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| An education used to be a classical education, so students knew the foundation of Western Civilization. |
quercuscontramalum (http://quercuscontramalum.myopenid.com/) has left a new comment on your post "Homeschooling Is Easier Now":
MUSINGS ON PUBLIC EDUCTION (sic) #3: "In the U.S. Steel company town of Gary, Indiana, Superintendent William A. Wirt, a former student of John Dewey's at the University of Chicago, was busy testing a radical school innovation called the Gary Plan, soon to be sprung on the national scene...in which school subjects were departmentalized; this required movement of students from room to room on a regular basis so that all building spaces were in constant use. Bells would ring and just as with Pavlov's salivating dog, children would shift out of their seats and lurtch toward yet another class.
"In this way children could be exposed to many nonacademic socialization experiences and much scientifically engineered physical activity...a curriculum apart from the so-called basic subjects, which by this time were being looked upon as an actual menace to long-range social goals...[The Gary Plan's] noteworthy economical feature, rigorously scheduling a student body twice as large as before into the same space and time, earned it the informal name 'platoon school.'
Early in 1914, the Federal Bureau of Education...strongly endorsed Wirt's system. This led to one of the most dramatic and least-known events in twentieth-century school history. In New York City, a spontaneous rebellion occurred on the part of the students and parents against extension of the Gary Plan to their own city. While the revolt had only short-lived effects, it highlights the demoralization of private life occasioned by passing methods of industry off as education."
--John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education
