The Secrets Of Dumbing-Down Revealed

Thanks for trying to help out here. I’ll restate this matter:

Circa 1930 there were millions of fast, fluent readers. They had of course all learned phonetically.

The Look-say sophistry had two claims: 1) that these people were recognizing whole words. In fact, the experts are STILL debating this point. My own suspicion is that the brain dips into words as much or as little as needed (but really fast). It doesn’t make any sense for the brain to carry around a lot of memorized baggage. A much better strategy is to process the phonetic information faster and faster. So I don’t accept the whole-word claim. But I then said, even if the brain is grabbing whole words, it takes a lot of years to get to that step, like being really good at sight-reading music. So it’s a moot point instructionally.
2) But the sophistry said: hey, if they’ll be doing this years from now, let’s make them do it NOW. That’s the madness I was writing about.

The article contains a great quote form Paul Witty. You can see the whole sophistry in naked form. (He and his gang actually taught that kids should learn to read “groups of words.”

(One thing that seems to be causing a lot of confusing is that many people—like me— went to sight-word schools. But learned to read anyway. The mind breaks through to the phonetic machinery. Just because someone went to a sight-word school and now reads well does not tell us what skills are being used. A true sight-word reader is very rare. I met a woman who said she reached college reading that way. She complained about how the words slide off the page!)

Here’s another of my YouTube videos about Dolch Words that might help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPTXWo5wZXI

I just put a review on Amazon for Blumenfeld’s excellent “Vicitms of Dick and Jane.” Here’s one quote I used in review:

“We’ve known now since 1955 that whole-word methodology is the problem. Flesch naively assumed back then that after the educators read his book they would recognize the error of their ways and return to the sane phonetic method of teaching. What he didn’t understand, however, was the political agenda behind what those progressive professors were doing. Their goal was to use education as a means for changing America from an individualist, capitalist, religious society into a socialist, collectivist, humanist society.”

In short, I’m very comfortable with the word conspiracy. Going back to Dewey.

You might like reading this book. It will give you ammo. My own short take is “41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt” on Improve-Education.org.

Interesting.

>The first tactic here is to demonize memorization and acquisition of knowledge.<

I was just thinking about this very thing the other day.

My daughter was so frustrated with her homework that she was crying. Once I showed her the simple steps of solving the simple math problems made into a puzzle, she started doing them very quickly and angrily.

I feel like they take the very simplest concepts and make them so convoluted that kids can’t get around it sometimes.

I remember when she was first learning multiplication. When I was in school, we memorized our multiplication tables and were able to move on to more complex problems very quickly due to our mastery of the tables.

She has been dabbling in simple multiplication facts for a good while now. She gets frustrated because she has to show her work for the simplest thing that she already knows-like 2 times 5 is 10. Neither one of us can understand why it isn’t enough to simply know the answer. Instead she has to waste her time making 2 groups of 5 little dots or x’s. She is doing all this silly busy work instead of moving on to meatier stuff.

The beauty of math is that the answer is either right or wrong if you know the basic facts, but this way, even if they get the right answer, it can still count against them that they didn’t draw the little dots and show their work the right way.

I believe this is an insidious way of muddying things up and making a person second guess their thinking and trick them into believing they are stupid and render them incapable of thinking for themselves.

I believe on some level, my daughter can sense that something of this unseemly nature is happening, but she’s so little that she doesn’t fully understand what it is or why and the idea that it is happening like that is shocking to her.

I marvel at how different school is now. Both of our kids tell us(mom and dad)that they learn more from us here at home than they do at school. The really sad thing about that is we don’t spend that much time really teaching them. All we are doing is helping them with their homework or debriefing them when they come home brainwashed.

My son can’t believe all the people he comes into contact with at school that simply have no clue and the way the teachers lie to the students about history and current events is literally breathtaking. In our neck of the woods, they are nothing but democrat/leftist hacks who are teaching the children to be just like them.

I think more and more about homeschooling everyday. I don’t like to talk about it though, because outside the family, I will hear, “But what about socialization?” and inside the family we worry about whether or not we have the stamina and the discipline.

Califreak,

All the things you talk about are the reason I’m an education activist.

Your comments embody the premise of the piece—the “educators” do everything in the worst possible way. They do this deliberately.

On Improve-Education.org there’s “36: The Assault on Math,” which deals with the math side (i.e., Reform Math).

But you open up a new frontier: what do you tell the children who are victims of this child abuse?? “Yes, dear, this is nuts, and these people are criminals, but please do your homework ANYWAY.” (I think at least you could create conservatives rather easily.)

Some delicate balancing may be required. Please write up your solutions and post them. Or send them to me, and I’ll add them to #36 or make an article. I’m sure a lot of parents need help in this area.

Bruce Price
Improve-Education.org

PS By the way, the saddest comment I’ve gotten on this site was from a parent who helped her kids do better in math; but when the kids showed improvement at school, the principal called and said, please don’t help them, it’s not fair to the other kids!!!!

I don’t really have any solutions.

Probably, the best possible thing I could do for my children is muster up the courage and determination to home school them.

I’m not the sharpest tack in the box so I would be learning along with them.

For now, as long as they’re in the public school system, I ask them a lot of questions about what they are learning in school. I ask them what they are being told in history class. I ask them if the teacher has some kind of agenda they are pushing.

If one of my kids has been told something weird, I correct it. If I am not sure of the answer, we research it together.

When my daughter was in the second grade, her teacher insisted there was no such thing as a two dollar bill.
They are rare, but they do exist. My daughter has seen them and wished we would get one so she could use it for lunch money, but we had no luck in obtaining one.

LOL!

I work with them about a lot of things and I either make them read or I read to them a lot.

Reading is half the battle and the key to everything in life.

Re: the “Team Concept”

>The team concept is nothing but a euphemism for collectivism. Replace the word “team” in the slogan “we all have to make sacrifices for the sake of the team,” with “tribe” or “city” or “clan” or “state,” or worse, “the company,” because, unfortunately many of these collectivist ideas now infect business and industry.<

Whenever I see the words “only team players need apply” in a help wanted ad all I can think of are the crappy jobs where they regularly sacrifice a team member to make the rest of the crew look good.

This is typically done by giving all the problem items to one person who is usually new and managing a “trouble desk” that has been problematic for years.

What many people don’t realize is that there is a revolving door at the trouble desk and that the trouble desk is a scapegoat for the rest of the department and is never supposed to really be fixed. If there’s any danger at all of someone fixing that “troubled desk” every effort possible will be made to sabotage the person trying to fix it, or implicate them in a scandal of some sort.

I’ll cooperate until hell freezes over, but I refuse to be a team player anymore.

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