Academia and Education

The War against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools  by Cheri Pierson Yecke, Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2005.  Middle School Movement The National Middle School Association was founded in 1973. It is easier to create a new institution than to change an existing institution. That is why the activists did not simply repurpose junior high schools. The activists renamed junior high school (grades 7 and 8) as middle school (sometimes also inc

Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, Third Edition, Revised and Expanded  by E. G. West, Liberty Fund, 1994).  Proposed Justifications for Government Schools This book describes the rise of government schools in England. The author shows the flaws in the following justifications for government schools that were given during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:  Protect minors from negligent parents, who fail to ensure that their children receiv

NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education  by Samuel L. Blumenfeld, The Paradigm Company, 1984.  Government Schools This book describes the rise of government schools in the United States. When the country was founded, there were no government schools. Schools were private and run by the church. The first government-run primary schools were created in 1818, in Boston, by the Unitarians. They were inspired by Robert Owen, a Scottish socialist.  National Educational Association T

Why Johnny Can't Read?: And What You Can Do About It  by Rudolf Franz Flesch, William Morrow, 2012 (originally published 1955).  Phonics versus Whole Word The author is an advocate of phonics, and an opponent of the whole-word method.,  In the whole-word method of reading, the reader recognizes the length and overall shape of the word, and guesses which known word it is from that. The whole-word method is similar to the method of Chinese characters. It is also called look-and

Not Out of Africa: How "Afrocentrism" Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History  by Mary R. Lefkowitz, Basic Books, 1996.  This book is a...

Impostors in the Temple: The Decline of the American University  by Martin Anderson, Simon & Schuster, 1992.  Favoring Research over Teaching America’s colleges and universities make teaching students a secondary goal, with research as the primary goal. Much of the teaching is performed by graduate student teaching assistants, rather than by professors. The author believes that it should take only 3-4 years of graduate school for a college graduate to obtain a Ph.D., but it a

Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It  by Richard H. Sander and Stuart Taylor, Jr., Basic Books, 2012.  Thomas Sowell This book is a criticism affirmative action at colleges and universities. Moderately talented black students who attend elite colleges and universities have significantly greater drop-out rates than similarly talented black students who attended second-tier schools. This situation has been na

Breakdown of Higher Education  by John M. Ellis. Encounter Books, 2021.  College professors and public intellectuals who have been...

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money by Bryan Douglas Caplan. Princeton University Press; Updated edition (2019)  Signaling For many students, what they learned in college is used in their future jobs. But for many other students, either they didn’t learn much in college, or what they learned was not useful for gaining or retaining employment. For these latter students, the only value of going to college is that it signals to prosp