The quality of the writing and reporting at the Core Knowledge blog has declined precipitously since the departure of Robert Pondiscio, but even so, they can still hit a good one now and again.
But my take away from the article is rather different. That Washington Times article was from 1948. About the same time in suburban Southern California, my grandmother was forced to teach her son to read (using my grandfather's textbooks) because the schools had failed to teach him. The problems enumerated in the article were not local to Washington DC, they were widespread, and growing.
Over 65 years have passed since both article and my father learning to read at his mother's kitchen table. During that time, the strident drum beat of constructivist educators has only grown louder. Almost three generations of teachers have come and gone through the classroom, being trained in nothing but progressive pedagogy and dogma. That's a long, long time.
Have we forgotten how to teach effectively? True there are tiny islands of sanity (Core Knowledge, Precision Teaching, classical education, and others) within this sea of lunacy. But they are small and under the constant stress of erosion. It's impossible for them to have preserved every nuance, every technique. A lot has been lost, and we seem to be going backwards. More and more people are successful in spite of their education, not because of it. Is this what the beginning of the Dark Ages looked like?
