education

From 2009 to 2010, the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) set about the once-a-decade task of writing curriculum standards for Texas’ almost five million school children. Claiming that “Academia is skewed too far to the left,” right-wing Board members voted to undermine the teaching of evolution and rewrite history from a Christian nationalist perspective.

The Virginia state legislature passed a bill yesterday that would allow religious and political student groups on college campuses to discriminate and still receive public funding. The bill, which would prevent universities from implementing wide-ranging non-discrimination policies, follows a scattered and heated debate across colleges nationwide on what constitutes religious discrimination.

After the controversy surrounding Arizona’s S.B. 1070 immigration law and recent legislation banning abortion after 20 weeks of gestation, I’ve grown accustomed to controversial legislation from my home state. This month, the Arizona legislature is proposing a trio of laws that were declared unconstitutional decades ago.

This week, Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield (R) re-introduced the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which bans any discussion of homosexuality by elementary and middle school teachers in the state.

Really? Are we having this discussion?

Right-wing funders support the creation of legislation enacting school vouchers and school choice, both of which take away resources from America’s public schools, furthering a right-wing agenda.

Grayling’s New College of the Humanities “is not an atheist institution,” he and other spokespeople for the university have stated repeatedly. But it’s hard to imagine Richard Dawkins soft-pedaling on the topic of religion. Grayling insists that he’s not as vehement as his colleague. “I’m the velvet version,” he likes to say.

For the research subjects’ sacred values, the ones they wouldn’t give up on for any amount of money (they could ‘auction off their value’ for up to $100), what lit up in the brain were areas known to be involved in right-wrong decisions, not in cost-benefit/utilitarian parts of the brain. That is, we naturally go to right-wrong thinking in making sacred value decisions.

If atheist Richard Dawkins believes he is right, as a recent Times profile once again suggests, why is he so afraid of passing it on to our kids?

Last night’s debate revealed just how far the Republican Party has edged toward the religious right goal of abolishing public education.