Posted on 01/02/2021 6:52:16 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
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(These reform ideas are explained in greater depth in Saving K-12, this writer’s guide to fixing public schools.)
© Bruce Deitrick Price
1. Bring back corporal punishment
>>Most of the problems in the public school are caused by deliberate human actions.
Same with every negative thing about 2020.
Of the teachers and staff? I’m for that.
Booya!! YES!!
I’m a certified ELA teacher in the state of Florida and it is CRIMINAL what the DOE is doing to students.
When I was teaching the hoodrats in the day treatment center, I started teaching them OLD SCHOOL because I could. Phonics, and the big thing these kids were nuts for — cursive writing!!
I found so much on the interwebs to help them.
I taught them to the educational standard (barf!) that the FDOE set forth, but then beefed up their education with real world learning. Phonics, cursive, and reading. Reading to understand, not just answer questions on tests.
My gang bangers were my favorite students. And some of them got their lives back in order.
They were tough, but I miss so many of them.
Bookmarking.
Kids are not all the same - some learn a lot faster than others. If you don't have explicit tracking, you still implicitly track everyone into one group - either an average level where you will lose the best and brightest through boredom and the slowest will be unable to keep up, or you aim for the lowest level and screw up education for everyone.
ha ha. Well said.
#1 Get rid of teachers unions
#2 Get rid of teachers unions
#3 Get rid of teachers unions
The State Indoctrination Camps are simply too far down the collectivist hell hole to fix. Stop funding them! If parents had to pay directly for their kids education they would insist on getting what they pay for ,just like anything else in the free market. Separation of School and State is an idea whose time has come.
I was a charter school board member for 16 years. The #1 thing that has to happen for the conventional schools to break the cycle is wreck the union. As long as there are teachers’ unions controlling education, there is no hope of reform.
Missed the biggest one and two and three. Fire al teachers with teaching credentials, disband the teachers unions and eliminate the department of education.
Trump’s biggest failure was appointing Betsy Devos as education secretary. She has had four years to implement these changes and she has done almost nothing.
There is too much social promotion, students with grades of F, are routinely passed. The myth of students graduating and can’t read their diploma is no myth.
9. Teach logic and reasoning at every level. BRING back debate teams as a graduation requirement for seniors.
10. Teach students to read past the headline and don’t take a single story as gospel before posting.
1. Homeschool.
Then, you can ditch the rest.
Make union membership illegal and have a right to fire both teachers and administrators at will.
Why we homeschooled!
You got me. What do I need to sacrifice to be forgiven?
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