Ablow: Got kids? Apologize

Nearly 50 million students are now returning to classrooms--from kindergarten through 12th grade. They will spend approximately eight hours a day at school and additional hours doing homework. They will be educated, in public schools alone, by the equivalent of over 3 million full-time teachers. And they will, with rare exception, learn a dismal fraction of what they ought to be learning to be creative, confident and critical thinkers about themselves and the world around them. As a parent myself, I literally apologized to each of my children--and not just once--for the fact that so much of their time as grade school and junior high school and high school students (even at private school) was being spent on memorization, regurgitation and rote learning that amounted to busy work and the warehousing of them, physically and mentally.