Hat Tip: Jon Justice

Ernest Calderon, the Vice President of the Arizona Board of Regents stated yesterday, “What universities need to do is undertake their primary mission of fully educating our students so that they realize that they have challenges ahead.” All well and good, right?

No.

What Ernest Calderon means is Arizona grads don’t know enough about Global Warming, the tenets of Islam, and DNA. Further, Calderon is suggesting a mandatory class for all Freshmen on these topics. Mandatory classes on a religion because it is growing rapidly? Yeah, no agenda here, right?

How about this? Why don’t we teach incoming Freshmen about the current global cooling trend, The Ten Commandments, and DNA by Intelligent Design and the perils of cloning? No? I didn’t think so.

If you want people to learn these things, make them electives, and let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise, allow the students to leave political agendas at the door of the classroom and mandate that teachers do the same.

What Calderon is talking about is not rounding out a young person’s education, but indoctrinating young people to their political agenda. There is nothing lacking in a graduate who has managed to remain sane and still thinking after four years in the leftist pressure cooker our campuses have become.

You don’t really hear about this and personally, I would never have thought this possible.

The first public military academy opened in Richmond, Va., in 1980, and now there are 16 schools in such cities as New York, Sarasota, Fla., Kenosha, Wis., and Sandy Hook, N.J.

This fall, Chicago opened the Marine Military Academy, and last week it approved plans for a sixth academy, affiliated with the Air Force, that will open in 2009. That will make Chicago the only district with schools representing all four branches of the military.

This is a great idea for children and parents who would like another option for their kids. In Chicago, the test scores don’t appear to be much different according to this story. Yet, that isn’t the only reason to explore other avenues of education. A child accepting of this kind of structure is much less likely to get into trouble.

About 7,500 students applied for 700 freshman openings this school year at the academies, which have competitive college-style admissions, Duncan said.

Duncan said the academies’ attendance rate is 94 percent, versus the district average of 85 percent. But aside from that, success is difficult to gauge.

I would say the attendance rate itself is a success. The fact that you have more than 10 students applying for every freshman opening is a success as well.

You know, perhaps there is a middle ground here in the school choice debate. This learning environment is different enough, it seems, from the traditional public school model to perhaps satisfy those of us who advocate creating competition and offering other opportunities for parents and children. Yet, since this is still within the public school system, the threat of voucher dollars being taken out of the public school system is removed.