K-12: The Math You Need Is Not the Math You Get

Learning school subjects should be like learning anything else in life. You start at the beginning, proceed step by step, master more difficult aspects, and become skilled. Isn't that how we learn to drive a car, build a doghouse, play the piano, surf, or operate a computer? Of course. That's how we humans do it.

But our Education Establishment does not approve. Those in the Education Establishment insist on doing everything in inefficient, likely to fail ways, something like taking a child to a busy street and saying, Now, let's see you parallel park. Lots of adults, with years of experience, avoid parallel parking. But our schools (this is the essence of Common Core) put a 15-year-old in this stressful situation on the theory that he will be able to handle stress better in the future. No, many are scarred and never try parallel parking again.

Public schools (and Common Core) consistently embrace counterproductive methods. For example, "[t]he first standards gave a strong call for a de-emphasis on manual arithmetic in favor of students' discovering their own knowledge and conceptual thinking."

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