Public Education and Fact vs. Fiction
Dear Diane,
There was one invaluable course I took at the University of Chicago that still sticks with me. The professor, historian Louis R. Gottschalk, gave everyone some historical facts to which most history books attested and asked us to explore them. We pretty quickly figured out that something must be wrong with them. In fact, they were all fictions that had crept into history books as facts. Mine had something to do with Napoleon's Navy and the Caribbean.
Richard Rothstein's wonderful The Way We Were? is a must-read on educational facts and fictions. If anybody who reads our exchanges hasn't read it—shame on them. I keep it close by whenever I start to write about schooling in America.
A very smart lady whose blogging I sometimes read asserts, for example, that, until a few years ago teachers in New York City didn't "do reading" until 2nd or 3rd grade. Actually, maybe she read that about Finland's schools. Or Rudolf Steiner schools. The latter claim they hold off until the first adult tooth appears. I think it's mostly so they have a chance to imbed their other ideals in kids before they get immersed into reading on their own. The
