How everyone can strengthen their own and their families’ education at the PK-12 levels to provide broader, deeper, and excellent preparation for a Liberal Education before entering college.

1. Reading instruction must be research-based. I have spent over 30 years confronting the reading establishment which is well documented in Let’s Kill Dick and Jane by Harold Henderson. It took a century of failure in reading instruction to get it right! Now most state departments of education are requiring schools to use research-based methods. Reading aloud and programs like Sesame Street are also valuable and recommended. Parents, including fathers, and others, should read aloud to all preschoolers, starting with one-year olds. (I recommend the Read Aloud Handbook and The Enchanted Hour.)

2. Each state should provide a performance-based end of secondary examination, like the International Baccalaureate (IB) examination, and examinations provided by the education systems in most industrial countries. All responses in secondary examinations and entry level examinations to higher education must be in writing - - no multiple-choice responses in entrance examinations to assure all entry level students can write. As pointed out centuries ago: if you cannot write you cannot think. (Writing should be graded.)

3. By the end of secondary school all students must be competent in writing, but preferably by the end of 6th grade when all students should be examined in the 3 R’s.

4. Mathematics must be dramatically improved, so that all students are mathematically literate. US students score 48th in national and international assessments of mathematics. In a fourth-grade comparison in the 80s with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean classes, most competent students in math in America scored below the lowest achieving students in math in all three Asian countries. To begin with, all students must be comfortable with fractions by the fourth grade.

5. In addition to the above comments about improving instruction in the 3 R’s, we need to improve instruction in all subjects. Certainly, the teachers’ colleges can improve instruction as proposed by Stigler and Stevenson. However, we need to recognize that many aspects of teaching skills are learned on the job! Note the important research in observing how the teachers in Japan, China, and Korea learn to become expert teachers by investing at least 20% of their time discussing and analyzing current activities and planning for the future – lifelong! See: James Stigler and James Hiebert, in The Teaching Gap. In this way, all teachers can reach world-class competency if they discuss and continually improve as in Asia.

6. A Community Service component should be required.

7. Work-based learning with at least three months of internship should be required for all students. Choosing a career is one of the most problematic decisions in everyone’s life and some work-based learning is essential to help make this choice.

8. Reorganize schools:

   • Increasing the length of secondary school to six years, namely 7-12 grades, so that students have more opportunities to have broader and deeper education in the basic subjects. For example, algebra should be taught in 7th grade so it can be used in all sciences, and calculus can be taught in the senior year.

   • The school week should be organized as in most European schools so that in the case of sciences: physics, chemistry, and biology, all should be taught for two sessions per week starting in the 7th grade and all taught continuously until graduation. (Currently in America, one year without seeing the relationship among the sciences is not effective.)

9. Character Education or SEL is taught in all grades. I find the Positivity Project to be the best resource.

10. Reading aloud should be provided, especially in the inner cities (with outside resources), starting with one-year olds. If students are missing 30,000,000 words with adults, they are unable to be educated. See Read-Aloud Handbook and The Enchanted Hour.

11. Foreign Languages should be taught starting in kindergarten as is done in foreign non-English speaking countries (Foreign languages at an early age make children smarter!)

12. The broadening of history courses to restore history as a subject. To call it social studies (starting a century ago) has killed history, so many Americans are not historically literate, especially in their own history and understanding our own remarkable history and constitution. Note the Bradley Report of 1989, Historical Literacy. World History, European History, and American History, and Civics should be part of K-12 education experiences for all students. Howard Zinns’ book on American History has been a best seller and is inappropriate by itself.

13. Physical Fitness is an area that needs more resources to make certain all US students are physically fit and healthy, as required by the Ancient Greeks. Spectator sports may be valuable for a few students but not for those sitting on the benches. A selective service officer in 1965 authored a book called The Wasted Generation in which he pointed out only 50% of the male students qualified for the national services versus 75% of European students. As a possibility for World War III, we do not have enough people to raise an Army, Navy, or Air Force. What then? The obesity of American students is embarrassing and intolerable.

14. Music literacy is essential and should start with five-year-olds with hundreds of folk songs. One hour a week, which most schools provide for music, is all that is needed. The teacher does not need a musical background because the children’s songs, including songs in foreign languages, will be on the internet.

15. Schools, regions, or states that make considerable progress along these and similar ways should be recognized by the media and donors.

16. States should give students who reach high standards scholarships to state colleges and universities (as Florida does for International Baccalaureate students).

17. The International Baccalaureate is now the best secondary education in the world. Any school can adopt individual subjects such as the Theory of Knowledge (epistemology) or preferably the entire program for the 11th and 12th grades. (See the last chapter of What Works by Hamish McRae)

Blouke Carus

(These opportunities for strengthening education will be written in greater detail and with references in my forthcoming autobiography)

April 2025