And deference to local control and private - school autonomy make it extremely difficult to contemplate
the prescription of academic knowledge that must be imparted by all schools that are funded directly (districts and charters) or indirectly (via tax credits, vouchers, and ESAs).
Though often mistaken as one man's
prescription for what should be taught in school, Cultural Literacy was a pioneering study
of the history
of education theory as applied in our schools — and it came to the rather damning conclusion that those schools had wrongly forsaken the importance
of transmitting
knowledge in the classroom; the
academic failures were not the result
of moral or character imperfections but
of knowledge deficits.