Guest Post
One wearies, or I weary anyway, of the endless news stories reporting that children can barely read or not at all, can’t add, and don’t know anything.
“Detroit Public Schools: 93% Not Proficient in Reading; 96% Not Proficient in Math” Nationwide, only 33 percent of public-school eighth graders scored proficient or better in reading….”
This in the United States? The exceptional nation, shining city on a hill, guiding light of mankind? On and on it goes: the national toleration of the stupid, the inferior, the lazy, and the uncultivated. More specifically, toleration of substandard teachers, substandard races, substandard approaches to schooling, and intellectually shiftless people bitching about everything being somebody else’s fault.
These laudable thoughts came to me when, having spent recent decades reading of the godawful effects of American schooling, I stumbled across a column I wrote thirty years ago about the same things, and about my daughter Macon. In it I proposed a simple solution to many of our gravest national problems. It can be effected in the home.
Let’s start at the beginning. The alphabet consists of all of twenty-six letters, as mysterious as potatoes. Big deal. How long can it take to learn two dozen little squiggles? Herewith my experience from the aforementioned ancient column:
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