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Ideas in Exile: The Bullies Win at Yale by Diana Furchtgott-Roth

December 15, 2015/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The student speech bullies have won at Yale. Erika Christakis, Assistant Master of Yale’s Silliman College, who had the temerity to suggest that college students should choose their own Halloween costumes, has resigned from teaching. Her husband, sociology professor Nicholas Christakis, Master of Silliman College, will take a sabbatical next semester.

One of the bullies’ demands to Yale President Salovey was that the couple be dismissed, and a resignation and sabbatical are a close second.

As had been widely reported, Erika Christakis said,

Is there no room any more for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious, a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive? American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition.

At issue are costumes such as wearing a sombrero, which might be offensive to Mexicans; wearing a feathered headdress, which might offend Native Americans, previously termed Red Indians; and wearing blackface to dress up as an African American.

Dr. Christakis’s comment is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. Students who are admitted to Yale are some of the brightest in the country, and it should not be the role of the University to tell them how, or whether, to dress up at Halloween.

The speech bullies want mandatory diversity training, rules against hate speech, the dismissal of Nicholas and Erika Christakis, and the renaming of Calhoun College because its namesake, John Calhoun, defended slavery.

If America is to be whitewashed of the names of individuals from prior centuries who fall short of the political standards of the 21st century, we will be a nation not only without names but also without a past. The names of our states, our municipalities, and even our universities would disappear. Elihu Yale was a governor of the East India Company, which may have occasionally engaged in the slavery trade. It is easy to condemn the dead who cannot defend themselves. But if we curse the past, what fate awaits us from our progeny?

Not all Yale students agree with the tactics employed by the bullies. Freshman Connor Wood said,

The acceptance or rejection of coercive tactics is a choice that will literally decide the fate of our democracy. Our republic will not survive without a culture of robust public debate. And the far more immediate threat is to academia: how can we expect to learn when people are afraid to speak out?

The Committee for the Defense of Freedom at Yale has organized a petition in the form of a letter to President to express concern with the bullies’ demands. Over 800 members of the Yale community have signed. Zachary Young, a junior at Yale and one of the organizers of the petition, told me in an email, “We want to promote free speech and free minds at Yale, and don’t think the loudest voices should set the agenda.”

Nevertheless, it appears that the loudest voices are indeed influencing President Salovey. He has given in to protesters by announcing a new center for the study of race, ethnicity, and social identity; creating four new faculty positions to study “unrepresented and under-represented communities;” launching “a five-year series of conferences on issues of race, gender, inequality, and inclusion;” spending $50 million over the next five years to enhance faculty diversity; doubling the budgets of cultural centers (Western culture not included); and increasing financial aid for low-income students.

In addition, President Salovey volunteered, along with other members of the faculty and administration, to “receive training on recognizing and combating racism and other forms of discrimination.”

With an endowment of $24 billion, these expenses are a proverbial drop in the bucket for Yale. But it doesn’t mean that the administration should cave. Isaac Cohen, a Yale senior, wrote in the student newspaper,

Our administrators, who ought to act with prudence and foresight, appear helpless in the face of these indictments. Consider President Salovey’s email to the Yale community this week. Without any fight or pushback — indeed, with no thoughts as to burdens versus benefits — he capitulated in most respects to the demands of a small faction of theatrically aggrieved students.

Yale’s protests, and others around the country, including Claremont-McKenna, the University of Missouri, and Princeton, stem from the efforts of a small group of students to shield themselves from difficult situations. Students want to get rid of speech that might be offensive to someone that they term a “micro-aggressions.” This limits what can be said because everything can be interpreted as offensive if looked at in a particular context.

For instance, when I write (as I have done) that the wage gap between men and women is due to the sexes choosing different university majors, different hours of work, and different professions, this potentially represents a micro-aggression, even though it is true. Even the term “the sexes” is potentially offensive, because it implies two sexes, male and female, and leaves out gays, lesbians, and transgenders. The term “gender” is preferred to “sex.”

What about a discussion of the contribution of affirmative action to the alienation of some groups on campuses today? Under affirmative action, students are admitted who otherwise might not qualify. In Supreme Court hearings on Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia said, “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to — to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a less — a slower-track school where they do well.”

The majority of students at Yale want an open discussion of all subjects, but the attack on the Christakises have frightened them into silence. Zach Young told me,

If the accusers’ intent was to enlighten and persuade, their result was to silence and instill fear. I worry that because of this backlash, fewer students or faculty — including people of color and those of liberal persuasions — will feel comfortable expressing views that dissent from the campus norms. Why risk getting so much hate, disgust, calls against your firing, just for the sake of expressing an opinion?

Why indeed? The answer is that arguing about opinions is the only way to get a real education. Let’s hope that another university stands up for freedom of speech and offers the Christakises teaching positions next semester.

This article first appeared at CapX.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, is director of Economics21 and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

How Affirmative Action Backfires by Richard Sander

December 11, 2015/in Courts & Law, Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Affirmative action is before the Supreme Court again this week, as it rehears arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas. (I’ve discussed the legal issues in Fisher here.)

But perhaps the most important question about racial preferences is one that’s not directly raised by the case: do they even work? Do they help underrepresented minorities to achieve their goals, and foster interracial interaction and understanding on elite campuses? Or do large preferences often “mismatch” students in campuses where they will struggle and fail?

Scholars began empirically studying the mismatch issue in the 1990s, but in the past five years the field has matured. There are now dozens of careful, peer-reviewed studies that find strong evidence of mismatch.

None of the authors of these studies claim that mismatch is a universal or inevitable consequence of affirmative action. But in my view, only demagogues (of which there is, unfortunately, no shortage) or people who haven’t read the relevant literature can still claim that mismatch is not a genuine problem.

It is helpful to think about mismatch as three interrelated phenomena that could affect a student of any race — let’s call her Sally — who receives a large admissions preference, so that she attends a college where her level of academic preparation is substantially below that of her peers.

First, “learning mismatch” occurs if Sally learns less than she would at a less competitive school, because the pace is too fast or her professors are pitching their material at a level that’s not ideal for her.

Others and I have argued that learning mismatch occurs on a massive scale in American law schools, where African-Americans (and some other students) tend to receive very large preferences and then, very often, are never able to practice law because they cannot pass bar exams.

Our best estimate is that only about one-third of black students who start law school in America successfully graduate and pass the bar exam on their first attempt (see my September 2006 blog post here).

A second form of mismatch — “competition” mismatch — occurs when students abandon particular fields, or college itself, because of the practical and psychological effects of competing with better-prepared students.

Suppose that Sally dreams of becoming a chemist, does very well in a standard high school chemistry course, and receives a preference into an elite school where most of her classmates have taken AP Chemistry. Even if Sally does not experience “learning” mismatch, she may nonetheless end up with a B- or a C in chemistry simply because of the strength of the competition.

A long line of studies (e.g., this excellent study by two psychologists) have shown that students receiving large preferences, facing these pressures, tend to abandon STEM fields in large numbers. Competition mismatch thus appears to have large and damaging effects on the number of African-Americans, in particular, graduating with science or engineering degrees.

The third type of mismatch — “social mismatch” — is in some ways the most intriguing.

Several studies have now found that college students are much more likely to form friendships with students who have similar levels of academic preparation or performance at college. The phenomenon operates even within racial groups, but when a college’s preferences are highly correlated with race (as they are at many elite schools), social mismatch can lead to self-segregation by minority students.

The result is decreased social interaction across racial lines. That’s particularly relevant to the Supreme Court’s deliberations because its tolerance of racial preferences has been based on the idea that a diverse racial campus promotes interracial contact and learning.

But if preferences promote substantial social mismatch, then race-conscious admissions actually decrease interracial contact and learning — not only at the school where the preferences are used, but also at the college that the preferenced minority student would have attended in the absence of preferences.

Of course, new studies of higher education come out all the time, and one can point to some study to argue almost any point. What makes the evidence of mismatch so compelling is the large number of very high-quality studies that have appeared in the past few years, performed by a wide array of scholars and appearing in the strongest academic journals that exercise the most stringent peer review.

For example, the highly-respected Journal of Economic Literature last year commissioned two economists to summarize the state of research on higher education mismatch. To ensure an impartial study, the two economists JEL selected started out with different views of mismatch: one was a skeptic, the other the author of research that had found evidence of mismatch. JEL also asked seven other economists, again representing a wide range of perspectives, to peer review the article when it was drafted.

The resulting article is circumspect, but unequivocal in finding that much of the evidence on mismatch (especially in law school and the sciences) is compelling.

The American Economic Review — one of the three or four top journals in the social sciences — also recently announced that it is publishing a comprehensive study of mismatch in the sciences. It takes advantage of an unusually large database from eight campuses of the University of California, covering the period before and after California voters, through Prop 209, made it illegal to consider of race in public college admissions.

The study could thus examine how UC students who, through racial preferences, attended the most elite UC campuses before Prop 209 compared with very similar students who attended less elite campuses after Prop 209.

Peter Arcidiacono, Esteban Aucejo, and Joseph Hotz conclude unequivocally: “We find less-prepared minority students at top-ranked campuses would have higher science graduation rates had they attended lower-ranked campuses.”

The gold standard for empirical research is a genuine experimental design, where a group of subjects are randomly assigned to “treatment” and “control” groups. While random experiments are routine in medical research, they are still uncommon in the social sciences. A revealing study of that kind was recently conducted by three economists working with the Air Force Academy.

Based on other work, the researchers hypothesized that students entering the Academy with relatively weak academic preparation would learn more and do better if they were assigned to squadrons with particularly academically strong cadets, thus creating opportunities for mentoring and tutoring. The Academy agreed to do a large randomized experiment, assigning some of the targeted students to the experimental squadrons with strong peers, and other students to “control” groups comprised of more typical students.

Again, the results were unequivocal: academically weak students in the experimental group learned less and got worse grades. Having much stronger students in the same squadron increased the weaker students’ tendency to form study groups with other weak students — a strong demonstration of “social mismatch.”

All this impressive research — and much more in a similar vein — has had little impact upon educational institutions. Even though many educational leaders will admit in private that the research is compelling, they believe that any public admission that racial preferences are counterproductive would be met with the sort of campus reaction that routinely drives college presidents from office.

For the same reason, university presidents and other educational leaders aggressively block the release of information vital to mismatch research — data which could, for example, help determine the border between small, safe preferences and large, harmful ones.

All of this should give the Supreme Court pause in assessing racial preferences. Past Court decisions have invoked a traditional deference to the independence of educational institutions. But colleges and universities have demonstrated that they are politically incapable of acting as good fiduciaries for their most vulnerable students.

A version of this post first appeared at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Richard Sander

Richard Sander is an economist and law professor at UCLA, where he has taught since 1989.

VIDEO: Young Frankensteins at the University of Missouri

November 12, 2015/in Commentary, Culture War, Policy, Politics/by Bill Finlay

Radical students at the University of Missouri are turning on the university which created them. They are neo-Frankensteins.

Michael A. Kline from Accuracy in Academia writes:

Most of the coverage of recent college demonstrations has been largely sympathetic to the demonstrators. Indeed, few sources were consulted who would speak any evil of them.

Nevertheless, our November author’s night speaker—William Barclay Allen—saw in them the culmination of a disturbing trend. “I have spent my whole life in academia and I can tell you I have witnessed the deterioration over the course of time,” Dr. Allen, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University, said in November. “It is no longer to be assumed that freedom of speech prevails on a university campus.”

“Instead, there are codes of speech.” Dr. Allen is the former chairman of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission.

“What I am suggesting to you is not that there are outliers, a few extremists who at college campuses especially in elite institutions who the rest of us can look at as perhaps, in their own way, testaments to our virtue because they are so unlike us,” Dr. Allen said. “No that is not the case.”

Read more.

Here is a different perspective on the problem.

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Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Fix College Is Worse than Nothing by Ariel Deschapell

October 21, 2015/in Education, Policy, Politics, Taxes/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Bernie Sanders has tapped into a frenzied millennial base by proposing “free” college tuition (that is, tuition paid for by the government). Bachelor degrees are pitched as the primary means by which individuals can gain skills and increase their incomes, so skyrocketing tuition is becoming a hot election topic. But are more subsidies to the university system a legitimate solution to the problem, or simply a stunt to capitalize on youthful outrage?

There’s no denying that the price of higher education is unrealistically high, and a fix is needed. But Sanders’ plan doesn’t even purport to be a solution. It does nothing to address the root problem of rising costs. It merely spreads those costs to society as a whole by socializing them.

Proponents of this idea don’t ever seem to explore the more fundamental question of why the cost of college continues to increase, let alone how socializing those costs stops the inflationary trend.

The assumption seems to be that rising costs are simply a law of nature that we have to deal with. Fortunately, this isn’t the case. If we look at the wider economy, the cost of higher education is clearly an anomaly. Products across the economic spectrum, from smartphones to automobiles, decrease in cost and increase in quality year after year, despite heavy demand. Indeed, consumer demand is what drives continuous innovation in these industries.

Could the problem be something as simple as decreased public funding? Even if that were true, it still wouldn’t explain why universities seem incapable of cutting costs and maximizing performance. Apple, Samsung, and most any other firms seem perfectly able to do so without any regular source of taxpayer funding.

Higher education possess no unique characteristic that prevents it from improving and adapting as every other industry regularly does. But incentives matter, and the market incentives that drive competitive innovation in other industries are heavily distorted in the college and university system.

For starters, under the Higher Education Act signed into law by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, universities and colleges gained a de facto monopoly on higher education.

As Senator Mike Lee explains,

Under the federal Higher Education Act, students are eligible for Title IV student loans and grants only if they attend formally accredited institutions. That makes some sense, for purposes of quality control.

Except that under the law, only degree-issuing academic institutions are allowed to be accredited. And only the U.S. Department of Education gets to say who can be an accreditor.

That is, the federal government today operates a kind of higher-education cartel, with federally approved accreditors using their gatekeeper power to keep out unwanted competition.

Can this explain why higher education seems perpetually stagnant and inefficient? Since 1965, computers have gone from being the size of a small building to vastly more powerful, more common, and more affordable pocket-sized devices. Whole other industries have been continuously disrupted again and again, giving way to newer and better models for doing business.

Yet despite a relentlessly increasing price tag, a college education is largely the same beast it was decades ago. In 21st century America, our higher education system is still governed by rules written in 1965.

Because of these rules (and a flood of taxpayer-backed loans), more students are funneled into accredited higher education every year, while the supply remains artificially restricted. Even the smallest regional colleges turn away more students than they could hope to take in.

Is it any surprise then that tuition continues to climb when there exists so little competitive pressure to keep it in check? Without the risk of losing potential students to superior alternatives, universities lack the basic incentives to maximize the value they provide while minimizing the cost.

With this in mind, what does Sanders’s proposal do to address the underlying structural problem in higher education? As it turns out, worse than nothing.

Instead of seeking to weaken the cartel and drive down prices by increasing competition, free tuition goes the exact opposite way. Like decades worth of failed higher education programs, Sanders seeks to continue stimulating demand while doing nothing to address the artificially limited supply and dearth of innovation. Unchecked by any last remnant of market forces college costs will continue to run away at an even faster rate than before.

Were it still 1965, the Senator might suggest we deal with the AT&T telephone monopoly by demanding free landlines for all Americans forever. Thankfully, this isn’t what happened, and instead of a sprawling federally subsidized landline monopoly, we have a cheap, competitive nationwide market for cellular and mobile internet providers.

But this is exactly what Sanders proposes for higher education: a stagnant, expensive, uncompetitive industry, stuck in the past and eating up billions in subsidies. In doing so, he threatens to deny us the creative destruction sorely needed to bring higher education into the 21st century.

Socialized college tuition may provide a popular and illusory respite for students, but only the competition present in free markets can actually reduce costs and spur sustainable innovation.

Ariel Deschapell

Ariel holds the Henry Hazlitt Fellowship for Digital Development at FEE. He is a student of Florida International University with a focus in finance and economics.

Your Liberty Receipt

September 24, 2015/in Commentary, Policy, Politics, Taxes, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Dan Bongino

Here at Conservative Review we recently launched a new feature called the Taxpayer’s Monthly Government Receipt where we detail for you a receipt documenting the extraordinary financial burdens the cost of government is placing on your life. Whether taking the form of taxes paid, future taxes owed, government debts incurred, or future government obligations, these financial burdens are YOURS. There is no money fairy to rescue us. There are not enough wealthy people to pay a “fair share” high enough to get us out of this debt hole. These are our debts and they WILL be paid off by the sweat of your brow and the labor of your children and grandchildren.

After reading through the Taxpayer’s Monthly Government Receipt I decided to write this piece to call attention to the burden on your freedom, as well as your wallet.

The Liberty Receipt:

Healthcare

Prior to the passing of Obamacare, using questionable legislative tactics, you were free to purchase health insurance or not, and to tailor it to your family’s needs. Many self-employed, or young and healthy individuals who felt it was more cost effective to pay their medical bills themselves took advantage of their freedom and liberty and didn’t purchase expensive health insurance. After Obamacare, you lost the ability to make those decisions for yourself. The government makes these decisions for you now, using the power of the IRS to ensure that you comply.

In short, liberty was lost.

The Economy

President Obama’s tax increases on income, capital gains, healthcare, payroll, and more, have taken record amounts of money from the wallets of hard working Americans, reducing their economic liberty with each additional dollar removed from their wallets. Your hard-earned money cannot belong to you and the government at the same time, and as the burden of government grows, your ability to economically support yourself and your family recedes. In short, liberty was lost.

Regulations

In 2014 alone, the Obama administration added over $180 billion in new regulations costing YOU over $500 per capita. This tidal wave of additional government red tape has not only stolen your economic liberty, it has also countermanded personal control of your private property, local control of your neighborhood and your business. Either way, decisions about your home, business and neighborhood which you were free to make prior to the Obama presidency, are no longer available to you. The government has already made those decisions for you. In short, liberty was lost.

Education

The Obama administration insists on standing in the way of educational liberty, and standing in the way of lower-income, minority children and a quality education. After suing, and then requesting a federal review of Louisiana’s school voucher program, followed by the administration’s refusal to fund the Washington D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, it’s clear that the Obama administration has stolen away the ability for struggling parents to freely choose where their children attend school. This life-changing decision was once just a school voucher away from changing the lives of lower income children just looking for a shot at the American Dream. That decision is no longer yours, the government made it for you. In short, liberty was lost.

Once liberty is lost it’s a difficult two-step process to get it back. First we have to raise awareness to what happened. President Obama has a gift for stealing your liberty and making you believe that he left you with a gift. We must all become Paul and Paulette Reveres and make every effort to sound the alarm as to what is going on. Second, we must elect and support fearless leaders who fear the loss of liberty and freedom more than the fear of losing an election. In short, liberty was lost and here’s your receipt. Use it to organize and fight back.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image of the Twin Towers and Statue of Liberty is courtesy of the Associated Press.

Huckabee Hucksterism on Common Core?

September 14, 2015/in Education, Policy, Politics/by Dr. Mary Grabar

Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee surprised many conservatives by sending a mailing asking them to “Endorse Mike’s Pledge to Kill Common Core.” It reads, “I, Mike Huckabee, pledge allegiance to God, the Constitution, and the citizens of the United States: As President I will fight to kill Common Core and restore common sense. Education is a family function—not a federal function.”

Huckabee then came out with another mailing in which he vowed not only to kill Common Core, but to abolish the Department of Education.

Huckabee declared his candidacy in May. Reporters and commentators questioned the motivations for his shift on Common Core. At the Daily Caller, Blake Neff called Huckabee’s “strong, total condemnation” a “relatively new trait” and questioned the governor’s explanation: “the unexpected involvement of the Obama administration.” In January, at National Review Andrew Johnson noted that Huckabee had publicly praised Common Core standards that he claimed were developed by governors and state education officials. A blog called “The Truth about Mike Huckabee” basically repeats these claims but in a heightened, defensive style, stating, “It is important to note that The National Governor’s Association Common Core IS NOT the same as the Common Core associated with the Department of Education Grants. If you take the time to research this topic you will see that one of many differences is that the federal government requires those who administer the grant project meet certain diversity guidelines, which is completely foreign to the work done by the National Governor’s Association. These are two completely different programs, begun by different organizations, with different implementation and operational objectives.”

Huckabee’s defense does not stand up to scrutiny. Neff pointed to Huckabee’s 2011 book A Simple Government, in which Huckabee endorsed the role of the federal government, writing, “I fully endorse the new federal program Race to the Top, which has states compete for additional education funds, allowing them to decide what reforms to enact, rather than having specific reforms imposed on them from above.” This was two years after the Race to the Top program required that states agree to adopt the federal Common Core guidelines as part of the application process.

As he contemplated his presidential run, Huckabee knew that his “complicated history with Common Core” could be the reason he’d lose a significant portion of the evangelical base that supported him in 2008, according to Johnson. Conservatives already had a problem with Huckabee’s record as governor that included increases in taxes and pardons for criminals.

Furthermore, Huckabee’s efforts continued in 2013 and included sending a letter to Oklahoma lawmakers ahead of a vote to dump Common Core in that state; he encouraged them “to resist any attempt to delay implementation.” That year, Huckabee also told the Council of Chief State School Officers to “rebrand” Common Core, and not “retreat.”

The authors of Common Core Report: Grading the 2016 GOP Candidates (by American Principles in Action and Cornerstone Policy Research Action) write that Huckabee’s “rebrand advice to the owners and supporters gut-stabbed the national grassroots movement right when it was gaining traction.” Rebranding, or renaming, the Common Core standards, while making superficial changes, has been a favorite strategy of politicians and bureaucrats trying to fool voters and legislators who really are trying to kill Common Core in their states.

Huckabee claimed his comments were “misconstrued.” By December of 2013, Huckabee was using his Fox News show to outline his concerns about “what Common Core has become” – a divisive issue. He encouraged “activists on both sides of the issue to move past Common Core,” and “argued for a renewed, broader effort to improve education,” according to Johnson.

What is the federal government’s role, and specifically a president’s role, in improving education? On his campaign site page Huckabee pledges to abolish the Department of Education, while insisting, “We must demand results, accountability and success for every child in every classroom. I oppose watering down our education standards or automatically promoting every student.”

The rationale behind federal education programs, including the No Child Left Behind initiative of the George W. Bush administration, is precisely the demand for “accountability.” NCLB was built on the false notion that every child can achieve “success” and that it is the federal government’s role to see to it. Indeed, the current education reauthorization spending bill is called the “Every Child Achieves Act” (ECAA). Common Core was hustled through on such pretexts of accountability and standards.

The Common Core Report: Grading the 2016 GOP Candidates gives Huckabee a “C,” in spite of his “checkered past.” (Grades range from “A-” for Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to “F” for Jeb Bush.)

Raising his grade is Huckabee’s “forceful general argument” of late about the problem of special interests currying the favor of the federal executive branch, which then puts mandates on the states. State departments of education, state boards of education, and governors then become “supplicants” to the U.S. Department of Education.

Real Clear Politics puts Huckabee in ninth position in a field of 15 candidates. Four major polls show him garnering four percent of the support. It appears that Huckabee will not be the candidate who ends the system of “supplication” to the Department of Education. Let’s hope we get one, nevertheless.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Selous Foundation for Public Policy Research.

Can Millennials [And Academia] Take a Joke? by Clark Conner

August 18, 2015/in Culture War, Featured, Policy/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Millennials can be a hypersensitive bunch, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the academy. American institutions of higher learning have become veritable minefields of trigger warnings, safe zones, and speech codes.

It appears we can add another line item to the growing list of things too radical for college students: humor. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld recently joined an expanding group of high-profile figures in denouncing higher education’s culture of hyper-sensitivity.

In an interview with ESPN Radio’s Colin Cowherd, Seinfeld discussed why comics are reluctant to take their act on campus:

COWHERD: Does the climate worry you now? I’ve talked to Chris Rock and Larry the Cable Guy; they don’t even want to do college campuses anymore.

SEINFELD: I hear that all the time. I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, “Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.” I’ll give you an example: My daughter’s 14. My wife says to her, “Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys.” You know what my daughter says? She says, “That’s sexist.”

COWHERD: That’s amazing.

SEINFELD: They just want to use these words: “That’s racist”; “That’s sexist”; “That’s prejudice.” They don’t know what they’re talking about.

It took roughly 24 hours for Seinfeld’s point to prove itself. The day after the Huffington Post ran an article on Seinfeld’s comments, an open letter appeared on the site addressed to Mr. Seinfeld from a “College Student.”

The letter touches on a myriad of topics, including racism, sexism, offending the “right” people, and (for reasons unknown) “the underlying culture of violence and male domination that inhabits high school football,” but its overarching spirit is summed up in the author’s ironic introduction:

Recently, I’ve heard about your reluctance to perform on college campuses because of how “politically correct” college students are… As a college student that loves and appreciates offensive, provocative comedy, I’m disheartened by these comments.

So, a college student was “disheartened” by Jerry Seinfeld’s observation that college students are too sensitive. Let that sink in.

Seinfeld isn’t the only comedian to denounce the current sensitivity epidemic on campus. In a discussion with Frank Rich, Chris Rock espoused the same views as Seinfeld:

RICH: What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?

ROCK: Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.

RICH: In their political views?

ROCK: Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

Former Tonight Show host Jay Leno, too, shared his experience with a college intern who conflated his dislike of Mexican food with racism.

The experiences of Seinfeld, Rock, and Leno obviously can’t be projected on the whole of entertainment media, but their willingness to criticize the don’t-offend-me culture indicates a growing sense that American campuses are becoming hostile to humor.

And their criticisms aren’t unfounded: the uptrend in campus outrage over even mildly provocative humor is inescapable. Ask Robert Klein Engler, formerly of Roosevelt University, who received his walking papers after telling his class a joke he overheard as a way of stimulating conversation about an Arizona immigration bill.

“There was a sociological study done in Arizona,” Engler said to the students, “and they discovered that 60 percent of the people in Arizona approved of the immigration law and 40 percent said, ‘no habla ingles.’”

That caused a student, Cristina Solis, to file a written complaint with the university, which in turn opened a harassment investigation against the professor.

According to reporting from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Engler was summoned by university officials to discuss the harassment charges, but they wouldn’t disclose the nature of accusation, nor the identity of the accuser. Engler agreed to cooperate with the university’s investigation, but only if the accusations were put in writing.

Roosevelt wouldn’t do so, and also refused Engler the right to be accompanied by his attorney at investigation meetings. Stripped of due process, Engler chose not to participate in the sham investigation, which resulted in Roosevelt University terminating his employment.

What’s worse, Ms. Solis voiced her approval with the university’s decision to terminate Engler. In a quote to the student newspaper preserved on Minding the Campus she proclaimed:

If that [Mr. Engler’s firing] is what it took to give him a reality check, and to make sure that no other student has to go through that, maybe it’s for the best. It’s just something you don’t say in a classroom, not coming from a professor, and especially not at a school like Roosevelt University, which is based on social justice.

What a dangerous precedent this is, that a lone student infatuated with the idea of social justice can spearhead a movement to fire a professor over a throw-away joke.

Teresa Buchanan, formerly an associate professor at Louisiana State University, also knows what it means to offend the wrong people.

Buchanan was known by her students as a “gunslinger” who sometimes incorporated profanity or sexually charged jokes in class. For example, Reason reports that one of her zingers came in the form of advice to female students that their boyfriends would stop helping them with coursework “after the sex gets stale.”

After the Fall 2013 semester, Buchanan was informed by the university that she was being placed under suspension pending an investigation for “sexual harassment” and promoting a “hostile learning environment.”

The investigation dragged on, and 15 months later a faculty committee upheld the university’s accusation of sexual harassment. The committee, however, decided that termination was not the solution, but rather that LSU should ask that Buchanan tone down her language.

This suggestion was ignored by university president F. King Alexander. Buchanan was fired on June 19, 2015.

Not only are American academics under fire for using semi-edgy humor, British academics, too, are learning the hard way to leave the one-liners at home.

The saga of Sir Tim Hunt illustrates how even the most prestigious careers can be derailed by pitchfork-wielding mobs feigning outrage over innocuous comments.

Hunt, a Nobel laureate, found himself to be the object of scorn, stemming from a joke he made while presenting to the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea:

It’s strange that such a chauvinist monster like me has been asked to speak to women scientists.

Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry. Perhaps we should make separate labs for boys and girls?

Now, seriously, I’m impressed by the economic development of Korea. And women scientists played, without doubt, an important role in it. Science needs women, and you should do science, despite all the obstacles, and despite monsters like me.

This comment was first reported by Connie St. Louis, a journalism professor at University College London (UCL) who was present for Hunt’s speech. She claimed his comments induced a “stony silence” on the crowd.

In reaction, an armada of social media warriors descended on Hunt, resulting in his resignation from multiple honorary positions, including at UCL. Although Hunt incessantly apologized for his “transgression,” his opponents continued to besmirch his character and career.

In making the comments public, however, St. Louis only mentioned some of Hunt’s remarks. She omitted the part where Hunt clearly stated he was joking and praised the role of women scientists.

A few weeks later, a report from a European Commission official recalled a different version of events. Unlike St. Louis, the report included Hunt’s entire statement and claimed that Hunt’s joke was received by laughter, not the agitation asserted by St. Louis.

Despite the EC report vindicating Hunt and dispelling the charges of sexism, the damage is done. Hunt’s top-shelf academic career is now in shambles after being sullied by a throng of raging speech oppressors.

A joke was all it took.

Anything Peaceful

Anything Peaceful is FEE’s new online ideas marketplace, hosting original and aggregate content from across the Web.

EDITORS NOTE: A version of this post first appeared at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The featured image is courtesy of FEE and Shutterstock.

The Credential Is Killing the Classroom by Isaac M. Morehouse

August 12, 2015/in Culture War, Education, Policy/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

“I wish college were like this!”

I hear this exclamation over and over at the seminars put on by organizations like the Foundation for Economic Education and the Institute for Humane Studies.

Attendees are blown away by the excellence of the content, the professors’ willingness to engage students even in free time, and the intelligence and interest level of the other participants.

And it’s not just the students who see a difference. Faculty also talk about how these seminars are far better than typical college classes.

What causes this distinction?

One obvious explanation is self-selection. Faculty and students who choose to give up a week of their summer to discuss ideas are high caliber and highly engaged.

But college has self-selection, too. Shouldn’t it be full of professors and students who are earnest truth and knowledge seekers of the finest quality?

With the rare exception of one or two classes, college is nothing like this. Why does the self-selection only produce quality learning in these seminars?

It’s because college offers an official credential — a degree. Educational experiences outside of college do not.

That’s it. Every other difference is insignificant.

Imagine how different these summer seminars would be if they offered an official, government-approved piece of paper at the end — something without which you couldn’t get past the first screening of job applications. A summer seminar selling a magical ticket to a job that Mom and Dad would feel proud of and that society would respect would be overwhelmed with attendees. And many of them wouldn’t give a hoot about what they had to do to get the paper at the end. Demand for faculty would spike, and many instructors would do whatever it took to get the paycheck and retreat to quiet corridors where they could be with their books and the few colleagues who actually care.

It would become, in a word, college.

The evidence is everywhere that the credential is killing the classroom. I’ve guest taught entry-level college classes before. It’s pretty painful. Most of the students are half asleep, grumpy, forlorn, texting, and generally inattentive.

I like to joke that if aliens from another planet came down and observed a typical class at a typical university and were asked what they had witnessed, they would scan the cinder block and fluorescent room, ponder the pained look on student faces, and conclude it was a penal colony. Imagine their surprise when told these people are not only here of their own free will, but paying tens of thousands of dollars for their suffering.

Not every classroom is that painful, but few inspire the joy of learning. Consider this: when class is cancelled, everyone is happy — students and professors alike. What other good can you think of where you pay in advance and are excited when it’s not delivered?

But what is the product that colleges are selling? The professors may not always realize it, but it’s not their lectures the students are buying. It’s nice to get a little enjoyment and knowledge out of the deal, but that’s not what tuition pays for. After all, if that’s all that students were seeking, they could simply sit in on classes without registering or paying.

They are there for the credential. The credential is the signal to the working world that they are at least slightly better, on average, than those without it. That’s it.

In some fields the credential is required, and in many others alternative ways to measure competence are illegal, so the signal of a degree retains artificially enhanced value. Even so, that value is fading.

Large institutions form because transaction costs are high, with tons of individuals exchanging goods, services, and information separately. This is why family names mattered so much in times past. Economist Ronald Coase famously explained the existence of firms using this basic logic. It works for universities, too. When it’s hard to prove your worth, you get a trusted institution to vouch for you. It’s a shortcut that reduces risk on the part of those who want to hire you.

But each passing year, the value of this institutional reputation-backer declines compared to the available alternatives. Technology has dramatically reduced information costs, so it is now easier than ever to vouch for yourself — or to get vast networks of clients and customers to vouch for you.

Whose steak is the best? Where once you had to rely on a few food critics or word of mouth among a small set of friends, now Yelp reviews let you consult a vast array of food lovers.

With reputation markets, you can build a better signal than what college is selling.

As long as legal and cultural norms make the degree the primary signal of value in the marketplace, the classroom will continue to decline in quality. When the majority of students are purchasing one good (the credential) but are made to endure another (the classroom), they will continue to see formal education as more of a cost than a benefit — and they will behave accordingly, sliding through to minimize pain and suffering.

The classroom isn’t doing the credential any favors, either. Most employers admit that a degree signals very little these days. Everyone has one. Most universities sell as many as they possibly can. Cases of professors passing bad students and universities passing bad professors are well known, and the institutions’ clout is waning.

Even employers who still require a degree ask for much more on top of it, because sitting through a bunch of classes you didn’t care about and doing the minimum amount of passionless hoop-jumping doesn’t convey much about your energy, eagerness, and ability to create value in a dynamic market.

My professor friends sometimes chastise me for what they think are unfair criticisms of college. What I’m suggesting, however — that the credential should be separated from the classroom — reflects my respect for great professors and the value of their style of education.

Classroom learning at its best — classes like those I’ve experienced in summer seminars — is so powerful and so valuable that I hate to see great education destroyed and diminished by artificial attachment to a supposedly magical credential. The subsidies, loans, restrictions, requirements, and licensure laws, as well as the parental and societal worship of college as the great economic security blanket, have filled the classroom with so much clutter that it’s a rarity for quality interaction to occur.

I’m excited to see the cleavage between the credential and the classroom happening right in front of us. It’s not the proliferation of free online university courses that will fundamentally change the college experience in countries like the United States, where access to information is already rich. The “massively open online course” is just a new delivery system for a current good — and one that most Americans aren’t buying anyway. The real shift is occurring as fewer and fewer employers look to the degree as the dominant signal, and as more and more young people build their own.

When the dust settles, we’ll see great teachers and researchers doing their thing with eager audiences of students who are actually there to purchase that unique product, not just suffering through it on their way to getting something else they really want. The host of mediocre faculty will lose, but the good ones will win big, both in economic opportunity and in quality of the craft. So will the young customers who wish to learn from them.

Isaac M. Morehouse

Isaac Morehouse is the founder and CEO of Praxis.

Who Is Doing More for Affordable Education: Politicians or Innovators? by Bryan Jinks

August 3, 2015/in Budget and Finance, Education, Policy, Politics, Taxes/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

With a current outstanding student loan debt of $1.3 trillion, debt-free education is poised to be a major issue leading up to the 2016 presidential election.

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has come forth with his plan for tuition-free higher education.

Senator Elizabeth Warren supports debt-free education, which goes even further by guaranteeing that students don’t take on debt to pay other expenses incurred while receiving an education.

Democratic Party front-runner Hillary Clinton is expected to propose a plan to reduce student loan debt at some point. And don’t forget President Obama’s proposal to provide two years of community college to all students tuition-free.

While all of these plans would certainly increase access to higher education, they would also be expensive. President Obama’s relatively modest community college plan would cost $60 billion over the next decade. What makes this an even worse idea is that all of that taxpayer money wouldn’t solve the most important problems currently facing higher education.

Shifting the costs completely to taxpayers doesn’t actually reduce the costs. It also doesn’t increase the quality of education in a system that has high drop-out rates and where a lot of graduates end up in low-paying jobs that don’t use their degree. Among first-time college students who enrolled in a community college in the fall of 2008, fewer than 40% earned a credential from either a two-year or four-year institution within six years.

Whatever the other social or spiritual benefits of attending college are, they don’t justify wasting that so much time and money without seeing much improvement in wages or job prospects.

Proponents of debt-free college argue that these programs are worth the cost because a more educated workforce will boost the economy. But these programs would push more marginal students into college without any regard for how prepared they are, how likely they are to graduate, or how interested they are in getting a degree. If even more of these students enter college, keeping the low completion rates from falling even further would be a challenge.

All of these plans would just make sure that everyone would have access to the mediocre product that higher education currently is. Just as the purpose of Obamacare was to make sure that every American had a health insurance card in their wallet, the purpose of debt-free education is to make sure that every American has a student ID card too — whether it means anything or not.

But there are changes coming in higher education that can actually solve some of these problems.

The Internet is making education much cheaper. While Open Online Courses have existed for more than a decade, there are a growing number of places to find educational materials online. Udemy is an online marketplace that allows anyone to create their own course and sell it or give it away. Saylor Academy and University of the People both have online models that offer college credit with free tuition and relatively low examination fees.

Udacity offers nanodegrees that can be completed in 6-12 months. The online curriculum is made in partnership with technology companies to give students exactly the skills that hiring managers are looking for. And there are many more businesses and non-profits offering new ways to learn that are cheaper, faster, and more able to keep up with the ever-changing economy than traditional universities.

All of these innovations are happening in response the rising costs and poor outcomes that have become typical of formal education. New educational models will keep developing that offer solutions that policy makers can’t provide.

Some of these options are free, some aren’t. Each has their own curriculum and some provide more tangible credentials than others. There isn’t one definitive answer as to how someone should go about receiving an education. But each of these innovations provides a small part of the answer to the current problems with higher education.

Change for the better is coming to higher education. Just don’t expect it to come from Washington.

Bryan Jinks

Bryan Jinks is a ?freelance writer based out of Cleveland, Ohio.

New York Orders Fast-Food Workers Replaced With Robots, Kiosks, Mobile Apps by Daniel Bier

July 24, 2015/in Culture War, Economy, Must Read, Policy, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Well, they didn’t quite put it that way — the New York Times‘ headline read “New York panel recommends $15 minimum wage for fast-food workers” — but it amounts to the same thing.

A panel appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo recommended on Wednesday that the minimum wage be raised for employees of fast food chain restaurants throughout the state to $15 an hour over the next few years. Wages would be raised faster in New York City than in the rest of the state to account for the higher cost of living there.

The panel’s recommendations, which are expected to be put into effect by an order of the state’s acting commissioner of labor, represent a major triumph for the advocates who have rallied burger flippers and fry cooks to demand pay that covers their basic needs.

They argued that taxpayers were subsidizing the workforces of some multinational corporations, like McDonald’s, that were not paying enough to keep their workers from relying on food stamps and other welfare benefits.

The $15 wage would represent a raise of more than 70 percent for workers earning the state’s current minimum wage of $8.75 an hour. Advocates for low wage workers said they believed the mandate would quickly spur raises for employees in other industries across the state, and a jubilant Mr. Cuomo predicted that other states would follow his lead.

In other news, I ordered my lunch yesterday on my computer and picked it up from Panera Bread without ever talking to a person. Last night, I picked up a couple groceries and paid through the self-checkout lane. This morning, I ordered a latte on my Starbucks app, and it was waiting for me when I walked into the store. I’m thinking of going to a burger joint later, where I’ll tap out my order on a kiosk.

Of course, it’s not fair to blame the minimum wage exclusively for the increasingly widespread automation of service jobs. Ordering kiosks and mobile apps are becoming more popular as the technology becomes better, cheaper, and more popular. That will probably happen no matter what the price of labor is.

But the fact that the cost of not using technology — that is, an employee — is about to cost 70% more will give the entire New York fast-food industry a great big shove away from labor and towards machines. And since chain restaurants don’t just operate in New York, the investment in automation will spill into stores everywhere.

Who wins from this?

Unions and more experienced workers, at least in the short-run. Labor unions’ entire purpose is to push up wages for their members, which makes them more expensive and less attractive compared to non-union workers.

But if unions — like, say, the Service Employees International Union — can make all workers more expensive, it makes union labor look relatively better by comparison. They won’t have to compete against cheaper labor anymore (which is to say, less-skilled workers won’t be allowed to compete by underbidding them).

Why arbitrarily single out “fast food” for the hike?

First, it makes the fight politically easier because the unions only have to defeat one industry lobby, instead of every business that uses unskilled labor. Second, the SEIU, in particular, represents a lot of food workers and has for years been pushing to unionize the big fast-food chains.

Who loses?

First, businesses, especially those operating on thin margins. They’ll be staring at a 70% increase in labor costs, already typically one of the biggest expenses for restaurants.

Less experienced workers — especially unskilled immigrants and young people starting out in the job market — will also lose. Businesses will try to offset some of higher cost of labor by cutting hours or jobs, delaying or cancelling expansions, replacing labor with capital where they can, and replacing less skilled with more skilled workers where they can’t.

They’ll also try to raise prices to cover costs, so consumers lose, too — especially those who eat fast-food more often, have tighter budgets, and have food as a bigger share of their budgets: i.e., low and lower-middle income families.

The net effect this will be less employment, less production, and less consumption. The economy and especially less-advantaged people will be worse off for it.

Miscellaneous arguments:

CEO pay: The Times awkwardly shoehorns in the fact that McDonald’s chief executive made $7.5 million last year, presumably trying to suggest that he’s the reason its other 420,000 employees are paid so little. In case you’re wondering, redistributing his salary comes out to 5 cents per employee per day. And then McDonald’s has no CEO. Hurray?
Corporate Subsidy: The Times also uncritically repeats the incoherent claim that taxpayers are somehow “subsidizing” these “multinational corporations” because they don’t pay “enough to keep their workers from relying on food stamps and other welfare benefits.” This makes no sense at all.
No Big Deal: The economists who claim that raising the minimum wage won’t hurt employment that much always couch it with the caveat that the increase be “small” or “moderate.” By no stretch of the imagination is hiking the wage floor to $15 “moderate.” In New York, it’s a 70% increase; in states with the federal minimum of $7.25, it’s 107% increase.

Antony Davies has charted the relationship between the minimum wage as a share of the average wage and the unemployment rates for different workers over time.

There’s no connection between the minimum wage and unemployment for the college-educated, but for those with high school or less, there’s a strong positive correlation:

Notice that the chart axis stops at 45% of the average hourly wage: in more than three decades, the minimum wage has never gone higher. Today, according to BLS data, a $15 minimum wage would be 60% of the average hourly wage — the highest relative minimum wage ever. We are literally going into uncharted territory.

Daniel Bier

Daniel Bier is the editor of Anything Peaceful. He writes on issues relating to science, civil liberties, and economic freedom.

The Hidden Costs of Tenure by Jonathon Anomaly

July 15, 2015/in Education, Policy, Science/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Conversations I’ve had with non-academics about university employment practices usually evoke surprise and skepticism. Most people have a hard time understanding the point of a system that makes it so difficult to dismiss faculty members who are not especially good at their job.

The recent motion in Wisconsin to remove state laws that protect teacher tenure has re-ignited the debate over providing special protections to teachers—protections that don’t apply to journalists, gardeners, or bloggers who are occasionally fired for expressing unpopular views.

In some ways, regulations that determine how university professors are hired and fired in the United States are analogous to the restrictive labor laws in Spain and Greece. By raising the cost of firing bad workers, they increase the relative cost of hiring good ones.

The consequence is persistent unemployment and low productivity in Greece and Spain. The consequences of our tenure system are the proliferation of poor teaching and arcane research in university departments that are immunized from market forces.

Those who pursue a career as a university professor are mostly incentivized to produce specialized work aimed at impressing people who may end up on their promotion committee rather than a wider audience.

In the sciences, this may be a good thing, since one’s peers are likely doing narrow but important work that uncovers the basic structure of the universe. But in the humanities and social sciences, it often leads to the pursuit of bizarre research that is inscrutable to outsiders and of little value even to scholars in related fields.

Another hidden effect of the tenure system is that it often sifts out the very people it is supposed to protect: those with unusual or unpopular ideas. The original justification for tenure was to protect teachers and scholars who hold unpopular views by making it difficult to fire them. But when tenure is the main game in town, the stakes associated with hiring a new faculty member are high, making departments risk-averse. Thus, in order to be considered for tenure-track jobs, candidates have strong reasons to conceal unpopular political beliefs and to pursue relatively conservative lines of research.

By “conservative” I do not mean politically conservative. Quite the opposite.

If most people in a department where you’ve applied are progressives, it is not likely that your allegiance to any non-progressive views will help your cause. Tenured faculty members who make those decisions are often unwilling to take a chance on somebody with eccentric or politically unpopular views, since when a tenure-track position is filled, the candidate who fills it will probably be a colleague for life.

This is not only unfair; it is contrary to the mission of most universities. Research by Professor Jonathan Haidt suggests that political bias negatively impacts the quality of research by stifling open debate. But it’s one of the unintended results of tenure.

Tenure can, of course, protect people with unpopular views. Consider Edward Wilson and Arthur Jensen, eminent scholars at Harvard and Berkeley who have argued, among other things, that different groups of human beings exhibit average differences in genetically-mediated characteristics, including general intelligence and impulse control. Tenure protected their careers, although it didn’t protect them from death threats and intimidation.

On the other hand, it is likely that many more controversial scholars will never be hired in the first place because those on the hiring committee are hostile to their ideas.

Tenure also makes it much harder to terminate faculty members. It was never supposed to be a guarantee that one will never be fired. According to the American Association of University Professors, tenure can be revoked if members of a department can demonstrate that a colleague exhibits incompetence, or engages in academic fraud or seriously immoral behavior.

But even when these things can be shown, it is often easier for faculty and administration to ignore the problem than to mount a costly battle to fire a colleague.

This is one reason many tenure-track jobs are being replaced with adjunct positions, which is a temporary fix for a deeper problem. In the long run, it is likely that the quality of student education and faculty research would increase under a system that offered faculty a greater diversity of contracts, reflecting a faculty member’s ongoing accomplishments, experience, and contributions to the university.

In effect, tenure is a barrier to entry in the academic job market that makes it difficult to replace poorly performing faculty with better alternatives. We should applaud rather than protest the recent decision of the Wisconsin legislature to force the University of Wisconsin to experiment with new ways of conducting the business of hiring and firing faculty.

This post first appeared at the John William Pope Center.

Jonathan Anomaly

7 Things the Left Should Apologize For

July 13, 2015/in Culture War, Economy, Immigration, Policy/by Dan Bongino

While attending a gathering of conservatives a few years ago in Washington, D.C., I was confronted by a far Left group conducting an amateur “ambush interview.” They demanded I opine on the comments of a number of 2012 Republican U.S. Senate candidates whom they found objectionable, and it was clear that they were seeking some sort of apology.

The Left loves to demand apologies from conservatives for grievances both real and imagined and, sadly, sometimes we play along with this ridiculous game.

The Left loves to demand apologies from conservatives for grievances both real and imagined and, sadly, sometimes we play along with this ridiculous game. I frequently wonder why conservatives don’t pay back the favor and demand apologies from the Left.

At the macro level, the Left should apologize to America for their continued allegiance to European-style welfare statism. At the micro level, they should apologize for their ongoing use of hateful division politics.

These two guiding ideologies of the Left have caused immeasurable poverty, misery and grief. Their intent to divide us is leading to concertina-wire-reinforced borders among the individual race, gender, and religious silos that they have chosen for us.

With the continued focus on the 2016 presidential elections we should start demanding apologies from the Left. Here are seven things the Left is largely responsible for which I’m demanding apologies before Election Day.

The death of four American patriots in Benghazi and the disgusting lies told to the families of the deceased…

Sanctuary cities and the murder of Kate Steinle, by an illegal immigrant deported, an unforgivable five times.
The ruthless political targeting of conservatives by the IRS to silence conservatives and advance the Left’s political agenda.
The Obama economic “recovery,” where a tragic 1 in 5 Americans are now on some form of government welfare and over 90 million Americans are not working.
The continuing destruction of the economies and education infrastructures of America’s once great inner cities by liberal governance.
The massive health insurance premium hikes, outrageously high deductibles, and doctor and hospital restrictions imposed on middle class Americans by the disastrous Obamacare legislation.
The death of four American patriots in Benghazi and the disgusting lies told to the families of the deceased, and to concerned American citizens, by the Obama administration afterwards.
And, most importantly, the continued shredding of our Constitutional Republic, and what little faith we had left in our government.

Demand an apology from the Left for this, America deserves it.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifying before Congress on Benghazi is courtesy by Bill Clark Roll Call CQ | AP Photo.

Keep Sex out of Kindergarten by Hannah Phillips

July 12, 2015/in Culture War, Education, Policy/by Dr. Judith Reisman

It’s the first day of kindergarten. Each child is excited to learn about the alphabet, numbers, and – sex? Under the guise of “family life” or “health” education, children are exposed to graphic sexual images and ideas that damage their young minds. A child’s undeveloped brain is not prepared to make decisions regarding sexuality.

Obscenity Exemptions

Outside of the classroom, it is illegal to expose children to sexually explicit material. For example, Virginia law prohibits any person to “print, copy, manufacture, produce, or reproduce any obscene item for purposes of sale or distribution.”[1] Schools, however, are the exception. Under Virginia law, the prohibition does not apply to the “purchase, distribution, exhibition, or loan of any book, magazine, or other printed or manuscript material by any library, school, or institution of higher learning.”[2] According to Dr. Judith Reisman and Mary McAlister, children “are exposed to otherwise illegal sexually explicit materials because of ‘obscenity exemptions’ granted to schools, libraries, and other organizations.”[3] The young minds that should be protected in their innocence are instead exploited in the name of education.

Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education

Planned Parenthood and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) are the frontrunners of comprehensive sexuality education taught from kindergarten through twelfth grade. Many advocates claim that comprehensive sexuality education in early grades is necessary for a child’s healthy development. In 2004, SIECUS published its third edition of Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade. A “national task force of experts” devised the Guidelines to “help educators create new sexuality education programs and evaluate already existing curricula.”[4] In addition to over 100,000 copies that have been dispersed across the United States, more than 1,000 people each month download the Guidelines from SIECUS’ website.[5] SIECUS praises the Guidelines as “popular and valuable.”[6] The National Guidelines Task Force that developed the Guidelines originally consisted of members from Planned Parenthood, Indiana University, and various public school systems. Although SIECUS claims that a “majority of parents want schools to provide comprehensive education about sexuality,” many parents do not know what schools are teaching their children.[7]

SIECUS’ Guidelines presents comprehensive sexuality education as a “lifelong process” that begins at birth and continues throughout adulthood.[8] As SIECUS’ ultimate goal, a “sexually healthy adult” will “affirm that human development includes sexual development which may . . . include . . . sexual experience,” “affirm one’s own sexual orientation,” and “affirm one’s own gender identities.”[9] The Guidelines recommend that schools teach children, ages 5 through 8, about masturbation, sexual intercourse, abortion, and sexual orientation. Little children are taught that “touching and rubbing one’s own genitals to feel good is called masturbation” and that “some boys and girls masturbate” in a “private place.”[10] Educators are supposed to instruct five-year-olds on “vaginal intercourse – when a penis is placed inside a vagina.”[11] The Guidelines describe abortion as the solution for circumstances in which “women become pregnant when they do not want to be or are unable to care for a child.”[12] Kindergarteners learn that “human beings can love people of the same gender and people of another gender,” according to a person’s sexual orientation.[13] Under SIECUS’ Guidelines, sexual perversions are deemed natural, favorable, and void of all consequences. Similarly, Planned Parenthood promotes initiating comprehensive sex education in kindergarten because “sexuality is an integral part of each person’s identity.”[14] Although Planned Parenthood does not lay out its own guidelines for comprehensive sexuality education, it directs interested educators to SIECUS’ Guidelines.[15]

Schools and libraries provide children with access to explicit sexual material and ideas in books. Recommended by SIECUS’ Guidelines as a resource for children, the book It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health by Robie H. Harris covers topics such as sexual reproduction, sexual desire, sexual intercourse, and homosexuality. Although the book is designed for children ages ten and up, it includes cartoon images of a naked man and woman engaging in sexual intercourse, two men and two women in homosexual relationships, and multiple naked men and women depicted at different stages in life.[16] Advocates of comprehensive sexuality education in kindergarten assure cautious parents that sex education teaches only scientific facts. According to SIECUS, however, comprehensive sexuality education includes “forming attitudes, beliefs, and values about . . . identity, relationships, and intimacy.”[17] Sex education does not only teach facts, but it also teaches values. As religious and traditional values become irrelevant, sexual promiscuity becomes rampant.

The Man behind Comprehensive Sexuality Education

The current traumatization of children with explicit sexual images and ideas finds its roots in the work of “scientist” Alfred Kinsey in the 1940s. According to Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence, Kinsey claimed that “children are . . . unharmed by sexual activity even from birth.”[18] In his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey included several tables depicting the “erotic arousal” of between “1,746 to 2,035 boys and girls” based on “instrumental measurement” and “timed with a stopwatch.”[19] Kinsey recruited pedophiles, parents, and nursery personnel to molest and rape children under the guise of “scientific research.”[20] Kinsey used his infamous Table 34 to support his contention that children are capable of “orgasm.” Table 34 “reported around-the-clock experimental ‘data’ on infants and young boys,” with the youngest child being five months old.[21] The infants and children who were sexually stimulated responded with pain, fright, “extreme tension with violent convulsion,” or fainting – a reaction which Kinsey considered “orgasm.”[22] What Kinsey deemed an “orgasm” in infants, however, can only be interpreted as an absolute protest to the violation of their bodies. From his “data,” Kinsey concluded that children are sexual from birth and can benefit from “incest or sex with adults” and that all forms of sexual behavior are both permissible and beneficial.[23]

The recent shift toward teaching explicit sex education in early grades is entirely based on the fraudulent research of this child rapist. Before Kinsey’s reports were published, all sexuality education was the “responsibility of parents or legal guardians.”[24] However, after Kinsey, school teachers became the primary instructors of sexuality information and health. Kinsey’s corrupt ideas are currently taught under deceptive pseudonyms such as “sex education, AIDS prevention or awareness, family life, health, hygiene, home economics, physical education, even ‘abstinence’ education.”[25] Based on Kinsey’s false ideologies, Planned Parenthood endorses teaching children comprehensive sexuality education in kindergarten since “learning about sexuality . . . begin[s] at birth and continue[s] throughout our lives.”[26] The false contention that children are sexual from birth remains prevalent in our schools today. Just as Kinsey violated the fragile bodies of thousands of infants and children, schools are violating the fragile minds of children.

The Harm Caused by Comprehensive Sexuality Education

A Child’s Brain

According to Dr. Judith Reisman and Mary McAlister, every “child or young person who views sexually explicit images suffers real harm.”[27] This harm is irreversible on a child’s brain. Brains are “far more impressionable in early life than in maturity.”[28] A child cannot process auditory and visual information like an adult. In contrast to an adult, “young children’s brains are more vulnerable to developmental problems should their environment prove especially impoverished or un-nurturing.”[29] In “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball, Dr. Reisman recognizes that “the human brain experiences conflicting and confusing images and information when viewing pornography.”[30] An impressionable child is confused when forced to absorb sexually explicit material. Describing pornography’s influence, Dr. Reisman continues, “When one reaches a state of emotional arousal faster than the body can rally its adaptive reactions, a form of stress follows.”[31] Children who are exposed to sexually explicit images experience stress and anxiety that carries into their adulthood.

The Rights of Parents

“Obscenity exemptions” provided for schools erodes the rights of parents. According to Pierce, the Supreme Court declared, “The child is not the mere creature of the state; those who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations.”[32] All parents have the right and responsibility to educate their children. President Obama, however, endorsed teaching “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education” in kindergarten as “the right thing to do.”[33] Who determines what is age-appropriate for a kindergartener? Planned Parenthood? Local school boards? The federal government? Since schools have “obscenity exemptions,” schools can expose children to sexually explicit material and deem it “age-appropriate” by their own standards. SIECUS considers teaching about masturbation, sexual orientation, and sexual intercourse to be “age appropriate” for five-year-olds. Parents have a duty to protect their children from harm. Schools that indoctrinate young students with comprehensive sexuality education usurp the authority of parents.

Conclusion

SIECUS “believes that all people have the right to comprehensive sexuality education that addresses the socio-cultural, biological, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sexuality by . . . exploring feelings, values and attitudes.”[34] Do five-year-olds have the right to digest sexually explicit material in school? Does SIECUS or the federal government have the right to impose their perverse and twisted values on your children? On that first day of kindergarten, each child anticipates learning about numbers and the alphabet. Let’s keep sex out of it.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on the Liberty Center for Law and Policy website. It is reprinted with permission.

REFERENCES:

[1] VA Code Ann. § 18.2-374.

[2] VA Code Ann. § 18.2-383.

[3] Judith Reisman and Mary E. McAlister, “‘Obscenity Exemptions’ for Educators Violate Children’s Civil Rights by Creating a Hostile Learning Environment” (executive summary, Liberty University School of Law, 2015), 1.

[4] “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade,” Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (2004): 5, http://www.siecus.org/_data/global/images/guidelines.pdf (accessed June 29, 2015).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 13.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 16.

[10] Ibid., 51-52.

[11] Ibid., 26.

[12] Ibid., 61.

[13] Ibid., 29.

[14] Planned Parenthood, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/educators/implementing-sex-education (accessed June 29, 2015).

[15] Ibid.

[16] Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley, It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing, Sex, and Sexual Health (Somerville, MA: Candlewick, 2009), 14-20.

[17] “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade,” 13.

[18] Judith Reisman, PhD, Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence: How America was Betrayed by the Lies and Sexual Crimes of a Mad “Scientist” (Orlando, FL: New Revolution Publishers, 2013), 133.

[19] Ibid., 135.

[20] The Kinsey Syndrome: How One Man Destroyed the Morality of America, DVD, Directed by Christian J. Pinto (American History Films, 2008).

[21] Reisman, Stolen Honor Stolen Innocence, 144.

[22] Ibid., 146-147.

[23] Ibid., 170.

[24] Ibid., 133.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Planned Parenthood, http://www.plannedparenthood.org/educators/implementing-sex-education (accessed June 29, 2015).

[27] Judith Reisman and Mary E. McAlister, “‘Obscenity Exemptions’ for Educators Violate Children’s Civil Rights by Creating a Hostile Learning Environment” (executive summary, Liberty University School of Law, 2015), 1.

[28] Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddler, and Families, http://main.zerotothree.org/site/PageServer? pagename=ter_key_brainFAQ (accessed July 2, 2015).

[29] Ibid.

[30] Judith Reisman, PhD, “Soft Porn” Plays Hardball: Its Tragic Effects on Women, Children, and the Family (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House Publishers, 1991), 17.

[31] Ibid., 18.

[32] Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 535 (1925).

[33] Terence P. Jeffrey, “Obama: Sex Ed for Kindergarteners is the ‘Right Thing to Do,’” CNS News, http://cnsnews. com/news/article/obama-sex-ed-kindergartners-right-thing-do (accessed July 2, 2015).

[34] Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade, 13.

Students Expect (and Demand) to Have Their Beliefs Confirmed by George C. Leef

July 10, 2015/in Culture War, Education/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

With so many more Americans going to college than in the past, you would think that anti-intellectualism would be a distant, rapidly fading memory. But you’d be mistaken, argue Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow, editors of a sharp new book The State of the American Mind.

“Instead of acquiring a richer and fuller knowledge of U.S. history and civics, American students and grown-ups display astounding ignorance of them, and their blindness is matched by their indifference to the problem,” write Bauerlein and Bellow.

Increasingly, Americans shrug at the idea of basic liberties but “accept restrictions on speech, freedom of association, rights to privacy, and religious conscience.”

The book they have put together shows the depth of these worrisome trends.

Each of the sixteen essays included is worthwhile. I am going to focus in particular on one that dovetails especially with the work of the Pope Center — Greg Lukianoff’s “How Colleges Create the ‘Expectation of Confirmation.’”

Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group that stands up for free speech on campus no matter who the speaker is or what the content of the message might be.

In his essay, he laments the fact that many college students have become so bold as to demand that school administrators silence speakers with whom they disagree and “protect” them from arguments contrary to their beliefs.

Or, it would be more accurate to say, “assume they disagree with,” because they refuse to allow the individuals to speak. Therefore, they are spared having to actually think of logical responses after listening to the speaker’s arguments. So is everyone else on campus, of course.

The “heckler’s veto” thus affects those would like to hear the speaker’s message just as much as those who think they’re entitled to silence perceived enemies.

Lukianoff presents quite a few instances, starting with one at Brown University, where Ray Kelly, former New York City police commissioner, had been scheduled to give a talk. A group of students managed to so disrupt the event that Kelly finally gave up and left the building. Afterward, a student who had been at the center of the disgraceful, anti-intellectual protest bragged, “They decided not to cancel the lecture, so we decided to cancel it for them.”

The intellectual climate on many campuses has been in decline for years, but it seems to be speeding up. Just a few years ago, the big new trend was the demand that lectures, books, and everything else on campus that might possibly offend anyone be scrubbed of ideas or images that might “trigger” a sensitive student. Lukianoff senses that we are moving further into this swamp as the “right not to be offended” morphs into “the right to have your views confirmed and not challenged.”

Although it occurred too recently to make it into the book, the Laura Kipnis furor is evidence for Lukianoff’s point. When a liberal feminist professor at Northwestern wrote an essay that took issue with the popular trope that college campuses are dangerous places for women and need more federal oversight, she was blasted by women students who couldn’t stand Professor Kipnis’ disagreement with their cherished beliefs.

The students did more than just wring their hands and write about their hurt feelings. They filed an official complaint against Kipnis with Northwestern’s “Title IX coordinator,” claiming that her writings had violated their rights. Thus began an amazing, Kafka-esque series of proceedings for Kipnis, which she details here.

My point is not that Title IX invites abuse, although it certainly does. My point is that we now have college students who think that it is proper to bring down the weight of federal regulation on the head of a professor simply for saying something that clashed with a view they expected to be reinforced.

It’s especially troubling that the students went after a member of the faculty. In the past, you would have expected students to at least show a bit of deference towards scholarly thought. “Maybe we should consider the possibility that Professor X has a point here….”

But now we find a new breed of know-it-all students who eagerly use the machinery of federal regulation to wreak vengeance on a professor for writing something they find disagreeable.

Lukianoff’s analysis of the reasons for this deplorable state of affairs centers on the way Americans increasingly “cluster” ideologically. That is, they tend to hear only opinions that coincide with theirs and, disturbingly, that phenomenon becomes more apparent as educational levels rise.

Citing Diana Mutz’s book Hearing the Other Side, Lukianoff notes that “people with a high school education or less are the most likely to engage in discussions along lines of political and philosophical disagreement, while those with higher levels of education are less likely.”

I suspect that observation is generally correct, but the effect is much more pronounced among leftist students. Students who have at least some sympathy for private property, free enterprise, and individual responsibility are very apt to encounter people, especially in the education system, who will argue against their beliefs. (“Denounce” would often be a more accurate word than “argue,” however.)

As Professor Michael Munger observed in this Pope Center piece last year, it is leftist students who are likely to get rewarded just for stating the “correct” beliefs. Conservative and libertarian students don’t develop that expectation of having their opinions validated and their egos stroked because they can hardly avoid intellectual combat. There is a huge ideological asymmetry here.

Moreover, leftist students themselves tend to cluster in courses where ideology is the primary focus and professors are prone to reinforcing their already formed views about the array of “social justice” topics.

As a means of countering this noxious trend of students who think that the point of college is to reinforce their existing beliefs, Lukianoff suggests that part of freshman orientation be devoted to “instruction in productive academic engagement.” That is, tell students “we fight offensive speech not with censorship but with contrary words.”

That is a superb idea. Orientations should be used for the salutary academic purpose of explaining to students what intellectual arguments are and how they’re conducted. An assignment might be to read that part of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty that deals with the importance of free speech and debate.

Schools should be just as interested in making sure that students know the rules of academic dispute as that they know the rules, say, about drinking on campus.

We hear again and again from college leaders that they want students to learn “critical thinking skills,” but evidence keeps mounting that the exact opposite is happening — that many students are learning how to make life miserable for those who dare to disagree with them.

Leaders who really care about the intellectual development of the students who come to their schools ought to pay attention to the alarm Greg Lukianoff is sounding.

This post first appeared at the Pope Center.

George C. Leef

George Leef is the former book review editor of The Freeman. He is director of research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.

Real Heroes: Homeschool Parents — Home Education Inspires a Love of Learning by Lawrence W. Reed

July 4, 2015/in Culture War, Education, Policy, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

The hero in this story is not any one person but rather nearly two million Americans — moms and dads who go the extra mile and who, often at great sacrifice to themselves, are rescuing children in a profoundly personal way. They are the homeschoolers, parents who give up time and income to directly supervise the education of their children. They teach, they arrange learning experiences within their home and elsewhere in cooperation with other parents, and they inspire an appetite for learning.

Of all the ingredients in the recipe for education, which one has the greatest potential to improve student performance?

No doubt the teachers unions would put higher salaries for their members at the top of the list, to which almost every school reformer might reply, “Been there, done that!” Teacher compensation has gone up in recent decades, while indicators of student performance have stagnated or fallen.

Other standard answers include smaller class size, a longer school year, more money for computers, or simply more money for fill-in-the-blank. The consensus of hundreds of studies over the past several years is that these factors exhibit either no positive correlation with better student performance or only a weak connection. On this important question, the verdict is in and it is definitive: The one ingredient that makes the most difference in how well and how much children learn is parental involvement. Homeschooling is the ultimate in parental involvement.

When parents take a personal interest in their children’s education, several things happen. The child gets a strong message that education is important to success in life; it isn’t something that parents dump in someone else’s lap. Caring, involved parents usually instill a love of learning in their children — a love that translates into a sense of pride and achievement as their students accumulate knowledge and put it to good use. As one might expect, time spent with books goes up and time wasted in the streets goes down, but there’s so much more to the homeschooling experience, as explained by Marianna Brashear, curriculum development manager at the Foundation for Economic Education:

Much time is spent not just in books, but seeing the world and participating in field trips with hands-on learning. There is so much knowledge that is gained through real-world exposure to a vast array of subjects far more lasting than reading out of a textbook. The word “schooling” in homeschooling is misleading because education takes place in and out of formal lessons. The biggest waste of time in schools comes not just from indoctrination, but also from “teaching to the test,” where kids memorize, regurgitate, and forget.

American parents were once almost universally regarded as the people most responsible for children’s education. Until the late 19th century, the home, the church, and a small nearby school were the primary centers of learning for the great majority of Americans.

In more recent times, many American parents have largely abdicated this responsibility, in favor of supposed “experts.” The context for this abdication is a compulsory system established to replace parental values with those preferred by the states and now, to an increasing degree, by the federal government. (It’s important to remember how much the current system was established as a reaction to immigrants, especially Catholics. See Robert Murphy’s “The Origins of the Public School” in the Freeman, July 1998.)

Twenty years ago, a report from Temple University in Pennsylvania revealed that nearly one in three parents was seriously disengaged from their children’s education. The Temple researchers found that about one-sixth of all students believed their parents didn’t care whether they earned good grades, and nearly one-third said their parents had no idea how they were doing in school. I can think of no reason to believe things have improved on this front in the two decades since.

Homeschooling is working — and working extraordinarily well — for the growing number of parents and children who choose it.

Teaching children at home isn’t for everyone. No one advocates that every parent try it. There are plenty of good schools — private and many public and charter schools, too — that are doing a better job than some parents could do for their own children. And I certainly praise those parents who may not homeschool but who see to it that their children get the most out of education, both in school and at home. Homeschooling almost always goes the extra mile, however, and it is working extraordinarily well for the growing number of parents and children who choose it.

This outcome is all the more remarkable when one considers that these dedicated parents must juggle teaching with all the other demands and chores of modern life. Also, they get little or nothing back from what they pay in taxes for a public system they don’t patronize. By not using the public system, they are in fact saving taxpayers at least $24 billion annually even as they pay taxes for it anyway.

In the early 1980s, fewer than 20,000 children were in homeschools. From 2003 through 2012, the number of American children 5 through 17 years old who were being homeschooled by their parents climbed by 61.8 percent to nearly 1.8 million, according to the US Department of Education. That’s likely a conservative estimate, but it equals 3.4 percent of the nation’s 52 million students in the 5–17 age group.

Parents who homeschool do so for a variety of reasons. Some want a strong moral or religious emphasis in their children’s education. Others are fleeing unsafe public schools or schools where discipline and academics have taken a backseat to fuzzy, feel-good, or politically correct dogma. Many homeschool parents complain about the pervasiveness in public schools of trendy instructional methods that border on pedagogical malpractice. Others value the flexibility to travel, often with their children for hands-on, educational purposes; the ability to customize curricula to each child’s needs and interests; and the potential to strengthen relationships within the family.

“When my wife and I first decided to homeschool our three children,” says Bradley Thompson, a political science professor who heads the Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism at Clemson University, “we did it for one reason: we wanted to give them a classical education — the kind that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson might have received when they were young boys.” He adds,

Within a couple of years, we added a second reason: we didn’t want our children exposed to the kind of socialization that goes on in both government and some private schools. Over time, however, we added a third reason: homeschooling became a way of life for our family, a way of life that was irreplaceable and beautiful. By the time our third child goes to college, we will have been homeschooling for 18 years. Those years have been, without question, the most important of my life.

Homeschool parents are fiercely protective of their constitutional right to educate their children. In early 1994, the House of Representatives voted to mandate that all teachers — including parents in the home — acquire state certification in the subjects they teach. A massive campaign of letters, phone calls, and faxes from homeschool parents produced one of the most stunning turnabouts in legislative history: by a vote of 424 to 1, the House reversed itself and then approved an amendment that affirmed the rights and independence of homeschool parents.

The certification issue deserves a comment: we have a national crisis in public education, where virtually every teacher is duly certified. There is no national crisis in home education.

Critics have long harbored a jaundiced view of parents who educate children at home. They argue that children need the guidance of professionals and the social interaction that comes from being with a class of others. Homeschooled children, these critics say, will be socially and academically stunted by the confines of the home. But the facts suggest otherwise.

Reports from state after state show homeschoolers scoring significantly better than the norm on college entrance examinations. Prestigious universities, including Harvard and Yale, accept homeschooled children eagerly and often. And there’s simply no evidence that homeschooled children (with a rare exception) make anything but fine, solid citizens who respect others and work hard as adults. Marianna Brashear informs me thus:

More and more early college and dual enrollment programs are available for rising 9th through 12th graders, and these programs, too, are quite eager to admit homeschoolers for their ability to take responsibility and to self-motivate, for their maturity, and for their determination to learn and succeed. For example, my 14-year-old daughter will be starting with a nearby technical institute in August and will receive high school and college credit simultaneously. She will be in a class with other high school students, and they are on track to receive AA degrees before graduating high school.

Homeschool parents approach their task in a variety of ways. While some discover texts and methods as they go, others plan their work well before they start, often assisted by other homeschoolers or associations that have sprung up to aid those who choose this option. Writing in the Freeman in May 2001, homeschool parent Chris Cardiff observed that because parents aren’t experts in every possible subject,

families band together in local homeschooling support groups. From within these voluntary associations springs a spontaneous educational order. An overabundance of services, knowledge, activities, collaboration, and social opportunities flourishes within these homeschooling communities.

My FEE colleague, B.K. Marcus, also a homeschool parent, identifies this natural “socialization” as a critically important point:

Homeschooling produces communities and participates in a division of labor. Homeschooling is social and cooperative, contrary to the stereotype of the overprotected child under the stern watch of narrow-minded parents. Traditionally schooled kids show far fewer social skills outside their segregated age groups.

A quick Internet search reveals thousands of cooperative ventures for and between homeschoolers. In Yahoo Groups alone, as of June 2015, about 6,300 results pop up when you search for the keyword “homeschool.” More than 800 show up in Google Groups. Facebook is another option for locating a plethora of local, regional, and national homeschool groups, support groups, events, co-ops, and communities.

In every other walk of life, Americans traditionally regard as heroes the men and women who meet challenges head-on, who go against the grain and persevere to bring a dream to fruition. At a time when more troubles and shortcomings plague education and educational heroes are too few in number, recognizing the homeschool champions in our midst may be both long overdue and highly instructive.

Common to every homeschool parent is the belief that the education of their children is too important to hand over to someone else. Hallelujah for that!

For further information, see:

National Home Education Research Institute
Institute of Education Sciences’ Digest of Education Statistics
“1,733,000 Homeschooled Children Up 61.8% in 10 Years” by Terrence P. Jeffrey
“Public School Successes, Home School Failures” by Dennis L. Peterson
“Toward an Educational Renaissance” by Chris Cardiff
“Homeschooling: The Public Schools’ Invasive Species” by Wendy McElroy
“Opposition to Common Core Spurs Jump in Homeschooling” from Fox News
“Homeschooling Goes Mainstream” by Milton Gaither in EducationNext
“The Dramatic Rise of Homeschooling: Hope for American Education” by Russ Hepler in The Federalist Papers Project
Homeschool Laws by State

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of FEE in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s.

EDITORS NOTE: Each week, Mr. Reed will relate the stories of people whose choices and actions make them heroes. See the table of contents for previous installments.