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The Making of the Modern Teacher If one wishes to understand what happens in the classroom, one must look first at what happens before the classroom. Teachers do not arrive fully formed. They are trained, credentialed, mentored, assessed, and licensed through institutions that hold definite ideas about what a teacher is for. That is why…
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Part 6: Why So Many Parents No Longer Trust Public Education Public trust is rarely destroyed by a single event. It is worn down by repeated contradiction. Parents are told that schools are committed to excellence, yet many see weak academic results. They are told that schools welcome partnership, yet too often experience opacity, delay, and condescension…
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The Child Does Not Belong to the State A free society must answer certain questions correctly or it will soon answer many others wrongly. One of those questions is this: who bears the first responsibility for the child? The answer is not the school district, the state agency, the licensing body, the union, or the educational theorist.…
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When the Classroom Becomes a Political Stage A classroom is not a campaign office, a protest rally, or a stage on which adults perform their moral identity before a captive audience of minors. Its first obligation is instruction. That does not mean politics must never be discussed. On the contrary, any serious education in history,…
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Part 3: From Reading and Arithmetic to Therapy and Activism There was a time when the purpose of a school could be stated without embarrassment. Children were sent there to learn to read, to write, to count, to know something of the world that existed before they arrived, and to acquire habits of mind that would serve them when novelty had…
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How Schools Stopped Teaching Children How to Think There are few phrases in modern education more overused, or more carelessly used, than “critical thinking.” It appears in mission statements, curriculum guides, strategic plans, and teacher training materials with almost liturgical regularity. Yet the phrase often conceals as much as it reveals. A student is not…
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The Real Crisis in American Education Is Not Money, but Mission Ask most parents what school is for, and the answer is usually plain enough. A school exists to teach children to read with understanding, write with clarity, reckon with numbers, know something of history and science, and grow into adults capable of sound judgment. That…
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Having been born and raised in Roseville, Minnesota, I watch the events unfold in my former home with keen interest of late. I have watched with dismay and a strong sense of wonder on how the land I have loved has fallen into such ill repute and chaos. Minnesotans do not need to be told…
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When Christ calls, He does not add a fresh coat of paint to a tired room. He breaks a window to heaven and lets a new world in. Scripture names this miracle new birth. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, behold, the new has come” (2 Corinthians 5:17). A heart…
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The Event and Its Distorted Message In August, outside an Arlington County School Board meeting in Virginia, a small protest formed over a proposal to restrict transgender students from using bathrooms that do not align with their biological sex. Among the counter-protesters stood a man holding a hand-drawn sign that read, “Hey Winsome, if trans can’t…
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