Do you believe in teaching more, not less?

Yes? Well, you are certainly an oddball. Our entire public school system is devoted to the idea that children should learn less each year. Less, always less.

They used to have to know the names of the state capitals. Then they had to know the names of the states. Then they had to know the name of the country. Ah, the good old days.

If you haven't been keeping a close eye on our Education Establishment, you have no idea how many cheap tricks they have invented to justify teaching less.

Here's just a single example. The gimmick known as Relevance dictated that children should be taught only what was relevant to their immediate life; so the schools should get rid of history, geography, the past, and everything else  that was more than a few miles away. So there goes 80% of the traditional curriculum. Next, and sometimes simultaneously, they came up with another gimmick known as Multiculturalism, which dictated that children should be taught things from around the world, from back in history, anything just so long as it wasn't a part of the child's environment. So we  actually have many children in America who know the names of Chinese rivers but don't know what the Mississippi is.

It's obvious that Relevance and Multiculturalism, cutting from two different directions, will soon destroy everything that once went on in our public schools. And that's just two gimmicks out of many.

 So if we want to turn the schools around, we have to forget everything our Educational Establishment preaches. They have declared war against knowledge, for all practical purposes.

 Let's declare war on ignorance. My thesis is that far more can be taught. Children WANT to learn more. (That is a central tenet of the classical academies now springing up.)

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The name of this article is "Schools can teach a lot more to children." If you believe in dumbing down, avoid this article. But if you'd like some encouragement, and some ideas, about teaching more, please check it out.

At the end there are several links to related material. Bottom line, teaching more is the only way we save the public schools. Teaching less is not working out all that well.

http://www.edarticle.com/article.php?id=41118

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