Education

We at VanDamme Academy love hearing stories about things the students do or say at home that reflects their VanDamme Academy education. I recently asked parents to share some stories from home. Here are a few highlights: Calvin (5): I was talking to Calvin about the...

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (or NAEP), the average high school student is an incompetent writer. To evaluate their writing ability, testers asked high school juniors to write a paragraph based on notes they were given about a haunted...

In my recent article "The Failure of Field Trips," I explained what is wrong with traditional school outings. The typical field trip is irrelevant to the students' education, either because they have been unprepared to appreciate it by their schooling (e.g., City Hall...

Many educators stress the importance of field trips--opportunities to get students out of their desks and away from their books, and to give them direct, vivid, sensory experience with the world around them. Reflecting on my own education, these excursions off campus...

I began my career as a private teacher for a few families committed to providing their children with a real education. These parents had abandoned a fruitless search for a school in which their children would read the classics of literature, learn the story of...

When I tell people that I teach literature to junior high students, the response is nearly universal: an expression of profound sympathy. Teaching junior high is regarded as a martyr's job, to be taken on only by those with such a selfless commitment to children and...

Several weeks ago, in my article "Pattern Recognition vs. Real Understanding," I stressed the crucial connection between writing and understanding: For the student to write explanations, in complete sentences, about every subject--whether history, literature, grammar,...

Every class in elementary and junior high school should be in a lecture format. The teacher must be an authority on the subject, he must grasp its basic purpose, he must carefully define the knowledge to be conveyed by reference to that purpose, and he must present...

Every year, when I give my first test in a grammar or literature class, some new student asks me whether the test will be multiple choice. Every year, I look him in the eye and say "I can assure you that you will never, in any class, under any circumstances, at any...

It might be a hilarious comedy routine to have a group of highly educated judges solemnly expounding on something that everybody knows to be utter nonsense. But it isn't nearly as funny when this solemn discourse about nonsense takes place on the Supreme Court of the...

Every year, dozens of parents sit at my desk and describe to me the intense frustration they feel as they watch their children get churned through the public schools. One of the refrains of their complaints: endless homework. And no wonder: The work itself is largely...

The science curriculum for the elementary students at VanDamme Academy is taught primarily through experiments. These students are learning principles that are very close to the perceptual level, so we always demonstrate the principle in carefully designed hands-on...

Recently, I was visited by a mother frustrated with her son's education and looking for something more.She informed me that mid-way through his kindergarten year, they were still learning their letters--most recently, they had been studying the letter "P." And in...

Another consequence of the rampant violation of hierarchy in science education, available to both teachers and students alike, is that students find learning about science boring.When I ask people about their experience studying science in school, particularly...

This year, I have the pleasure of teaching literature to our school's Elementary 1 students, children in second and third grades, a class that includes my own seven-year-old daughter Lana. Their uninhibited enthusiasm for learning, their eager quest to see...