A child's mind is hungry for knowledge, stimulation, the excitement of learning which school should provide, yet most American schools fall far short. From kindergarten through high school, our public educational system is among the worst in the developed world.As renowned educator and author E. D. Hirsch, Jr., argues in The Schools We Need, in disdaining content-based curricula for abstract, and discredited, theories of how a child learns, the ideas uniformly taught by our schools have done terrible harm to America's students. Instead of preparing our children for the highly competitive, information-based economy in which we now live, our school practices have severely curtailed their ability, and desire, to learn.
There is a solution. Mainstream research has shown that if children, all children, not just the privileged, are taught in ways that emphasize hard work, the learning of facts, and rigorous testing, their enthusiasm for school will grow, their test scores will rise, and they will become successful citizens in the information-age civilization.
