Just as bad as sky-high grocery prices, or ridiculous F-150 sticker prices — perhaps worse — is employers demanding degrees for jobs that don’t require them. This forces kids to go to college and rack up student debts they can’t afford which conservatives are adamant must be [...]
Archive for the ‘Schools & Colleges’ Category
May 24th, 2024 - 3:55 am § in Schools & Colleges
What should children learn in school?
That’s not just a question for teachers or education experts. Increasingly activist parents want a say, and it’s becoming a partisan football, kicked this way and that. I’m sure schools have changed since I went through the K12 grades and college in the 1950s and 1960s. I was a bri[...]
May 17th, 2024 - 6:05 pm § in Law and Courts, Schools & Colleges
Soccer mom sues cops who gave her a fire ant sandwich
A Texas woman is accusing cops “of hogtying her and pressing her face down to a pile of fire ants.” When dropping her son off at school, she turned into a bus-only lane, and then apparently panicked (see story here). But the cops claim she drove across a lawn fleeing from police, then fo[...]
May 12th, 2024 - 12:37 am § in Schools & Colleges
Alito frets over loss of free speech on campuses
Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito said there’s “declining” support for free speech on college campuses in his commencement speech at a Catholic college on May 11, 2024 (read story here). I’m not sure who he’s blaming, but I don’t disagree with what he’s saying. R[...]
May 11th, 2024 - 8:07 pm § in Israel/Palestine, Schools & Colleges
Who should run universities?
“In recent years, universities across the US have come under increasing pressure from conservative politicians and donors criticizing them as liberal bastions of ‘wokeness.’” This is an excerpt from a CNN article on May 11, 2024, about pro-Palestinian campus protests (read it her[...]
May 10th, 2024 - 8:25 pm § in Racism, Schools & Colleges
Virginia conservatives show their true colors
White supremacy in the South never went away, it just laid low for a few decades, and resurfaced when Trump made racism great again. Virginia’s Shenandoah valley is steeped in Civil War history and Confederate “heritage.” Mountain View High School in Stafford, and Honey Run Element[...]
May 9th, 2024 - 6:05 pm § in Israel/Palestine, Schools & Colleges
Do people with strong opinions belong in academia?
Scholarship rests on impartial inquiry. Its credibility derives from neutrality. A scholar should be neither for nor against his subject; his role is to understand and explain it. But faculty are human, and have opinions. So the problem is deciding when their personal feelings and opinions get in th[...]
Monologue isn’t dialogue
This excerpt is from a story in The Daily, the University of Washington’s student newspaper, that was published online on May 2, 2024 (read it here): James Pfeiffer, professor of global health at UW, encourages people on campus to go down and engage with the encampment and in dialogue with pro[...]
Political correctness costs a school $1 million
Smearing one’s face with dark-colored medication is a widely-used method of treating acne, the teen skin scourge. That’s what three students at a Mountain View, California, Catholic high school did, and they took selfies which circulated on the internet and social media played “tel[...]
May 7th, 2024 - 11:03 pm § in Schools & Colleges
School superintendent loses job in ‘Clappergate’ scandal
It began with a spring awards banquet for a girls’ softball team at a San Diego-area high school. The school district superintendent’s daughter was one of the players. She won the Most Valuable Player award, and everybody clapped. But not loudly enough, it seems. This incident came to be[...]