By Paul Boyce

One of the main stressors of teaching is the sheer amount of testing. Students are tested as frequently as twice per month and an average of once per month.

While testing has been around for decades, its increased involvement returned in 2002. As a result of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), teachers are “teaching to test.” These tests were designed to standardize the process and track progress. Schools must make accommodations for children failing to make progress.

There was a slight change to the law under the Obama administration. Passed in December 2015, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) gives greater control to states. However, children are still consistently tested through grades three to eight for literacy and math. According to Harvard professor Daniel Koretz, ESSA does little to relieve the pressure of testing.

Why is testing bad? ...

Children being made to eat vegetarian food for lunch in schools in Britain and France, and not allowed meat or fish, raises some serious questions about freedom of choice and possible dietary deficiencies.

By Kerry McDonald

With college classes underway for the fall semester, parents may worry about how their children will navigate campus life, balance academics and social pressures, and find their pathway to a meaningful career. While parents of college students have long shared these common worries, they now confront new concerns.

The number of college students experiencing mental health issues has soared, with survey findings from the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors suggesting that 41 percent of college students are anxious and 36 percent are depressed...

By Katy Gambella

As a manager for a job placement company, I oversee a lot of talent searches for entry/junior employees.

This means I get to interact with a lot of young professionals and have a front-row seat for one of the most exciting (and often overwhelming) times for burgeoning professionals: the job search.

As you can imagine, I’ve seen some really interesting things. Like, reality television interesting. Some of it is beautiful and inspiring and gives me hope for the future of freedom. And some of it…well…it makes me want to bang my head against a wall...

A school in the UK gave their teenage English students the task of writing a suicide note in the context of an exercise to explore suicidal feelings, prompting one “genuinely shocked” parent to complain.

By Jeffrey A. Tucker

The latest survey of small business contains a surprise. Or maybe it is not a surprise if you are or know a small business owner. Over the last six years, the concerns of taxes and regulations are being eclipsed by a new number-one concern: the lack of quality in the workforce.

Meanwhile, college enrollment is booming (50% to almost 70% in 30 years) but evidently it’s not helping to convince employers that these kids can get the job done. Indeed, the mass handing out of college degrees could have a perverse effect on work ethic: I’ve got my paper so you have to pay me just for being my awesome self!...

By Sarah Surette

How could trust revolutionize education?

Peter Gray defines unschooling in his book Free to Learn, as “the category of home-based education most compatible with trustful parenting.” In this way, the parent is placing trust in the abilities and instincts of the child instead of allowing outside authorities to dictate what, where, when and how to learn.

Unschooling is a child-led, deadline-free and respect-centered method of parenting.

But unschooling is NOT passive...

According to a new poll by College Pulse, a majority of conservative students are hiding their political views in the classroom. The survey asked students to respond to the following question: “Have you ever withheld your political views in class for fear that your grades would suffer?”

Police and teachers have been criticised for locking school gates to schoolchildren who protested a new 'gender neutral' uniform policy this morning, leaving pupils to wander the streets of a Sussex town.

Angry pupils and parents protested outside the gates of Priory School in Lewes over the clothing policy for the new school year.

But teachers and Sussex Police officers locked the gates on pupils and refused admittance to girls in skirts - and according to one eyewitness officers were actually involved in selecting which students could enter and which would be barred.

By Kerry McDonald

Whenever my children express an interest in economics or are curious about the ideals of freedom and responsibility, I can barely contain my excitement. It wasn’t until college that I discovered, and fell in love with, economics, and it wasn’t until much later that I understood liberty as a life philosophy.

Fortunately, I can avoid stifling their budding interest by drawing demand curves or quoting Hayek and Hazlitt (though I’ve been known to do both!) and turn to some outstanding resources just for kids. Designed to introduce economic principles and the foundations of a free society to young children, these tools are interesting, engaging, and easy-to-understand—for children and adults alike!...

With Remainers denouncing Eton-educated Johnson as a private-school elitist, a question from the school’s 2011 entrance exam surfaced online on Tuesday. Some commenters say it gives a frightening insight into the thought processes of the leaders educated at Eton.

“The year is 2040,” 13-year-old boys competing for the King’s Scholarship were asked. “There have been riots in the streets of London after Britain has run out of petrol because of an oil crisis in the Middle East. Protesters have attacked public buildings. Several policemen have died. Consequently, the Government has deployed the Army to curb the protests. After two days the protests have been stopped but twenty-five protesters have been killed by the Army.”

“You are the Prime Minister. Write the script for a speech to be broadcast to the nation in which you explain why employing the Army against violent protesters was the only option available to you and one which was both necessary and moral.”

More schools in England are setting up food banks to help feed their pupils' families, according to the biggest school governors' organisation.

The National Governance Association's annual survey found 8% of governors were in schools which had food banks - up from 7% last year.

The highest proportion were in the North East - where 13% of governors were in schools with a food bank.

Heads' leader Geoff Barton said schools faced "rising levels of poverty".

"It is a shameful situation in a country which is among the wealthiest in the world," said Mr Barton, leader of the ASCL head teachers' union.

By Mayukh Saha

Children are wired 24/7 to their parents even when they don’t seem to be. And the least the parents can do, within the little time that they allow their children, is to be attentive to their needs and desires.

By such constant inattention, are we inadvertently conveying the message to children that a smartphone is more interesting?

By Brittany Hunter

Twelve-year-old Lucie Wise couldn’t wait to open her own business. On three separate occasions, she had accompanied her mother to the Children’s Entrepreneur Market—an expo of child-run businesses hosted annually by the Utah nonprofit Libertas Institute—dreaming of the day she could set up her own booth and sell her wares to curious passersby.

Like Lucie, many children are coming up with original ideas for products and services, bringing them to life, paying for booth space, and trying their luck in the marketplace. While the Children’s Market is intended to teach children to love entrepreneurship, one thing it isn’t supposed to do is crush their spirit with the harsh realities of government overreach.

But are they exempt from taxes?...

By Karen Roehr-Brackin, University of Essex and Angela Tellier, University of Essex

People often assume that children learn new languages easily and without effort, regardless of the situation they find themselves in. But is it really true that children soak up language like sponges?

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” — H. L. Mencken

The U.S. government is working hard to destabilize the nation.

No, this is not another conspiracy theory.

Although it is certainly not far-fetched to suggest that the government might be engaged in nefarious activities that run counter to the best interests of the American people, doing so will likely brand me a domestic terrorist under the FBI’s new classification system.

Observe for yourself what is happening right before our eyes.

By B.N. Frank

Reports about phone bans in schools in the U.S. and around the world aren’t new, and many of the comments posted with this news story mention that.

It’s still good news and many of the kids interviewed at this school seem to be embracing as well as thriving from the new policy...

By Daniel J. Boudreaux

As long as the reality of human existence remains on the imperfect side of paradise — mired in scarcity, often unpredictable, and always carrying at least a small risk of calamity for each individual as well as for groups — some people will complain about the state of reality. Indeed, as human welfare improves, such complaints grow more frequent and fervent. If nearly everyone’s life is miserable, and if such misery is all that we know and remember, we accept misery as an unalterable condition of existence, much as we accept as unalterable our inability to fly by flapping our arms.

But as the masses have become materially more prosperous, the possibility of even greater prosperity has become more evident. And so any shortfall of the masses’ current prosperity from what can be imagined or plausibly foreseen strikes many as an intolerable condition that should be remedied forthwith.

By Paul Boyce

The public education system we currently know has been around for more than 150 years. However, the basic schooling model remains the same. Roughly 20 to 30 kids of the same age are stuffed into a classroom and taught by one teacher.

Even though the curricula have developed, the essence has stayed the same. Children are still taught in a standardized and industrialized way. As with anything that comes from centralized control, it is highly inefficient, bureaucratic, and wasteful...

Five years ago, a group of faculty members at the University of California-Irvine decided to “out” themselves. At the large research university, where more than half of students are the first in their families to go to college, these faculty would proudly say: Us, too.

By Kerry McDonald

Plans for the Boston Public Library, the nation’s second-oldest public library, were approved in 1852, the same year Massachusetts passed the country’s first compulsory schooling law. Both public libraries and public schools are funded through taxation and both are “free” to access, but the similarities end there. The main difference between public libraries and public schools is the level of coercion and state power that public schooling wields...

By Aaron Kesel

A recent article in CNN tells the tale of teens whose friends think they are spying on their phone conversations because they work for the National Security Agency (NSA) at the complex at Fort Meade in Maryland.

CNN expresses that three 18-year-old teens who graduated from high schools in Maryland — Summer, Brianna and Simon — are among more than 150 high schoolers in a work study program at the NSA. These students are then given TS/SCI or Top Secret security clearance access to U.S. secrets...

By Simon Black, Sovereign Man

Welcome to our Friday roll up, where we highlight the most absurd and concerning stories we are following this week.

Careful what you say about your kid’s public school curriculum.

We’ve moved beyond gender-neutral pronouns and triggering micro-aggressions. Now just expressing any old opinion offends people.

Apparently, you can’t do that in the USA, anymore. If you offend someone with constructive criticism, they turn around and sue you...

By Chloe Anagnos

The student loan crisis has recently played an important role in the Democratic presidential debates, with Democratic candidates pushing for solutions that look a lot like the policies that put us here in the first place. But as they pursue an agenda that would essentially reward people for owing money, reports surfaced showing that many are taking out nearly half a million dollars in student loans. What’s worse, many expect the government will do something to help them...

How does it make any sense to bus hundreds of children into buildings across the Country, keep them there for eight hours a day, remove all forms of defense and post signs stating that everyone inside is unarmed and defenseless? Well, New York Democrats have gone one step further. They have made it law in New York that those teachers and children never have the option of self-defense while in school. New York law-makers have put in place an ironclad barrier preventing school staff from being able to protect themselves and our kids.

Milton Friedman was one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring champions of individual liberty. He was the 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, and in this 1999 interview he spoke about the need for an internet currency that couldn't be tracked.

By Patricia Burke

Many groups are promoting the use of Virtual Reality as a treatment strategy for pain patients. For example, VR is promoted as an alternative to opiates, “because it’s very powerful with no side effects.” However, Virtual Reality stops the brain from processing pain because it overrides full-body and full sensory system intelligence and integration...

Teenagers report higher levels of stress than adults, and cite school as the highest contributing factor, according to the American Psychological Association’s annual report. A summary from 2013 concluded that while stress among Americans was not new, “what’s troubling is the stress outlook for teens in the United States.”

In response, recently some schools have turned to mindfulness-based programs as a way to alleviate stress among their students. These programs could benefit from more research into what activities students find most useful...

By Kelly Rose, Teesside University

There are more than 91m school children worldwide now defined as living with obesity – and the UK is in the top 20 countries for obesity levels. In the UK, the obesity rate for children doubles during primary school years – and then increases again in secondary school.

This is in part because teenagers in the UK consume poor quality diets, low in nutrients and high in processed foods...

By Kerry McDonald

Teenagers are able to accomplish remarkable things when given freedom and opportunity. Instead, our culture systematically underestimates teenagers, coddling them like toddlers, confining them to ever more schooling, and disconnecting them from the adult world they will soon enter...

Google has recently (June 2019) used their power to manipulate public opinion in favor of the Pro Vaccine Argument!

The Pentagon is desperate. Far too many millennials are criminals, so luring them in to become the latest crop of bullet stoppers for the state is a nonstarter. -- Solution? Recruit 16 year olds. Most have yet graduated to petty and violent crime, although a lot of them are in video game training for a future of violence and self-destructive stupidity.

By Matt Agorist

Luzerne County, PA — As TFTP reported this week, Wyoming Valley West School District parents, whose school lunch accounts were delinquent, received a disturbing letter threatening to have their children kidnapped by Child and Youth Services if they don’t pay their past due balances. The letter garnered national attention and drew the ire of many, including a millionaire CEO who offered to pay these past due balances. In an infuriating move, however, the school board rejected his offer and is opting for stealing the kids instead...

“Let’s be clear: This is overt political propaganda being scooped into the most capable students minds under the guise of education. Even if they don’t accept its messages entirely, studying this wastes time that young people deserve to be spending getting actually educated.”

Something most parents don’t want to hear from their teenager: I am not prepared to be an adult, and it’s your fault.

Nearly all parents (97%) in a new national poll say they are helping their teen become more independent by using strategies like allowing them to make more choices (86%), pushing them to handle things themselves (74%) and no longer doing things for them (65%).

Despite this, one quarter of parents surveyed say they are the main barrier to their teen’s independence by not taking the time or effort to give their teen more responsibility according to a new poll...

A new “inclusive language guide” compiled by Colorado State University asserts that the word “America” is “non-inclusive” and should be avoided.

By Emma Fiala

A school district in Pennsylvania has warned parents that their children could end up in foster care if overdue school lunch bills aren’t paid.

About 1,000 parents in the Wyoming Valley West School District received letters outlining the new policy, leading to complaints from parents and the community...

By Kerry McDonald

At the heart of debates around education freedom and school choice is the subtle but sinister sentiment that parents can’t be trusted. They are too busy, too poor, or too ignorant to make the right decisions for their kids, and others know better how to raise and educate children. Never mind that parents have successfully cared for and educated their children for millennia, ensuring the ongoing survival and continued success of our species...

Today’s true tragedy is that most people think what we see today has always been so. As such, today’s Americans accept behavior that our parents and grandparents never would have accepted.

By B.N. Frank

There’s a lot of information and misinformation being reported about health risks from exposure to 5G technology. So if you can only remember one thing about 5G and health risks, this would be it: The telecom industry has provided NO scientific evidence that 5G is safe.

If you can remember two things: There is research that says it IS NOT safe...

“Over the past four decades our corrupt and deceitful corporate-owned mainstream media, in cooperation with feminists and women's groups, have very effectively conditioned the public with propaganda with respect to how we view men. The only women who know the truth about female sexual predators are the mothers of the male children who have been sexually molested by a female predator. Remember that for every video clip you see about a female committing a sex related crime, there's a hundred news articles for which a video of a female predator was never made. This documentary dispels the belief that only men are capable of sexual exploitation of children”. (3.00 - 3.48)

By Kerry McDonald

Most of us spent at least 15,000 hours of our childhood and adolescence being schooled before we turned 18. Now in adulthood, we may need to unlearn some of what we were taught and embrace self-education for career success and personal fulfillment.

Much of what we learned in school was dictated by others, disconnected from our own passions and proclivities. We were taught what to learn, and we learned to be taught. With self-education, we take back control of our own learning, exploring topics and skills that matter to us, free from coercion...

By Nwachukwu Egbunike

A group of students and alumni linked to the privately-owned Madonna University in the Niger Delta, Nigeria, risk up to seven years in jail over social media posts denouncing poor conditions and mistreatment of students and staff at the university...

Satire often demonstrates how our real-world so-called "news," so-called "political leadership," and so-called "entertainment" help indoctrinate Americans to accept dictatorial government. Americans' loss of promised rights are real, forever lie-started and illegal Wars of Aggression are real, and exponential debt is real, and the challenge of US .01% "leadership" is to convince the American public to embrace these slave conditions as "necessary" for public safety.

Read on to see this is the point of so much of what we're given to watch for "public programming."

By Logan Smith

Graduation season has once again concluded, and 1.9 million Americans have left college behind and graduated with a bachelor’s degree. The social and cultural pressures to attend college are high, and the financial expense to do so is just as acute. Major presidential candidates gin up their base by empathetically promising to absolve the self-inflicted financial troubles of student loans, blissfully punishing those who made sound financial college decisions. While presidential candidates are showcasing the victims of so-called nefarious student loans, celebrities are bribing university officials with millions of dollars simply to grant their children admission to state schools...

By Shane Trejo

The California legislature has approved legislation that will be signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to set up an educational system that will use big data to track children from “cradle to career.”

Senate Bill 75 was approved by a vote of 31-7 in the Senate and 62-14 in the Assembly. It will create a “longitudinal” data system that profiles and manipulates pupils from the earliest of ages so they are guided into a career determined by the central planners...

By John Anderer

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — High school music courses frequently fall victim to budget cuts due to the general belief that other subjects, such as math or history, are more important to students’ education. However, a new study performed at the University of British Columbia finds that high schoolers enrolled in at least one musical course score significantly higher than their non-musical peers on English, math, and science exams...

By Neve Spicer

Child-led free play is unstructured time where children set the rules and call the shots. It’s a moment for them to navigate social interaction and explore the world on their own terms and at their own pace. It’s nothing new. In fact, for most parents, their childhood days were filled with it. Unstructured, self-led play was the cultural norm.

Not any more...