For a few years I thought the worst possible gimmick in education was Whole Word, basically a device to make sure kids don’t learn to read. In the last few months, the clamor grew about Core Standards and National Standards, and I started to focus on arithmetic. More and more I’m struck by the parallel […]

Starting in 1975, Pol Pot and his Communist revolutionaries killed almost 2,000,000 Cambodians, out of a total population of 5,000,000. Why?? Pol Pot lived in Paris for many years where he became a Marxist intellectual. Sitting in classrooms and cafes, he visualized the perfect Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia to eliminate foreign influences, purge […]

This country has a bizarre and unprecedented problem. “The longer American children are in school, the worse they perform compared to their international peers,” according to McKinsey and Company, management consultants. Columnists at the New York Times have realized that the education crisis is grave. Tom Friedman said we’re falling off a cliff. Paul Krugman […]

Two or three years ago, if I tried to tell people that the problems in the public schools should be blamed on the bosses at the top, that is, the Education Establishment, I didn’t get too far. People would object, what about the unconcerned parents? The lazy kids? The unions? What about rock ‘n roll, […]

I read The Pledge to America with growing respect. It’s written clearly and directly. Some say it’s too long. But it does cover all the bases. Except one. Republican leaders don’t seem to understand that Education is a huge issue, a winning issue. Promise to fix the public schools. That is what the public wants […]

Summary: when you understand why educators scorn geography, you know all the reasons why American public schools keep getting dumber. It’s easy to point out that public schools don’t teach much geography. Explaining why is more complex. Here are four reasons why our Education Establishment scorns geography: 1) THEY ARE ANTI-KNOWLEDGE: For more than a […]

Summary: even liberal media are starting to realize that we are sliding into an educational swamp, most of it caused by liberal educators. Okay, liberals, everything’s cool. The New York Times — preeminently, Bob Herbert — has endorsed all the points I’ve been making the last many years. You may have thought these were extreme […]

Summary: Media are supposed to be neutral and state the facts. Instead, most newspapers have rushed to promote new, unproven ideas coming from federal government. ——- Race to the Top? I’d bet a more accurate name is Race to the Bottom. But there’s hardly a newspaper in the land that isn’t salivating over federally mandated […]

Summary: Socialists tend to believe in grandiose social engineering plans. Students who know too much, citizens who can think for themselves, tend to be a problem. What’s the answer? Talk a lot about education; but make sure nobody has much of it. ———— All the way back in 1848 (the year Karl Marx published his […]

Summary: A lot of modern education is incoherent and not really trying, except for foreign language courses. There, teachers still proceed in a logical and sequential way toward ambitious goals. There’s a message here. ——————– There is one constant throughout the 20th-century: professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes for how education […]