A Checklist Of Ten Education Ideas We Might Want To Reconsider

2010-03-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

One fascinating thing about education is that everyone has an analysis or a miracle cure.

Even when correct, however, a lot of these theories seem to me superficial. They don’t deal with the deep-down pathologies.

If we’re seeing really bad results, can’t you usually be pretty sure there’s a really bad idea down there somewhere?
Rushing in where angels might fear to tread, I offer my checklist of bad ideas undermining many American schools:

Self-esteem is pushed

Constructivism is injected into every course

Arithmetic is badly taught

Reading instruction is flawed

Guessing is encouraged

Foundational knowledge is slighted

Group learning is favored

Memorization is dismissed

Handwriting is not taught

Fuzziness is praised

Put aside for the moment whether a school is rich or poor, the teachers good or bad, the students smart or not so smart; put aside all the explanations and alibis typically mentioned. Behind all of that, these bad ideas are humming away 24/7, diminishing educational effectiveness.

Presumably for ideological reasons, our Education Establishment is more focused on social engineering than on intellectual engineering. The result is that they tend to favor inferior pedagogical methods. That’s what I believe this list is: inferior pedagogical methods.

For a little more detail on each item, please see “46: Public Schools Seem To Be Designed To Fail,” the newest article on Improve-Education.org.

(NB: this article is very brief because it was originally written to make a YouTube graphic video (one of 40 at this point). For the 4-minute YouTube version, click here.)