The second season of ‘Sold a Story,’ a podcast about education, opens in 1966 in an Illinois classroom. The teacher is a former Chicago marketing executive named Siegfried Engelmann. Before him sit seven Black children. He calls out arithmetic questions and they answer together, as is the norm in direct instruction, the teaching method Engelmann pioneered. The lesson moves on to algebra. The children keep pace. Then the creator and host of the podcast, Emily Hanford, cuts in. The children, she notes, are in preschool. Sixty years later, we have UC Berkeley math teaching professor Zvezdelina Stankova complaining, in a San Francisco ‘Standard’ op-ed that went viral this summer, that students at the University of California’s flagship campus were struggling with “fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.” What happened? A year after Engelmann showed off his method in a recorded half-hour lesson, President Lyndon B. Johnson instructed education officials in his administration to evaluate the best way to teach poor children. They landed on Engelmann’s direct instruction — but it was never implemented nationwide. The reason was Engelmann’s “militaristic” approach to education, as the education writer Alfie Kohn explained in his criticism of direct instruction, which he said is today favored by “right-wing activists” who “wanted to make sure that learning itself is conceived as a fundamentally passive process.” Engelmann’s supporters’ politics were off, which meant his ideas were bad. And since Kohn gave this assessment in 2022, it seems that little has changed. Read more about how we’ve forgotten the art of teaching kids math, from the second season of ‘Sold a Story’: nymag.visitlink.me/1BaDzx