Category Archives: education

Banning the Bible in Schools

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The Davis School District, Utah’s second largest for public schools, has decided to ban the Bible from its elementary and junior high schools, retaining it only in district high school libraries.

The district’s officials aren’t even claiming the transparent fig leaf of separation of church and state for the ban. The Bible is out because of its vulgarity or violence. It’s true enough that the Bible has what some might consider vulgarity—all those begets and begots, even incidents like one man in a leadership role sending a rival off to war to be killed so the one could have the other’s wife for himself.

And that violence—all those wars, David so violently killing Goliath, the mass killing of Pharoah’s army in the Red Sea; sacrificing animals; the violence just goes on and on.

What’s the next set of books to be banned from the Utah district’s children’s tender minds?

History books, of course. History is rife with the violence of war and all those killings, destructions of whole nations, slavery, rape. There’s the vulgarity, too, of those rapes: the Sabine women, the rapes of slave women, the literal rape of Nanking, comfort women; the incestuous behavior of royals who married each other’s women for the sake of politics; one king’s serial use and abuse of his wives—these make up just a few examples.

This is the Left, infesting even Utah’s schools.

Gone Too Woke

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Speak the truth, and be fired. Hurt someone’s feelings with that truth, and be banned altogether from your profession.

That’s what has happened to a teacher in Great Britain, a public school teacher who happens to be Christian, after having mistakenly “misgendered” (can there even be such a thing in a sane world?) a secondary school student and then compounding his sin by speaking honestly about his thoughts on gay marriage when a student asked.

The United Kingdom’s Teaching Regulation Authority, which regulates teaching and deals with serious misconduct, found that [the] former math teacher at a public secondary school in Oxford, failed to treat a student with “dignity and respect” by “misgendering” biologically female student who identified as male, the Christian Legal Centre, which has been representing [the teacher], said Tuesday.

The TRA followed up by banning the teacher from teaching indefinitely, although the agency magnanimously permitted him to appeal in 2025. Sure. As a saying goes in the US military, “Disapproved. Resubmit in 90 days for further disapproval.”

This is where our nation is headed, if we don’t step up. “Be like Europe” is the Left’s mantra, and this business in Great Britain is an example of the disaster that would be.

A Parallel Solution

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DoEd Secretary Miguel Cardona (D) wants to enact a rule that would expand Title IX (illegally, but that’s a separate problem) to require State education systems to include transgender athletes in all heretofore women’s sports programs and all on heretofore women’s sports teams. Half of the governors of our States object.

If it comes down to it, Cardona’s move is very likely to fail in the courts. That will be an expensive and time consuming enterprise.

I propose another solution to be pushed in parallel with the lawsuit effort. It also would be expensive and time consuming to put into effect, but I think it would have a more permanent, and more beneficial, outcome.

States should stop taking Federal dollars altogether into their education systems. That would put the States beyond the reach of Title IX, which applies only to those State systems that take Federal dollars.

Not taking the government’s lucre would be expensive, certainly, but only until the States’ budgets adjusted. However, the move would do more than place those States’ education systems beyond the reach of Title IX’s strings, it would free the States from a potful of Federal education strings—and demonstrate that States can get along just fine without those dollars and those strings and so encourage them to decline ever more Federal dollars and reap the increasing value of being free of those strings.

Teachers Union Disinformation

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In response to a collection of education-related laws recently enacted in Florida, Florida Education Association President Andrew Spar said in his news release,

This new law grossly oversteps in trying to silence teachers, staff, professors, and most other public employees. We will not go quietly….

Here’s some of what those silencing laws do:

  • allow teachers to require students to hand over their phones at the beginning of class
  • ban the use of TikTok on school Wi-Fi and networks
  • does not allow students to use school internet to access social media (with some exceptions)
  • block classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity for all grades
  • bar availability of certain sexual books in school libraries
  • prevent students and teachers from being required to use certain pronouns
  • prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in state colleges
  • allow teachers to leave school unions for any reason
  • State budget provides an increase in teacher pay—fourth year in a row

Not misinformation—disinformation. Go quietly, or go noisily, but maybe Florida’s teachers unions need to go. Let the teachers themselves form new unions from the ground up, or not, at the teachers’ own discretion.

Higher Ed Administrators and Values

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New Jersey’s Progressive-Democratic Party Governor, Phil Murphy, has decided to intervene, nakedly, on the side of unions in a labor dispute between Rutgers faculty and Rutgers administrators.

Rutgers faculty walked off the job Monday after three employee unions launched a strike. The move has left classrooms empty….

Under New Jersey law, university administrators can go into State court and get an injunction forcing an end to the strike and a resumption/continuation of negotiations. Murphy has stepped in, though, and told the administrators “don’t you dare.” Murphy’s diktat isn’t, strictly speaking, enforceable, but Murphy does control 20% of Rutgers’ state funding, and he appoints the majority of its board.

As the WSJ editorial put it,

…administrators are now under political pressure to cave.

Not entirely, though. They could force Murphy’s hand by going to court anyway. These administrators just have to decide which they value more: their personal jobs or the Rutgers students and their ability to get the education they’re paying princely sums for.

Those administrators’ actions will make their values obvious, regardless of how they might characterize their choice.