Articles

It used to be thought that college was where you went to open your mind, explore ideas and, in the words of Robert Maynard Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, “be freed from the prison-house of … class, race, time, place [and] background.”

As a child I knew my grandfather was different. Grandpapa had been a sharecropper in southern Indiana. He had worked most of his adult life raising corn and pigs. His hands were big and callused. He stooped when he walked and the skin on his neck and face was scarred. His earlobes were long, stretched and fused down low at the back of his jawbone. His eyes seemed to be a bit elongated in their sockets. He was different because he looked different. You see, when he was a young child he had played with matches and caught his clothes on fire. His facial disfigurement was the price he paid for the bad judgment of a toddler.

A few years ago, I wrote a classroom resource about ecology for elementary and middle school kids. It covered all the territory you’d expect—biomes, habitats, food chains, etc. But the publisher insisted on a conspicuous omission. No mention could be made of one of the major biologists who pioneered ecology. That biologist was Charles Darwin.

Are charter schools helping to resegregate public schools? A just-released study states flatly that they are.

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance who worked at the local college where I was teaching had trouble sending and receiving emails. She couldn’t, for the life of her, figure out why. Then an IT administrator clued her in: Her first name—Gay—triggered the school’s Internet filters. They were set to block any references to homosexuality, gender identity, etc.

As a young newspaper reporter in Texas, I covered my fair share of speeches. The thrill of hearing an important person give carefully prepared remarks wore off quickly. So I got in the habit of turning away from the speaker and watching the crowd.

The United States Justice Department recently struck a blow against bullying behavior. Officials there reversed a decade-old policy and asked to intervene in a harassment suit brought by a gay youth.

Earlier this month, hundreds of educators, parents and students gathered at the Educating Youth of Color Summit in Colorado Springs, Colo. That the state’s 4th Judicial District sponsored the event was no accident.

Texas is in the throes of rewriting the curriculum standards for its K-12 textbooks. And that is something to be very, very worried about.

Every year around Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the news media start quoting his “I Have A Dream” speech. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a great speech – certainly one of the best ever given in the cause of civil rights.