You can tell when the stock market is about to tumble, when loads of companies who should never have had IPOs go public. You know a real estate bubble is ready to burst, when acres of residential or commercial buildings go up all at once, particularly in regions that obviously won’t be able to support them.
Nicely timed to publicize Glenn Reynolds’ new broadside from Encounter Books, The Higher Education Bubble, the Blue Man Group of performance artists have decided to get into “progressive” education in a big way — with just the results you’d expect:
The Blue School is one big play date in desperate need of adult supervision.
Parents are yanking their kids out of the “progressive,” $32,000 per-year private school founded by the Blue Man Group — which has no books and no tests — because their kids are barely learning to read, The Post has learned.
One mother, who is yanking her son at the end of the school year, complained that the school is “unstructured.”
“It’s true,” she said when asked if her kid was struggling to read.
In all, she added, four of her son’s first-grade classmates are leaving the Financial District institution.
Another parent who dropped her first-grade son off yesterday said he’s not coming back next year — because he’s got nothing to do.
“When a 6-year-old says they’re bored, there’s a problem,” the mother said. “I think they bit off more than they can chew.”
Other moms have taken to a popular message board to vent.
“It’s all fun and games until you realize your second-grader can’t read,” a parent wrote on Urbanbaby.com.
And parent Marina Brolin added, “I think they don’t push [reading] as much.”
I saw the Blue Man Group at the Luxor in Vegas around 2002 or so. Fun show, but nothing there indicated that these were the men to educate the 21st century youth of America, except perhaps in the art of wearing makeup and banging on percussive instruments whilst bathed in a bitchin’ light show.
Wait. If that’s all it takes, then why hasn’t Kiss opened up their own school?
Incidentally, note the statement from this “education advisor” quoted in the Post’s article above:
Some experts said parents who choose progressive schools shouldn’t expect to see the same results as they do from a conventional school.
“A majority of my Upper East Side clients, if they took a look down there, their heads would explode,” said education adviser Terri Decker of Smart City Kids. “Literally, their brains would be on the pavement.”
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