Our high schools today are not even as good as the high schools of 50 years ago. I know. I was there. Well, 40 years ago. Whaddaya think? Maybe there's an agenda running which does not include educating American children to succeed in the world of the future and to be leaders in it. Maybe?
"Our high schools today are not even as good as the high schools of 50 years ago. I know. I was there. Well, 40 years ago. Whaddaya think? Maybe there's an agenda running which does not include educating American children to succeed in the world of the future and to be leaders in it. Maybe?"
posted a reply before seeing yours... see post 54... may be related
"Since the early Fifties, the educationists, as Professor Barzun points out, have aspired to a progressive and egalitarian method of teaching. The importance of the arduous, repetitive task of acquiring rudimentary knowledge has diminished under the growth of academic folly inspired by the desire to entice students with instant stimulation.
Professor Barzun uses the term "pre-posterism"-"putting the end before the beginning"-to describe what has taken over public schools. The forgotten condition of learning from the beginning and progressing to more complex tasks has been replaced by pressure to appear to obtain quickly what can only be the fruit of some effort.
In years past, teachers led pupils slowly through the basic steps of learning. Education, after all, is a process. To read: sound out the letters of the alphabet, move on to the formation of words, then to words as parts of speech and their place in a sentence. Eventually pupils are not only reading, but understanding the makeup of the language itself. It's so simple we'll all be wondering why we spent so much money seeking alternatives to what works.