Thirty years ago I was a temporary office worker at Westlake School, one of the snootiest schools in the Los Angeles area. (It has since merged with Harvard School, which was an Episcopalian boys' school, and is now one of two campuses of Harvard-Westlake School, THE snootiest school in the Los Angeles area.)
I just would like to mention that the English Department at that time had been turned into a Hollywood Studies Department. If these girls were taught anything in their four years of High School, it certainly didn't include grammar, literature apart from movie scripts, and structured composition.
This sort of junk came early on in a modern-day movement that pushed teachers to adopt a philosophy of "never give the kids what they're not already interested in." I could write about the stupidity of this philosophy for hours, but here I only want to mention my contempt for the idea of approaching the student where he is NOW and never giving him anything new to ponder, no new ideas to pierce his skull, and never expanding his horizons--three things that education was specifically geared to do, and which is now stripped from it. Why should we bother "educating" our kids any more? If we never give them anything new to think of, never ask them to look beyond their innately narrow world, never ask them to ponder anything they didn't come by on their own, then let's give them a break and quit forcing them to stay in school till the age of 18.
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