Families to receive $1.5 million after Supreme Court victory over LGBT storytelling in school

Zero Hedge

A Maryland school district that lost a recent U.S. Supreme Court case will pay $1.5 million to parents who weren't allowed to opt their children out of LGBT story time, the families' attorneys said.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the plaintiffs in the landmark Mahmoud v. Taylor case, announced the settlement on Feb. 20. The defendant, the Montgomery County Board of Education — which oversees Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest school district in the state — was also ordered to comply with court orders mandating advance notice and opt-out provisions.

"Public schools nationwide are on notice: running roughshod over parents' rights and religious freedom isn't just illegal — it's costly," Eric Baxter, Becket senior counsel and the lead attorney in the case, said in a Feb. 20 statement.

"This settlement enforces the Supreme Court's ruling and ensures parents, not government bureaucrats, have the final say in how their children are raised."

Read more

California Parents Horrified At New Sex-Ed Agenda

Liberty Nation 

The debate over whether schools should teach sex education to minors has been going on for decades. But now, perhaps more than ever, many parents are horrified by what their children are being taught – especially when parents, despite their religious beliefs, have no say about the teaching materials.

In a small California community, parents and clergy were so appalled at the explicit and LGBTQ-inspired lessons, they went undercover to investigate deeper. What they discovered at a Riverside County Comprehensive Health Education meeting so horrified them, they determined to stop the curriculum.

Our Watch President Pastor Tim Thompson said:

“We don’t want our children exposed to some of these things they are showing, th(is) pornographic, sexually explicit material. It has no place in the classroom. It’s not right, and it won’t be tolerated.”

Thompson was referring to Positive Prevention Plus, the text for sex ed classes. John Andrews, parent of a student in the Murrieta School District, was sick over the explicit material depicted in the “educational” materials. He said:

“They talk about mutual masturbation. They discuss gender roles, the gender spectrum, and in the support materials … they take it even further. They discuss everything, topics like roleplaying for different genders, blood play, dental dams … fisting is mentioned. I mean, they mention it all.
“If I were to show that material to a child, I would be brought up on charges. But somehow our public schools are allowed to teach this to junior high and high school kids.”

The graphics in the instructional guides use cartoon images so detailed that many parents found them inappropriate. Wanting to discover more about what children would be learning, Thompson’s group attended meetings held by the school boards. At one particular meeting in Riverside, a woman went “undercover” and recorded the event. Thompson said he was shocked to discover some of the biggest contributors to the new sex ed curriculum included Planned Parenthood and Cardea Services, which he said is a huge advocate for the LGBT community. Another shocker was that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was on hand to explain how to excuse children from class to get abortions without parents finding out.

“We knew parents had to see for themselves or else they weren’t going to believe it,” Thompson said, referring to the video he posted.

Read more

Political indoctrination: UK govt unveils plan to teach school kids about 'fake news'

RT

The British government is planning a new initiative which will aim to help schoolchildren distinguish real information from 'fake news' — in an eyebrow-raising move which could be described as a little bit Orwellian.

British Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds unveiled the new plan, warning that teachers need to better prepare students for the risks posed by "fake news" online, the Independent reported.

From 2020, British kids in both primary and secondary schools will learn about "confirmation bias" and "online risks" as part of a compulsory section of the curriculum. As part of the plan, teachers will help children identify techniques used for "persuasion" and be told "when to seek support." They will also learn about the reasons why someone might wish to "bend the truth" in the first place.

A concerned Hinds warned that the internet makes it easier for both state actors and individuals to "spread falsehoods." One area in particular which the government is looking at is "misleading content" regarding vaccinations. Without "firm action," the proliferation of allegedly misleading information online will "get a lot worse," he said.

Hinds recalled that propagandists have sought to "manipulate the truth" since "ancient times." Indeed, this is something any British government official should be well aware of, since it's well-known that the British mainstream media — including the BBC and British newspapers — have historically been infiltrated by intelligence agents from MI5 and MI6. One could probably safely assume that such inconvenient information will be left off the agenda, however, with the British program more likely to focus on the evils of propaganda emanating from Britain's geopolitical adversaries.

Aside from the obvious question of whether governments are best placed to create a curriculum on fake vs. real news, there's also the added dilemma of whether teachers should be responsible for imparting wisdom on media manipulation to children, when so much of the task of deciphering the news these days comes down to pure opinion. What one teacher might regard as real, another might view as fake.

Read more

Drag Queen Storytime: Convicted pedophile, dressed as a woman, reads to kids at public library

Comment: No, it isn't sensationalist right-wing propaganda - it's simply the truth. 

It seems LGBTQ folks are happy to ram their ideology down everyone's throats - including young children. Yet, they are not so keen on seeing the inherent hypocrisy that defines such actions.

If it wasn't bizzare enough already, it seems it's A-okay for a pederast/paedophile dressed as a drag-queen to take the role of story-teller....

---------------------

Doug Mainwaring
Lifesite News

HOUSTON, Texas, March 19, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A pro-family activist group has uncovered the truth about the pedophile past of a drag queen who reads to young children at a public library’s “Drag Queen Storytime.”

Thirty-two-year-old Albert Garza is a registered sex offender who was convicted of assaulting an eight-year-old boy in 2008, yet that has not hindered him from dressing in garish women’s clothing, calling himself “Tatiana Mala Nina,” and performing in front of kids.   

When the story broke, one news site suggested an alternative name for “Drag Queen Storytime,” with a headline that blared, “Pederast Story Hour in Houston.”

When the Freed-Montrose Public Library failed to respond to inquiries by Houston MassResistance, the activist group – which had been protesting the program – conducted its own investigation into the background of the drag queens as well as the way in which “Drag Queen Storytime” is conducted. They ended up compiling a detailed 163-page report, replete with disturbing photos, documenting “the lurid activities of some of these ‘Drag Queens’ who read to children, and how the library blatantly disregarded its own rules.”

Read more

Orwellian Future: Facial Recognition & Mass Surveillance Is Coming To U.S. Schools

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com

We are staring our Orwellian future right in the face.  Beginning in New York, facial recognition is coming to schools in the United States and it’ll be switched on for testing next week.

The dystopian future George Orwell warned about in his accidental historical predictions book, 1984, has arrived. According to an article by Engadget, the Lockport City School District in New York will start testing a facial and object recognitionsystem called “Aegis” on June 3rd. According to BuzzFeed News, that will make it the first in the U.S. to pilot a facial recognition mass surveillance system on its students and faculty.

The district installed cameras and the software suite back in September, using $1.4 million of the $4.2 million funding it received through the New York Smart Schools Bond Act. Funding provided through the Bond Act is supposed to go towards instructional tech devices, such as iPads and laptops, but the district clearly had other plans. –Engadget

BuzzFeed News got its hands on a copy of a letter distributed to the students’ parents, and it describes Aegis as “an early warning system” that can notify officials of threats.  But that’s the propagandized version of what the system is in reality: it’s a mass surveillance tool being sold to the public as “safety” as with any human rights infringement. The system, created by Canadian company SN Technologies, can apparently keep track of certain individuals in school grounds.

Read more

Five Years In Prison For Offending Someone Online...

Simon Black
Sovereign Man

Let the weekly absurdity begin!

New SAT scoring will combat Asian privilege

 

The infamous SAT has been used since 1926 as a sort of university entrance exam to objectively test high school students’ scholastic aptitude. Until now.

Test administrators announced plans this week to include an ‘adversity score’ for every student taking the SAT.

This score will excuse poor test results if the student lives in a high crime neighborhood, went to a poor high school, is living in a single parent or low income household, and so on.

And this should really put a dent in Asian privilege. Yes you read that right. With an average SAT score of 1223, Asians achieve the highest marks among all the ethnic groups tracked by SAT administrators.

But these same Asian test takers also typically come from dual-parent, higher-income households. So they’ll be penalized because of their parents’ success.

This is truly amazing thing to be teaching young people.

Universities and the SAT administrators don’t want high school students to identify as strong, self-reliant, independent individuals who seek to solve problems and overcome adversity.

Instead they’re encouraging young people to make their socioeconomic circumstances the strongest part of their identities. And, based on those socioeconomic circumstances, cultivate a guilt or victim mentality, and expect penalties or handouts for the rest of their lives.

Click here for the full story.

Harvard lynch-mob runs professor off campus

 

Harvard Professor Ronald Sullivan has spent his career as a lawyer defending some of the poorest people in the country.

He was previously the public defender in Washington DC and personally overturned dozens of wrongful convictions.

Professor Sullivan also represented Michael Brown’s family after the teen was shot to death by police. Huffington Post even called him the “man who dealt the biggest blow to mass incarceration.”

But now he and his wife– the first black student housing deans in Harvard history– have been run off campus by an angry mob of #metoo zealots.

His crime: joining Harvey Weinstein’s defense team.

Read more

Manufacturing anxiety

Frank Furedi 
spiked.com

How the mental-health panic is messing up the next generation.

We live in a world in which children and young people are constantly told they are at risk of mental illness. Report after report claims that an epidemic of stress, anxiety, depression and other ailments is ruining young people’s lives. Every year the age of those at risk of mental-health problems seems to get lower. A recent report on children in Walsall, England claimed that children as young as three are suffering from mental-health issues. Last month a survey of schools concluded that schoolchildren’s mental health is at a ‘crisis point’. Teachers expressed a sense of helplessness. One said it was like ‘a slow-motion car crash for our young people that I am powerless to stop and can’t bear to watch or be part of anymore’.

Since the turn of the century, there has been a constant stream of scare stories about the apparently distressing state of young people’s mental health. Every year the scale of the epidemic appears to expand and the number of psychological problems afflicting the young seems to grow. Invariably, reports claim that ‘the crisis of mental health is far greater than we thought’.

One of the most unfortunate consequences of these claims of a mental-health crisis is that normal young people come to be treated as patients. This usually leads to a well-meaning but entirely counterproductive attempt to protect young people from the pressures of everyday life. Schools and universities have adopted practices that are better suited to a clinic than an educational institution. Last week it was reported that the University of Bristol will offer a 12-week happiness course for all of its students. The course will even make up 20 of the 120 credit points students pursue each year. 

Read more

THE END OF SCHOOL: AI ‘Google brain’ implants to REPLACE education and ‘supercharge IQ’

secureteam.com 

AI expert Nikolas Kairinos believes artificial intelligence will improve people’s lives on a mass scale and dramatically transform the way we learn

The CEO and Founder of Fountech.ai exclusively told Daily Star Online he is working on a revolutionary AI to “personalize education”.“The current area of focus is personalized education – trying to speed up learning so that anyone can learn almost anything using AI,” he told Daily Star Online.

“And it’s highly personalized, so the more the AI gets to know you the more it adapts its teaching style, its voice, the time of day it speaks to you – all to optimize learning.”

Nick said the new learning tool could end school as we know it – getting rid of “rogue memorization” where facts are learned and repeated and eventually forgotten.

“That’s not learning,” Nick said.

Nick said we will hear the answers to our questions inside our heads. “This AI will enable anyone in the world, no matter who or how old they are, to log on to their smart tv or their computer or their phone or their smart glasses or the AI in their car, and say ‘teach me about this’.

“You won’t need to memorize anything. Learning will not be about memorizing anything.”

Nick says the need to learn things in “parrot fashion” as we are taught in schools will disappear completely and will free up our brains to think in new, innovative ways – skyrocketing our IQs.

“At the moment it’s all about memorizing and learning facts but when they are accessible to you instantly, things are going to be taken up a level.

“We will be doing more thinking than just memorizing, perhaps getting more creative, learning how to connect dots, and learning how to apply that knowledge.

Read more

Mark Zuckerberg turned American classrooms into nonconsensual laboratories for his pet educational theories, and now they're rebelling

Boing Boing 

Summit Learning is a nonprofit, high-tech "customized learning" group funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan's family charity; under the program, students are equipped with high-surveillance Chromebooks and work on their own "at their own pace" and call on teachers to act as "mentors" when they get stuck.

It's a high-tech version of student-led education, where a high teacher-to-pupil ratio allows students to pursue self-directed education based on their own proclivities and interests, and mentor one another. But in the Zuck version, students work alone in front of screens, in social isolation, taking automated quizzes to assess their progress.

Many students and parents find this incredibly invasive and frustrating. Students with special needs -- exactly the group that you'd expect to benefit most from "customized learning" -- find the systems especially troublesome, and for students with screen-triggered epilepsy, the systems are pure torture.

The result is rebellion, with parents withdrawing students from school altogether, or demanding that alternative accommodations be made for them; students in Brooklyn have staged mass walkouts to protest the systems; other districts have canceled the program in the face of student protests, and one University of Pennsylvania study found that 70% of students opposed the program. 

Read more

Radical Islamic preachers gaining increasing influence in Dutch education

Janene Pieters
NL Times

Dutch intelligence service AIVD warns of radical influences in education in its annual report for 2018. According to the service, "radical Islamic boosters" play an increasingly emphatic role in the education offer for young Muslims in the Netherlands. In the long term, this could undermine the democratic legal order, the AIVD said, NOS reports.

As examples, the AIVD mentioned the "at first sight accessible and innocent" after-school lessons in Arabic and Islam. "We believe, however, that children and young people are alienated from society by this interpretation of education and may be hindered in their participation in society. This is caused by the intolerant and anti-democratic views of the initiators. According to the AIVD, "a new group of eloquent preachers" has been trained, and part of this group is not necessarily opposed to the violent jihadist ideology.

Last month NRC reported that controversial British Sharia preacher Haitham Al Haddad gave "covert" lessons at Amsterdam high school Cornelius Haga Lyceum.

The Netherlands experienced an increase in the number of incidents related to terrorism and jihad last year, the AIVD said in its annual report. For the first time since the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, the country was faced with terrorist violence in 2018. In the years before, terrorist incidents mainly happened in the countries around the Netherlands. But that changed last year. In May a Syrian man stabbed three people in The Hague. In August a man stabbed and seriously injured two American tourists at Amsterdam Central Station. And in September a network of seven jihadists were arrested. They were planning an attack at an event, according to the authorities.

A total of around 500 jihadists, and a few thousand sympathizers, are active in the Netherlands, the AIVD said. 

Read more

18 Statistics That Prove That America Has Become An “Idiocracy”

Michael Snyder
End Of The American Dream

What in the world has happened to us?  Once upon a time, America had the greatest system of education on the entire planet, and our people were sharp, capable and extremely well informed.  Sadly, none of those things are true anymore.  In 2006, Mike Judge made a movie entitled “Idiocracy” in which an individual of below average intelligence wakes up after being asleep for 500 years thanks to a military hibernation experiment.  When he wakes up, he quickly realizes that he is now the smartest man in America, and that is not a good thing.  The film became an instant classic, but when I originally watched it I thought that such a thing could never actually happen in this country.  Unfortunately, I was wrong.  Since 2006 our nation has been “dumbed down” at a pace that is absolutely staggering, and it is difficult to see a positive future for America if this trend continues.

The following are 18 statistics that prove that America has become an “idiocracy”…

#1 One recent survey found that 74 percent of Americans don’t even know how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights.

#2 An earlier survey discovered that 37 percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment.

#3 Shockingly, only 26 percent of Americans can name all three branches of government.

#4 During the 2016 election, more than 40 percent of Americans did not know who was running for vice-president from either of the major parties.

#5 North Carolina is considering passing a law which would “mean only scores lower than 39 percent would qualify for an F grade” in North Carolina public schools.

#6 30 years ago, the United States awarded more high school diplomas than anyone in the world.  Today, we have fallen to 36th place.

#7 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

Read more

Cambridge University rescinds Jordan Peterson invitation

Comment: The world is going utterly insane. 

----------------------

The Guardian

Cambridge University has rescinded its offer of a visiting fellowship to Jordan Peterson, the self-styled “professor against political correctness”, after a backlash from faculty and students.

Peterson, a psychology professor from Toronto who has courted controversy for his views on transgender rights, gender and race, announced on Monday via his YouTube channel that he was joining Cambridge for two months.

“In October I am going to Cambridge University in the UK for two months and I will be a visiting fellow there at the divinity school and should give me the opportunity to talk to religious experts of all types for a couple of months, as well as students,” he said. “It’s a thrill for someone academically minded ... to be invited there, to sit in and participate for a few months.”

The University of Cambridge said Peterson requested to be a visiting fellow and was initially granted the opportunity, but after further review it decided to take back the offer.

“[Cambridge] is an inclusive environment and we expect all our staff and visitors to uphold our principles. There is no place here for anyone who cannot,” a spokesperson for the university said.

Read more

Houston Public Library admits registered child sex offender read to kids in Drag Queen Storytime

Comment: "Drag Queen Storytime." Really?! 

-------------------

Khou.com

 

A registered child sex offender has been reading to children at Houston Public Library as part of its Drag Queen Storytime.

A group called Mass Resistance, which has been trying to put an end to the program, contacted KHOU about the child sex offender.

Mass Resistance claims it had been asking the City of Houston for months to disclose information about the drag queens, and when requests went unanswered, they did their own digging and made the shocking link.

A media spokesperson for the library confirmed one of the program’s drag queens, Tatiana Mala Nina, is Alberto Garza, a 32-year-old child sex offender. In 2008, he was convicted of assaulting an 8-year-old boy.

“Most parents would not allow that individual to sit in this library and be held up as a role model to our children. Shame on you, Mayor (Sylvester) Turner!” said Tracy Shannon with Mass Resistance.

In a statement, the Houston Public Library admits they didn’t do a background check on Garza and said Garza will not be involved in any future library programs.

Read More

Jordan Peterson on Mythology, Fame, and Reading People

Conversations with Tyler

Jordan Peterson joins Tyler to discuss collecting Soviet propaganda, why he’s so drawn to Jung, what the Exodus story can teach us about current events, his marriage and fame, what the Intellectual Dark Web gets wrong, immigration in America and Canada, his tendency towards depression, Tinder’s revolutionary nature, the lessons from The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, fixing universities, the skills needed to become a good educator, and much more.

Listen to the full conversation

Read the full transcript

TYLER COWEN: Thank you, Jordan. I’d like to give the audience that kind of rapid-fire overview of your thought and also your life as a human being.

JORDAN PETERSON: I’m looking forward to hearing that.

[laughter]

COWEN: Let me start with a very lateral question. Why do you collect old Communist memorabilia and propaganda?

PETERSON: Well, part of it is dark comedy. Really, I spent quite a bit of time on eBay for a number of years. And I had read this article by a psychologist named James Pennebaker. He said that the past turned into history at 15 years. That’s when you start to see people commemorate events in the past. At that point, it was 2004, and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. It’s 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed. Maybe I can go online and see what historical memorabilia is left over.”

So I went on eBay, looking up Soviet artifacts, and I thought that was so comical because there isn’t anything more capitalistic than eBay, right? Seriously, that was completely unrestrained capitalism. And then all this Soviet-era stuff was for sale. I thought it was absolutely comical that I could buy paintings of Karl Marx discounted on the world’s most intense capitalist platform.

[laughter]

And I’m really interested in the relationship between art and propaganda. So I bought all these pieces. Some of them are of very high quality because the Russians kept the intense training characteristic of late-19th-century European art academies open throughout the entire 20th century. So they had very high-quality artists dedicated to producing Soviet realist propaganda.

Some of it is intensely propagandistic, and I’m interested in that because I’m interested in propaganda. And some of it is actually quite high quality from a purely artistic perspective. So it was interesting to surround myself with these works that were battlegrounds between art and propaganda.

COWEN: What’s the main thing you learned over the years, living with those works, viewing the propaganda, thinking about it every day, every night?

PETERSON: Art wins.

COWEN: Art wins over propaganda. Why?

Read more

School of War: The Arms Industry and Education in the UK

Lucy Nichols
Stop The War Coalition

By allowing the arms trade into schools and colleges we are teaching children that innovation for the sake of destruction is acceptable

Private arms companies and government-owned military organisations have wormed their way into the British education system. Global arms companies have links with many UK Universities; investing in research programmes, poaching recent graduates and funding new buildings.

But these links stretch further than this into our education system, as weapons manufacturers also invest their time and money into schools across the country. Raytheon, an American weapons and cyber security company with multiple UK sites, holds an annual ‘Quadcopter Challenge’ in which children are encouraged to design the best drone they can. Billed as a means for the company to ‘invest in its future workforce’ by promoting STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, this programme reached over 1,000 14-15 year-olds nationwide in 2018 and has the backing of the government; last year Baroness Sugg CBE helped judge the contest.

Pushing STEM subjects is common amongst private arms manufacturers and government-funded military organisations; QinetiQ and BAE Systems each boast various outreach programmes. In 2017, BAE partnered up with the Royal Navy and the RAF to visit 420 schools with a workshop designed to encourage the uptake of science and maths amongst 10-13 year olds. That year, BAE Systems also joined forces with the Royal Navy, QinetiQ and the University of Portsmouth to open a college.

Read more

Benefits of garden-based learning for children

Tim Moore
Foundation for Economic Education

The time you spend in the garden with your children is invaluable.

If you have children or work with children, then you probably have noticed that hands-on experiences help them make connections to the lessons they are learning. This is especially true when the lesson involves something you enjoy or have made a hobby out of, such as gardening. Hands-on learning experiences surround us if we take the time to look, and educational opportunities abound with a little ingenuity to turn daily tasks into lessons.

Help your children establish a sense of responsibility surrounding planning, caring for, and harvesting their own gardens. Older children can even get in on the spacial awareness, science, and finances behind it all. These lessons easily transfer to a larger picture: namely, how their own responsibilities and care of something living is integral to their attention to personal moral values as they grow. Benefits of Children in the Garden

The benefits of children working in the garden have been studied for decades, with connections to independent learning and emotional growth identified as key potential effects. This could be due to the chores and tasks placed on young children early on in their development, which helps them gain a sense of importance and self-esteem, or even because of the confidence fostered by watching a plant grow and come to fruition under their close watch. No matter the study, the outcomes have reflected positively on children, which has led many educators to use gardens as part of their educational toolbox-a lesson that can be mimicked at home, as well.  

Read more

REVEALED: Canary Mission Blacklist Is Secretly Bankrolled By Major Jewish Federation

Forward

One of the largest Jewish charities in the U.S. has been secretly funding a shadowy online blacklist targeting college students who criticize Israel.

For three years, a website called Canary Mission has spread fear among undergraduate activists, posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student supporters of Palestinian rights. The dossiers are meant to harm students’ job prospects, and have been used in interrogations by Israeli security officials.

At the same time, the website has gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial trail connecting it to its donors and staff. Registered through a secrecy service, the site is untraceable.

Now, for the first time, the Forward has definitively identified a major donor to Canary Mission. It is a foundation controlled by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, a major Jewish charity with an annual budget of over $100 million.

The federation’s support of Canary Mission connects the American Jewish establishment itself to a website that is facing increasing criticism from young Jews.

Canary Mission has been controversial since it appeared in mid-2015, drawing comparisons to a McCarthyite blacklist. While some of those listed on the site are prominent activists, others are students who attended a single event, or even student government representatives suspected of voting for resolutions that are critical of Israel.

Read More

Dark Ages: Scientists Are Being Purged From Universities for Doing Science

Watts Up With That?
Heather Heying, The Wall Street Journal

The postmodernist left on campus is intolerant not only of opposing views, but of science itself.

Who would have guessed that when America cleaved, the left would get the National Football League and the right would get uncontested custody of science?

The revolution on college campuses, which seeks to eradicate individuals and ideas that are considered unsavory, constitutes a hostile takeover by fringe elements on the extreme left. Last spring at the Evergreen State College, where I was a professor for 15 years, the revolution was televised—proudly and intentionally—by the radicals. Opinions not fitting with the currently accepted dogma—that all white people are racist, that questioning policy changes aimed at achieving “equity” is itself an act of white supremacy—would not be tolerated, and those who disagreed were shouted down, hunted, assaulted, even battered. 

Similar eruptions have happened all over the country.

What may not be obvious from outside academia is that this revolution is an attack on Enlightenment values: reason, inquiry and dissent. Extremists on the left are going after science. Why? Because science seeks truth, and truth isn’t always convenient.

The left has long pointed to deniers of climate change and evolution to demonstrate that over here, science is a core value. But increasingly, that’s patently not true.

The battle on our campuses—and ever more, in K-12 schools, in cubicles and in meetings, and on the streets—is being framed as a battle for equity, but that’s a false front. True, there are real grievances. Gaps between populations exist, for historical and modern reasons that are neither honorable nor acceptable, and they must be addressed. But what is going on at institutions across the country is—yes—a culture war between science and postmodernism. The extreme left has embraced a facile fiction.

Read more

Through the Looking Glass at Concordia University

Terry Newman
Quillette

It was in a class called Representations of Minorities in Documentary Film, the last elective I needed to receive my BA at Concordia University in Montreal, that I first realized something was very wrong. The class had just watched Sound and Fury, a 2000 Oscar-nominated documentary about deaf culture. The film follows a 6-year-old deaf girl named Heather and her family (several members of whom also are deaf) as they go back and forth on the issue of cochlear implants, a then-new technology that allows some deaf people to hear.

Heather wants cochlear implants so she can talk to people and hear lions. Her mother, too, opts for the implants. But when she discovers the implant will not be as effective for her, she changes her mind, and, without consulting her daughter, decrees that neither of them will be undergoing the procedure.

After the film ended, our professor asked students for their thoughts. When called on, I said that parents should try to make their children’s lives easier. If I remember my words correctly, I added: “They shouldn’t hold their children back from something that will help them grow.”

“You just feel that way because you’re white, cisgendered, abled, and privileged,” came the snarl from somewhere below. I looked down a few aisles to the front of the dark screening room. I saw the back of a mostly shaved head, with a lock of hair tied on top. I had never seen the back of this head before. And I never saw the front of it either, because the responder didn’t bother to look at me.

You don’t know me, I thought. What gives you the right to comment on who I am? My inner monologue started racing in my privileged Cape Breton accent. Ya, I’m right some privileged, b’y. I was abandoned by my mother, y’arse! I never knew my father. I grew up under a staircase, like Harry Potter. My hand shot up so I could respond. The professor ignored it. I kept it up and locked eyes with him, agitated. He looked away. The last few minutes of the class rolled on, with others talking about things I can’t even remember. The attack on my identity just hung there over the space, unchallenged, floating, settling into the upholstery of the chairs. Then the class was dismissed.

I walked out of the screening room feeling kind of shell-shocked. What was I to take from this? What were the other students to take from this? That the attack on my character warranted no rebuttal? That my race, my gender, and my sexual identity had all disqualified me from participating? The lesson seemed clear. My status as a mother of two young girls—unimportant. My opinions—unwanted. I learned the lesson so well that I did not again participate in that class for the rest of the semester.

My experience in that undergraduate film class was just a taste, an appetizer if you will, for the full-fledged graduate feast I was to consume at Concordia once my undergrad was finished. 

Read more

Revisiting Time Magazine’s 2016 “Screens in Schools Are a $60B Hoax” by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras. It’s Only Become Worse.

B.N. Frank
Activist Post

Almost 2 years ago, TIME magazine published an opinion piece by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, author of Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking Our Kids—and How to Break the Trance. 

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras didn’t mince words.

Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

Most of us have been witnessing this firsthand in our families and everywhere else.  Today’s young adults and children have more problems – and different problems – than those of us that didn’t grow up with technology 24/7.  We are all suffering because of it.

Dr. Kardaras asked us to follow the money.  You may want to follow up with a shower:

Read more