Visit any activist website and you are likely to find extremist opinions not held by the mainstream.

I didn't say Michaelangelo was a human secularist (which would obviously be wrong), I said he was a humanist. That is the actual word you used yourself.

It would be a lot more pleasant to talk with you if you could refrain from taking pot-shots at people. Maybe you are upset about some things some people have said, but why not try to discuss them and give your own opinions without the constant offensive personal remarks. I do not require an apology. I do, however, wonder why I keep getting into discussions with someone so consistently insulting. All these discussions require is a basic respect for the humanity of the person sitting at the other keyboard.

You would like to hear my opinions about the article? OK. I graduated from a high school in Nebraska in the early 90s and went to a liberal arts college. I taught high school English in the UK for 5 years. The system is different in some key ways here. I would say that the English curriculum is more rigorous and demanding here, and by the time a student has passed their A-Levels, their skills in literary analysis are usually superior to those of many US college graduates. I am not exaggerating. However, there are problems with this too. British A-Levels force students to specialise at a very early age, assuming they can have a good idea of what career they want to pursue for the rest of their lives. They are very academic and the students are tested ad nauseam; there is huge pressure on teachers to teach to the tests, because people want to see "results," and they get put into school league tables which are used in political ping-pong. And guess what -- university professors here are also complaining that standards in written English have dropped. This is maybe partly to do with the fact that teaching explicit grammar went out of vogue for a whole generation -- mine -- and while I was teaching I found that many of my colleagues had not themselves been taught very basic grammatical knowedge. This has been changing for the past several years.

This article says that US students are struggling to get meaning out of a text and that thier writing skills are rather basic, though their grammar is OK. This seems pretty well in line with the sort of education I got in junior high and high school. Compared to the sort of textual analysis that is done with similarly-aged students here, all I can remember doing there is having a good talk about what we'd read. And occasionally writing the odd short story. I had some super teachers who really brought the texts to life, but we were not taught how to really examine and analyse what we read. Little of this went on even in college. Pretty unbelievable, but true.

Like many similar discussions with an element of nostalgia, this article talks about how parents and grandparents did so much better in US schools. I would like to see some statistics for how many people went to school earlier in the 20th century -- how many graduated from high school, how many went to college. College seems to be almost a minimum requirement now for anyone hoping for something better than a mcjob. Whether you are academically suited or not, it has become the necessary qualification. Even masters degrees are becoming a dime a dozen in many professions. Where do you stop? Just how much higher education does a person need in order to work in an office? In the past, if you were keen to go be a builder or a plumber, you left school and got apprenticed to someone. Nowadays you have to stay in school even if academics are not your forte. I think there is still very much an academic elitist attitude in US education, surpassed only by the elitist attitude toward sports. If you are good at either of these you are adulated. If you're not, you just become a little cog in a big system, more or less forgotten about. No matter that when you actually leave school, the fact that you got straight A's means nothing if you don't know that in order to get ahead in your job you've got to wear the right clothes and know the right people.

I think schools can go toward improving academic excellence for those whom it would benefit. They also need to offer more to people who can't cope with this, and there are many. I've taught them. We have a national curriculum here for many subjects. I have been forced to teach it, and the major academic high school test (called GCSE), to a small group of boys who had behaviour problems, who could barely read and write, and many of whom wanted to be a mechanic in a garage or just wanted to get out altogether, onto the streets if nothing else. I had to teach them Shakespeare. I had to make them write essays. They achieved a lot considering the circumstances, but it was also one of the most stressful periods of my life, and I had this class for 2 years. I will discuss this example in detail to anyone who advocates a blanket "academic excellence" emphasis in schools. Great for some, not for others.

It wasn't all that bad when I was in school. I read classics in junior high English (though not so much, strangely, in advanced placement high school Engish): A Tale of Two Cities, The Time Machine, Antigone, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet. OK textual analysis was almost non-existent, but at least I enjoyed those books and we had some great discussions, which is why I still remember them today. A good teacher can go a long way toward making up for weaknesses in the curriculum.

And even though I would have been considered an academic, I do have to ask why people are so concerned that students consistently do well in so many disciplines. I did math through calculus. I found it interesting. But to be honest, how have I ever made use of that? It had never figured into what I've done in my day-to-day life or my career. I couldn't do an integral to save my life now because I've forgotten how. Yes let people take these classes, but I think a lot of debate needs to take place before we say that certain skills are important for everyone to have. And up to what level? That needs to be decided too.

I think US schools would greatly benefit from teaching logic, religious education, and life skills (called personal and social education here). Children need to learn how to manage finances, how to develop their social skills, and even how to care for babies and children. Schools need to prepare children for life, not just teach them academics. When I left school, entering the "real world" was a huge and painful slap in the face. That shouldn't be the case for anyone. All that praise for how clever I was, for getting good grades? It meant just about zero.

Just to touch on some other points here. This article really likes bashing the 60s and hippy/liberal values. I wouldn't mind reading similar articles with different underlying prejudices, see what common ground there is. A lot of people like to blame everything on the 60s. I like to blame lots of things on Thatcher and Reagan myself.

I'm also not keen on the simplistic analysis of ability-grouping here. The only factual thing that can be said is that there's controversy about it, and always has been. I'm aware of the problems in a mixed-ability classroom, I've taught in them. But when you group according to ability, you also get problems. The brightest students usually do well. The middle-ability students lack the examples and the contributions of the brighter students and can remain stuck in mediocrity, never aspiring for anything better. The bottom sets are hell. These are the sorts of things that make teachers quit their jobs. When you are put in a bottom set you know it. Many children in these groups have very little self-esteem. They reinforce each other's bad behaviour. They will often do anything to avoid the actual work. However, separate children like this, put them in a larger group of students who are more well behaved and willing to work, and you often find the problems disappear. As long as you put children into sets you get bottom sets. Sometimes these children really are lovely but more often they will collectively test the patience of the most experienced and skilled teachers, and make them wonder why they bring themselves in for more punishment day after day.

I have been selling some old books at local second-hand book shops without much success, because the shop owners are telling me that they don't sell so many books themselves anymore. People aren't reading as much. I suppose it stands to reason. We've got TV, ipods, MySpace, text messaging, any number of things that many people would rather do. People also have shorter attention spans for a variety of reasons. Is forcing more books on them in school the answer? You'd have a tough fight. I think you'd simply find that most of the students haven't done the reading. Parents vary in how much they can or will help their children with homework, whether or not they encourage them to do it.

Overall this is a well contructed article, but there needs to be a lot of debate. I think the idea of a national curriculum should be considered, but you have to beware of what's happened with it here. It is so prescriptive, at least in my subject, that teachers have little room for autonomy or decision-making in which texts to study. The best thing about it though? Whatever assessment grade you give can be understood across the country, and you can explain to a student how they got it and how they can improve. Better than a 'C' written in red on top of your paper with no comments isn't it?