Madam Speaker, it appears to me that the liberal thinkers who talk about education and always call for education standards are not to be taken seriously. These advocates for children, who proudly call themselves progressives, are the same people responsible for the outrageous academic fads in the classroom which have produced such terrible academic results in the first place.
Academic rigor gives way to emphasis on self-esteem.
Merit is replaced by cooperative learning. Common sense, time-tested methods to teach kids how to spell correctly lose out to whole learning. Classrooms which challenge the gifted are scrapped for dumbed-down learning that cheat kids out of real education. Math that requires actual calculations yields to rain forest algebra that teaches no mathematical skills whatsoever, and so on and on. So before we listen to the progressives who are responsible for this deplorable state of affairs, let us consider instead whether a return to the basics and common sense learning methods are what is really needed.