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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