Late entrant in my gibbeting-the-dead nominations, one I heartily approve

of: “Hi John—We should dig up John Dewey. No single person has managed

to do so much damage to our education system as he. To my mind, he started

the whole social engineering aspect to education. His whole language

approach to reading was, by and large, a disaster – and he knew it. He was

ideologically bound to the idea of teaching children to read later, stating

’A child who learns to read too early has an individualized mind, what we

want is a more collectivized mind.’ Where’s the shovel?”