If you want to witness the most blatantly un-Constitutional and un-American laws at work than just take a walk through your local schools. They are currently under the control of the federal government.

Illinois School District 126, covering Alsip, Hazelgreen and Oak Lawn, has defended its choice to assign summer reading to 12- and 13-year-olds that is replete with harsh profanity and references to teen sex (even teen sex with adults).

Parents stress more than ever over where the kid gets accepted.

Irvine, CA--A federal judge recently struck down as unconstitutional a California bill that would have criminalized selling or renting “excessively violent” video games to minors. A spokesman for Calif. state Sen. Leland Yee, who helped draft the legislation, defended the bill saying: “We prohibit children from smoking. We regulate driver’s licenses. We prohibit alcohol. We prohibit lots of things from children, and we think it’s logical that kids should not be able to purchase these games on their own.” Similar bills have been passed or are being considered in many other states.

According to Expedia.com 2006 survey data, the average American employee gets 14 days of vacation annually, and usually only uses 10 of those. In contrast, human resources firm Hewitt Associates reports that Europeans average around four weeks of vacation per year. Hewitt Associates told Vault, an internet-based career-information provider, that Denmark employees receive the most vacation in Europe, with an average 31 days per year, while Switzerland came in on the low end with an average 20 days vacation annually. Vault reports that because Americans receive vacation based on seniority, it can take American employees 15 years or more to earn four weeks of vacation, unless you’re a teacher, of course.

True self-esteem requires nurturing and rewarding a child’s exercise of his mind not his feelings.

Even if you don’t regularly interact with teenagers, you’ve probably heard about too many apathetic high school students blowing off their responsibility to study. Thank today’s ridiculous education theories for exacerbating this problem.

Any number of examples can be found these days to illustrate the poor or destructive education received by our children in the United States today. All across the country our children are being slighted by Teacher’s Unions and organizations who don’t wish to teach but wish to indoctrinate our children with their brand of political activism. From the whitewashing and PCing of our history textbooks to the failed “new” concepts in teaching being so regrettably foisted upon our little ones as an “education,” the examples are legion and can be found with ease. That activism is almost universally in the socialist or communist mode of thinking, one antithetical to the whole of the American experience. It is a mode of thinking designed to destroy the things that make America great.

Black Entertainment Television has been playing what is being called a Public Service Announcement created by a rapper named Bomani “D’mite” Armah(1). It is in cartoon form and made in the Rapper music video style. However, it contains some very offensive language even as the underlying message is one encouraging children to read by telling them to read a “mother****ing book, N***er.” It’s a mixed message, indeed. Do we need to encourage kids to read by cursing at them every other word in a song aired to them on a black centric television station? Is this the proper type of work that should be seen on BET?

Phoenix--The U.S. Department of Education (USDoE) yesterday rejected a critical argument made by the Arizona Department of Education (ADE) in forcing charter schools to align their curricula to state edicts, a policy under court challenge by the Goldwater Institute Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation.

Soon thousands of teens and twentysomethings will be going off to “institutions of higher learning.” Young people who’ve been raised with moral values will go behind the fortified walls of Babylon, pretty much unarmed.  And the barbarians are prepared to chew them up and spit them out.

A short column by Ray Mcallister(1) of the Richmond Times-Dispatch scolded a Virginia Middle School for having a drawing of Karl Marx on their graduation certificate. The school replied that they had thought that the drawing represented Frederick Douglas and didn’t realize they had been using a picture of Karl Marx.

David Yezzi is Executive Editor of The New Criterion and the former director of New York’s Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. He is a well-known poet whose published collections include The Hidden Model and Sad Is Eros along with the Zoo Anthology of Younger American Poets; a compendium he edited. His essays have appeared at Poetry, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Sun, and The New Yorker. He has earned degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia University School of the Arts.

Last week the Supreme court handed down three free speech rulings that find favor with conservatives.  One of them is Morse et al. v. Frederick, a case involving the free speech rights of students.  At issue is a five year old incident wherein a Juneau-Douglas High School senior named Joe Frederick raised a 14-foot banner stating “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” and was subsequently suspended for “drug speech” by then school principal Deborah Morse.  Writing for the majority in a five to four decision in favor of the school, Chief Justice John Roberts reasoned that the First Amendment should not be applied in this case because the student was encouraging drug use.

Enforcing proper behavior is anathema to liberals, but essential to learning.