Derisive laughter. Cat calls. Bullhorns. Students at Dakota Ridge High School in Littleton, Colo, their families and friends, had to go to extremes to silence a school board member delivering a long-winded graduation speech that appeared as if it would never end.
ARVE error: need id and provider
If the Obama administration wanted to protect our schools, the solution would be simple: Station armed police officers or security guards at the schools. But the administration really isn’t interested in protecting schools or children so much as exploiting them so it can implement sweeping gun control measures. Pundit Dick Morris explains the politics.
ARVE error: need id and provider
In the wake of the tragic school massacre in Connecticut, many on the Left are pushing for stricter gun controls. But Connecticut has some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation, and that didn’t prevent the massacre. Pundit Dick Morris has an alternative suggestion — increased security at schools, including metal detectors and armed officers. We stopped plane hijackings by improving security at airports, and now we need to move proactively to protect our schools, he says.
ARVE error: need id and provider
There is more than $1 trillion in student loan debt outstanding, and it keeps going higher, as does the cost of college tuition. Are we in the midst of a massive student loan bubble, and can universities continue to provide costly educations that burden graduates with a lifetime of debt? Will the federal government bail out struggling graduates? Find out on this InstaVision as Richard Vedder, author of Going Broke By Degree, talks to Glenn Reynolds.
ARVE error: need id and provider
It’s no secret that U.S. college tuition costs are rising dramatically, and the high cost of a college education burdens young people and their families. How can we make college more affordable?
Many suggest that the best way to keep tuition affordable is by increasing government assistance through student loans, grants and tax credits for education. American University Professor Daniel Lin shows that doing so will actually lead to higher college costs, because loans/grants/tax credits are directly related to the increasing cost of education.
Before we can find any solution, it is important to understand the root cause of the rising prices. Lin finds that increased demand—fueled by improved job prospects for graduates and increased government assistance—is to blame for soaring tuition prices. H/T LearnLiberty
ARVE error: need id and provider
How do fast-paced video games affect the brain? Step into the lab with cognitive researcher Daphne Bavelier from the University of Rochester to hear surprising news about how video games, even action-packed shooter games, can help us learn, focus and, fascinatingly, multitask. H/T TEDtalks
ARVE error: need id and provider
“The…idea that if you just let people talk, it will be this pit of racist pandemonium…is sort of childish and it oversimplifies. But it is a great justification for having a lot of power over speech,” says Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Lukianoff spoke with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie about his new book Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, where he details the slow and steady withering of free expression on America’s college campuses.
In some ways, the modern on-campus free-speech movement dates back to 1993’s “water buffalo incident” at the University of Pennsylvania, where a student was brought up on racial harassment charges for using the term “water buffalo” as an insult. That case led directly to the founding of FIRE, which “defends free speech, due process and basic rights on campus.”
A Stanford Law-trained liberal who blogs at the Huffington Post, Lukianoff insists that by restricting controversial or potentially offensive speech, “you’re putting people into echo chambers” where they only interact with people with whom they already agree. That sort of groupthink is dangerous to a free society, says Lukianoff, but it’s particularly appalling to see it instituted at the nation’s colleges and universities, where the free exchange of ideas is supposed to be the whole point of higher education.
ARVE error: need id and provider
The Northside school district in San Antonio, Texas, has won November’s Nanny of the Month Award for its decision requiring students to wear electronic tracking devices. The students actually wear radio frequency identification chips (RFID chips, for short) that can be monitored from dozens of electronic readers installed in schools’ ceiling panels to keep tabs on the kiddos during the schoolday.
With school-based tracking going back to at least 2004, the Lone Star State has been something of an RFID trailblazer. In fact, Northside is considering expanding the program to cover all of the district’s 97,000 students.
Reason.TV named two runners-up for the Nanny of the Month Award:
* The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where administrators may ban booze in dorms — even for students of legal drinking age.
* The city of Chicago, where officials are using GPS devices to track food trucks to make sure they don’t wander within 200 feet of any fixed businesses that sell food, including convenience stores. Violators could face fines of $2,000.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Many students grumble about their teachers and their schools. But how many 17-year-old students have written a book calling for a radical overhaul of the American educational system? Nikhil Goyal of Woodbury, New York, has written just such a book. And he’s being taken quite seriously as an advocate of educational reform and critic of our existing classroom approaches. He not only has spoken at several Fortune 500 companies and major universities, but also appeared on Fox and Friends and NBC Nightly News, as well doing interviews with the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, among many other publications.
Graphic from Warren Berger’s website http://amorebeautifulquestion.com/
We at Call Me Stormy recently had the good fortune to touch base with Goyal, the author of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School. We asked Goyal what motivated him to write his book. He cited two factors. “I became very frustrated in my experiences in school,” he said. “I’ve hated going to school for a long time. I realized that I was learning so much more on my own through travels, books, lectures, conferences, and online communities than my time in school. I wanted to do something about it.”
Secondly, he found he was not alone. Boredom or hostility toward a traditional curriculum are what drive many students to drop out of school. “I have a goal of virtually eliminating the dropout rate in this country,” he said. “Studies have found that the main reason why students drop out of school is because they found their classes to be uninteresting and irrelevant to their lives. I’ve examined some of the best schools in the country and what their kids generally unanimously say is that they love going to school every single day.”
How would he keep more students engaged in learning? By “allowing children to take control of their education by means of experiences, apprenticeships, and learning by doing.” Goyal is not just impassioned on this subject, but amazingly gifted and bright, and eager to see a turnaround in the success rates achieved by our failing schools. To give you a sense of his full range of ideas, we present Goyal’s TEDx talk, “Learning Revolution,” that he presented this past July.
ARVE error: need id and provider
Readers of DC Comics in the 1960s might remember Bizarro World, the cube-shaped planet that spawned sundry alter-ego versions of Superman and other superheroes. Bizarro World, also known as “Htrae,” or Earth spelled backwards, gave us such notables as Wonderzarro, Bizarro Flash, The Yellow Lantern and Batzarro, the World’s Worst Detective. Their motto: “Us do opposite of all Earthly things! Us hate beauty! Us love ugliness! Is big crime to make anything perfect on Bizarro World!”
Flash forward to 2012, and one might think Bizzaro World has overtaken several prominent universities and colleges in the United States. A case in point: Fordham University, a Jesuit-founded school in New York City. Fordham’s President Joseph M. McShane had a conniption fit recently when the College Republicans invited Ann Coulter to speak on campus. McShane accused Coulter of spewing hate and said her message is “aimed squarely at the dark side of our nature.” As a result of his rebuke, the College Republicans rescinded their invitation to Coulter.
Now, we learn that while Coulter was being blackballed by this august university, no one on campus apparently perceived any hypocrisy in extending open arms and offering a public speaking platform to Peter Singer. Who’s Peter Singer, you ask? He’s a tenured “bioethics” professor at Princeton University who preaches against killing animals but believes it’s perfectly acceptable to commit infanticide on baby humans through their first month of life. He’s a radical proponent of animal liberation, but also has defended bestiality, believing society ought to loosen its strictures against sex with animals.
Singer’s appearance didn’t faze McShane in the least, or draw one word of condemnation from the Fordham president. The DC Comics writers weren’t just entertaining. They were prophets, who foresaw Bizarro World right around the corner.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: YouTube has censored and removed the original video. In its place, we present Ann Coulter discussing free speech on college campuses, following publication of her book In Trump We Trust.)
ARVE error: need id and provider
