Fixing our lousy schools: Back to the future?

[Valin]

Daily Caller:

Glenn Harlan Reynolds

1/13/14

 

Our public schools stink. Rife with lousy performance and idiotic “zero tolerance” policies, they are the way they are because Horace Mann had a good time in Germany. But now it’s time for a change. Ironically, many kids may be better off being educated the way Horace Mann’s kids were — at home — instead of the way Horace Mann advocated for others.

 

At the time of the American Revolution, America already had one of the highest literacy rates in the world, which is one reason why Tom Paine’s pamphlets were so successful at stoking the fires of anti-British sentiment. But by the beginning of the 19th Century, educational thought leaders were looking for something to replace the decentralized American educational system.

 

The most influential of those thought leaders was Massachusetts Secretary of Education Horace Mann, who took a tour of Prussia and liked what he saw. Unlike the American system, the Prussian schools were highly centralized, with a state-directed curriculum of instructions, centrally organized statistics, and a professionalized, state-sanctioned instructorate.

 

(Snip)