Maggie's Farm

In The New Yorker, Success Academy’s Radical Educational Experiment - Inside Eva Moskowitz’s quest to combine rigid discipline with a progressive curriculum.

What the author might not understand is that the kids in the Success Academies tend not to be the same kids that the author probably grew up with. Inner city kids and kids from dysfunctional backgrounds often do not arrive at school with the levels of bourgeois impulse control, respect, and orderliness that middle class schools and private schools are accustomed to. To the contrary, these kids are starved for structure. Actually, most people function best with clear structure and deteriorate or unravel without it.

Moskowitz' idea is neither radical nor new. It's the old way. 

Dewey was an idealist who, like idealists in general, imagined an imaginary ideal (ideal in their minds) reality. There are no, or extremely few, little John Deweys or John Stuart Mills lurking inside of most schoolkids. Is that news?