Cafeteria-style education, combined with the unwillingness of our schools to place demands on students, has resulted in a steady diminishment of commonly shared information between generations and between young people.
Other nations, whose students experience the same distractions of TV, internet, video games, and sometimes show the same diversity of population, have improved while we have declined.
Our society cannot afford a two-tiered system in which the affluent have access to superior education, while everyone else is subjected to a dull and incoherent classroom experience. Academic excellence, educational equity, and fairness demand a strong foundation of knowledge for all learners.
Standards and curriculum are not the same thing. The Common Core Standards do not guarantee a uniformity of educational experience any more than auto safety standards force Americans to drive a single kind of car, or building codes make every house look the same.
The achievement of high universal literacy is the key to all other fundamental improvements in American education.
The story of America's educational decline is the story of verbal decline. It has a beginning, a traceable arc and, if the states are vigilant, an end.
We have ignored cultural literacy in thinking about education We ignore the air we breathe until it is thin or foul. Cultural literacy is the oxygen of social intercourse.
We have too readily blamed shortcomings in American education on social changes (the disorientation of the American family or the impact of television) or incompetent teachers or structural flaws in our schools systems. But the chief blame should fall on faulty theories promulgated in our schools of education and accepted by educational policymakers.
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