…]

Not Sermons but Stories – Engaging in Culture the Right Way

January 12, 2013January 14, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

Christians Engaging Culture Through Stories by Eric Metaxas –
If you’ve read The Chronicles of Narnia, you know they are loaded with Christian themes and symbols. That’s why many assume that C. S. Lewis wrote them in order to send some kind of Christian message.

But Lewis himself insisted otherwise. The tales, he said, started as a series of pictures that came into his mind and set his imagination working. The result was not sermons, but stories—beautiful stories loved by believers and non-believers alike for decades.

There’s a lesson in here for all of us. Conservative Christians today often feel alienated from the larger society, and for good reason. The vast majority of the stories that permeate our culture are told by people whose worldview is diametrically opposed to ours. We can hardly watch a TV show or read a magazine without seeing ourselves portrayed as villains, and our cultural opponents held up as the epitome of righteousness. [Read more…]

Educating Ignorance

January 9, 2013January 14, 2013 by Orthodox Editors

University Indoctrination Center by Janice Shaw Crouse –
The best-kept secret in America today is the precipitous drop in the quality of college since the Left seized power in higher education. Every year, various magazines publish a list of rankings for American undergraduate institutions. Forbes assures parents that “Every school with a Forbes grade meets a high standard.” U.S. News and World Reportassures its readers that they consider a wide variety of factors in measuring a college’s effectiveness. While American colleges were once great institutions of learning, those who know higher education today recognize that “high standards” of quality are casualties in the war against traditionalism and American values. Where religion and love of country and family were once revered, radical Leftist ideology now prevails. Traditional values have been replaced by moral relativism, anti-establishment teachings, and the breakdown of the family.

The radicalization of colleges did not happen overnight. What we have now is a product of past indifference and disinclination to do anything to reverse the spread of Leftist trends. [Read more…]

Dumbing Down American Public Education

December 9, 2012December 17, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Dumbing Down American Public Education by Glenn Fairman –
In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California. On one assignment, I was to cover a social studies class of some old-timer; he had written down in his instructions that since his classes were on a field trip, my sole duty was to show a movie at 6th period to those who did not attend. What I found that day opened my eyes.

In a dusty corner shelf of the room was a set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s, and although my memory cannot now relinquish their title, their contents burned themselves into my brain. As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed “civics.” This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools. [Read more…]

The Unteachables: A Generation that Cannot Learn

August 17, 2012August 20, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Indoctrination of Children by Janice Fiamengo –
The greatest tragedy of progressive education is not the students’ lack of skills, but of teachable character.
“The honeymoon is over.” Instructors who award low grades in humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days. Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.

The matter doesn’t always end there. Some students are prepared for a fight, writing emails of entreaty or threat, or besieging the instructor in his office to make clear that the grade is unacceptable. Every instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word or two, have been blown out of proportion. [Read more…]

Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary

March 14, 2012March 15, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

Freedom vs. the Secular Seminary by Christopher Chantrill –
Little did I know, when contrasting conservative freedom and liberal liberation, that a poster-girl for liberation was presenting herself at the Altar of the Victim, the remarkable Sandra Fluke, the toast of our Democratic friends. For Ms. Fluke’s belief system suggests to her that she cannot have access to her sexuality unless a big institution provides her contraception. Moreover, since she is a law student with a degree in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell, she is evidently well into a professional career in liberation activism.

Conservatives scratch our heads at the activist university and its characteristic products like Ms. Fluke. But we are fools. The university has seldom been an institution of higher learning devoted to science and disinterested scholarship. More often it has been a seminary. When young Fred Vincy, son of a Middlemarch merchant, went off to the University of Cambridge in around 1830, it was to study to be a priest in the state Church of England. [Read more…]

What Kids Now Learn in College

March 2, 2012March 5, 2012 by Orthodox Editors

by Dennis Prager –
Save your money. Here’s a list of the lessons they’ll be taught.

As high school seniors throughout America will be receiving acceptance letters to colleges within the next month, it would be nice for parents to meditate on what they are getting for the $20–$50,000 they will pay each year.

The United States is no better than any other country, and in many areas worse than many. On the world stage, America is an imperialist country, and domestically it mistreats its minorities and neglects its poor, while discriminating against non-whites.

There is no better and no worse in literature and the arts. The reason universities in the past taught Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Bach rather than, let us say, Guatemalan poets, Sri Lankan musicians, and Native American storytellers was “Eurocentrism.”

God is at best a non-issue, and at worst, a foolish and dangerous belief.

Christianity is largely a history of inquisitions, crusades, oppression, and anti-intellectualism. Islam, on the other hand, is “a religion of peace.” [Read more…]