The Emperor's New Clothes is one of my favorite stories. Everyone pretends the emperor has a fine new suit of clothing as he parades down the street stark naked. Then a little boy shouts, "Why he hasn't got anything on!"
Brian Huskie notes that Hans Christian Anderson's story doesn't end there. The emperor realizes that he's naked, but decides to continue the parade. "So he held himself more proudly than before, and the lords in waiting walked on bearing the train—the train that wasn't there at all."
School leadership also suffers from willful refusal to acknowledge the truth, writes Huskie. It can be easier to keep pretending than to face reality.
Replacing classic texts with "high interest " or Young Adult books is a "naked-emperor" issue, he argues. His school's English department replaced Romeo and Juliet with The Poet X.
I can’t understand how we could consider "Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,/For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night" to be the literary equivalent of "I offered him my boobs."
The school is offering "an inferior education," writes Huskie. "We all know that, and we all know that we all know that, but we are pretending it isn’t true because of 'high interest' or 'connecting with the youth' or 'inclusion' or some other silly self-preservation non-truth-loving nonsense."
His naked-emperor list:
“Productive struggle,” i.e., Student-does-Class does-Teacher-does model
The near total absence of g (intelligence) as a consideration in an industry whose goal is to increase intelligence.
You can add your own examples.
I don't mind multiple intelligences. Dogs smell better than people. Hawks look better than people. Sharks taste better than people. Standard IQ tests don't assess the ability to judge character or to store and correlate olfactory information.
We need all those silly ideas. How else will EdD candidates have anything to write a "thesis" about?