Teaching in AmericaABSTRACT: The term "teaching" is usually used in the academy without a clear idea of ​​what is meant, with the result that teaching is inaccurate and ineffective. The standard 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 the Academy, measured in its "rate of defects" by about 30 percent. The first draft definition of teaching – skills adopted from a theoretical foundation, in turn based on a critical approach – is well founded in the academic tradition. Such a definition, however, represents a challenge for an Academy at the end of an ancien régime. It has been evident for a couple of decades that something is wrong with the way we teach in this country. Much of the attention is focused on “grades,” but higher education is no longer free from criticism. The most alarming reports are quite consistent: between 27% and 35% of students entering the college and university system do not complete the program they enter. (1) For so many students to be admitted, only to be lost along the way, is an unacceptable "desertion rate." General interest There is a large body of literature on the topic of what is wrong with the education system. They range from alarming reports in the popular press to practical and anecdotal reports, to what passes for academic reportage of research supported by significant public and private funding. The popular press is, by definition, popular; favors the tangible ("reading, writing and arithmetic"). Academic reporting is contradictory, for example: One report, in a teachers union publication, tells us that two-year college students entering the upper division study are more likely… half the paper… published an essay very insightful about the irrelevance of current economic theory and the economists who produce it. The picture is complex, but the fact of the matter is that modern school economics is so caught up in the imaginative application of increasingly recondite skills that it loses any sense of the larger world it is supposed to be shaping. It turns out that Keynes and his successors were the last of that breed to have their feet firmly planted in reality – as well as generally being better applied mathematicians. As I read this essay, it seemed to me that much the same thing could be said for exponents of quantitative political science, quantitative sociology, and so on: these people owned their fields in the 1970s and 1980s; we hear little about them today, and what they present as "science" - as, for example, in The Bell Curve from a couple of years ago - is rightly derided as pure nonsense..