Posted on 02/23/2013 2:54:18 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
[Summary: To dumb down the public schools, our elite educators often rely on sophistry.]
Disingenuous. Paradox. Counterintuitive. Sophistry. Counterproductive. These five words always fascinated me.
They suggest unexpected warps in a common-sense grasp of the world. Something is out of kilter, weird, defective, or whacko.
American public education in the 20th century--which has been characterized as “deliberate dumbing down”--is impossible to discuss without constant recourse to these quirky words. They point to deception, but done with art and flair.
Rod Sterling captured the resulting sense of disorientation: “You unlock this door...Beyond it is another dimension....You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”
Disingenuous is when you know the truth about something but you stare blandly into space, pretending not to know the truth. For example, one of the big fads now is called Constructivism. It dictates that teachers should not teach; they should be rebranded as facilitators. Students, meanwhile, are supposed to discover everything for themselves. Sometimes you may get magical results. On average, however, children will need a lot more time to learn any given subject. Meanwhile, the Education Establishment retreats behind a fog of jargon and misdirection, disingenuously pretending not to know why children know so little.
As for paradox, how about spending twice as much money on education, but twenty years later all stats remain the same? To pull this off, you need true believers pushing empty ideas. Exhibit A is education’s supreme paradox. For 100 years, the Education Establishment demonized rote memorization as the worst thing you can do to a child. Then the experts built their entire reading program on an especially brutal and tedious form of rote memorization. Whole Word requires that children memorize the English language one word at...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
You can’t set up an “education” system this bad, unless education is the last thing you want to achieve. It’s like Obama — he’s running the country really, really badly isn’t he? Well, that’s because he’s doing it badly on purpose. You cannot be this bad just by being dumb. Even dumb people do somethings correctly. If you are 100% wrong (Obama; government schools) you must be working to a plan.
Isn’t that odd.
This is precisely what the teachers’ unions say goes on in home schools and can not be permitted because the children are harmed.
But now it is the latest and greatest thing for teachers. Probably so that they can do even less and get paid more.
Courtesy ping!
I refer to it as the “Upside Down, Right is Wrong & Wrong is Right” ride.
Same concept as Twilight Zone (when I had netflix, I watched every single episode, even though I had already seen most of them).
I don’t like this ride, I want off. Unfortunately, the way things are looking, there seems to be only one way off, and it ain’t pretty.
But I believe most of us know this already.
GIVE IT UP! If you wish to see the reforms you are seeking that will ONLY happen in a free market. Socialist-entitlement K-12 schooling has destroyed and continues to destroy the free market in education.
Our nation's government owned and run K-12 schools are the very DEFINITION of a socialist-entitlement, single-payer, godless, compulsory use, compulsory funded, program. These schools are the very DEFINITION of a price-fixed monopoly cartel that is destroying the free market in education by giving its services aways for tuition-free!
THIS CAN NOT BE FIXED!!! IT MUST BE ABOLISHED!
Personally, I see the government's socialist-entitlement schools to be soooooooooo EVIL for the child and such a threat to our nation's continuing freedom, that I will NOT have a government school teacher or worker for a friend. They are NOT welcome in my house. They are too evil, too stupid, or too much of a Useful Idiot to be a friend. ( I don't have abortion workers for friends, either.)
I don't like the ride, either! Personally, I put full blame on our nation's system of socialist-entitlement schooling. It was EVIL from its very beginnings in the mid-1800s to early 1900s.
All it took to give the nation Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt was one to three generations of voters schooled to be comfortable with socialism in their socialist-entitlement, single-payer, religiously generic and lukewarm, and compulsory use schools.
Think about it. If children attend socialist-entitlement and single-payer schools they risk learning that the voting mob can give them tuition-free schooling. They were then indoctrinated by their teachers that it was their human right to have this tuition-free schooling. Well?...Duh?....If the voting mob can give them tuition-free schooling, why not use that mob to get LOTS of free stuff! One to three generations of this and the nation got Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Children in these government schools are no longer be taught to be lukewarm and generic about their Protestant faith. No! Instead they are not force-fed the government religion of GODLESSNESS! Woe unto our nation! Shame on any conservative who supports this.!
I just employ a 'catch-all policy' of not allowing Democrats OR RINO's into my home...covers most of the bases that way. :-)
Good move. ( Sitting here chuckling.)
Arête.
RE: “It’s like Obama.”
An important point. Obama makes it easier to understand the decline in education.
And understanding how they achieved the decline in education makes it easier to see what Obama is doing to the whole society.
You are absolutely right about the paradox of the establisment demonizing rote memorization and then torturing children with whole word reading instruction.
Having taught hundreds of children to read, including my own using phonics which has a minor amount of memorization, I compare the difference to being asked to memorize the multiplication table (phonics) and being asked to memorize the the products of all numbers regardless of the number of digits instead of teaching the steps to multiplying numbers with more than one digit.
It’s so stupid, it’s hard to believe the educrats have been pulling this off since the 50’s and disabling so many Americans.
I do not believe the system can be reformed, it can only be abandoned.
I tutor my friends kids in math from time to time. A while back one of my friends kids was here from Texas, and needed help in algebra 2. I was told that his main problem was in graphing rational functions (ie (x^2 - 2x + 1) / (x + 4) ) kind of stuff. I hadn’t done that kind of thing since high school, but I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a plan.
Apparantly the class had been working on this for several weeks, and my first question was, “how did your teacher explain how to do this”. He went into quite an in depth lengthy confusing list of nonsensical steps the teacher had taught, and I immediately understood why it was so confusing for him. I showed him in a very simple manner how to go about it, at which point after a few problems he exclaimed...”Whoa! Really? It’s that easy? You explained this to me in like 30 minutes, where the teacher did nothing but confuse the entire class for 3 weeks?” He did a few more dozen problems with no issues. Then I made up some more and had him do them the next day to make sure it stuck. I then had him when he got home teach some of his buddies so it was sure to stick. He got an A on the test.
If you want to know just how DEVIOUS the people running schools are, even HERE IN TEXAS, go look up “CSCOPE” on Google - what it is and how it was done is one of the most FRIGHTENING things I’ve ever seen from government in this country.
This is very revealing. You know teachers didn’t make that stuff up by themselves.
It seems that some of the smartest, most devious people in the country concoct that bull. Let’s give NCTM a round of applause. National Council of Teachers of Math.
New Math. Reform Math. Always, they find the slow, confusing methods for teaching everything. (The antidote is John Saxon or similar.)
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