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Our culture's focus on academic basics (the "Three R's:" reading, writing, and ' rithmetic ) shifts in both direction and intensity as the world around us changes. Buoyed in past decades by the Cold War, the U.S./Soviet space race, and the development of personal computers, "' rithmetic " never falls far out of favor (although recent shifts toward questionable pedagogy and educational policy have contributed to a precipitous drop in America's mathematical competitiveness, leading in the last several years to a desperate hyper-focus on the need to improve math and science instruction in the U.S.; read my post titled "Mediocrity in Math Instruction," here ). Reading returned to prominence about 20 years ago, as the disastrous effects of "whole language" instructional theory became obvious and the specter of a generation that couldn't read lead to crash literacy programs and the return of "old fashioned" phonics...

Our culture's focus on academic basics (the "Three R's:" reading, writing, and ' rithmetic ) shifts in both direction and intensity as the world around us changes. Buoyed in past decades by the Cold War, the U.S./Soviet space race, and the development of personal computers, "' rithmetic " never falls far out of favor (although recent shifts toward questionable pedagogy and educational policy have contributed to a precipitous drop in America's mathematical competitiveness, leading in the last several years to a desperate hyper-focus on the need to improve math and science instruction in the U.S.; read my post titled "Mediocrity in Math Instruction," here ). Reading returned to prominence about 20 years ago, as the disastrous effects of "whole language" instructional theory became obvious and the specter of a generation that couldn't read lead to crash literacy programs and the return of "old fashioned" phonics...

Our culture's focus on academic basics (the "Three R's:" reading, writing, and ' rithmetic ) shifts in both direction and intensity as the world around us changes. Buoyed in past decades by the Cold War, the U.S./Soviet space race, and the development of personal computers, "' rithmetic " never falls far out of favor (although recent shifts toward questionable pedagogy and educational policy have contributed to a precipitous drop in America's mathematical competitiveness, leading in the last several years to a desperate hyper-focus on the need to improve math and science instruction in the U.S.; read my post titled "Mediocrity in Math Instruction," here ). Reading returned to prominence about 20 years ago, as the disastrous effects of "whole language" instructional theory became obvious and the specter of a generation that couldn't read lead to crash literacy programs and the return of "old fashioned" phonics...