reaping fifty years of "feel good" education

finally, a wake up call for public education -- but will it be answered? the smock thinks not.

according to the coverstory of this week's TIME, parents, the wee ones we've experimented on since the in the 60s, are behaving badly.

from the article:

An Iowa high school counselor gets a call from a parent protesting the C her child received on an assignment. "The parent argued every point in the essay," recalls the counselor, who soon realized why the mother was so upset about the grade. "It became apparent that she'd written it."

and later in the article:

When she started teaching 31 years ago, she says, "I could make objective observations about my kids without parents getting offended. But now we handle parents a lot more delicately. We handle children a lot more delicately. They feel good about themselves for no reason. We've given them this cotton-candy sense of self with no basis in reality. We don't emphasize what's best for the greater good of society or even the classroom." [emphasis mine]

no kidding! reasonable people have been pointing this out for years, but because the facts were being heralded mostly by conservatives, liberal school districts discounted them as big ol' bullies and ignored them.