Enforcing proper behavior is anathema to liberals, but essential to learning.

Phoenix(6-22-07)--Today five charter schools announced they filed suit to prevent being forced to change the curricula that has helped them rank among the top public schools in the country. The lawsuit is the first filed by the new Goldwater Institute Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.

NBC’s Tonight Show host Jay Leno walks around Los Angeles streets asking easy questions of young people. His questions equate to what a sixth grader must know to move on to the seventh grade.

Two years ago, during a teachers’ staff meeting, the speaker caught my attention revealing that bullying causes over 150,000 student absences every day. She also reported the obvious as if it were profound - most kids eventually experience some form of bulling. Then she stated bullying had become an epidemic in America. At that moment, I started sensing the force behind this seminar.

People fear the word “abstinence”. It seems to raise more flags than giving pure sex to those newly married. The ‘left’ seems to be attacking abstinence programs at will. They seem to believe we are slaves to our sexual needs, and what is really needed is a ‘band-aid’ approach to an act that will happen no matter what.

While excuse makers and vacillating politicians bicker over immigration and No Child Left Behind, public education’s politically correct culture continues its noxious indoctrination of those confined inside its system. The kinder and gentler social experiments that masquerade as modern pedagogy are brainwashing many students into a bunch of low-achieving, over-sensitive, undisciplined, and dimwitted wimps. How anyone remains perplexed over floundering classroom performance eludes comprehension. The problem is in “the culture.”

Over the Memorial Day weekend, I was honored to be the guest on a radio program called Political Pistachio. The show’s host (Douglas Gibbs) and his wife ("Mrs. Pistachio") invited me on to discuss several issues facing public education. I shared my inside view regarding two PC agendas polluting public classrooms: multicultural excrement and artificial self-esteem. In nine years of teaching, I saw firsthand how PC programs retarded my students’ critical thinking skills and defiled American cornerstones like competition and self-reliance.

Here’s another argument that public-school bureaucrats use to “justify” their monopoly control over our children’s minds and lives. They claim that we cannot trust the free-market to educate our children because too many free-market (private) schools are greedy for profits, cheat parents and students, take their money, make wild promises, or go out of business.

A few weeks ago the Pew Research Center released their newest Political Knowledge Survey(1), a report that tracked the general political knowledge of responding Americans, and compared it to similar survey results from 1989. The results show that, as Pew reports, “public knowledge of current affairs is little changed by news and the information revolutions.” It seems somewhat reassuring for Pew to say we really haven’t gotten any dumber on politics. But a closer look at the results not only shows we are getting dumber, but that the internet and cable news “revolutions” really haven’t made us a whole lot smarter on politics, when you’d think that they would have. In fact, it seems more like these wonderful new sources of information we have at our fingertips have helped us but tread water in the hunt for a more informed public… even losing some ground.

In quite possibly the most blatant display of hypocrisy ever displayed by a former public official, former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey is now teaching ethics to young men and women at a New Jersey public college. Last November, Kean University located in Union hired the disgraced McGreevey to teach a course in ethics, law and leadership.

Shaping young minds...or is it twisting? - One of the perks of being a celebrity is being asked to give public speeches, including the occasional commencement address for a high school or institution of higher learning. Of course, I’m not a celebrity, per se, which would explain why I’m still waiting on a high school or institution of higher learning to contact me. But, just in case Pauly Shore or Paris Hilton’s gardener’s first cousin’s manicurist has to cancel, here’s a glimpse at what you’d get if you hired me.

It seems teachers that want to teach are getting fed up with the Progressive BS!

I alluded to this point briefly in this week’s radio spot, and I think it imperative that a discussion be initiated on another reason for the Virginia Tech shooting that will be avoided by mainstream media analysis: the need for Teacher Control.

There was a day in the United States when the citizens of this great nation celebrated intelligence in those whom they raised to the level of “celebrity”. It was a day when cogent thoughts were related in high style, where literacy and learning were prized, a day when to be “smart” meant to actually have some sort of culture and ability to write. To achieve fame one had to exhibit some level of education even if it was one realized by one’s own efforts alone, an amalgamation of knowledge not the result of a program from an institute of higher learning. The general public in America once looked up to people who embodied the highest education, even that had from the veritable slate in a log cabin.

It once was the entire purpose of college to create strong moral character.  The idea of going to college in order to get a better job or to go to college in order to take courses which would make you appear smart and sophisticated was the anti-thesis of college.