America’s educational landscape is being transformed under the cover of “health.” This transformation began with sex education, which once was relegated to a subunit of physiology that addressed the science of human reproduction. But sex education suddenly required its own graphic, stand-alone how-to course, then morphed into a “nonjudgmental” monstrosity designed to transmit knowledge of...
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Rich Man, Poor Man
When the late Tony Snow stepped down from his position as President George W. Bush’s press secretary, he explained that he simply could not “make it on $168,000 a year.” The comment didn’t play well in Peoria. The media downplays the enormous wealth enjoyed by disgraced chief executive officers of bankrupted companies, special-interest moguls, lobbying...
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Homeschooling as Mental Illness
Last March delivered a double whammy to the American people. A few pundits expressed dismay; some parents shook their heads sadly. Then people moved on. On March 10, California’s 2nd Appellate Court virtually banned homeschooling. Then on March 11, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene of the Centers for Disease Control announced epidemic levels...
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Election 2008 Guide
As I was downloading oldies onto my computer the other day, I found a classic hit from the 1950’s: “Yakety-Yak” by the Coasters. Back in the 50’s, every kid in America—white, black, Hispanic, or Asian; native or naturalized—identified with that song. Several assumptions undergirded the lyrics: Mothers and fathers rear children together; they are on...
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“Clear®”: The Price of a Civil Airport Shakedown
I first read about it in the newspaper: a new concept in speeding up airline security called Clear®. The idea is to pre-inspect, via extensive background checks, passengers traveling by air so that bottlenecks in the security lines can be eliminated, and “cleared” passengers, whisked through. I may not be nuts about being “inspected,” but...
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Clueless in the Congress: The Reauthorization of a Reckless Bill
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act are up for reauthorization again. This process typically entails legislators tweaking the bill—a caveat here, a zinger there. Almost always, it translates into more money. Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) of the Committee ...
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Clueless in the Congress: The Reauthorization of a Reckless Bill
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the No Child Left Behind Act are up for reauthorization again. This process typically entails legislators tweaking the bill—a caveat here, a zinger there. Almost always, it translates into more money. Representatives George Miller (D-CA) and Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA) of the Committee on Education and Labor recently...
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Outsourcing Parenthood
Two categories of parents emerged in the 1970’s: those who wanted to rear children and those who merely wanted to have them. I first became aware of the distinction in 1972, about the time the feminist revolution was beginning its blitzkrieg through university campuses. I had been married about four years, and the stark differences...
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The Legacy of Sandra Dee
A first-wave Baby Boomer, I grew up the 1950’s and early 60’s. We teenage girls yearned to look like Sandra Dee (a.k.a. Alexandra Zuck), who passed away on February 20, 2005. If we couldn’t remake ourselves into the image of “Gidget,” then Mouseketeer-turned-beach-babe Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley (Blue Denim), Tuesday Weld (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!),...
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Final Solution
Public education exacerbates today’s toxic youth subculture. The combined forces of advertisers, television, teen magazines, and internet spammers have lured our nation’s youth into lives of promiscuity. Government schools add incompetence and dependency to the mix—all wrapped in a façade of “learning” and “testing” packages. Government education, unfortunately, never quite met the promised ideal. Even...
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Has America Lost Her Moral Gag Reflex?
Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness. Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he...
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The Death of David Reimer: A Case Study in Psychiatric Politics
David Reimer, the 38-year-old man who was raised as a girl (“Brenda”) following a botched circumcision in infancy, committed suicide on May 4, 2004. As the left rushes to validate sodomy by judicial fiat and “homosexual marriage,” perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit his case. It reveals more about the public-policy effect of...
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What? Are You Crazy?
A nationwide initiative has been quietly in the making since 2002. Conceived in Texas, apparently with President George W. Bush’s enthusiastic blessing, there are now some 27 sites around the country piloting various parts of it. Nationally, however, the proposed legislation earned barely a blip on the radar screen—the project is so hush-hush that two officials...
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Blindsided by Education’s Leftists
Michael Moore, the leftist director of Fahrenheit 9/11, got one thing right when he proclaimed at a June 24 press conference that, despite the Republican control of the White House and Congress, America is liberal. It is a fact. The Republican Party, the only home conservatives have at election time, does not remotely resemble the...
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Anything That Ails You
As far back as the 1970’s, shortly after the feminist movement was launched, it was estimated that as many as 30 million American women were taking tranquilizers. That was almost half of the female population at the time. In 1975 alone, more than 103 million prescriptions for tranquilizers were written. By the 1980’s, prescription levels...
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Terms of Empowerment
Imagine, if you can, thousands of parents last January insisting that the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board distribute a 169-question sex survey to their 13-, 15-, and 17-year-olds. Envision legions of taxpayers falling all over themselves to divert $60,000 earmarked for educational purposes to ask students about oral sex, number of sexual partners, depression, and...
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Real Education Reform
For the first time in memory, teachers refused to be intimidated by the National Education Association’s leftist leadership. At their annual convention in New Orleans on June 30, a large contingent of teacher-delegates insisted the NEA drop “reproductive freedom”/family planning from its voluminous list of resolutions and stick to topics actually relevant to schools and...
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Making a Killing
Pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton is breath-ing new life into the popular perception of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a “disease”—a chemical imbalance that requires a stabilizing, “counter-balancing” agent such as Ritalin, Adderall, Concerta, or another name-brand amphetamine to correct a defective brain. An example can be found in his recent syndicated column: “Managing ADHD Once...
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The SLA and the Child Experts
If there ever was a case to be made against the therapeutic approach to childrearing—packaged as “parenting” by three decades of child psychologists—the pathetic image of four aging, 1970’s-era radicals, who gave themselves the silly name “Symbionese Liberation Army,” was it. I cannot help but wonder how differently the lives of Michael Bortin, William Harris,...
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The Slippery Slope of Safety
Keeping up with technology is tricky. Sometimes, you find information in a press release; other times, you ascertain the full measure of what is going on through obscure legal and scientific papers, last-minute legislative “riders,” and seemingly inconsequential blurbs in the foreign press. Even as my piece on implantable identification tags was going to press...
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Implanted IDs: Click Here!
Applied Digital Solutions (ADS) announced in March that it had filed for FDA approval of its tiny ID implant, VeriChip, and the Florida-based company performed its first commercial implant on three local children on May 10, promising “easy access of medical rec-ords.” While both announcements were greeted with surprise, ADS had already revealed that it...
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Bushwhacking Johnny
At dinner, ten-year-old Johnny is sullen and uncommunicative. It has been a bad day. His parents pass off his ill humor as “going through a phase.” Actually, it was an easy day—taken up with “another stupid school assembly.” Johnny had sat there, bored, listening to people drone on about diversity and tolerance. When a lesbian...
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A String of Domestic Atrocities
Andrea Yates, the Houston mother recently sentenced to life in prison for drowning her five children in the bathtub, has become the latest horror story in an alarming string of domestic atrocities occurring in the wake of mental-health drug treatment. From the killer kids of Columbine, to the sickies of Springfield, Oregon, and Santee, California,...
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Influence on Behavior
Dartmouth Medical School has published the results of research concerning parental influence upon children’s behavior in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Lo and behold: Parents’ “preaching” works! Their lectures have a “positive impact” on teenage behaviors such as smoking and drug use—even when parents themselves engage in such activities. Similar findings are...
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School Days
No one could see where the floor began and the rubbish ended. A window down the hall shattered. and I could hear the tinkle and clatter as the last broken pieces hit the ones that had preceded them. May 21, 1981, was already hot in the Clear Lake suburb of Houston, Texas, an astronaut/engineer-dominated middleclass...
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Uncle Sam’s Classroom
Yolanda and Raul Salazar of Miami, Florida, naturalized citizens who escaped Castro’s Cuba, are finding out the hard way that Uncle Sam’s classrooms are not about proficiency at anything, or literacy, or basics. America’s schools aren’t extensions of the home, where families are held sacred and parents are valued. Instead, American education is about “mental...
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Socialization as Schooling
For 30 years, elementary and secondary education has been taking on a new orientation, away from substantive subject matter toward a mental health agenda. Personality development—i.e., the “whole child” concept of education—has become the primary focus of schooling. Collection of psychological data on minors, and its storage in nonsecure, cross-referenecable facilities, without the prior notification...
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When Sex Conquers Love
Much as I hate to admit it, AIDS czarina Kristine Gebbie got it right. The message to youngsters these days does indeed give the impression that sex is ugly, dirty, and a more perverse than pleasurable experience. Ms. Gebbie bungled only when she took on the role of anti-Victorian-morality crusader. In the space of a...