MUGGED BY REALITY. J. Martin Rochester's Class Warfare proved to be a relatively quick Book Review No. 36. It's mainly the memoir of a parent conducting an often lonely rearguard action against school boards bent on diluting the curriculum and calling it "inclusion," often at the expense of the most able students who in the new dispensation become unpaid teacher aides doing the "cooperative learning" for their less diligent classmates. The book squares with a few gripes of mine, including the increased burdens on the university to do "remediation" (were Ambrose Bierce alive, he'd have an entry to the effect of teaching middle-school grammar to college students or something equally devastating) and the increased influence of trendy College of Deaducation fads on the way the university conducts classes. Professor Rochester's focus on one dimension of "pack pedagogy," the teacher as facilitator or as coach (these pack pedagogues evidently never heard of St. Vincent of the Pack) who, in the twee phrases so popular with deaducationists, becomes the "guide at the side" rather than the "sage on the stage," suggests yet one more reason for the loss of respect teachers have suffered. And perhaps this is more significant than the trades-union mentality that manifests itself in September teacher strikes, or the shedding of coats and ties, because if the teacher simply enables the student to bring out what he or she already has inside (why does this remind me of bringing up infants in complete silence with the expectation that they will grow up speaking Hebrew?) there is little point in ensuring that such a teacher deserves the respect, let alone the remuneration, of a highly qualified professional. The new approach to K-12 also inverts the responsibility of lower and higher education, with individual exploration and self-discovery of ideas in the lower grades to the exclusion of reading, writing, and figuring, and remediation to develop these skills in college, with perhaps a few acolytes discovering a vocation for being able to explore and discover at the frontier. But the early returns are not promising: to my knowledge, no middle-schooler with an elementary understanding of "invented math" has proven that any even number greater than 4 can be expressed as the sum of two primes, or found a shorter proof of Fermat's famous theorem.