America Needs the Traditional Classroom

   Education is another of many American institutions that are disintegrating before our eyes while at the same time self-consciously innovating at warp speed.  The net effect of these changes is that classroom management collapses, classroom misbehavior increases, and learning is diluted, resulting in a dumbing down of the school-age population.  Veronique Mintz, an 8th grade student draws our attention to this drift in a recent New York Times op-ed article.  Her op-ed poses the alternative she faces between social isolation at home in front of a screen and collaborative or group learning projects in the school where most of the students do not want to either cooperate or “discover.”  

   When she was growing up, my daughter also complained about those collaborative projects because she, or she and another student, would do all the work for their group, but everybody in the group would get the same good grade. This is an educational strategy that essentially inculcates communism. It’s a case study in equality of outcomes that the left has been spouting for quite a while.  Further, students in groups often do projects that are so dismally simple that any thinking person would be embarrassed to engage students with those projects.   One 11th grade teacher I observed had a collaborative, discovery project that involved pasting pictures on colored construction paper and “making a booklet&rdq ...