18 June 2013

progressive education is dumbing the country down


Hippy dippy idealism is fine...AFTER the kids have a grasp on the basics.  It's all well and good to say "write what you *feel*" - but don't expect it to be a functional piece of writing that communicates those feelings to others if the author hasn't been taught the difference between past and present tense (for instance)

Same with math - all well and good to encourage creative solutions to logic puzzles and the like, but don't expect a nine year old to be capable of intuiting how to do long division if no one ever shows him the rules of how it works.

Yeesh.  We wonder why we're falling further and further behind every year.  The emphasis on "Socratic Method" for adults is fine, but we will only succeed in thinking critically if we have an established foundation of HOW to do that, with every tool at our disposal.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/the-faulty-logic-of-the-math-wars/

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-writing-revolution/309090/

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