Chesterton tackles the WASL, more or less...

G. K. Chesterton explains exactly why our schools have failed. "Education", he says, "is only truth in a state of transmission." (If we do not agree on the truth, how can we teach it to our children?) Remember, he was writing in 1910 in England, yet even then he recognized the "tendency toward new educational theories--such as the idea that education is not instruction at all, that the teacher is simply there to 'draw out' of the child his own inherent knowledge and abilities."
Chesterton goes on,
"You may indeed 'draw out' squeals and grunts from the child by simply poking him and pulling him around, a pleasant but cruel pastime to which many psychologists are addicted. But you will wait and watch very patiently indeed before you draw the English language out of him. That you have got to put into him; and there is an end of the matter."
G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With the World?