School Survival

On a chilly morning in February 2009, state police found 26-year-old Kenzie Houk in her bed with a bullet though her head. She was eight months pregnant. The search for her killer ended with the most surprising murder suspect residents of Wampum, Pennsylvania, had ever seen: 11-year-old Jordan Brown, the son of the victim's fiancé. […]

by Pat Farenga One of the core ideas of John Holt’s approach to education is that children are good at learning. John asserted in the early sixties, often and clearly, that children are natural learners and that adult interference in their attempts to learn, often through uninvited teaching, inhibits children’s learning. This idea continues to […]

A 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten and kicked in the head by a gang of other teenagers on a Seattle bus platform while several security guards stood by and watched. In the chilling surveillance video that caught the assault on tape, the victim is seen being jumped from behind by another girl in front of […]

Administrators at a suburban Philadelphia school district are defending their actions after being accused of spying on students via their laptop computer webcams. The Lower Merion School District admits to remotely activating webcams 42 times in an effort to find missing, lost or stolen computers. But officials say the webcam images were never used to […]

INTERNET HACKERS connected with the group Anonymous, which is better known for its attacks against Scientology, have launched a campaign against Australian government websites. The group is protesting against the Australian government's determination to censor its citizens' Internet connections. The government has indicated that as part of its censorship campaign all pictures of small breasted […]

WE'VE all heard of Gen X, Gen Y, even Gen Z - but in January we go to a whole new alphabet and welcome to the world the next instalment: Generation Alpha. Social researchers and sociologists claim the babies born into new Generation Alpha - dubbed Gen A - will be the most formally educated […]

PHILADELPHIA – A suburban Philadelphia school district accused of spying on students at home via school-issued computers told parents it only activated the webcams to find missing laptops. The schools' technology and security departments would activate the webcam when any of the 2,300 student laptops were reported lost or stolen, Lower Merion School District Superintendent […]

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college. Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior […]

Two Iowa GOP State Representatives, Jason Schultz, and Matt Windschitl, this week, co-sponsored legislation which seeks to remove LGBT students from the 2007 Iowa Safe Schools Law that protects students from harassment and bullying in Iowa’s schools and the measure has been referred to the Iowa House Education Committee for consideration. Iowa’s Safe Schools Law […]

By Cory Doctorow According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The […]