by Reid Fitzsimons  (The following letter was set to the Editor-in-Chief of Highlights For Children but a response was never received)

Editor-in-Chief, Highlights for Children, 803 Church St., Honesdale, PA 18431, January 26, 2017

Dear Christine French Cully:

(Thank you in advance for reading through this rather long-winded but hopefully pertinent letter from a Highlights subscriber and almost neighbor- over in Thompson, PA)

I was driving through Honesdale recently half-listening to the Wayne/Pike (county) local news when I heard a mention of Children’s Highlights Magazine. Knowing the connection of the Magazine to Honesdale and having just ordered three gift subscriptions I paid attention, assuming there would be an anniversary celebration or some such announcement. Rather it proved to be a “say it isn’t so” moment in which I learned Highlights is putting the interests of adults above the welfare of children in the form of political and social activism. For the first time in my 50-plus year recollection the magazine it was entering the realm of indoctrination, specifically by attempting to normalize the progressive and trendy narrative of homosexual families.

...continue reading →

by Reid Fitzsimons

Back in perhaps 1966 or 1967 the eternally progressive Montgomery County (Maryland) school system introduced “New Math.” Presumably the education elite at the time determined that Old Math was passé and a more hip method of teaching was required. This was just at the time my math education was beginning in elementary school, and I recall three specific New Math tenets: properties imbued with the names associative, distributive, and communicative. I suspect beyond these words I learned math in pretty much the same manner as prior generations, and the New Math and its proponents long ago went the way of King Ozymandias. I wonder how many times since the educational theorists, or perhaps the textbook publishers, have decreed, “We’ve been doing it wrong all this time, and now we finally we have the ultimate and correct teaching methodology!”

...continue reading →