More from “The Underground History of American Education”

Reading the book yet? Here’s another teaser:

Full literacy wasn’t unusual in the colonies or early republic; many schools wouldn’t admit students who didn’t know reading and counting because few schoolmasters were willing to waste time teaching what was so easy to learn. It was deemed a mark of depraved character if literacy hadn’t been attained by the matriculating student. Even the many charity schools operated by churches, towns, and philanthropic associations for the poor would have been flabbergasted at the great hue and cry raised today about difficulties teaching literacy. American experience proved the contrary.1

Think about it. “Reading specialists” throughout our nation’s prisons for kids have a vested interest in making the art of teaching reading as arcane and difficult as possible. There are those, however, who have had universal success with a program that essentially lets kids teach themselves.

Storm the “bastilles’ of public education! Rescue the children! Save our future as a nation!

Those are not too strong. If anything, all those exclamation points are too few, too weak.


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