Friday, May 19, 2006

OK to insult Christians at the University of Oregon

The usual double standards

The Insurgent didn't violate any student government or University rules by publishing material many Christians considered offensive in its March issue, according to an ASUO ruling on the most recent grievance, filed jointly by 91 students against the publication. A new coalition, Students of Faith, filed the grievance May 5, saying the publication's content violated three University policies and was "discriminatory, knowingly false, slanderous and egregious," according to the grievance.

David Goward, ASUO programs administrator, ruled in favor of The Insurgent on all three allegations and said student free speech is protected, even when it involves religious ideas or concepts, according to his ruling Monday. "Furthermore, there are no grounds for demanding an apology from the Student Insurgent," according to the ruling, which reinforced an earlier decision in favor of The Insurgent after University student Zachary White filed a grievance against the publication over the same issue.

Students of Faith member and University junior Jethro Higgins said the group members expected to lose but wanted to cover their bases before taking a complaint to the University administration. "We want to make sure the University isn't using public funds to support hate speech," he said. "They have the right to say whatever they want, but I don't want to have to pay for it."

Members of The Insurgent agree with the ASUO ruling. "If you start suspending publications because you don't like what they said, then that leads to the dictatorship and kind of things Russia used to do that we hated so much, supposedly," said Don Goldman, contributor to The Insurgent.

Higgins said Students of Faith is well organized, has lots of community support and won't go away.

Source






BRITISH TEACHERS NOW REJECT CRAZY "MAINSTREAMING" FOR PROBLEM PUPILS

The policy of educating children with special needs in mainstream schools has failed and must be changed immediately, the country's biggest teaching union said yesterday. The National Union of Teachers dramatically reversed decades of support for "inclusion" and demanded a halt to the closure of special schools. It called on the Government to carry out "an urgent review of inclusion in policy and practice". The union issued a report by academics at Cambridge University, which suggested that inclusion was harming children with special needs, undermining the education of others and leaving teachers exhausted as they struggled to cope with severe behavioural and medical conditions.

John MacBeath, one of the authors, described inclusion "as a form of abuse" for some children, who were placed in "totally inappropriate" schools where they inevitably failed. Pupils with special needs were nine times more likely to be expelled and teachers were leaving the profession because they could not cope with the pressure of working with them. Teachers were being given responsibility for tasks such as clearing out tracheotomy tubes, changing nappies and managing children prone to harming themselves in outbursts of extreme violence.

Other pupils lost out as staff devoted excessive time to special needs children. Many students witnessed highly disturbing behaviour as special needs pupils reacted in frustration and anger to their surroundings. Teachers often delegated responsibility for special needs pupils to classroom assistants. Parents felt betrayed as their children's educational needs went unmet and the children sunk into a spiral of misbehaviour that often ended in expulsion. Parents of other children were unhappy at the repeated disruptions to their education.

Steve Sinnott, the union's general secretary, said that "inclusion has failed many children". Teachers supported the idea in principle, but felt let down by the practice. He said: "It demonstrates very clearly the failures in policy and practice in our education system and in our schools."

The Cambridge researchers interviewed teachers, children and parents at 20 schools in seven local authorites. They concluded that the reality of inclusion was very far from the "world of fine intentions" inhabited by policymakers. "While there are many examples of social benefits both for children with special needs and their peers, there is much less positive evidence that learning needs are being met across the whole spectrum of ability," the report said.

But Lord Adonis, the Schools Minister, said: "Children should be taught in mainstream schools where this is what their parents want and it is not incompatible with the efficient education of other children." David Willetts, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: "This report should lead the Government to a radical rethink on its inclusion policy."

Source






WIDESPREAD STUDENT DISSATISFACTION WITH TERTIARY COLLEGES

According to a study published by the U.S. Department of Education, as many as 60 percent of American college students attend more than one school before they graduate with a Bachelor's degree. The college transfer rate has been rising steadily for the last two decades, but in recent years, admissions officers have seen an explosion in transfer applications - and they say the reasons are clear.

Miranda Spradlin is a second-year student at New York University, where she is studying communications and public relations. She grew up in California, but says she decided to go to school in New York, because she wanted something different. After just two months here, though, she started to feel that the move may have been a mistake. "I just wasn't happy with NYU," Spradlin says as she sits in a coffee shop after a morning of classes. "Despite the fact that they don't have a campus, they said 'we make up for it; we're still a community; you see students all the time.' And I really didn't get that. I'd go out on the weekends, and I'd be with 30-year-old men at the bars that knew college girls were going to be there and stuff, and it just wasn't very appealing."

She stuck it out for the year, but when she found she still was not happy at the start of her second year at NYU, Miranda Spradlin decided to transfer. She has applied to three schools in the state of California's university system. "They're much more social schools, much more community-oriented," she says. "I like the idea of having Greek Life (i.e. fraternities and sororities) - not necessarily to be in a sorority, but just because it kind of brings the students together. I like the idea of having sports teams, because it does the same thing. And they're closer to home."

Homesickness and a general dissatisfaction with their social lives are two big reasons college students transfer -- but they are not the only reasons. Many switch schools because they can no longer afford to stay where they are. And according to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly two-thirds of college students who transfer these days say they are doing it because they want a more prestigious degree, or because they want an educational program that is not offered at the school they first entered.

Nicholas Sharac

That is the case with Nicholas Sharac, who is finishing his first year at Fordham University. The school has a tightly-defined core curriculum that requires students to take a number of Humanities courses. But Sharac says he has decided he wants to concentrate on the sciences. "In the beginning, when I first came to college, I was happy with the core (curriculum), because it enabled me to not have to pick a path, as far as education goes," he says. "But now that I want to get into biology and more into science courses, I don't really feel the need to learn about theology, or spend time on courses that don't really have to do with what I want to do."

Sharac says he is not surprised to learn so many college students choose to transfer. He says when you are in high school, you do not always know what you like, or what you are good at - and sometimes you are forced to make a decision about college before you really understand who you are. "You can't really know how you're going to be doing or what you're going to be thinking in college, when you're in high school," Sharac says. "So the way high school is set up now, you can't really make a great decision as far as college goes. In my case, high school didn't really motivate me to pick any direction at all. So that's kind of why I couldn't pick a direction in high school."

Indeed, that may be why some students start out at a two-year community college, where they get an Associate's degree, and then transfer to a four-year institution, to get their Bachelor's. But teenaged aimlessness is not a new thing - and by itself, it cannot explain the explosive increase in college transfer rates. Lehigh University, for example, has seen the number of transfer applications increase by 30 percent in the last three years, according to Eric Kaplan, Director of Admissions at Lehigh.

Eric Kaplan

Kaplan says the transfer rate may be up because colleges are doing a much better job of marketing themselves - and recent changes in technology have helped them do that. "There are lots of resources that are devoted to marketing," he says, "Either through institutional print pieces or through websites - which is a great example of something that in the mid 1990s students didn't have access to, that now are one of the key sources of information for high school students."

But something else may also be at work. The average cost of tuition and housing at a private university in the United States has gone up 40% in the last five years. At NYU - where Miranda Spradlin goes to school - it costs more than $43,000 a year to get a Bachelor's degree. "My parents are paying for college," she says with conviction, "And I think it's unfair to them for me to be somewhere that I don't want to be, and they're spending all this money - you know, that's just dumb."

In this sense, a college education may have become just another commodity for America's consumer-savvy young adults - who are not willing to pay good money for a jacket. a pair of shoes. or an education that does not suit them.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"


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