Nick Schott is used to his father missing milestone events.
“My father has never seen me wrestle, never seen me play football or run track,” said Nick, the son of Army Staff Sgt. Jamie Schott. “Because of the job he does, it’s fine. He’s serving our country.”
But one event Schott did not miss was seeing his son walk across the stage Friday at Goose Creek High School’s graduation ceremony.
Read it all from the local paper and do not miss the pictures.
The varied and vital role of chaplains in Church of England state secondary schools and academies is outlined in “The Public Face of God”, showing that chaplaincy is no longer the preserve of the independent sector.
The research showed that of the 72 schools which responded 58 have chaplains or a chaplaincy team with the majority ordained but with a growing number of lay chaplains. Almost all are directly funded from the school’s own budget. The Church of England has 220 secondary schools and 80 sponsored academies.
The Revd Garry Neave, the Church of England’s National Further Education and Post-16 Adviser and co-author of the report said: “This research clearly shows that schools greatly value the contribution which chaplains can make to pastoral care of students and staff – and to the whole school community – to encouraging the spiritual development of students and to serving people of all faiths and beliefs.”
Read it all and note the link to the full study.
Our school has a very tolerant atmosphere, and it even has a depression awareness group, so this response seemed uncharacteristic. We were surprised that the administration and the adults who advocated for mental health awareness were the ones standing in the way of it. By telling us that students could not talk openly about their struggles, they reinforced the very stigma we were trying to eliminate.
The feeling of being alone is closely linked to depression. This can be exacerbated if there is no one to reach out to. Though there are professionals to talk to, we feel it doesn’t compare to sharing your experiences with a peer who has faced similar struggles. And, most important to us, no one afflicted with a mental illness should have to believe that it’s something he should feel obliged to hide in the first place. If someone has an illness such as diabetes, she is not discouraged from speaking about it. Depression does not indicate mental weakness. It is a disorder, often a flaw of biology, not one of character.
By interviewing these teenagers for our newspaper, we tried ”” and failed ”” to start small in the fight against stigma. Unfortunately, we’ve learned this won’t be easy. It seems that those who are charged with advocating for our well-being aren’t ready yet to let us have an open and honest dialogue about depression.
If it isn’t one thing it’s another. Education is always throwing up news stories.
Recently we have seen a playground fight between Coalition partners over the funding of free schools and free school meals. Eventually everyone made up and went back into the classroom.
We have had more leaks about the Trojan Horse enquiry and the threat of “extremist takeovers” in some Birmingham schools. The exact nature of the Horse is still unclear.
Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) will strike on Thursday to demand the prompt release of schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram militants last month and compensation for teachers killed in the restive northeast region so far.
“All schools nationwide shall be closed as Thursday will be our day of protest against the abduction of the Chibok female students and the heartless murder of the 173 teachers,” NUT President Michael Olukoya said in a statement.
The union has directed members to hold processions across the capitals of Nigeria’s states and federal capital Abuja.
Any student who demands””and gets””emotional pampering from his university needs to pay a commensurate price in intellectual derision. College was once about preparing boys and girls to become men and women, not least through a process of desensitization to discomfiting ideas. Now it’s just a $240,000 extension of kindergarten. Maybe Oberlin can start offering courses in Sharing Is Caring. Students can read “The Gruffalo” with trigger warnings that it potentially stigmatizes people with hairy backs.
This is the bind you find yourselves in, Class of 2014: No society, not even one that cossets the young as much as ours does, can treat you as children forever. A central teaching of Genesis is that knowledge is purchased at the expense of innocence. A core teaching of the ancients is that personal dignity is obtained through habituation to virtue. And at least one basic teaching of true liberalism is that the essential right of free people is the right to offend, and an essential responsibility of free people is to learn how to cope with being offended.
The Archbishop of Canterbury tucked into a school dinner with pupils from St Luke’s School during his visit to Stratford and Canning Town.
He said that his trip, which was organised to show off the regeneneration in the borough, showed that the area faced both “huge opportunity and huge challenge”.
“I think it’s enormously exciting,” Justin Welby said. “I think there are huge challenges because you’ve got all this new building coming in, which is brilliant, you’ve got this extraordinary Olympic legacy and that gives a massive challenge of creating community and the community developing rather than becoming fractured as numbers grow and new people move in.”
This means that we must be crystal-clear about the difference between training people to perform publicly useful tasks, and educating people who will ask constructively critical questions in public life, who will understand the forces that shape it and know how seriously (or not) to take the confused mass of propaganda and fashion that swirls around in the overpopulated information culture of our age. The most important bit of “impact” any university course can have is to help people to become intelligent citizens ”“ and that means helping them to see what a critical argument looks like, and to see what genuine thinking is. Part of the function of a university that works really well is to bring different kinds of thinking together, and bring them into conversation so that we learn to recognise the same rigour and high expectations in other fields of study and skill.
Learning to appreciate that good thinking is both diverse and convergent, and that it works in many different ways but is always characterised by rigorous self-awareness and self-challenge, is essential to a healthy public life. Citizens who have never thought about what good argument looks like, or who have never been challenged to recognise the solidity and quality of a different sort of skill from their own, are at the mercy of those who know how to press buttons for emotional responses, self-defensive responses, that just reinforce what makes us feel safer and better. All good education should be teaching us how to be free from that kind of slavery.
State schools are creating amoral children because they spend more time on academic studies than learning right from wrong, a leading independent school headmaster will say today.
The pressure to get excellent results is distracting teachers from imparting good values to pupils, according to Richard Walden, chairman of the Independent Schools Association.
Private schools, by contrast, turn out young people with emotional intelligence and moral understanding, he is due to tell the association’s annual conference in Warwickshire .
Read it all (requires subscription).
The Archbishop of Canterbury has today launched a report from the Education Division of the Church of England “Valuing All God’s Children: Guidance for Church of England Schools on Challenging Homophobic Bullying.”
The guidance, which is being sent to all Church of England schools, provides 10 key recommendations which should be adopted by schools in combating homophobic bullying as well as sample policies for primary and secondary Church schools. Published by the Church Of England Archbishop’s Council Education Division, the guidance involved consultation and involvement with a number of Church of England schools with existing good practice.
Speaking at a Church of England Secondary School, at Trinity Lewisham, The Right Reverend Justin Welby said that the publication of the guidance fulfilled a pledge he made last July when addressing the Church of England’s General Synod.
“Less than a year ago I set out my concerns about the terrible impact of homophobic bullying on the lives of young people and I made a public commitment to support our schools in eradicating homophobic stereotyping and bullying….
During the past school year, several leading American universities, including Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Carnegie-Mellon, welcomed new presidents. These men were leading scholars, and they were experienced administrators; in some cases, they held degrees from the universities they now lead. And none of them ”” not one ”” inherited the job from his father or mother.
That goes without saying, right? Nonprofit, tax-exempt universities are not typically family dynasties. People would think it queer if Drew Gilpin Faust’s daughter succeeded her mother as president of Harvard. But at evangelical Christian colleges, including some of the most prominent, there are different expectations.
Since 2007, the world’s largest Christian university, Liberty University, in Lynchburg, Va., has been led by Jerry Falwell Jr., the son of the famous founder. The presidency of Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Okla., passed from father to son (although it has since passed out of the family). Until Friday, when Stephen Jones stepped down as president of Bob Jones University, in Greenville, S.C., the college had been led only by Bob Jones and three generations of his direct descendants.
The morning after Mkeki Ntakai learned of the mass kidnapping by Boko Haram, he fired up his rickety motor scooter and sped down a dirt road in northern Nigeria to find his 16-year-old daughter.
Mr. Ntakai was joined by more than 100 fathers, uncles and big brothers, all seeking several hundred girls taken by force from a boarding school in the remote hamlet of Chibok. The men followed a trail of hair ties and scraps of clothing the girls dropped to lead rescuers. One found his daughter’s flip-flop; another retrieved a remnant of a school uniform.
But the kidnappers had too big a head start. Three weeks later, the trail has gone cold for the 223 girls still missing. More than 50 managed to escape in the first few hours, jumping out of the beds of pickup trucks or slipping away while they were supposed to be washing dishes.
The rest are presumed held by the jihadi group, whose leader Abubakar Shekau said he would sell the girls as slaves.
As these girls are held hostage, it is vital that we act on their behalf. Here are the top 3 things you can do to help these young women:
1. Pray
The number one thing that persecuted Christians ask for is our prayers. And though to some it might seem like a passive reaction, we believers know that prayer has changed the course of history. God has changed the hearts of leaders, fellow-countrymen and even persecutors because of the faithful prayers of Christians around the world. Here are some specific ways in which you can pray for them.
2. Spread The Word & Educate
Some prominent leaders, artist and other influencers are shedding light on this important story by using the hashtag #bringbackourgirls.
The bishops ”” two Episcopal, one Roman Catholic, one Lutheran and one United Methodist ”” hope their collective gravitas, backed by the support of their 450,000 parishioners, will persuade citizens and state legislators to reform and fund a system they believe is failing too many children.
“Crumbling buildings, inadequate funding, and low expectations mark too many districts at a time when a 21st century economy demands more of our people. How can the next generation rise to the challenge of this day and age when they are not given the superior education they deserve?” the bishops wrote in the letter.
“Even in the most successful of school districts, too many students underachieve, or worse, fall through the cracks and do not achieve success. All too easily they can become caught in the grip of poverty.”
The Archbishop of Canterbury’s view that the UK is “a deeply Christian country” is a “self-serving claim” and his church is “banging the religious drum” , according to a secular campaign group.
The comments come after the Most Rev Justin Welby defended faith schools, pointing out they are often in the poorest parts of the country.
But the National Secular Society (NSS) said Church of England schools “prioritise evangelisation over serving the population who are steadily abandoning his pews”.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has defended faith schools, saying they provide education for some of the poorest children in the UK.
Archbishop Welby acknowledged the potential danger of fundamentalists attempting to take control of schools.
However, in a BBC interview he said Church of England schools continued to “love and serve”, as they “have done for hundreds of years”
The archbishop repeated his view that the UK is “a deeply Christian country”.
Consider Monica (not her real name), the African American mother of two daughters. An immigrant from Cote d’Ivoire, she is an American success story, gaining her citizenship and raising two daughters on her own. One is a college junior, the other a high school senior trying to decide between colleges.
Before getting married in July, Monica’s income made her eligible for financial aid which brought her yearly tuition liability to $15,000. If she had not got married, her per-student tuition liability would have likely remained the same, so she would have been responsible for $30,000 a year for both of her daughters combined.
Instead, her daughter’s university wants her to contribute $25,000 for each child because of her new husband’s income. This increase happened even though Monica’s new husband is not the biological or legal father of her daughters, and he has children of his own to support.
Cohabitation without marriage pays.
The number of kidnapped schoolgirls missing in Nigeria has risen to 276, up by more than 30 from a previous estimate, police said, adding that the actual number abducted by Islamic extremists on April 14 was more than 300.
Police Commissioner Tanko Lawan said the number of girls and young women who have escaped also has risen, to 53.
He told a news conference Thursday night in Maiduguri, the northeastern capital of Borno state, that the figures keep increasing because students from other schools were brought into one school for final exams last month after all schools in Borno state were shut because of attacks by Islamic extremists.
…last week the story began to crumble faster than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found, among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push, images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share many similarities””including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument used””with the “wife” fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
“Two factors immediately indicated that this was a forgery,” Mr. Askeland tells me. “First, the fragment shared the same line breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before the sixth century.” Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and “concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested in the seventh to ninth centuries.” In other words, the fragment that came from the same material as the “Jesus’ wife” fragment was written in a dialect that didn’t exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel of John discovery: “It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and this conclusion means that the Jesus’ Wife Fragment is a fake too.” Alin Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: “Given that the evidence of the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife papyrus over.”
Suspected members of the militant Islamist group Boko Haram are believed to be holding 187 girls hostage in north-eastern Nigeria, after kidnapping them from their boarding school in Chibok at night.
Several girls managed to escape and get back to their families during the kidnapping on 14 April, but most are still being held. The Christian Association of Nigeria has called for prayer and fasting for the girls’ safe release.
The National Council of Churches USA has joined in “urgent solidarity” with Christians and other faith groups around the world to call for the release of 234 Nigerian school girls kidnapped April 14 by the Boko Haram extremist sect.
Speaking out with special urgency is the Church of the Brethren, one of the NCC’s member communions. Leadership of the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (Ekklesiyar Yan’uwa a Nigeria””EYN) has reported that most of the girls are EYN.
“This act of cruel violence tears at the hearts of Brethren who are called as witnesses of God’s call to live in love and peace with our neighbors,” said Stan Noffsinger, general secretary of the Church of the Brethren in the U.S.
The BBC’s Will Ross speaks to Abba Moro, the Nigerian Interior Minister…
Nearly three quarters of Danwon [High School]’s 11th graders died two weeks ago in the sinking of a ferry that ranks as one of the country’s deadliest disasters in recent decades.
“I’ve seen these kids grow up. I know each of their faces,” said Mr. Kim[In-jea], 57, who lives nearby and said seven of his neighbors lost their children. “To say that this neighborhood feels empty would be an understatement. This neighborhood feels like a morgue.”
At least 18 people, including 10 children, have been killed in a Syrian government air strike in the northern city of Aleppo, activist groups say.
A missile struck Ain Jalout school in the Ansari district, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
Images showed blood on corridor walls and debris in classrooms.
Demonstrators are to march through the Nigerian capital Abuja to press for the release of more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by militants two weeks ago.
They say they will march to the National Assembly and demand more action from the government, which has been criticised for not doing enough.
The Islamist group Boko Haram has been blamed for abducting the girls from their school in Chibok, Borno state.
Boko Haram has not yet made any response to the accusation.
By kindergarten, girls are substantially more attentive, better behaved, more sensitive, more persistent, more flexible and more independent than boys, according to a new paper from Third Way, a Washington research group. The gap grows over the course of elementary school and feeds into academic gaps between the sexes. By eighth grade, 48 percent of girls receive a mix of A’s and B’s or better. Only 31 percent of boys do.
And in an economy that rewards knowledge, the academic struggles of boys turn into economic struggles. Men’s wages are stagnating. Men are much more likely to be idle ”” neither working, looking for work nor caring for family ”” than they once were and much more likely to be idle than women.
We reported last week that the United States had lost its once-enormous global lead in middle-class pay, based on international income surveys over the last three decades. After-tax median income in Canada appears to have been higher last year than the same measure in this country. The poor in Canada and much of western Europe earn more than the poor here.
These depressing trends have many causes, but the social struggles of men and boys are an important one.
Family scholars, from sociologist Sara McLanahan to psychologist Ross Parke, have long observed that fathers typically play an important role in advancing the welfare of their children. Focusing on the impact of family structure, McLanahan has found that, compared to children from single-parent homes, children who live with their fathers in an intact family have significantly lower rates of incarceration and teenage pregnancy and higher rates of high school and college graduation. Examining the extent and style of paternal involvement, Parke notes, for instance, that engaged fathers play an important role in “helping sons and daughters achieve independent and distinct identities” and that this independence often translates into educational and occupational success.
Likewise, a U.S. Department of Education study found that among children living with both biological parents, those with highly involved fathers were 42 percent more likely to earn A grades and 33 percent less likely to be held back a year in school than children whose dads had low levels of involvement. But little research has examined the association between paternal involvement per se and college graduation.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they believe that the Bible holds the answer to all or most of life’s basic questions. Yet only one-third know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and 10 percent think that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife.
Many Americans know even less about other faiths, from Islam to Hinduism. Several days after 9/11, a vigilante shot and killed an Indian-American Sikh because of the assumption that a turban must mean a Muslim: Ignorance and murderous bigotry joined in one.
All this goes to the larger question of the relevance of the humanities. Literature, philosophy and the arts have come to be seen as effete and irrelevant, but if we want to understand the world around us and think deeply about it, it helps to have exposure to Shakespeare and Kant, Mozart and Confucius ”” and, yes, Jesus, Moses and the Prophet Muhammad.
Maybe RoboCop is closer to becoming a reality than you think.
Engineers at Clemson University are trying to get research moving to create a robot capable of responding to a violent attack at a school, such as what happened at Sandy Hook or Columbine.
“This will save lives,” said Dr. Juan Gilbert, presidential endowed professor and chairman of the Human-Centered Computing Division at Clemson.
You spend anytime around the 44-year-old [Clemson Coach] and you are going to hear about Jesus, Scripture, and the power of it all. It isn’t necessarily, or at least not always, done to proselytize. It’s part of how he talks, how he lives. Faith, Family, Football ”“ that’s about it with him.
There is no delineation.
For the people at the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a non-profit out of Madison, Wis., there needs to be or he shouldn’t have his job.
In what is, if nothing else, an absolutely fascinating subject, the FFRF sent a letter of complaint to Clemson this week about “several serious constitutional concerns” over how “Christian worship seems interwoven into the Clemson football program.”