ndrosen

Back when I was in high school, I read Rudolf Flesch’s famous book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, which had been published about twenty years earlier, even back then. The dispute over phonics versus other methods continues, and I think that this is one of those cases where the official experts (many perfessers of education) are wrong, and the outsider critics are basically right. Be that as it may, John Stossel is astringently on the side of phonics.

Emma Camp had a good article in Reason the other day on California state guidelines pressuring schools not to offer algebra to middle schoolers, which will likely have the effect of their not taking calculus as seniors, and not being prepared for real college-level courses in mathematics, physics, and other areas of science and engineering. The article quotes a math professor named Brian Conrad, whose article in The Atlantic I had read before reading Ms Camp’s piece.

Some parents may put their children in private schools, or otherwise supplement the education being doled out to them in government schools; other parents won’t have the money, or may not realize that their teenagers are being inadequately educated. Young adults, in particular poorer or minority young adults, will then not be prepared for STEM courses and majors in college, or will require an additional year in college, with concomitant greater expenses. I don’t think that this is a conspiracy by malevolent racists or by foreign agents attempting to sabotage and handicap the United States, but if it were, the results would be much the same.

I remember a line from a report decades ago, that if a foreign power had imposed such an inferior educational process on America, we might well consider it an act of war. Richard Mitchell, the Underground Grammarian, commented that to write of imposing a process showed poor usage of English.

It’s time for the moral equivalent of war against the anti-learning educrats!