Get rid of education majors.

“We have known these principles for some time, and it’s intriguing that schools don’t pick them up, or that people don’t learn them by trial and error,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.”

Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are “visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students, others “right-brain.” In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. “The contrast between the enormous popularity of the learning-styles approach within education and the lack of credible evidence for its utility is, in our opinion, striking and disturbing,” the researchers concluded.

I've thought for a long time that schools were ignoring proven concepts in favor of fad theories. I learned phonics in third grade, which helped me to learn to sound out and spell words and provided a structure for future study of languages and exceptions to rules, but somehow, later educational theories managed to displace this approach with the idea that children should learn to recognize whole words. My impression from hearing other adults read out loud is that too many of them recognize the first few letters in a word and then guess at the rest of it, instead of taking it a syllable at a time (if they know what a syllable is) and sounding it out. The advantage of this approach is that it helps one to recognize quickly whether the word is a new one or a familiar one. It also helps with our arcane spelling rules, whether you like them or not.

There are many other concepts, such as repetition techniques like flash cards, recitation and drills, that are the foundation of music learning, but have been abandoned in schools. And how many more there may be that I don't know about worries me.