http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304177104577307580650834716.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
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i work for a public school. believe me, its on its way out. they'll be cries of pain as it dies though. Just ignore them. One of those cries of pains will be me losing my job, but that's ok. In the end, it'll be worth it for my young kids.
Sources on this:
John Taylor Gatto (amazon book list) (full text Underground History)
The War on Kids
Education playlist
JJ what do you think of Underground History? I tend to give Amazon reviews a good weight, and some of the reviews seemed to have good criticisms of the work. Those criticisms being that he didn't cite sources and drew sweeping conclusions.
The Anarch is to the Anarchist what the Monarch is to the Monarchist. -Ernst Jünger
Yeah that was actually a concern of mine too. I haven't been through enough of it to give a worthy critique, but my biggest concern would be source citation. He does make a lot of claims, like:
"In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them."
Which, I suppose something like that would be easy enough to verify, simply by getting ahold of a copy of the school reader. I mean if you can get that primary source, and all those authors are in there, it's obviously undeniable proof that kids were much better read at much younger ages. You can also see corrections made to the pre-publication edition, showing the amount of attention to such details.
I can post an update as I get more into it.