Matt Miller’s The Tyranny of Dead Ideas: Letting Go of the Old Ways of Thinking to Unleash a New Prosperity is a no-nonsense Reality Check. Miller deals with several “Dead Ideas” like our children will do better economically than their parents, that retirement systems and Social Security will be there for our kids, that our educational system is the best in the world, and that taxes can’t go up any more. I think that Miller’s chapter on education is the best in the book. Miller advocates for national educational standards and an abandonment of local school boards and the antiquated system of homogeneous classrooms. “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards,” Mark Twain wrote. Education hasn’t changed much since Twain’s time. Miller also suggests a Value Added Tax (VAT) that the Europeans use could be used to fund many of the changes in education, energy policy, and health care that confront us. If you’re interested in where the U.S. life-style is headed, Miller’s analysis makes a lot of sense. GRADE: B.
Jackie fought to get heterogeneous grouping in the classroom 15 years ago. Eventually she succeeded. The educational bureaucracy bends with the wind of whatever the idea du jour is.
Diane tried many educational innovations in her classroom, too. Looping, mentoring, heterogeneous grouping, whole language reading, etc. But it was always an uphill battle against the educational bureaucracy that resisted all changes…unless they were lavishly Federally funded.
So many things I believed would improve by my dotage did not. I can’t even travel through space like they do in Star Trek. Most things are worse, in fact. The amount of money my parents derived from social security was amazing.
Matt Miller says Social Security won’t be there for our kids. The cost of taking care of the Baby Boomers will drain the Social Security trust fund.