"not trivia like what door to walk through."
My thought is that is a possible predictor of they have more significant ideological axes to grind. If they say, “Children need rhythm that mirrors the motion of the skies, so they should enter through the east and depart through the west,” or anything remotely like that, they're not for me.

"Understanding the principles of education takes more than "teach things"."
Maybe my bad experience at the very first school we tried causes me to set the bar low. I want my kids to learn the facts and tools to find the facts. Their age is a great time to indoctrinate someone into an ideology, and that's precisely what I do not want for them. All I want is for them to pick up tools to examine reality. In my lowbrow words, just teach them things.

"If the only time in your life you think you have seen Pragmatism is in a law suit, then you still don't know what it is."
I don't get this part. I mean, if I don't know what it is, what are we talking about?

I'm not a philosopher, but from reading the Ayn Rand books, I think of pragmatism as saying since we use models to understand the world and models are imperfect, there is not true reality. We can say for sure how efficient a tranformer is and we can use Maxwell's equations, but this is just an expedient, they say, to get something working. We shouldn't think, they say, that science brings us closer to understanding the nature of the universe. In my non-philosopher view, post-modernism is a more extreme version of this, in which they don't even believe we can know how efficient the transformer is b/c of the biases of the observer. They rightly point out that human observation is unreliable. Instead of finding ways to work around human frailties, they throw up their hands and say nothing's real anyway.

I don't know if that first school was planning on teaching stuff like this when they got older, but I imagine so. I could tell you the stories, but I try to put it behind me.

We did hear a story second-hand last week of this type of thing. My wife has a college student working PT in her practice. He said he was in a TA-facilitated discussion in some liberal arts class. The TA said she believed in a radical form of socialism that had no money or trading. Some of the students asked questions like "how would they deal with something that's scarce but get me made through work?" After a few respectful but critical questions, the TA said the students were not "respecting her space" or some words like that and then left the class in protest. I can't imagine that when I went to school in the 90s. The student who works for us thought it was bizarre but seems more used to this concept of living in a zone protected from uncomfortable questions.

That suggests to me there's a real problem, but I resist the urge to say "kids these days..."