It’s your son too. It’s all of them,” Zentgraf wrote in a Facebook post under her online name, “Da Graf.” “They are all menace[s] to society and we need to stop giving birth to them.”

“I have news for the mothers of boys who believe they raised their sons ‘right’: In the world we live in, raising a boy right at home does not guarantee that he will be seen or treated right outside those doors,” she continued. “You can do everything in your power to raise him to be a good man … But once he steps outside your home, he enters a patriarchal world that has taught men, in ways both subtle and overt, that they hold power over women.”

“If it’s too late to abort, raise him like your life depends on it because it does. All of our lives depend on it.”

If she indeed posted that, should this woman be teaching anyone? Of course not. She’s free to express such thoughts, but she shouldn’t be employed as a teacher or in any field in which she interacts with the public. And yet – at least as far as I can tell – she still holds her position.

But this post isn’t really about Zentgraf. It’s about the prevalence of this sort of unhinged rage, whether against men or any other group, and the somewhat-puzzling fact that so many teachers and others in the so-called helping professions think it’s perfectly okay to express such thoughts. It was (and still is, actually) a widespread phenomenon after the murder of CEO Brian Thompson and in particular after the murder of Charlie Kirk. We saw it after 10/7. We see it and see it and see it.

It’s not a totally new phenomenon. But what is relatively new is that the internet – and especially social media – give it a perfect chance to spread widely and to be normed. A person gets used to reading this sort of thing and seeing it get attention and approval from like-minded people who have found each other in online forums, and over time the expression of such thoughts seems more and more acceptable. Politicians, comedians (Dave Chapelle is a recent example), and other celebrities add to the din of the baying hounds.

Sometimes if a person goes too far there are consequences; sometimes not. But the Overton Window of what is “too far” has certainly shifted. And I don’t think we’re going back any time soon, or perhaps never.

The post This type of ed is special, all right appeared first on The New Neo.

Actually, I’m a bit surprised that it’s that low. Today’s college students have no personal memory of 9/11; it’s just something they learned about in school. And the vast majority of today’s college students have gone to schools dominated by leftist thought.

The pollsters didn’t ask the students who thought 9/11 was deserved why they thought it was deserved. Here’s more about the poll; the results are broken down by political affiliation but not by, for example, ethnicity or religion, which might have been informative.

I find this interesting and not the least bit surprising:

Some students in this survey expressed intolerance for contrary opinions. A significant minority (42%) believe that hearing opinions they disagree with can be harmful to their mental health, the highest percentage in the five years the question has been asked. 44% would avoid taking a class with a professor who publicly shares opinions they disagree with, and 48% would not be able to be close friends with someone of a different political party. Liberal students led moderates and conservatives in all 3 categories with 51% believing contradictory political opinions are harmful to their mental health, 55% saying they wouldn’t take a class with a professor with contrary opinions, and 65% being unwilling to have close friends across the aisle. Conservatives sat at just 31%, 33%, and 27% respectively.

That conforms to my own observations, and not just of students but across the age groups.

The post One in five college students say … appeared first on The New Neo.

[Chris Williamson was talking] with Robert Greene, who has a new book called “The Law of the Sublime” (commission earned). Maybe he’s got the answer to our problem of colorlessness.

Williamson prompts: “You talk about sort of pagan time, pagan religions, this sense of so much more wonder, so many more unanswered questions, the opportunity to use story and narrative and personification. It’s the gods fighting that’s made the lightning, how much easier it must have been to have been infused by life. Should we all become pagans again? Is that the answer? Can we just do that?”

Greene responds: “I would love it if we would. I’m down. If you want to make a pagan commune somewhere, I’ll join. I would because I’ve always felt myself to be pagan. I’ve always, when I see, when I go to the British Museum and I see that section on Assyrian [artifacts], I see some of those massive sculptures of like half human, half tiger, lions, whoa, I feel like it’s expressing something so powerful in me. I’ve always been deeply, deeply attracted to the designs, to the things of like the, in the Aborigines, their little paintings that they make of, you know, the waves inside of animals, something. It seems more alive. It seems like something so powerful and so direct.”

I don’t know about you, but when I read that I immediately thought “Wordsworth, ‘The World Is Too Much With Us.'” Perhaps it’s a small nitpicky point I’m making. But Greene’s thoughts so closely parallel that poem of Wordsworth’s, yet when I looked at the interview I saw not a single reference to Wordsworth or to the antiquity of the thoughts Greene himself was expressing (at least, I couldn’t find any – it’s a long long interview and perhaps I missed something).

Why does this absence bother me? Well, as a poetry lover, it just does – but it also indicates a cultural illiteracy that’s commonplace even among the highly educated. After all, Wordsworth is – or used to be – a big part of the Western canon. I had to memorize that poem (along with so many others) in junior high school in a NYC public school. Wordsworth was the founder of English Romanticism, and as such was an extremely important figure:

William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.

And “The World Is Too Much With Us,” a sonnet of which I’m not inordinately fond but which I can still recite from memory, goes like this, which seems to track very very closely with the point Greene is trying to make. It was written in 1802, well over two hundred years ago:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

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This time NHJ is in a confessional mood. I haven’t read all of the article because it’s behind a paywall, but there are copious excerpts at Ace’s: see this. Here are some samples, which should give you the general idea. The title is “In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”:

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. …

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” [my daughter] asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts. …

I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

Leftist race activists are often accused of compromising by sending their own children to elite private schools in order to protect them from a terrible public school system, opening the activists to accusations of hypocrisy. NHJ made a very different decision, which was to sacrifice her own child’s education in order to avoid such charges. When her daughter realized what had happened, she was angry – rightfully so, I think.

It’s amazing to me that NHJ wrote the piece at all, although apparently she sees herself as a well-meaning idealist rather than someone with insufficient regard for her daughter. I wonder if her daughter okayed the article, because it also seems like a possible invasion of privacy (as I said, I didn’t have access to the whole thing, so perhaps that issue is addressed in the article).

I think most leftists with the money probably opt for protecting their children and giving them a good education, unlike NHJ. But her approach has adherents, too – people for whom the principle overrides the person of the child. One such father was Leo Tolstoy, and the fight over the issue of education was a prominent and recurrent feature of his tumultuous relationship with his wife Sonya. Tolstoy had come to disbelieve in the value of education, but his wife Sonya wanted their children to have every advantage in that realm and she made sure they did.

[NOTE: I haven’t found much information online about the details of the Tolstoy battle over the children’s education, but I recall quite a bit about it after having read two books years ago that were devoted to the stormy Tolstoy marriage, and here’s a post I wrote on the subject.]

The post Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter’s education appeared first on The New Neo.

… New York public education is falling behind because the state has ignored chances to discover what educational practices really work, use that evidence to improve student outcomes, and make its leadership accountable for results.

While the state gathers troves of data, many of its most important programs are poorly measured or poorly evaluated.

For example, New York knows very little about its two fastest-growing programs: special education and school-based mental-health services. In New York, 21 percent of public school students are classified as having a disability, compared with the national average of 15 percent. The state has also opened more than 1,000 school-based mental-health clinics and hired counselors at a rate few other states can match. But it does not track if students are getting the services they need, if the programs are effective, or even if parents agreed to them.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Similar problems dog New York’s tracking of individual students, teacher training programs, and the elimination of the infamous compulsory Regents exams of my youth. New York knows that charter schools are a good idea, but for political reasons they are very limited. And on and on and on.

It’s a choice to be mediocre, and to use money to fund Democrat constituencies in education rather than caring about education itself.

The post Throwing money at schools doesn’t work … appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the story:

A wealthy Washington, D.C., suburb’s public school district is advising teachers not to link 9/11 with radical Islam and to be sure to create “safe spaces” for Muslim students as the nation somberly marks the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

The guardrails in a six-page instructional guide, “25th Anniversary and Commemoration of 9/11” and distributed to teachers, has prompted critics to accuse Fairfax County (Virginia) Public School’s liberal leaders of coddling post-9/11 sensitivities rather than teaching history.

But of course. Some people did something.

That’s what education in blue areas has come to – and although blue states and counties and cities are the worst in that respect, the phenomenon is not limited to them.

The post How Fairfax County teaches young people about 9/11 appeared first on The New Neo.

The article describes a meeting of radical DSA educators in New York City, mostly connected with CUNY (The City University of New York):

“We need to overhaul the curriculum in a class consciousness frame. . . . The curriculum as a whole needs to be relooked at, revisioned and reframed,” the CUNY Kingsborough Community College professor [Maureen Fadem] said.

The meeting, titled “Planning for Socialist School Governance,” was led by NYC DSA Labor Working Group co-chair Nina Bruckenthal, a math teacher at NEST+m, a public science-oriented K-12 school on the Lower East Side, and Amanda Vender, an ESL teacher at the International High School of Sciences in Elmhurst, Queens. …

The DSA educators vowed to use their connections to fellow socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani to get their agenda through, and also conspired to use upcoming contract negotiations to realize their far-left goals. …

The UFT contract for Gotham teachers is set to expire Nov. 28, 2027 and the DSA has progressively been strengthening its grip on the union.

An especially chilling portion of the article quotes one of the teachers acknowledging that the idea of indoctrinating children in this way isn’t popular with the public. The solution? To further oppose school choice and charter schools and make such schools even more difficult to access. The New York City public school system is already shunned by parents who can afford to do so and to send their children to private or parochial schools. But for those less affluent, there is at least the possibility of securing a place for their children in charter schools. The rest – about 75% of the children in NYC – are in the public school system, and the statistics look like this:

In 2024-25, there were 906,248 students in the NYC school system, the largest school district in the United States. Of those students:

16.8 percent of students were English Language Learners
22.4 percent were students with disabilities
75.3 percent were economically disadvantaged
Race or ethnicity:
42.3 percent Hispanic
19.3 percent Black
18.7 percent Asian and Pacific Islander
16.1 percent White
2.0 percent Multi-Racial
1.2 percent Native American

Note the large number of students whose native language is not English and who need extra help with English (“English Language Learners”), the large number who are coded with disabilities, and the absolutely enormous number who are considered “economically disadvantaged.” The latter designation means the child is getting some sort of welfare and/or is in foster care. Note also that white students are among the smallest ethnic groups in the system.

Therefore it’s quite clear that, if these DSA teachers get their way, they’ll be ramming this far-left propaganda down the throats of the children who are very much in need of basic instruction in traditional school subjects, and who have little access to alternatives to the regular public schools. These children will be used as guinea pigs by teachers who could not care less what the children or their families actually need or actually want.

The post The DSA plan for NYC schools appeared first on The New Neo.

“First-of-their-kind” transgender dolls — complete with removable genitalia — will debut in some Minnesota classrooms this fall to kids as young as 4 years old.

The paper dolls, with gender-neutral names like “Sam,” “Rory,” “Avery” and “Parker,” have removable internal and external genitals, along with more than 100 interchangeable pieces of clothing, accessories and hairstyles — like a trans Mr./Mrs. Potato Head.

The goal is for kids to “learn about the different options that exist for who they can be,” according to a therapist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, which spent over half a decade developing the controversial project funded by lefty Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz

The Medical School’s Institute for Sexual and Gender Health research over those six years included paying $20 to $60 for “trans and gender diverse” children and their parents to play with the dolls and “talk about gender and bodies” in groups.

Prototypes of the dolls were shown in a 2024 conference where one named “Sam” can be seen in what appears to be some phase of a gender transition, with a detachable penis off to the side, and a dress and girls’ underwear within reach.

The trans dolls — which promise to “make gender fun” — will be made available to teachers, school counselors, pediatricians and mental health providers …

This is terrible on so many levels. From the article, it seems they will be used with children who already “identify” as trans. But any child young enough to be playing with dolls is too young to be on such a track, and certainly it’s not the school that should be dealing with fostering this.

These dolls are wrong wrong wrong; attempting to become trans is not a game. So-called “bottom” surgery is so far from being a game that it is an obscenity to promote it or even visualize it in this way – for children, with dolls. It is a profoundly serious and disfiguring surgery with lifelong effects and dangers, and it is irreversible. It should never be marketed to children in any way or made into a game using a paper doll with easily detachable genitalia. There is no analogy to bottom surgery or to what human beings who undergo it experience.

And there’s also the problem of mission creep. Do we really think these dolls will be limited to children already saying they are trans? I very much doubt it; that’s not the way such things tend to work. These dolls should absolutely never be shown to children in general. Talk about fostering a little old-fashioned castration anxiety – not to mention just plain old anxiety and confusion of all kinds.

But sowing that sort of confusion is the point, isn’t it?

The post Transgender dolls for children: what could possibly go wrong? appeared first on The New Neo.

Cultural illiteracy.

Not knowing anything about Chu other than what I said above, I assumed that perhaps she hadn’t been educated in the US, which might account for the lacuna in her knowledge of history. But I discovered that she was born, raise, and educated in this country, and that her father was a WWII veteran:

Chu was born in Los Angeles as the second of four children to May Lin and Judson Chu. Judson was born in Chico, California, to Chinese parents from Jiangmen, Guangdong and served during World War II in the 10th Army Corps in Okinawa. He brought over his wife May from his ancestral home in Xinhui County as a war bride in 1948.

Chu grew up in South Los Angeles, near 62nd Street and Normandie Avenue, until her early teen years, when the family moved to the Bay Area. She graduated Buchser High School in Santa Clara, California in 1970.

In 1974, Chu earned a B.A. degree in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles. In 1979, she earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology of Alliant International University’s Los Angeles campus.

She’s been in Congress since 2009. And since Chu is 72 years old, she also doesn’t have the excuse of having been educated recently, when history has mostly been jettisoned in favor of wokeness. And yet there is that abysmal ignorance.

Nor does Chu say something like, “I know, it’s on the tip of my tongue but I forgot for the moment.” That would be more acceptable. But no; she merely says “I don’t know” and proceeds with her prepared talking points.

The post And now, presenting Congress member Judy Chu appeared first on The New Neo.

The European Union passed several resolutions condemning Palestinian Authority educational materials containing antisemitism and glorification of jihad, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se) has reported.

In the EU’s report on discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget of the European Union for the financial year 2024, it called for any future funding to the PA to be conditional on the removal of “antisemitic content, incitement to violence and the glorification of martyrdom and jihad” from textbooks.

The European Parliament’s budget report emphasized that EU financial assistance and engagement “should support education that promotes peace, tolerance and coexistence.”

This may seem like a no-brainer. But although I first read about the phenomenon of the vicious Jew-hatred in Palestinian textbooks some time during the 1990s, until now I’ve been unaware of any particular European move against them, and certainly no effective ones. Whether or not the PA complies, Palestinian society is inundated with this sort of thing. But the textbooks are an important part of it.

Doing some research now, I discover this is not a new phenomenon with the EU, although at this point their statements seems a little stronger. Here’s an article from 2021 [my emphasis]:

A study commissioned by the European Union examined 156 Palestinian Authority textbooks and 16 teachers’ guides. Eighteen texts are from 2020, the rest from 2017-2019. The report said they present “ambivalent – sometimes hostile – attitudes towards Jews and the characteristics they attribute to the Jewish people” and their “frequent use of negative attributions in relation to the Jewish people…suggest a conscious perpetuation of anti-Jewish prejudice, especially when embedded in the current political context.”

The EU provides funding for the Palestinian education system …

So the EU helps pay for the education in hatred. The article goes on to say this:

In October 2021, Britain announced it would cease direct funding to Palestinian education in the PA. The government denied it; however, the decision was related to the EU report. According to an investigation by the Jewish News [UK], roughly $137 million was spent by Britain in the previous five years, including on the salaries of the Palestinian civil servants and teachers responsible for drafting the PA textbooks.

In 2022, a group of European Union lawmakers called on the European Commission to reduce funding to the PA if it continues refusing to purge its K-12 curriculum of materials that “incite schoolchildren to hate Jews and emulate terrorists.”

But guess what? Although it appears the funding was frozen for a very short while (the article doesn’t make it clear whether it was just the British funding or the EU funding), it was restored in 2022 pending still another study. How many studies do you need? The problem with the textbooks isn’t subtle, it’s huge and overt.

More history here:

According to IMPACT-se, this is the seventh consecutive year in which such condemnations have been issued.
“>In July 2024, the PA signed an agreement with the EU to reform its curriculum, affirming its commitment to the process, but not all of the EU’s guidelines for the removal of violent, extremist content have been met.

As of November 2025, according to an IMPACT-se report, PA textbooks and educational materials still include content that glorifies jihad and incitement to violence.

Hard to say whether it will end up mattering this time, but it continues to be unconscionable that the EU funds this.

The second piece of news is this from Sweden:

Maria Malmer Stenergard, Sweden’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, announced before parliamentary representatives that the government will no longer use the term “Islamophobia.” She described the concept as “problematic,” because, according to her, “it focuses on individuals’ irrational fears.”

Stenergard emphasized that the Swedish government will also seek to replace the term with “anti-Muslim racism” or “anti-Muslim hatred” in international bodies, including the European Union and the United Nations. Discussions on this matter are set to continue during the third week of May in Brussels.

The decision has been welcomed by the right-wing Sweden Democrats party. Charlie Weimers, a member of the European Parliament for the party, said, “Islamists have exploited the term Islamophobia to advance their agenda and secure EU funding.” He described the government’s action as “finally scrapping a fabricated concept.”

Faw Azzat, Secretary General of the Global Alliance for Peace and Justice (GAPF) in Sweden, also praised the decision, stating that the term Islamophobia was “coined by Islamists themselves to equate criticism of a religion with racism against people—a semantic trick dressed up as anti-racism.”

I think this is pretty meaningless as well. Whether it’s called “Islamaphobia” or “anti-Muslim racism,” the term is often applied not only to generalized hatred of Muslims but also over-applied to rational and realistic evaluations of the radical Islamist devotion to terrorism and violence against the infidel.

The post Small changes in Europe? appeared first on The New Neo.