Looking for solutions to our country’s problems we go on making the same mistakes, in particular making the same incorrect assumptions as to how things might be changed for the better. In the Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay Steven Brill does exactly this sort of thing in what he has to say about education, assuming [...]
Archive for the ‘Education’ category
It’s not about the coaches, it’s about the players.
August 14, 2011The World of our Fathers is no More
August 5, 2011T. S. Eliot in a brief, 1932 essay, Modern Education and the Classics, had this to say about education: “Questions of education are frequently discussed as if they bore no relation to the social system in which and for which the education is carried on. This is one of the commonest reasons for the unsatisfactoriness [...]
Still the same school for the many different children
August 3, 2011The thoughts below occurred to me after reading Aaron Smith, director of knowledge management for YES Prep Charter Schools in Houston, Texas. He writes in the von Mises Blog: “What our system of education needs is simple: a recognition that children, parents, and educators are diverse and should be treated as individuals.” It has occurred [...]
The only Gap that counts
January 26, 2011Why can’t we as a whole, a whole country, including all of us, our politicians in and out of office, our media pundits, why can’t we accept that people are not equal, that outcomes, lives, will always be unequal, that inequality, more or less flagrant and unabashed, is here to stay, a principal ingredient of [...]
“algebra is not an opportunity for the boy who has no turn for mathematics,” George Harris, 1897
January 10, 2011I take the following word for word from Inequality and Progress, by George Harris, 1897, pp. 40-49] ECONOMIC equality through collective production is scouted by a school of social reformers who make equality of another kind an important part of their programme. They retain the charmed word, but give it another definition. Not equal possession of [...]
The End of Teaching as we’ve known it.
December 29, 2010Any number of people, and not only parents but people with know how, education writers and researchers, proponents of school reform, all sorts of people, including for a long time (although not any more) myself, are convinced that the single most important variable in the equation to improve the public schools (private schools too, but [...]
A Response to Michael Goldstein (Starting An Ed School)
December 4, 2010I’m going to “look harder” at something Michael Goldberg, in a recent (11/30) posting, Looking Harder At The College-Prep Message, on his Blog, Starting an Ed School, said. His school, the MATCH School, along with other what are now known as “No Excuses” schools, have been telling their mostly poor Black and Latino student bodies [...]
First Thoughts on the New Emphasis on Math and Science Education
December 3, 2010Do you know what is one of the very biggest mistakes that we go on making? It’s that we speak of education as if it were something in our power, in our power to control, and that by our efforts (and on top of these the seemingly endless reform efforts that always seem to follow [...]
Daniel Greenberg, Free At Last
November 12, 2010I call what follows a “Guest Blog.” It’s taken from my own history, at a time in my own past when Daniel Greenberg was someone of huge significance in my own life, and no less so in the thinking that went into our own school. The passaage is taken with a very few stylistic changes [...]
Fundamental Truths about Public School Education about which we might agree?
October 7, 2010Most of our disagreements over the schools, as, for example, the current sharply opposed reactions to the film, Waiting for Superman, would be softened, if not made to disappear entirely, if we could just agree on a few fundamental truths about the schools, an agreement which need not, in my opinion, be super hard to [...]
