DAN LERMAN: The War on Knowledge.

Schools have decided that facts are no longer worth teaching.

In many classrooms today, the very idea of committing information to memory has become unfashionable. As I tour schools for my daughter, we are often assured that facts will surely not be the focus of her education. “We don’t do rote memorization,” teachers proudly declare with a condescending wink. As if memorization were an outdated relic of a less enlightened era.

But without facts, what are students actually learning?

At the progressive Brooklyn private school where I once taught, spelling wasn’t corrected until middle school. Focusing on spelling, we were told, got in the way of creativity.

I then watched smart, curious kids write macien for machine at age 14, then wilt when people involuntarily gasped at their failed spelling attempts. Their writing was often expressive and insightful . . . and incoherent. They probably weren’t even aware of the $60,000 per annum price tag, or they might have raged against that macien.

Math was treated with the same flippancy. Curious about the curiously low standardized test scores, I once wandered into a math classroom where the teacher was barefoot, in a faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt (it was a great shirt). He then drew a circle on the board and announced, “This is not a circle. It’s a representation of a circle.” The lesson, it seemed, was to gain mystique points by using a stoner voice to say something quirky. I couldn’t help but make a connection between that math lesson, and the school’s undying demand for expensive private tutors.

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