Education
Are fundamentalist religious schools retarding America’s future?
Reading Time: 5 minutes After firmly resisting New York state oversight for years, a private fundamentalist Hasidic Jewish academy in Long Island—one of the state’s largest schools—finally in 2019 agreed to give standardized state tests in reading and math to more than 1,000 students. Every single s
Disinviting bigoted campus speakers blocks bigotry, not free speech
Reading Time: 6 minutes When American university and college students try to deny “free speech” platforms to arch-conservative opinion leaders they consider dangerous purveyors of bigotry, or just shout them down, right-wing complaints of suppression are swift and virulent. The constant trope is tha
Grove City College’s anti-‘woke’ report contradicts its stated Christian values
Reading Time: 14 minutes Grove City College is your typical conservative Christian college, but I’m not your typical alumna. Unlike my fellow students, I’m an atheist, and I formed this identity inside Grove City’s faith-based Pennsylvania bubble. Since graduating in May of 2018, I’ve done my best t
Why aren’t schools robustly teaching critical thinking? No time
Reading Time: 5 minutes American public schools are teaching our kids too much and too little simultaneously. It’s too much what to think and not enough how—like how to think critically, analytically, about all the factual information they’re being taught. The critical “how” responsibility of educat
Yet another study found that sex education reduces teen pregnancies
Reading Time: 3 minutes Educating kids about sex is far better than pretending they won’t have it before marriage
School prayer is already legal. So why are evangelicals still pushing it?
Reading Time: 4 minutes Although as a nontheist Democrat I’m somewhat of a religious and political outlier in my adopted ruby-red state, South Dakota, I’m proud of how reasonable some of its religiously conservative, Trumpian leaders can sometimes be. Like when it comes to school prayer. My latest r
How a critical thinking deficit aids fascism…and religion
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why do so many Americans embrace such outlandish and patently false ideas these days? Partly because they were never taught critical-thinking skills.