Category: Education
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Education in America – Part Six
Part 6: Why So Many Parents No Longer Trust Public Education Public trust is rarely destroyed by a single event. It is worn down by repeated contradiction. Parents are told that schools are committed to excellence, yet many see weak academic results. They are told that schools welcome partnership, yet too often experience opacity, delay, and condescension…
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Education in America – Part Five
The Child Does Not Belong to the State A free society must answer certain questions correctly or it will soon answer many others wrongly. One of those questions is this: who bears the first responsibility for the child? The answer is not the school district, the state agency, the licensing body, the union, or the educational theorist.…
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Education in America – Part Four
When the Classroom Becomes a Political Stage A classroom is not a campaign office, a protest rally, or a stage on which adults perform their moral identity before a captive audience of minors. Its first obligation is instruction. That does not mean politics must never be discussed. On the contrary, any serious education in history,…
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Education in America – Part Three
Part 3: From Reading and Arithmetic to Therapy and Activism There was a time when the purpose of a school could be stated without embarrassment. Children were sent there to learn to read, to write, to count, to know something of the world that existed before they arrived, and to acquire habits of mind that would serve them when novelty had…
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Education in America – Part Two
How Schools Stopped Teaching Children How to Think There are few phrases in modern education more overused, or more carelessly used, than “critical thinking.” It appears in mission statements, curriculum guides, strategic plans, and teacher training materials with almost liturgical regularity. Yet the phrase often conceals as much as it reveals. A student is not…
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Education in America – Part One
The Real Crisis in American Education Is Not Money, but Mission Ask most parents what school is for, and the answer is usually plain enough. A school exists to teach children to read with understanding, write with clarity, reckon with numbers, know something of history and science, and grow into adults capable of sound judgment. That…
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Moral Confusion in Modern Times: A Rebuke of False Equivalence
The Event and Its Distorted Message In August, outside an Arlington County School Board meeting in Virginia, a small protest formed over a proposal to restrict transgender students from using bathrooms that do not align with their biological sex. Among the counter-protesters stood a man holding a hand-drawn sign that read, “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t…
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Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Part Ways
Free speech is not a talisman that turns folly into wisdom or rudeness into courage. It is a legal shield against government punishment for words. It is not a contract that binds employers, customers, or neighbors to applaud, employ, or endorse those words. We confuse categories and then act shocked at the bill that arrives.…
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Blood of the Martyrs
The sorrow that comes upon us when the innocent are murdered while they pray should drive every soul to its knees. What words can suffice in the face of such terror? Men and women, little children, saints of Christ, gathered in the hush of midnight prayer, were visited not by the comfort of heaven but…
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The Triumph of Reason and Fairness in Women’s Athletics
A Thankful Reflection Today is a good day. There are moments in history, quiet but unmistakable, when truth stirs from its long slumber, shakes off the scorn of the fashionable lie, and rises to speak again. The news that the University of Pennsylvania has agreed to bar biological males from competing in women’s sports is…
Seeking Truth in Today's Troubled World 