Everybody complains about Common Core. Before that, the New New Math. Before that, the New Math. Parents seem to sense that “The textbooks in my day were not too bad, but these new ones are just off-the-charts horrific.” I’d say they’re only half-right. For generations, textbooks have been really bad. Here is an article about […]
Politicians love to plan things. Whenever we express our dismay over their plans, we often hear “We have a plan to bring progress and prosperity to this city. You naysayers have no plan.” But a city with millions of people actually has millions of individual plans to put the resources of each individual to work, […]
Many people claim that government must educate, because otherwise the poor would not be able to afford education for their children. The only problem with this theory is the facts. There can hardy be any educator in America who is unfamiliar with the “achievement gap.” No informed educator should be ignorant of the colossal failures […]
A modest proposal to improve the economy: Many parts of America are experiencing a drought. A little more rainfall, a little more water, would boost agriculture, allowing more rice, fruits, and other crops to be harvested. Let us say an additional 1% could be harvested – that would be a gain to agriculture of over […]
How did your children learn to walk, to talk, to feed themselves at an early age? Did you have formal lesson plans? Were you the driver, or did you simply help your child achieve her goals? Why did your child learn those things? A large part of the motive is simply emulation. You walk and […]
Albert Jay Nock, in his “Theory of American Education,” described a good education in the 1890s: After the three R’s, or rather for a time in company with them, his staples were Latin, Greek, and mathematics. He took up the elements of these two languages very early, and continued at them, with arithmetic and algebra, nearly all the […]
We in the Western World have become accustomed to a wide spread of “free” education provided by the government, with results which range from barely tolerable to severely inadequate, and costs which are shockingly high whenever one pulls back the curtains and looks at the government’s books. Is there a better way? Should the government […]
