Education

On Friday (June 29, 2001), ABC news correspondent John Stossel aired a hard-hitting report challenging the environmentalist movement and suggesting that "tampering with nature" makes human life better -- that such "unnatural" phenomena as clean water, heated homes and...

Q : My wife and I want to teach our four-year-old son to have self-confidence. How can we teach him? A: This is too vast a subject to appropriately answer in a short column. I can, however, give you some general principles. Here they are:Make sure you are confident...

There's nothing like stiff competition to bring out the worst in government. Nowhere does this prove more true than in the battle between home-schooling parents and public school bureaucrats. In Maryland, local prosecutors are moving forward with a little-noticed case...

No wonder the California Teachers Association was howling. Ray Haynes actually wanted them to practice what they preach. Haynes, a Republican state senator from California, recently introduced legislation in Sacramento that would have required public school teachers...

Test scores are not the only things that tell us how bad our public schools have become. In San Francisco, the school board voted unanimously to have the city's students take Friday, March 9th, off to go to Berkeley, in order to stage a protest demonstration,...

After every tragic school shooting -- and many other shocking murders -- the question gets asked: "How could he do such a thing?" This has become the centerpiece of a whole set of rituals. Another part of these rituals is the appearance of shrinks, like ambulance...

This Christmas season, take a moment to say a prayer for the many innocent people sent to prison by injustice. You can safely say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I," because the myriad causes of well-intentioned people have made it possible for anyone, no matter...

"Breast is best." No, it's not the new slogan for Hooters restaurant. It's the mantra of breast-feeding advocates who promote their cause with a cult-like fervor around the world. Their extremism must be condemned. I have nothing against breast-feeding. After weighing...

For almost a century the Soviet Union preached the doctrine of service to "the people." Toil, sacrifice, and suffer, the Soviet propagandists told their subjects; it is all being done for the good of "the people." As time went on, of course, the people found that they...

All politicians come out 200 percent in favor of education, especially when an election is coming up. What that usually means is that they are prepared to dump more billions of taxpayer dollars down the bottomless pit of our failing public schools, whether or not that...

Al Gore promises that, if elected, he will make it illegal for all teens to drop out of high school before age 18. (Currently they may drop out at 16). In other words he wants to use the guns and threat of police force to physically force students to not drop out....

Many people hear only one side of the story of our public schools, because only the teachers' unions have both the incentives and the millions of dollars required to produce sustained advertising campaigns about education. These campaigns intensify during an election...

It is amazing how many people who are "pro-choice" when it comes to abortion are against choice when it comes to education. Indeed, that is the official position of the Democratic Party. Despite Al Gore's rhetoric at the Democrats' convention in July about being...

It was painful to watch. Our bright 9-year-old son was rapidly losing his love of learning. Dissatisfied with his private school, the best we could find, I decided to postpone my second career as a writer and home-school him--a choice many Americans are forced to make...

Under pressure from the religious right, the Illinois Board of Education has quietly eliminated the word "evolution" from state school standards. Liberals complain that this violates the separation between church state. But they're getting exactly what they deserve....