Education

Go to college, study hard, get a good paying job - that's the mantra heard by most students across America as they wind down their high school careers.

No, this is not from The Onion.

In an apparent attempt to make math more relevant to the young people of Alabama, a teacher at Burns Middle School in Mobile, required eighth-graders to take a math quiz that drew complaints from parents about inappropriate themes and racist overtones.

As The Washington Post reports, nearly 900 students are enrolled at Burns Middle School, about 50 percent of them black and 40 percent white, according to state data. Forty-three percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Israel are teaching young school children how to use weapons and suppress protestors, allowing the Israeli police force into schools to teach kindergarten kids.  According to Haaretz newspaper, dozens of preschoolers took part in the country’s first ‘learn to kill’ lessons, which were supervised by police and rescue officers. The kids were given basic training lessons on how to shoot using plastic rifles and taught anti-riot methods used by the Israeli military.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

Short, intense directed apprenticeships that teach students how to learn on their own to mastery are the future of higher education.

The University of Chicago was founded in 1896 with the support of John D. Rockefeller in order to give the Baptists a worthy rival to the Ivy League’s prestigious East Coast universities like Harvard and Yale, not to mention England’s ancient Cambridge and Oxford. It was fitting, then, that the school was built in an ivy-strewn neo-Gothic style, using a special limestone that Rockefeller himself picked out to age in appearance much more quickly than normal rock.