I knew a very smart graduate of Vassar. She next enrolled at Hunter College to earn a degree in education. We were arguing one day about educational philosophy. Well, I said, we may disagree on a lot but I’m sure we agree on one thing. Students should be able to look at a map of the world and know where Japan is.

She amazed me by saying, No! They can look it up. And I thought: It really is all over. Hunter teaches this nonsense, and a Vassar grad accepts it.

Of all the many foolish strategies that educators have concocted, these five words are perhaps the Grand Canyon of Foolishness. In the real world, people read newspapers quickly or they half-hear talking heads on television–…an epidemic hit Japan... You have to learn a little before you can learn a lot. If you do not know what an epidemic is or what Japan is, the sentence might as well be syllables spoken in Minoan. People can run to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of course. But typically they muddle through with what they already know.

In the world of education, They can look it up is carte blanche for teachers to teach next to NOTHING. If you wish to keep people ignorant, repeat this mantra daily. Conversely, if you wish people to be informed and involved, make sure they know all the basic stuff.

More and more, my research suggests that many of the smartest people in education spend their time devising pretexts for teaching less. If you know examples of this, please leave comments.