Every year it seems that our public schools get worse and worse.
For 5,000 years the human race has been reading and writing, yet it seems that in the last 30 years somehow we've forgotten how to teach children how to read.
We know what the problem is. Everyone knows what the problem is. The problem is that decades of educational "reforms" have made our schools bureaucratic nightmares. We spend billions of dollars on education, but almost none of it actually makes it into the classroom. Meanwhile, classroom materials are chosen for our teachers by politicians, committees and bureaucrats, and those materials are uniformly awful.
It's not really a surprise that so many of our children aren't learning. The real surprise is that some of them actually manage to learn anyways!
Which leads to my idea:
Give every teacher an account on learning.amazon.com, and a budget. Let them directly choose the materials that will work best for their teaching style and the children they have to teach.
That's it. It's not a complicated idea. It's a very simple idea, but one with profound implications. My mother was a schoolteacher for 20 years. I know that this will work. I also know that all of the other proposed educational reforms I see won't work. Teaching is really about craftmanship.
The purpose of this website is to chronicle my attempts to reach the executives at Amazon.com in order to pitch them this idea. It wont be easy, but nothing worth doing is easy. I took the website approach because that's what I do for a living, so it was a natural fit.