Education

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have publicly declared that they will aggressively pressure schools and the government to use the Common Core education standards.  In an open letter to authorities, the Gates Foundation say: “Far too many districts report that identifying or developing Common Core-aligned materials is a challenge, meaning that teachers spend their time adapting or creating curriculum, developing lessons, and searching for supplemental materials”.

Students on liberal arts college campuses may have just jumped the shark for special-snowflakedness. As The Week reports, students at Oberlin College are asking the school to put academics on the back burner so they can better turn their attention to activism.

There’s an interesting discussion going on in the comments threads about wages, education, employment, and so forth. Several people are pointing out (correctly) that our society demeans the trades, wrongly, and discourages people who would do well in them from taking them up. A typical comment:

But beyond this, our education system demeans manual labor and respectable professions. Plumbers, electricians, machinists, etc. are all well-paid and respectable professions, but we are churning out people that lump those in with working in fast food.

Parents across the U.S. are rejecting Common Core, as more and more students and parents are opting-out of their ridiculous program en masse. Over half a million school-aged children opted out of Common Core standardized testing last year, and that number is rapidly increasing.

Parents in Canada who refuse to allow their kids to be vaccinated will be forced to attend a mandatory ‘vaccine class’ on ‘immunization facts’, according to new legislation being proposed by Ontario lawmakers.  Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins tabled a bill that would force parents to complete an “educational session” before the parents made their final decision on whether or not to vaccinate their children. If they do not attend the class, they will be forced to have their kids vaccinated.