So many students are learning nothing at all and the American educational establishment is at fault

See Can American Children Point to America on a Map? In “The Cradle of Citizenship,” the journalist James Traub finds that the biggest crisis in education is not what kids are learning, but whether they’re learning anything at all by Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University.

He reviewed the book "THE CRADLE OF CITIZENSHIP: How Schools Can Help Save Our Democracy," by James Traub. Excerpts:

"The real crisis of civics education, Traub discovered, is not that students are learning about 1619 rather than 1776, or the reverse. It is that so many are learning nothing at all. And here he lays responsibility at the feet of the American educational establishment, which has, in the words of one scholar, been turning the “meat of academic subjects into meatloaf.”"

"most public school districts prefer hiring graduates with degrees in education rather than in specific academic subjects like history and physics. This leads to a greater focus on the methods of teaching, expressed in jargon phrases like “inquiry-based learning,” than on acquiring particular knowledge. Traub found a real allergy among public school educators to memorization of vocabulary, chronology and narrative — the elemental material out of which reality-based opinions and arguments can be formed."

"Not all state-funded schools are alike. About a quarter million American children currently attend so-called “classical” schools, many of them charter schools that receive public money but are privately run. In these schools, memorization and recitation are prized, as are classic texts from the Western canon, like Plato’s “Republic” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”

Many liberals see red when classical charter schools are mentioned, because of their perceived religious bias and a feeling that such schools drain resources from less advantaged ones. One senses that Traub shared their concerns. But as his book progresses, these schools begin to appear as inspiring examples of more rigorous and civic-minded education for many young Americans.

Outside Dallas, he visits the Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite, a classical charter school with a student body that is nearly all Hispanic. Teachers there make great demands on the students and their parents, which seems only to spur them on. In a ninth grade Western Civilization class, children who had started studying Latin in third grade were reading and intelligently discussing an essay by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. In a medieval history class at another classical charter school in Phoenix, one girl argued that St. Anselm must have been more popular in his time than Thomas Aquinas since Anselm believed, as Traub writes, “that faith preceded reason." She was in seventh grade.

“It was in classical schools,” Traub observes, “rather than mainstream ones, that I had most often heard the kind of reflective discussion that civic education seeks to foster.” Yes, a large part of the curriculum is devoted to old books. But “if you can speak thoughtfully about ‘The Nicomachean Ethics,’” he remarks, “you can do so about the fairness of our tax system.”"