[gobucks]

Wow. Quite a post. I'd really comment at length ... but I attended a publik Hih Skool....

[gobucks]

To be more serious, the one thing missing from this article was a thorough discussion of the one thing that would have a gigantic overnight impact: vouchers....

[Izzy Dunne]

As Eliot, author of the final report, put it, “every subject which is taught at all in a secondary school should be taught in the same way and to the same extent to every pupil so long as he pursues it, no matter what the probable destination of the pupil may be, or at what point his education is to cease.…”

Herein lies a major problem with the way schools are conducted.
Everybody is treated the same.

While that sounds good from an equality point of view (racism, whatnot), it avoids the simple fact that people are not the same. Even if two kids are 100% identical in intelligence, the one who likes math is more likely to do well in your math class than the one who would rather be in English, or History, or Band.

[Aquinasfan]

I skimmed the article. The author seems to ignore the most important philosophical schools which shaped compulsory government schooling: behavioral psychology (Wundt, Hall, Thorndike, Skinner), Socialism/Humanism (Fichte, Bismarck, Mann, Dewey), Darwinian capitalism (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford), anti-Catholicism (the Know Nothing movement), and Social Darwinism (the "pure blood" organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution and related private academies such as Choate, Andover, etc.).

Modern schooling was born in the perfect storm of societal, religious and philosophical pathologies. John Taylor Gatto lays it all out in "The Underground History of American Education."