A book worth reading??

Charity Aimed at Change. As usual, one cannot judge a book by its cover and this, despite the title, Billions of Drops in Millions of Buckets, by Steven H. Goldberg, could be a book worth reading or it could be just another liberal blather text. I don't know anything about Goldberg but the premise of the book is a bit troubling. It sounds like another one of those "just throw more money at it" type of theses. With the changes on the horizon for Charitable giving more and more of the smaller charities will be squeezed as the bigger ones gobble up funding - under the misnomer that bigger charities are more effective than smaller ones. A sad fact is that most charities, big and small are not very effective. One of the case studies in the book, that the book's reviewer, William A. Schambra, notes is education and all of the various programs to improve education. I would be interested in reading Goldberg's views here. The reasons why education in America is in such a dismal state has little to do with funding levels than with the homogenized, one size fits all approach that the social engineers have been pushing for the last 50 years. Within the educational community - those dimwits that get degrees in education and then cook up theories on how to better educate children - there has not been an original idea for 30+ years. The current belief is that everyone should go to school and everyone should go to college; everything thinks the same and learns the same and so everyone should be educated the same. Educators are afraid to hurt a student's feelings so everyone is treated the same. Grades don't mean anything anymore and the best and the brightest are treated the same as those no so best and bright. Education has become a dumbing down process - a sinking to the lowest common denominator. In the end everyone suffers. Rather than recognizing that everyone is different and learns differently and thus needs to have their education tailored to their abilities we collectivize everyone and seek the lowest term and then gear the class to that term. The result is that the smart students are bored and the not so smart are never helped and those in the middle - the C students get an F level education. The best out of the box thinking I have come across was a series of articles in the Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray of The Bell Curve, fame. He called a spade a spade, by pointing out that not everyone needs to go to college and that our educational system is wasting valuable resources pushing this liberal wrong headed agenda. Rather than just recognizing that not everyone needs to read Shakespeare or do calculus our educational system keeps pushing students into lose-lose situations. His point was that instead of tailoring the educational system to the lowest level students, we need to tailor it for the upper level students and recognize that those at the bottom might be better served by learning a vocation and then getting a job that they can do and succeed at. By pushing them into college we do them a disservice and waste resources. The majority fail out of college, end up in poor jobs and lead miserable lives. Money cannot solve this problem, but clear thinking can.