Customer Reviews

End the Biggest Educational and Intellectual Blunder in History: A $100,000 Challenge to Our Top Educational Leaders

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As a teacher, I highly recommend this book to others. I began reading the book expecting the usual condemnation of teachers and schools. This is not the case as the book is supportive of schools and teachers. Inside you will find praise for John Dewey, a discussion of educational movements and fads, the "look say" and phonics methods of reading instruction, methods of math instruction, methods of science instruction, testing and more testing, No Child Left Behind, and more. The main thrust of the book is a very interesting case for teaching the scientific method. You may know this method as problem solving, discovery learning, or by many other names. The book is extremely well researched and states its case quite well. Should the scientific method be taught in schools? I suggest that you read the book, check the references, and decide for yourself.
The size of the book itself may put some people off, but the author wrote the book specifically for people to be able to "skip read" the parts that interest them. I read it straight through as I did not want to miss anything. I agree with the author and add my name to legendary astronomer Carl Sagan and the pilot of Apollo 8, William Anders, and others, as praising the need for teaching the scientific method.

Some books are really important. Darkness at Noon changed a French election. Uncle Tom's Cabin solidified Northern opinion against slavery. End the Biggest Educational and Intellectual Blunder in history by Norman W. Edmund addresses American education's neglecting to teach the scientific method of reasoning through all levels of education. This has important consequences in the real world: See Chapter 9 The Absurd Disaster in the Teaching of Reading.
Page 111 tells why more senior scientists have not rushed to support the book. Scientists learn the scientific method through apprenticeship. I learned medicine that way and learned it well. However this option is usually not avialable in the formative years of the late grades and high school. A viable alternative is training in rigorous logical thinking. Mr. Edmund describes its lack and shows it is part of the reason American students lag behind students abroad.
Mr. Demund has researched his subject thoroughly. He shows the reader in depth why our sciendce students are in trouble. Although his book is long, he has structured it so that readers can skip around yet follow the main points with ease. It is a cry for attention and an offer of help to an educational system that has only to look at its students'test scores to know that Amreica is in trouble. William L. Clovis, M. D.