Reading Time: 6 minutes Keeping kids isolated from viewpoints you disagree with is a parenting strategy that never works. A better one is to teach them how to recognize propaganda and toxic memes when they see them.
education
Posted inParenting & Family
When evolution is a bad word
Reading Time: 6 minutes (Part 1 | Part 3) Quick recap. My 9-year-old daughter won a national Evolution and Art contest. Her school’s assistant principal, Ms. Warner, said the principal would interview her about it on the school’s morning news program. But they wouldn’t be calling it an Evolution and Art contest, just an “Art” contest – because evolution […]
Posted inCulture
Accepting the reality of a less literate age
Reading Time: 5 minutes It’s hard to deny, and harder to accept, that reading and writing are in massive decline. But pull back for a wider view and the written word can be seen as a short-term innovation— and our current trend as a return to our oldest medium.
Posted inReligious News
Once again, the Satanic Temple reminds Christians about the wall of separation
Reading Time: 10 minutes This past week, an Oklahoma school board rejected a Catholic church’s application for a taxpayer-funded charter school, all because another Catholic warned them that the leaders of the Satanic Temple exist—and that they delight in taking advantage of the exact same funding and laws that Christians do. Therefore, if Oklahoma gave funding to Catholics for […]
Posted inStrange Customs with Sasha Sagan
Sarafina El-Badry Nance—The Grasp
Sasha Sagan talks to astrophysicist SARAFINA EL-BADRY NANCE and neuroscientist MARY HELEN IMMORDINO-YANG about the strange process of bringing external reality into our minds.
Posted inEducation
Want to protect secular democracy? Speak up at school board meetings
Reading Time: 3 minutes You don’t have to run for Congress to help protect our secular democracy. It’s at the level of your local school board that the Christian nationalist agenda is making its most influential stand. So it’s at public meetings of those school boards that our voices are most desperately needed.
Posted inEducation
Why we need public school: Pluralism is how progress happens
Reading Time: 4 minutes [Previous: What rights do parents have over their children’s education?] The battle over public schools is a clash of values. There’s no such thing as neutral or value-free education. Every choice about what to present or what to omit from the classroom carries ideological weight. That’s why red-state politicians want to present one version of […]
Posted inParenting & Family
What rights do parents have over their children’s education?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Religious conservatives want to impose heavy-handed censorship on public schools. We should reject this, but how much control should parents have over what is taught?
Posted inEducation
Draft bill bans everything but ‘scientific fact’ in Montana’s science classes
Reading Time: 2 minutes A draft bill in Montana sponsored by first-term Republican State Sen. Daniel Emrich would effectively destroy science classes throughout the state by requiring them to teach “scientific fact”… and nothing else. Which is the sort of thing you’d propose only if you didn’t understand the meaning of scientific “theory.” LC 2215 claims that “a scientific […]
Posted inEducation
Why did a Texas community college donate land to a private Christian school?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Why did the taxpayer-funded Weatherford College, a community college in Texas, donate “39 acres” of land, six buildings, and a “large parking lot” to a private Christian institution? That’s the question the Freedom From Religion Foundation wants to know because they believe that transfer is unconstitutional. Over a year ago, Weatherford College donated its entire […]