How to Bring Back Traditional Education

The American Thinker ^ | April 16, 2015 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Traditional education has taken a real beating the last 75 years. The entire Education Establishment lined up to demonize everything that teachers and schools had done for many thousands of years. The result is the vastly dumbed down classrooms we have now in K-12 education.

But how, at this point, can we resurrect a vanishing paradigm? As we will see, there is one example left, as if preserved in a time capsule.

Apparently, giving children lots of knowledge is what our socialist professors hate about traditional education. So these ideologues came up with a parade of insults, all designed to stop schools from fulfilling their essential function.

[snip]

....Fortunately, there is one area where traditional education survives. If you want to know how to fix our schools, just look at this one area, and copy all of its salient features.

That area is the study of foreign languages.....

..In all traditional education, you start at the smallest, simplest spot, and you steadily build outward and upward.

Imagine the French class in operation. The teacher presides – teaching, teaching, teaching. The students listen respectfully – learning, learning, learning. Everything the teacher is asking the kids to do is reasonable – not like Reform Math, where each step seems to be devised by insane psychiatrists.

Imagine how history or biology, or English literature, would be taught if it were taught exactly as French is taught. French class preserves for us the naturalness and logic of traditional education. You see it as the perfectly normal, perfectly self-evident world that it is.

It's only progressive education and Common Core education that are twisted. Things are done in illogical, unnatural ways. Everybody has to stand on his head and count backwards. Here is the essence of progressive education: doing nothing at all, or doing something that's intellectually perverted....

[snip]

[Grampa Dave]

"Parents have to understand the teachers union are a power with little interest in education."

"Schools do not fail. They succeed. Children always learn in school. Always and every day. When their rare and tiny compositions are "rated holistically" without regard for separate "aspects" like spelling, punctuation, capitalization, or even organization, they learn. They learn that mistakes bring no consequences."

Richard Mitchel, "The Graves of Academe"

[A CA Guy]

Take the union out of the Teachers Union and you may get the teachers back.

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

The best thing I read about French elementary schools is that the children in first grade have to memorize a new poem every week. What an amazing concept. Wouldn’t matter if they were little rinky-dink nursery rhymes. Every poem teaches a lot of lessons.

Conversely, I suspect many children here never have to memorize a poem.