3YO reads The Hobbit

If you could educate your child or grandchild in any way that you believe to be most effective, would you pick a public school? A private school? Would you homeschool? What is the very best education a child can have?

According to this author, the very best method has been around for a very long time and it's not a secret. But it's not acceptable because it's inequitable. It's one-on-one tutoring (image), typically by a paid/adult/expert tutor. It's inequitable because it costs a lot. Aristocrats used to do it.

This author had the available time, so he taught his 3-year-old son to read and has a video of the child reading the first paragraph of The Hobbit. 

Maybe it's not for everybody. But the boy now has: the ability to learn on his own, the lifelong pleasure of reading, and more time to play instead of participating in the total "time suck our inefficient school system has become."

from The Free Press

Phone bans

Our children's welfare concerns all of us. When a book explaining that they're in trouble because of smartphones was published last year, the message went viral across America. A state governor thought it so important that she sent a copy of the book to every state governor.

Screens are addicting. Students really need to pay attention in school, but there's a phone in their pocket tempting them with instant gratification. Which is more fun, classroom work or TikTok?

Maybe that governor had a big affect on the country, because a total of 22 states took steps to restrict phones in school just this year (image).

Grown-ups build boundaries around school children for their protection in situations where they may not be prepared to protect themselves.

Inequality

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

As they start their second year, the new president gave a Convocation address that might deeply "offend" anyone from Harvard. He says that inequality is good and unavoidable.

As the American Declaration of Independence says, we are created equal, which we understand to mean equal in value and dignity. But we're not the same. "We have unequal curiosity, unequal intellect, unequal talent, unequal courage, unequal drive, unequal achievement."

Nobody is excellent in everything. But we must enable people to excel in the strengths they have. They must aspire to a high standard. Our country needs scholars who study and speak excellently, as well as carpenters who measure and build excellently. 

Everyone benefits from the strengths of others . . and they're not all the same.

UATX not Harvard

Follow-up to these posts

No phones or laptops in class, no grade inflation, no TA's leading discussion instead of professors. Students planted 2,977 American flags on 9/11 without anyone telling them to. They debate Aristotle, dress up for the symphony, and cook for each other.

This is the University of Austin (UATX). It was founded because places like Harvard totally dropped the ball in educating our young adults, and something had to be done. UATX was created to be what a university ought to be: "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth."

Last year was their first year and they've just started their second. They've begun well. Time will tell whether they can survive the critics and establish success.

from If You Don't Want to Go to Harvard

(cont'd tomorrow)

Construction skill

We in the U.S. need more workers in the skilled trades. While artificial intelligence certainly will eliminate many office type jobs, it will never eliminate the demand for electricians, plumbers, carpenters, HVAC and other hands-on jobs.

A crisis in the housing sector illustrates the point. Lack of skilled labor is making housing less affordable. In fact, the National Association of Homebuilders (photo) study concluded that this shortage is impacting the single family home building sector by $10.8 billion per year. Time required to build new homes is about two months longer.

The shortage in skilled trades (not just construction) is why Marvin Ellison is investing millions in training for them (yesterday's video).

It's one big factor why first-time home buyers are having a harder time getting into that first home.

from Forbes

Our founding

Hillsdale College was asked by the President to help celebrate America's 250th birthday next year by producing a video series about America's founding. It's a great story - worth remembering together.

Here's the president of Hillsdale introducing it. We'll feature those videos in future posts.

Sorry girls!

Girls in college sports have something big to celebrate: they will no longer have to compete against male bodies at University of Pennsylvania. 

A former U Penn student and swimmer says “As a former UPenn swimmer who had to compete against and share a locker room with a male athlete, I am deeply grateful to the . . Administration for refusing to back down on protecting women and girls and restoring our rightful accolades. I am also pleased that my alma mater has finally agreed to take not only the lawful path, but the honorable one."

In negotiations, U Penn agreed to these actions: 

• Formal apologies will go out to the girls who wrongfully lost wins and records. 
• Trans athlete Lia Thomas (photo) will be stripped of his accolades won in girls' sports. 
• U Penn will stop violating Title IX and use biology-based definitions of female and male. 

 from NY Post

Education crisis 1

Everybody seems to agrees that our education system is in crisis. Various opinions describe it as being teacher shortages, poor reading skills, student mental health, too much bureaucracy, and they're all right and there's more problems than these--they affect every educational level from K-12 right up to the college level.

Administrators and other non-teaching staff have grown by 7x the number of teachers in the last several decades. "Both students and staff are chewed up by a bureaucratic machine that favors ever larger budgets . . ." The cost keeps rising, yet test scores rise little or not at all.

Almost 100 Yale professors signed an open letter to its president, opposing the growth of non-teaching staff which now amounts to double the number there a couple of decades ago. 

This Brown University student testified before Congress that he found enormous, wasteful spending bloat at the university level: 

AI in school 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Studying and learning are hard work. What if you, as a student, could delegate writing  assignments to artificial intelligence? That would mean less work, more free time, and it's super tempting. So students do it all the time . . even in writing classes.

A 20-year veteran of teaching gave it up because of that fact of life. Many students will do whatever they can to spare themselves the discomfort of difficult work. Thinking things through and communicating that through your own carefully constructed writing can be difficult. 

She was trying to teach writing at the college level, which includes reading and returning feedback to the student. Sadly, she discovered that most of her instructive feedback was a total waste because it was directed toward the AI that "wrote" it. So she quit.

If a student doesn't discipline himself to learn how to think and write, he's going to be at a disadvantage for the rest of his life to people who did learn it. 

How is our education system going to handle this?

from Time

AI in school 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Hannah would assign her students to write a paragraph, or five sentences, or an essay. Many were not able to do it, or complained that it was too hard, or questioned the value of doing the work . . and of course, many completed assignments were written by ChatGPT or another large language model (there's technology to determine that).

Some students saw no value in learning how to write a resume or a cover letter if they could simply make AI do it.

Are these kids learning how to write (photo)? Will their new employer be surprised with the low level of skill these students can execute when they need to think and write in the job environment? 

The problem is not only that turning in a writing assignment that the lazy student did not do is dishonest. It is dishonest, but there's more. Writing well requires a degree of clear thinking, often of making a reasonable argument. If this student ever has to recommend a certain decision to other people, in work or in the community, she will have to think through the options and make a case for the best one. She needs to build that communication skill.

 

AI in school

Teachers have been fleeing the profession in higher numbers for a while now, frequently citing poor behavior. Since ChatGPT came out in fall of 2022, it use and the widespread use of "large language models" (LLM's) like it have made teaching even harder, in the opinion of some.

Here's one of them, a high school teacher for three years. She thinks technology should be kept from students until college.

Quits Harvard

Harvard University has lost its credibility among American taxpayers. As the federal government removes billions of dollars of public funding, they counter with the claim that they can do whatever they want to do under the umbrella of free speech and academic freedom. 

Yes, they have free speech but we don't have to pay them billions for misleading students and breaking civil rights law. 

 

A psychiatrist who taught in their medical school felt compelled to break away a year ago. He explained his understandable reasons:

"I stopped teaching at Harvard last year [2024] primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism . .  Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking . . ."

He doesn't hold back: "Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility." 

from "Harvard Insider Blows Whistle: This Place is Totally Corrupted"

Harvard battle 4

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

So, in effect, Harvard's argument is that they have a right to taxpayer money (in the billions of dollars) while they pursue any policies they choose, i.e. do whatever they want. They're shocked, shocked, that the American people might want to withdraw their money from racial discrimination and . . antisemitism.

Yes, the university's president admits it. He tells NBC in this video: "At Harvard, we have a real problem with antisemitism . . . There's no doubt about the severity of this problem."

He says they have no choice but to defend themselves against government "overreach" and they're going to use their "first amendment rights." 

Amazing hutzpah! They claim the American right of free speech for themselves - while that freedom is suppressed on their campus.

Harvard battle 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Dated April 11, 2025, a particular letter was sent to Harvard from the government. It says that the U.S. has invested in that university because of its value to the country, but that investment is no longer justified since they haven't lived up to intellectual and civil rights conditions. 

A sum of $2.2 billion in federal government grants was withdrawn as a penalty for defying the government's letter.

 

 

Still defiant, the university (photo) filed a suit against the government for freezing those funds, claiming that important research programs will suffer. (With a mammoth endowment fund of $53 billion, the largest of any education institution in the world, some are wondering just how big a hardship losing $2 billion can be.)

Responding to the suit, a White House spokesman said: “The gravy train of federal assistance to institutions like Harvard, which enriches their grossly overpaid bureaucrats with tax dollars from struggling American families, is coming to an end. Taxpayer funds are a privilege, and Harvard fails to meet the basic conditions required to access that privilege.”

(cont'd tomorrow)

Harvard battle 2

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

Ivy League presidents received letters from the current administration warning them of the consequences of their violation of the Civil Rights Act and other policies. Federal funding could be withdrawn.

Responses have varied. The president of Columbia University agreed to change policies, and then she "stepped down" from her position. Princeton's president (photo) defied the letter's demands, and seems to argue that he is defending civil rights with his discriminatory policies.

Does he not understand the argument? "[R]acial discrimination is wrong whether it targets whites, Asians, Jews, blacks or Hispanics. Any institution that continues to discriminate based on race is ineligible for federal support." Princeton received $455 million from the federal government last year. 

Harvard receives billions from the federal government. All those billions are at stake, and they're suing the administration.

from City Journal

(cont'd tomorrow)

Harvard battle 1

Is it right to choose people for college admission or jobs or home purchase or promotion based on their race? It's not even legal in the United States to do that, and hasn't been since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

But prestigious Harvard University was convicted of doing that very thing in 2023, and they're not the only one. Somehow our whole university system got way off track:

"Shielded by a virtuous public image, elite universities have institutionalized discrimination against disfavored racial groups, implemented DEI policies based on racial rewards and penalties, hired and promoted faculty according to skin color rather than merit, and overseen racially segregated student programs, dormitories, and graduation ceremonies."

Now Americans through the recently elected president's administration are trying to bring universities back to American values. It's a fight. Harvard University is front and center.

from City Journal 

(cont'd tomorrow)

Poor learning

(cont'd from this post)

Our former Secretary of Education has seen the NAEP reports on how well our children are learning in school in recent years, and she is alarmed. Reading and math skills are declining.

 

 "Declines in student performance date back about a decade," exacerbated by Covid measures.

Since 1979 when the U.S. Dept. of Education was created, hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent but students are less proficient (image). They're spending $80 billion per year and achieving no improvement. That's not a worthy return on investment.

Her advice: shut it down.

 from The Free Press

Better learning

NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress and it calls itself the "Nation's Report Card," a "window into the state of our K-12 education system and what our children are learning."

Compared to public government schools, private schools deliver better results. According to this chart, Catholic schools do a better job of educating than either public or charter.

 

It costs the government about $20,000/year/student to run the public schools. All of that funding comes from taxpayers. But Catholic schools can educate a child for about $5,000-9,000/year/student. You have to wonder how they supply a better education at less cost.

Our education system desperately needs change.

Self-censors

A survey was taken of over six thousand faculty across 55 colleges and universities across the U.S. to see how they feel about expressing themselves in that environment.

You probably know that the vast majority of university professors are left-wing and donate to those political causes, so they must feel pretty secure to speak freely, right? Of course, non-leftist faculty may be afraid to speak their minds, but that's a very small number. 

So the number of those who fear speaking up must be small, right? On the contrary, many are afraid they will pay a price if they say what they believe (image).

Key findings in this survey by Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): 

35% of faculty say they recently toned down their writing for fear of controversy 

27% of faculty feel unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would respond

 23% of faculty worry about losing their jobs because someone misunderstands something they have said or done

Pink XX bands

Some parents of girls playing high school soccer in New Hampshire don't want them playing against male-bodied athletes. Well, who would? Answer: the school wants it.

Objections from the parents went nowhere. But they did not disrupt the games in any way. All they did was to wear pink wristbands with XX on them.

 

The school went ballistic. "They stopped the game, demanded the pink armbands be removed, and issued police-enforced “No Trespassing” orders against at least two parents."

"My daughter’s playing in the homecoming game this weekend, and I’m banned until the 23rd,” said Anthony Foote of Bow, N.H. “I can’t watch her play in homecoming — which is ridiculous.”

It's ridiculous, it's unfair, and it has to stop. How any otherwise rational human being can force girls to compete against male-bodied opponents is really beyond me. Read the account.

from New Hampshire Journal