We keep hearing from some quarters that if we reform public schools yet again, they’ll produce better results. Others say that if we go back in time and run public schools like they used to be run, they’ll produce better results. Those claims are not true. Public schools have never produced good results and they never will. They were not designed to build young minds and give them knowlege and skills. The real history of public education is easily accessed online and proves that.
Reforming public education is like trying to reform a brothel or, in a more extreme example, like trying to reform a concentration camp.
I forgot to ping you to Posting #12.
However bad public schools may have been in the past they are MUCH, MUCH worse now! The typical recent public high school graduate in this area may have what was a sixth grade public school education fifty or sixty years ago. As far as history knowledge goes I can tell you from personal experience that we have recent UNIVERSITY GRADUATES WHO MAJORED IN HISTORY in this area who could not pass a seventh grade history final from my era. We have teachers teaching in public high schools who would not have stood a chance of graduating from the public high schools of sixty years ago. Some of them couldn’t pass the test to be ADMITTED to a public high school of that era.