Best Ideas for Improving Education

Forbes Magazine interviews educational consultants on how to improve education here.  Most of the suggestions involved things like empowering teachers and students more to have charge of their own learning.

I like all of these ideas but the most important, the most necessary, change isn't mentioned at all.  We need to make developing a love of reading one of the most important goals.

If it is not stated as a top goal, schools will just continue to teach curriculum that turns kids off to books.  I taught high school English for 37 years, and my top students were always the avid readers.  They were the most sophisticated readers, the best writers, the kids who could concentrate and follow oral arguments, and the kids who had the broadest frames of reference and so could excel in all of their subjects.

As Professor Stephen Krashen, the UCLA researcher has shown, teaching skills is just testing skills.  Kids develop top reading skills through wide, avid reading.