Parenting Articles
Friday, March 2nd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
For over fifty years, public-school officials and politicians have tried one education fad after another. They have all failed. Children should not be turned into victims and educational guinea pigs by public-school authorities. Here's why public schools can waste 12 years of your children’s lives and destroy their love of learning:
1. These schools teach children to read with the whole-language method (now called "balanced-reading instruction"), which cripples children’s ability to read. That is why after 12 years, millions of graduating high-school students have poor reading skills, and some students can barely read their own diplomas.
2. Public schools teach ... [
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Friday, March 2nd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
In classrooms throughout the country, Judeo-Christian beliefs are often cast aside or ridiculed. Multiculturalism studies, environmental propaganda, and Save-the-Earth classes now indoctrinate children with New-Age religious beliefs, often without parents’ knowledge. Public schools sometimes try to sneak offensive pagan or new-age religions into their curriculum without parents’ knowledge under the guise of multiculturalism studies.
In January, 2003, a group of parents sued a Sacramento Unified School District because certain teachers at their local elementary school were aggressively, and secretly, teaching anthroposophy, a religion that combines traditional Western religion with astrology and New Age religion. Pacific Justice Institute lawyers representing ... [
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Friday, March 2nd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
It may seem obvious to many people why literacy is so important in our technologically advanced society. However, many parents may not fully realize the emotional pain and life-long damage illiteracy can cause their children. Literacy, the ability to read well, is the foundation of children’s education.
If children can’t read well, every subject they try to learn will frustrate them. If they can’t read math, history, or science textbooks, if they stumble over the words, they will soon give up reading out of frustration. Asking children who are poor readers to study these subjects is like asking them ... [
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Friday, February 23rd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
Is there anything wrong with lying, cheating, stealing, shop-lifting, taking drugs, premarital sex, insulting your parents, pornography, irresponsibility, or getting pregnant in junior high school? Not according to the values taught to children in many public schools today.
From the earliest times in America, teachers have believed that schools should teach moral values. What good is a child who knows when Columbus discovered America but can't tell right from wrong? The most popular reading instruction books in the nineteenth century were the "McGuffy Readers," which taught children to read through stories of increasing complexity.
Each story also taught children a ... [
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Friday, February 23rd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
Under the "No Child Left Behind Act," public schools whose students consistently fail standardized tests can be shut down. To protect their jobs, teachers and principals are now under intense pressure to cheat — to fudge test scores and report cards to fool parents and school administrators.
Myron Lieberman, author and former high-school teacher, listed some of the ways teachers can “cheat” in his book “Public Education: an Autopsy”:
1. Poor students were excluded or discouraged from taking the tests
2. Teachers assigned tests as homework or taught test items in class
3. Test security was minimal or even nonexistent
4. Students were ... [
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Friday, February 23rd, 2007
By Joel Turtel
For many adults, reading a book or newspaper seems effortless. Yet reading effortlessly comes from constant use of basic skills learned at an early age. Once children learn these basic skills, they can eventually read complex books like War and Peace.
What are these skills? To read, one must recognize thousands of words. Since all English words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task of recognizing letters and their sounds and putting them together to form words becomes greatly simplified. An English-speaking child only has to sound out the letters and then put the sounds together ... [
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