Posted on 05/03/2010 2:26:57 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Our Education Establishment is dumbing us down. How sad, sick, and pathetic. People calling themselves “educators” devote their careers to making sure no one is educated.
Everyone has heard the complaints. But the fascinating question still remains: HOW DO THEY DO IT? Is it all just bumbling incompetence or do these people have secret techniques?
One familiar technique is to remove content whenever possible from the schools. All right, that technique we can see. But for many years I’ve had the sense that deeper and weirder shenanigans were going on, but I couldn’t pinpoint them.
Now I think I can. The Education Establishment chooses whatever approach will get the worst result! I know it sounds bizarre but l believe that’s a factual description. Here’s how it works:
In all of human experience there is only one way to learn or teach anything. You start at the very beginning and then you work your way through steps A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc., no matter whether it’s chess, Latin accounting, biology, or surfing. We crawl, walk, run, and finally dance. The evil genius of our Education Establishment is to pervert this natural sequence, either by jumping way ahead or by remaining forever at the start.
In the two most fundamental situations --learning to read and do arithmetic--the educators invented sophistries to justify jumping way ahead. The excuse goes like this. Far in the future, these kids will be doing X. So let’s start them off doing X today. This was basically the trick used in New Math and Reform Math. These approaches demand that children learn set theory, algebra, statistics, geometry and boolean logic. But arithmetic? Who needs that?
The Education Establishment used the identical gimmick in reading. They fabricated a sophistry which claimed that experienced readers recognize whole words THEREFORE children should skip the alphabet and start off recognizing whole words on day one. I don’t believe experienced readers do what is claimed but even if this were true, it would still take many years to get there. So the sophistry--kids must ignore the baby steps and pretend to be experts on the first day--keeps readers perpetually babyish.
In two other major situations that permeate every aspect of k-12 education--acquiring knowledge and mastering subjects---the Education Establishment went to the opposite extreme. They invented lies and alibis for keeping children at steps A and B. This is so counterintuitive that you don’t realize it’s happening in front of you.
The first tactic here is to demonize memorization and acquisition of knowledge. Children never learn anything in any permanent sense. So even though they might spend a year studying history, science and geography, at the end they don’t know much history, science and geography. (What separates experts from the beginner is the beginner knows nothing but the expert knows lots of things. Our schools ensure that children always remain beginners in every subject.)
Another variation is seen in the very popular method called Constructivism. Children are supposed to create their own knowledge or, to put that cynically, to reinvent the wheel over and over again. This process takes so long that kids don’t finish many wheels. They’re always trying to construct simple pieces of knowledge: for example, 3 + 3 = 6 or Paris is the capital of France. There are thousands of things that should be studied. The gimmick is to make the whole process so prohibitive in terms of time that very little is accomplished.
There you have it: in all situations the universal device is to pervert the natural sequence of learning. They jump the kids way ahead so that the kids get bewildered and revert back to their first days. Or they keep them perpetually in the first days, spinning their wheels. Either way children remain as ignorant as when they showed up.
Note that the children themselves are not dumbed down. They are never allowed to learn. What happens is that when they reach the 10th grade, for example, they are not as well-educated as 10th graders from years before. And so we say that society is being dumbed down.
Here’s the good news. Our Education Establishment, by always pushing the worst methods, emerges as an infallible guide to educational excellence! Avoid the nonsense they are so fond of. Embrace the sensible practices they condemn.
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[This is a short version of “49: How Do We Learn? How Should We Teach? Why Do The Experts Get Everything Wrong?”--the newest article on Improve-Education.org.]
http://www.improve-education.org/id74.html
Hahaha. i guess I should have clarified that a little. I *was* married to a Chinese woman. She turned out to be an abusive psychotic. I left her in 2008. However, I did remarry, and am far happier for it.
Sorry to hear it..
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.
bump
Note that the piece was just a summary of a longer article. There was no intention to be difficult, but to be succinct. When you have time, please read the real article. I believe it’ll be clear enough.
Outlaw the NEA.
Note that the freerepublic piece was a summary of a longer article. See link.
But I’ll plead guilty to some degree. My specialty is covering lots of ground quickly. If I felt compelled to be a careful scholar, I couldn’t annoy the Education Establishment as much as I hope to!
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.
If any of you are seriously concerned about your children’s future please read the following links:
http://usabig.com/atnmst/jrnl_ii.php?art=99
http://usabig.com/atnmst/jrnl_ii.php?art=100
Hank
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.
“I’ll cooperate until hell freezes over, but I refuse to be a team player anymore.”
Good for you. Thanks for the comment.
Hank
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