Fix education now: 8-point checklist for reforming public schools

 If our irresponsible media would do its job, if our politicians and community leaders would be more involved in ending the great national embarrassment, if parents would understand what's going on in the classroom and become so angry they won't take it anymore, we could have better schools in no time.

Here is a dirty little secret that deserves your consideration. Most of the problems in the public school are caused by deliberate human actions. Not innocent human error as when somebody pushes the wrong button. No; think of the situation where somebody cuts a plane’s fuel line.

George Soros said his big ambition is to destroy America. That is how our Communists and globalists think. What's the easiest way to destroy America without spending much money or attracting much attention? Simple, you degrade and cripple the school system. You crimp some fuel lines, so to speak.

The Education Establishment has been doing this for 100 years. The damages are cumulative. A little less reading and arithmetic each decade. Don't bother with geography or history or science. Let's don't have grades, homework, grammar, essays, or genuine testing. Keep simplifying everything. Chop down a mighty forest tree by tree.

Here are eight necessary reforms that everyone can promote today:

Get eid of sight-words, bring back phonics. Children should learn to read in the first grade. Anything less means the people in charge are incompetent.

Almost all children can learn the arithmetic basics—add, subtract, multiply divide. For example, students should be able to compute 23×18, quickly, routinely. If students need more than 30 seconds, the people in charge are not competent. In any case, just say no to Common Core.

Everyone needs to know more geography so they can understand the news, weather reports, and events unfolding around the globe. Teachers should point to maps a lot more often, and tell the kids what's going on there.

Learn and cherish more history—systematic, objective history. When someone mentions a famous event, students should be able to explain why the event is famous.

Memorization is a good thing. Education professors have demonized memorization for a century. That's why we have college students who don't know who won the Civil War nor much else.

Constructivism is a gimmick that tells teachers to stand aside. Students are supposed to generate their own new knowledge. What sort of nitwittery requires that the most educated person in the room must be silent? That's a quick way to dumb down a country.

Cooperative learning is not the answer to every challenge. We often must finish projects on our own. K-12 experts pretend that a team is a bunch of interchangeable people all doing the same thing. That's the socialist dream. Teams at the corporate level are composed of specialists with complementary skills. Consider an NFL football team, that's a better picture of the world which students are preparing for.

Learning styles is another goofy idea that's been running amok for 50 years. Instead of teaching knowledge, teachers are supposed to expend time and energy figuring out each student’s peculiarities, as if the world will accommodate those peculiarities in the future. British reformer Mona McNee said kids have a lot more similarities than differences. Let's start there.

The central problem in American K-12: our experts demoted academic achievement in order to pursue social engineering. Now there is a fundamental lack of both seriousness and honesty. Students are kept busy on trivial activities and projects, that's the strategy. Behold, we witness the deliberate dumbing down of America. (Test for eighth-grade a century ago is more difficult than tests seen in college today.)

This dumbing-down strategy can be described as the death by 1000 cuts. Think of a big healthy bull that is stabbed repeatedly by picadores until it is halfway to dying and not so great a danger to the matador. That is comparable to what our socialist educators do. They weaken the school system and the students so they won't be so big an obstacle to ideologues trying to transform the country.

Communists speak constantly of their ideals and superior motivations but H L Mencken summed up the situation better: “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.”

The proper goal of a public school system can be simply stated. We lift every child up to each one's potential. Today, we are sub-educating millions of children. We can easily teach 99% of children to read, do arithmetic, find Antarctica on a globe, and understand all those thousands of elementary things that define our civilization. But we don't do this.

In their zeal to undermine our school system, the Progressives systematically discarded all the good ideas. I realize now that traditional education is the best education. We have to eliminate the clunkers introduced throughout the 20th century, and bring back the proven ideas that always worked. That's the goal embedded in this eight-point reform program.

(These reform ideas are explained in greater depth in Saving K-12, this writer’s guide to fixing the public schools.)

© Bruce Deitrick Price

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/bprice/201116

Maria Montessori vs. John Dewey (The Fight of The Century)

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

I've been studying Rudolf Flesch, the Reading Wars, the Ed Wars, John Dewey, and all points in between. Along the way I learned a lot about Montessori and her losing, bruising battle with America's top educators. Mainly, I learned that she deserved to win.

Montessori was the first female doctor in Italy, graduating in 1896. You know she was extremely smart and determined; you know she thought for herself.

She got into education along an odd tangent. She wanted to help children with learning disabilities (at a clinic in Rome). She devised her own techniques and was soon producing miracles: these slower children were beating the so-called normal children. Now, that is an amazing and wonderful story. But it gets better.

Montessori next asked the very questions that would possess me: what the heck were the public schools doing to Italy’s children that they lagged behind her less capable children? How could she, a medical doctor, come along and beat those schools at their own game?

Long story short: she applied her techniques to ordinary kids and soon, she was the talk of Europe and then the world. Her ideas swept through enlightened circles in the US. She came here to speak in 1913.

And then comes one of the most shameful moments in American education. John Heard Kilpatrick, a crony of John Dewey, wrote a major attack piece in the New York Times (1914) that devastated Montessori. Her reputation in the US collapsed. Montessori schools closed. Her name disappeared until the 1960s. (Both she and Dewey died in 1952.)

Finally, it comes down to what an educator is REALLY trying to do.

 Maria Montessori was trying to set kids lose, make them smart. And all her resources explore (and explode) their potential. That's what I believe in.

John Dewey and his gang were all too willing to settle for mediocrity. They were socialists and they believe that too much learning and knowledge got in the way of producing the cooperative, interdependent children they wanted. John Dewey specifically says in “My Pedagogical Creed” (1897) that he didn't believe in too much history, science, math, geography, literature, and so on in the early grades. That is, ages 6 to 9 when according to Montessori and common sense, kids are on fire, eager to learn, growing every day. 

 Instead, John Dewey says that he wants to emphasize social activities, including “cooking, sewing, manual training, etc.” (his words). He wants to slow kids down, to retard them. The payoff is supposed to be that they will grow to become good little socialists. (Even Antonio Gramsci, a real communist, said that if you want to help poor kids, you had better give them lots of basic academic skills.)

Here’s what I’ve figured out: you have to look at motives. Montessori was obsessed with making slow children fast. That’s a pedigree I can trust. Dewey was  obsessed with making all kids Socialists. So, from day one, Dewey was not an educator in the traditional sense. He believed in conditioning. He was a social engineer, trying to build he Brave New World he saw in his head.

A century later, we’re still paying for Dewey’s bad ideas. Dewey, I submit, is the  Father of Dumbing Down. He and his gang did not like too much literacy. That is, they were comfortable with more illiteracy. And they got it. By promoting Whole Word, which does not work, they made sure that this country’s literacy rate would steadily drop  This pedagogy is also, I believe, responsible for all the dyslexia and reading problems we hear about. (Want to eliminate dyslexia? My  conclusion is that the simplest way is to eliminate sight-words. Every last one. Once children see the sight-word shapes they become doomed, no longer able to perceive sounds in print.)

The problem with Dewey and Kilpatrick is that they were trying to pull off a silent coup. They wanted a Socialist America. You think they can speak candidly about their goals and strategy? Never. That’s why anything Kilpatrick, Dewey, or their allies say about Montessori will be bull and balderdash. It will, more formally, be disingenuous.

 Bottom line: let’s don’t get stuck in the details. Montessori was a real educator. She always INTENDS  to educate. Dewey was a real Socialist. He always intends to create  Socialists. As most people understand the term “education,” Dewey was actually anti-education.

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K-12: The Conspiracy Against Reading

A century ago, US public school students had achieved almost universal literacy. The Education Establishment took care of that.

 In his 1984 book about American education, Samuel Blumenfeld pointed out that: “Nothing has mystified Americans more than the massive decline of literacy in the United States. Children spend more time at school and the government spends more money on education than ever before. Yet, reading ability keeps declining. What has gone wrong?”

You have probably heard this lament. But here's where it becomes really alarming. Blumenfeld looked back seven decades to the year 1915. That's when the literacy figures for 1910 were published by the US Bureau of Education and quoted in a weekly publication, School and Society, edited by James McCain Cattelll, one of the luminaries in the Progressive education movement. School and Society stated that:

  “Statistics compiled by the Bureau of Education for use at the Panama-Pacific Exposition, show that of children from 10 to 14 years of age there were in 1910 only 22 out of every 1,000 who could neither read nor write….. The following states report only one child in 1,000 between ages of 10 and 14 as illiterate: Connecticut, District of Columbia, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Utah, and Washington…It is evident that the public schools will in a short time practically eliminate illiteracy.”   (READ MORE)

   

Socialism versus Education

 "A death instinct" in action…

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To understand the failures of public education, we have to understand the dreams of socialism. 

It has always had three main targets it hopes to destroy: family, religion, and private property. These three are the very foundation of civilization for thousands of years. How could you possibly destroy them? Through education, of course. Or perhaps “miseducation” is the proper word.

Control and pervert education, and you can convince the masses that they no longer want what their parents and grandparents wanted so desperately. 

Educated people can reflect on what is being done to them. Ignorant people do not know enough to reflect on much of anything. More and more, American students lack basic skills and fundamental knowledge. How can they understand proposals made by politicians, media, and government?

Igor Shafarevich, a famous Russian mathematician, wrote a 1980 book called “The Socialist Phenomenon.” Shafarevich explained that enforced equality was a constant obsession of socialists. To achieve it, they were willing to adopt extreme and indeed murderous measures. Shafarevich “argues that socialism is essentially nihilistic, unconsciously motivated by a death instinct. He concludes that we have the choice of either pursuing death or life.”

K-12: Inside Job

"When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.” Alain Finkielkraut

Beware the traitor, we are finding out. History will probably record that high-ranking government officials tried to overturn the election of Donald Trump. History, I suspect, will use the word coup and will call these people traitors. This is unpleasant stuff but also clarifying. A small group of people, well-organized and focused on the same goal, can overturn and destroy much larger organizations.

 John Dewey and his supporters, a century ago, did not think of themselves as traitors, now would they use the word coup. But they organized themselves in exactly that fashion. A few hundred professors of education took control of Columbia’s Teachers College et al with the goal of creating “progressive” teachers who could be sent out to the public schools of America to create a new kind of citizen, more cooperative and pliable.

Laurie Rogers, one of the sharpest critics of our Education Establishment, sees an abundance of betrayal. Her blog was titled “Betrayed — Why Public Education Is Failing.” Her 2011 book is titled “Betrayed: How the Education Establishment has Betrayed America.” 

In 2008 she summed up nearly a century of public school decline: “The dizzying downward spirals of skills in science, technology, engineering and math are jeopardizing students’ futures and the nation’s stability…Many of the people who built this failing education system make money off of it as it crumbles around our ears….Most of the people in the education establishment refuse to engage in this conversation (leaving students and parents to work it out on their own)….Of the rest, most neatly sidestep any blame for the tragedy as they foist blame on parents, teachers, money, legislators, society, hormones (yes, I've actually heard that), and the students themselves….Just a handful will try to warn you of this education apocalypse. Some of those brave souls have been censured, reprimanded or fired.” Rogers does not see accident or fad. She sees active betrayal.

(Read more)

K-12: Parallels with Venezuela

Progressive/Socialist theories promise panaceas; but the People typically end up with pain.

K-12: Parallels with Venezuela

Such a marvelous country. Venezuela is twice the size of California, with a mix of tropical and temperate climates, with 1500 miles of oceanfront and, guess what, more oil reserves than any other country in the world. What could go wrong? Venezuela has everything, unfortunately including a Socialist government.

Barron’s reported (April 8, 2017): “Venezuela is in free fall….Once Latin America’s wealthiest nation and a tourist destination touted in airline ads from the 1950s, Venezuela now faces shortages of food and basic medicines…”

The Washington Post reported (Feb. 12, 2018), “Venezuela’s economy is so bad, parents are leaving their children at orphanages.”

 How could so many blessings be turned into failures? The Panama Post  presented (Dec. 21, 2017) a profound political analysis of Venezuela’s plight. The key weapons used against it, according to this report, are “deception and distraction.” 

Many will see a parallel with our K-12 system:

“For years, the world’s socialists have successfully championed the idea that Venezuela is a somewhat deteriorated democracy but a democracy after all. A democracy where there’s a government that oversteps its limits and has dictatorial aspirations and on the other hand a democratic and moderate opposition that seeks to change the government through democratic elections. And they’ve always been SO close to achieving this goal, but for X or Y they could not: if only they had X percent more support, or if they’d had more volunteers in the polling stations, or more charismatic leaders, or whatever endless amount of mediocre rationalizations devised to hide the truth….(READ MORE)