Saturday, November 05, 2016

Some wisdom from Dan Lane, commenting over at According to Hoyt:
Why with all that extra time… [saved by having students memorize knowledge] You could actually *teach* instead of indoctrinate. ... Ah, heck, we can’t be having that, now can we?
Indeed not. Children who learn their lessons are harder to lie to. Children who are afforded a richer education for having memorized important/useful facts before they are mature enough to discern them from raw data and first principles are also going to be harder to confuse and mislead. In a word, they will be less gullible sheep than what our would-be betters would prefer to "take care of." Instead of just checking your kid's homework and making sure it's done and hopefully resisting the urge to "edit" the occasional mistake to make sure he gets a good grade, look at the curriculum itself. See what they're teaching and see what they're not teaching. Keep in mind that the weird things you see and the weird gaps you don't are not all just pedagogical fads.