Pensare Oltre is a group of Italian education reformers. They decided that their public schools have gone in the wrong direction, and they are trying to fix this mistake.

 The fascinating part of the story is that these are not the typical disgruntled intellectuals (such as myself) but in fact are upscale doctors, lawyers, business people, ballerinas, psychiatrists, sports figures, and everybody else who has figured out that the people in charge of education should be replaced.

 Their main interest is reading and the fact that Italian children have started to develop dyslexia and other mental problems. Reason: Italian schools started using sight-words, the same reason the children in America have dyslexia.

 What a tragedy. All of our bad ideas are being recycled in other countries. The geniuses up at the Harvard Graduate School of Education should feel ashamed.

. Anyway, the Italians contacted me a few years ago to explain why anybody would be so dumb as to use sight-words, especially in a language that is said to be phonetically perfect. I've been in touch for several years. I  just placed an article on American Thinker about this group  and their plans. I think it's inspiring.

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/01/education_reform_it...

QED: first of all, it's  a great honor that these people  asked me to advise them. Second of all, we need a group just like this in the US. We have  so many thousands of pointy head technocrats who seem to have bought into the  idea that we need to keep the society stable by keeping people dumb. I wish everyone would think about this. It's very shortsighted. We are not going to survive in this world with a whole society of dumb people. Society's natural leaders need to get busy.

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 PS. Someone left this comment on the article, which gives a quick sense of how bad things are:

"I have had a ringside seat to the devolution of the American education system because my wife is an English teacher doing the best she can to mitigate the essentially fraudulent systems failures. She is forced by the system to graduate 12th grade students who cannot read on a 5th grade level. She teaches phonics to those who are still trying to some effect, and been reprimanded for doing so on more than one occasion...."