Teaching Reading and Putting a Man on the Moon

A recent article in the New York Times (March 11, 2007, p. 3 in the Business Section) by Denise Caruso talks about how we can put a man on the moon but we cannot teach children how to read. Her article, "Knowledge is Power Only if You Know How to Use It," says "reading creates conflict," but if we "study enough examples of effective human know-how" then we will be able to "come up with a process that spurs solutions to problems as predictably as technological know-how does today."

We should decline gifts from the Trojans. Many of the problems we have in education today were created by so-called experts who have taken simple tasks like teaching reading and botched the job. Then they want to be paid in perpetuity to continue botching the problem until doomsday.

The public schools need to protect themselves from charlatans, especially the ones with Ph.D.s or Ed.D.s