532 If you‘re going nowhere, any road will get you there

"If someone argues that the purpose of studying mathematics is to build self-esteem, and proposes a study method that produces confident students who cannot do long division, then making the counter argument that the study method is a failure will fall on deaf ears. This is, of course, because the study method is in fact a rousing success. It produces exactly what its proponents want. It makes little sense to argue about the means, when you have completely different views about the ends."

This is actually the opening paragraph of an essay on modern architecture--postmodernism--written by Paul Mansour at Scourge of Modernism, a blog about architecture, in May 2003. (It may have been his last.)

But it recalls for me a letter in the Wall Street Journal today about what is wrong with progressive education (which apparently is not unlike modern architecture in content) written by Edwin Thompson. He writes that

Progressive education equals
whole-language
whole-math
anti-conceptual constructivism
multiculturalism
moral relativism
all of which thwart
cognitive development
and creates
followers not leaders
collectivists not individualists
pragmatists not goal oriented individuals and
numerous diagnoses of learning disabilities.

His letter is followed by one written by Bruce Bruxton, a Headmaster at a private day school. He says that all the education reforms, top down, that have occurred in the last 50 years or so have amounted to a massive failure, matched only by the failure of Marx and Lenin.