This article seems to be mostly a eulogy of someone who seemed to be a good teacher and a good person. That's great, although a bit odd material for HN's front-

This article seems to be mostly a eulogy of someone who seemed to be a good teacher and a good person. That's great, although a bit odd material for HN's front-page. But he does this mostly by comparing and contrasting his father's teaching style with a straw man or caricature of "modern" pedagogy, which I find to be unwarranted. There are still good teachers out there. The Socratic method is still used to great effect. Sure, there are poorly run classrooms out there (always have been), and norms around discipline have changed, but that by no means this entire generation is weak minded. Some of it is downright untrue, too. My kids would LOVE to be informed they could re-take a test as many times as they wanted. Unfortunately this mostly seems to be complaining about "kids these days" without any data to back up the assertions about what the kids these days actually are, and that isn't good content.