THE EDUCATION DEEP STATE IS OPPOSED TO REASON, REALITY, OBJECTIVITY, KNOWLEDGE, TRUTH, ETC. The War on Knowledge.
Schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.
In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.
But without facts, what are students actually learning?
At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.
I then watched smart, curious kids write macien for machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.
Math was treated with the same flippancy. Curious about the curiously low standardized test scores, I once wandered into a math classroom where the teacher was barefoot, in a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt (it was a great shirt). He then drew a circle on the board and announced, “This is not a circle. It’s a representation of a circle.” The lesson, it seemed, was to gain mystique points by using a stoner voice to say something quirky. I couldn’t help but make a connection between that math lesson, and the school’s undying demand for expensive private tutors.
This essay is a must read. Read the whole thing.