Experiments on Your Kids

From the Tom Woods Letter:

Just this week, the Boston Globe published an article by Newton South High School math and physics teacher Ryan Normandin admitting that an allegedly progressive education experiment had been a failure. How the Brain Works: T... DK Check Amazon for Pricing.

Mind you, it was obvious to every single person on this planet that this experiment would fail.

But in the minds of these people, your kids exist to be experimented on, and to help usher in the progressive future.

Here was the experiment:

Let’s put all students in the same math class, regardless of skill.

Let’s put all students in the same foreign-language class, regardless of skill.

You already know a major motivation behind the policy: why, separating students by academic skill level yields insufficient “diversity” in the classroom.

Not keeping up with the latest in modern educational theory, you might have asked a coarse question like, “Will this new arrangement mean a better education for my kids?”

Oh, dear reader. The thought never even crosses their minds.

Precisely what you’re assuming would happen, happened. Meltdown: A Free-Marke... Thomas E. Woods Best Price: $0.25 Buy New $20.00 (as of 02:20 UTC - Details)

“One world language teacher,” Normandin wrote, “compared the challenge of meeting the varied needs of students to teaching a class where half the students are learning colors for the first time and the other half are analyzing a Salvador Dali painting. There’s nothing wrong with learning either—but in one room, it’s impossible to teach both simultaneously.”

So the advanced kids can’t advance, and the less-skilled kids can’t keep up. Many teachers, wrote Normandin, are “forced to teach to the middle (let’s list all the colors in the Dali painting), leaving the highest-needs students lost and struggling and the highest-performing students bored and disengaged.”

As usual, then, even the students in whose name these policies are implemented end up not being helped, but if that comes as a surprise to you that’s because you are taking their official justifications — which are always lies — at face value.

I don’t deny that it’s a good thing that the school is figuring these things out. But what’s bizarre is that they thought these were things that needed to be figured out in the first place, when any damn fool had to know what was going to happen.

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