Ending Mandatory Education?
I would like to see everyone finally acknowledge that the United States, though into the second decade of the 21st Century, still has basically a 19th Century education system. Alternative educators have been saying this for years, but now national Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said as much in his open letter to America’s teachers…
Working together, we can transform teaching from the factory model designed over a century ago to one built for the information age.
When it comes to Arne Duncan and the Obama Administration, I certainly wouldn’t count on any transformation happening any time soon! I agree with commentators that say Duncan’s letter was just a sop to teachers. What the Administration is pushing is a standardized national one-size-fits-all academic-focused curriculum for every school, that seems much closer to Henry Ford’s assembly line (where you could have the car in any color as long as it was black) than the differentiated niche marketing of our current century. (Granted, Ford made cars
