7/14/2023 0 Comments Readwrite educational solutionsI only very nearly escaped the “open classroom” fad it was going on in the elementary school for which I was zoned, but as my mother was a public school teacher, at the time she was permitted to send me to another public school of her choice, one that was fortunately not expecting children to learn from osmosis in a chaotic environment. It was written not long after I graduated from high school, so I recognized some of the educational ideologies from my own experience, “cooperative learning” being the major one. One would think this book was out of date, having been published in 1995, but the point is that educational fads have a way of circling back again. ![]() What kind of public school education you receive depends largely on where you happen to hit this cycle when you enter your local school. education is largely a story of traditional, fairly successful, basics-focused education giving way to the trendy, “progressive” ideas born of the educational theorists in the academically mediocre Education Departments of the nation’s universities, resulting in students’ decreased ability to read, write, and compute, until the disaster becomes obvious enough that there is a return to basics, only to give way again a few years later to the same inane trends under different names, in a never-ending loop of “back-to-basic” and “progressive” approaches in which any educational gains are wiped out every few years. Sykes doesn’t quite put it like this, but his book shows that U.S. ![]() Dumbing Down Our Kids is an expansive (but not chronologically organized) history of educational fads and failed reforms from the 1920’s through the mid-1990’s, complete with numerous spine-chilling anecdotes of outlandish teachers, classes, and curricula.
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