Posted on 10/15/2018 7:34:39 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Summary: One thing our public schools do well is undermine real education....
K-12 education is a big swirl of unnecessary problems and impasses. Millions of children are damaged by what seem to be ideological decisions. Our self-appointed experts, which I call the Education Establishment, appear unable to improve the schools. Worse, they don't seem to want to.
Let’s identify the three main problems as the first step toward fixing them:
First, our schools seem to become dumber by the year and probably by the month. Government statistics say that the majority of our students, in both fourth grade and eighth grade, are below “proficient" in reading and math. Jay Leno, Jesse Waters, and Mark Dice have created scores of videos where people on the street are asked simple questions. For example, who won the Civil War? A woman looked wildly around and blurted out, “France?” Now, if an American doesn’t know who won the Civil War, you have to ask: what does that person know? The obvious answer is: shockingly little.
Prof. Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, finding that many students on his campus did not know the answer to this Civil War question, was appalled. He wrote a bitter complaint and posted it on the Internet, asserting that his students were “know-nothings.” He concluded that our school system is intended to produce “cultural amnesia" and is doing a superlative job.
Here’s how this amnesia trick is performed. American public schools discourage memorization. Furthermore, teachers are virtually prohibited from teaching knowledge directly; students must create their own new knowledge. School subjects are not studied in a orderly logical sequence. No, subjects are divided into odd chunks, which are then studied in illogical sequences. A school system cannot achieve something as vast as “cultural amnesia" without a serious, sustained effort. This array of malpractice has created extraordinary failure. In a commonsense world, the people in charge would be fired. All the many theories and methods leading reliably to mediocrity would be abolished.
QED: decline in all academic subjects is obvious; this is obviously caused by the Education Establishment’s bad decisions.
Second problem: all this dumbing-down takes place on a silent, uncomplaining landscape. A great passivity prevails. Our upper-class people, our celebrities, our movers and shakers of all kinds, our community and political leaders, our foundations, our great universities, and most shocking of all, our media—all seem not to care that our culture is dumb and getting dumber. Where is the protest? Where is the resistance? Where is the counterattack?
Does anyone complain at all? For example, we have almost 50 million functional illiterates. Has your local media mentioned this as something wretched and unforgivable? Everyone seems to be an Honorary Member of the National Education Association and its program of steadily eliminating traditional methods and standards.
QED: Our upscale people and achievers from all parts of the society must be more involved. Make some noise. Provide the leadership that your community needs. —————
Third problem: people do not understand the nuts and bolts of what is going on in the classroom. How can they fight back? If children are dumbed down, there must be programs and methods that make this happen. These need to be understood and then rejected.
Ideally, every American has a little more interest in the mechanics of bad education. Everyone has to understand why Sight-words don’t work, why Reform Math is a phony, why Constructivism is a hoax. All of these are cheap tricks. Once you recognize how a cheap trick works, you say, oh that’s all there is to it? Yes, that’s all there is to it.
For example, Constructivism dictates the teachers must stand to the side as facilitators, as passive guides. No direct teaching is permitted. Isn’t it a safe bet that much less education will take place. The school starts by preventing teachers from doing their essential job. It’s downhill from there. Similarly, in Common Core Math, children are confused and defeated by many kinds of unnecessary complexity. Get rid of that complexity, and children will learn arithmetic again.
Then you get to Sight-word reading, which all studies for the last hundred years indicate will be give you inferior results compared to phonics. What word can you put on this? If a man hits himself on the head with a hammer, we would tell him to stop hitting his head with a hammer. If teaching Sight-words means kids can’t read simple English, we should scream: Stop teaching Sight-words.
QED: as long as you're ignorant of the basic tricks used throughout the school, the Education Establishment will sneer at you. They’re con artists and you’re the mark, the victim. Refuse to play the part.
So that’s the big picture. First, schools are getting dumber and everyone should try to reverse this process. Second, the leaders who should be forcing reform and improvement stand passively aside, when they should jump into the battle. Third, Americans don’t understand the cheap tricks used throughout their public schools – but they need to.
Vouchers to te parents. That’s all.
Government runs schools like it runs other things—not very well.
New York State knowingly allows illiterates to be teachers in government schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-regents-teacher-exams-alst.html
More than "problems," crimes were committed in the deliberate destruction of the U.S. educational system, and justice demands that the criminal perpetrators be identified, hunted down, and brought to trial.
“...parents. That’s all....”
Exactly; until the traditional family is reestablished efforts to rebuild education (and all of basic society) will be futile.
We promote home schooling openly, and will organize seminars for parents getting started. Free. We believe in it that much.
We don't want a dime from government, not even in the form of vouchers. "Come shekels, come shackles."
You can flush the government-run public schools as far as we're concerned.
Rats need stupid poor people to win and design policies to assure this. Beyond sad
The ROT goes far beyond K-12!
2 MINUTE VIDEO
Because these cultural Marxist controlled places churn out hundreds of thousands of NEW brain-washed “yutes” every year,
we’d better get a handle on THIS PROBLEM or everything else we do is akin to REARRANGING DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC!
What then when THEY vastly outnumber those of us who remember the Founders’ sacrifices and warnings?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXNUqlt6F-U
The ROT goes far beyond K-12!
2 MINUTE VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXNUqlt6F-U
Because these cultural Marxist controlled places churn out hundreds of thousands of NEW brain-washed “yutes” every year,
we’d better get a handle on THIS PROBLEM or everything else we do is akin to REARRANGING DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC!
What then when THEY vastly outnumber those of us who remember the Founders’ sacrifices and warnings?
I have no reason to question your claim regarding the studies; I have empirical (that is, experiential) and anecdotal reason to question the validity of those studies.
No one learns foreign languages by studying the equivalent of phonics. They learn foreign languages by using said languages in the classroom environment.
It has been my observation that learning “sight-words” gave my daughter a two year, minimum, jump on accessing literature over what I had learning phonics.
No, my daughter does not read as proficiently as I did at the same age, but she enjoys the act of reading, and reads vastly more useful content than I did until several years older.
She May not be able to correctly spell various complex words, but she can recognize them. More importantly, she knows what they mean.
In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit she attends a Barney Project charter school sponsored by Hillsdale College.
What a blessing.
Which state?
I recently read that they have a Leander TX school/location (outside of Austin), but not sure if there are any other locations, in Texas.
We support Hillsdale and I will look in to this program, specifically.
I could bore you to tears with anecdotes about her education; suffice to say we are more than satisfied with the public school education our daughter is getting.
They’re not all so bad as to spark conspiracy theories.
What, and create new competitors on a landscape they already dominate?
Much ado about nothing
I’m actually a parent of 3rd and 6gh traders and an 18 yr old
Just be involved with your OWN children and THEIR education
Don’t depend on or oppose the public education system
Your teachings should be MUCH MORE important
1 problem: Federalized education.
1 solution: Abolish it.
“No one learns foreign languages by studying the equivanlent of phonics.”
That is just not true. Indeed, when I studied French 55 years ago was when I was first exposed to the systematic use of phonics, including the learning of the phonic alphabet and symbols. Moreover, you then go on to contradict yourself by saying that one “learn(s) foreign languages by using said languages in the classroom...” Seems to me, that means speaking the language, and listening to it being spoken, n’est pas? If that is not phonics, what is it?
I was taught to read in school by the Sight-word method (”Look-See” it was called then), but I learned to read at my parents’ knees, as they read out loud to me while I followed the letters and words on the pages in front of me. Due to my formal (lack of) education, I am to this day a poor speller, and have difficulty pronouncing words I have not seen before. But I started to learn to read phonetically when I studied Latin in High School, and French in college. I was further trained in phonics when I was training to be a tutor (my speciality was Math, but all of us who worked for the tutoring service had to teach English, and other subjects as well).
The theory is that different persons have different learning modes. Visual learners, who think in images, can learn to read very well and quickly by the Sight-word method; I did. Auditory learners, who think in the spoken word, do not learn to read well by Sight-word, nor do other modes of learners. Sometimes the disconnect is so great that the education establishment labels the students ‘dyslexics’, when it is the teaching method that is lacking, not the students.
Most ridiculous things schools do is a direct result of parental pressure: Johnny can't cut it, so lower the bar. Parents will do the same regardless of where their kids go to school.
Wow. Wife & I are former public school teachers, and we started homeschooling our 8 kids (5 when we started) in 1982 as well!
On their own, 5 are college grads w/o help from us (3 not interested, great careers in areas not needing degrees): 2 - Summa Cum Laude’s, 2 Phi Beta Kappa’s, 2 Engineers, 1 Tau Beta Pi (engineering equiv. of PBK), 2 - pilots, the 5 have 8 degrees.....
God is good.......
Well there's your problem. Just look up the definition of phonics.
Hint: it ain't what you think.
So far as I have studied them, foreign languages are always taught by using them: not learning how the words are constructed. Perhaps things were different 55 years ago, but my experience tells me that method has been universally abandoned by language teachers.
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