Teaching in AmericaSUMMARY: The term "teaching" is generally used in the Academy without a clear idea of ​​what is meant by it, resulting in imprecise and ineffective teaching. The guidelines - that teaching is a matter of applying approved methods, that teaching is primarily a matter of teaching skills - as a means to a career or otherwise - reflect the failure of Academy, measured by its "defect rate" of about 30 percent. The definition of outlined teaching – skills adopted from a theoretical foundation, itself grounded in critique – is well founded in the scientific tradition. Such a definition, however, constitutes a challenge for an Academy at the end of an old regime. It has been obvious for about 20 years that something is wrong with the way we teach in this country. Most of the attention is on “grades,” but higher education is no longer immune to criticism. The most alarming reports are quite consistent: between 27 percent and 35 percent of students entering the college and university system do not complete the program in which they enroll. (1) That so many students are admitted and then lost along the way constitutes an unacceptable “defect rate.” General interest There is a vast body of literature on problems in the education system. These range from alarming reports in the popular press, to practical and anecdotal accounts, to what passes for scientific reporting on research supported by large public and private grants. The popular press is, by definition, popular; it favors the tangible (“reading, writing and arithmetic”). Academic reports are contradictory, for example: one report, in a teachers' union publication, tells us that two-year students entering upper division studies are more likely... middle of article. ..... er published a very insightful essay on the irrelevance of current economic theory and the economists who produce it. The picture is complex, but the bottom line is that the modern school economy is so caught up in the fanciful application of deeper and deeper skills, that any sense of the larger world meant to be modeled is lost. It turns out that Keynes and his successors were the last of his ilk to have their feet firmly planted in reality – while generally being better applied mathematicians. Reading this essay, it seemed to me that the same thing could be said about representatives of quantitative political science, quantitative sociology, etc. : these people owned their estates in the 1970s and 1980s; today we hear little about it, and what they present as "science" - as, for example, in The Bell Curve of a few years ago - is rightly ridiculed as pure nonsense..