This book offers a first-hand account of the Great American Education War being waged from coast to coast, including the reading wars, maths wars, testing wars, and other schoolyard scuffles reported almost daily by the nation's media. Martin Rochester takes the reader on a field trip that begins with his own upper-middle class suburban school district in St Louis and then moves on to inner-city locales and some of the best private schools, in showing how 'pack pedagogy' has steamrollered parent resistance in promoting disasters such as whole-language, fuzzy maths, multiple intelligence theory, teacher-as-coach, the therapeutic classroom, and all the other latest fads found in today's schools. Rochester concludes that all children are being victimised, not only the most gifted, but especially 'average' students and those lower achieving kids whose needs are now supposedly driving the entire curriculum.