The reporter is a moron:
“With no lab equipment and an emphasis on textbook learning, it is hard to imagine that American Indian will turn out the next Darwin or Edison.”
What? Edison was essentially booted out of school after three months. His mother then took up the task of educating him. He learned as many people did in the nineteenth century: someone taught you to read, and then you read books, and read books, and read books. Apparently the reporter doesn’t know this. Idiot.
Darwin had a pretty standard education. He went to day schools. At 16 he apprenticed to a doctor, but didn’t like the work. Although he had already collected samples of insects and wildlife while still a boy, he really didn’t become much of a “doer” until after leaving the study of medicine.
The simple fact is that modern educrats - like this reporter - have been poisoned by Deweyite thinking into believing kids can’t learn unless they’re doing useless already-been-done-3 billion times-experiments.
The NUMBER ONE academic problem in teaching the young today - as opposed to a century ago - is getting kids TO READ.
Why don’t kids know anything about history? Because they don’t read.
Why don’t kids know how to write worth a damn? Because they don’t read.
Don’t forget Einstein, he was dyslexic and didn’t finish out elementary school.
Excellent post. Labs and “equipment” are the educational-complexes biggest myths.
How did we get here in the first place? Which great minds were raised with access to the top labs?
I agree with you on reading, but the other side of that is government schools kill the excitement of learning.
And why don’t they read? Because they don’t know how, and several years ago a CA state education official admitted that his state did a lousy job of teaching kids to read.
Ain't that the truth in a nutshell?
I had one college professor who was so bad (an affirmative action Muzzie) that the only way students got through his course is because we had a decent text and taught ourselves the material. Supposedly, the guy was brilliant and was well respected in his home country (Egypt)-- at least that's what we were told. But we all wondered why he was teaching a graduate level statistics class in America when he couldn't even speak understandable English?
If you saw the old Bill Murray movie Stripes about how they trained themselves to finissh boot camp, you know how our class got through that statistics course . . . and it was because we were motivated to read.