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Bruce,
Your article on this crucial issue couldn’t be more spot.
I fought idiotic curriculum directors, gullible teachers and principals twenty years ago when they brought in Goals 2000 “World Class Education” initiatives featuring: Whole language - creative spelling, look n guess reading, Mimosa thematic math, gradeless student portfolio assessment.
Our school system and others that fell for the Outcome based education found our student’s state test scores plummeted.
Eff’ing liberal head school bd told me to “just worry about your own kids. Do what you need to do to provide your kids with supplemental material to successfully learn.”
American education is terrible compared with other nations that do well on the International Math & Science studies, such as lower spending Asian nations.
Asian countries do not recklessly experiment on their student ‘s academic lessons, largely because they do not have the economic resources to risk and they do not fall for High Scope education hucksters making Pied Piper vacuous promises about the latest educational fad.
Please keep up the Essential work and add me to your Ping list.
I grew up in SoCal and went to school from 65 to 78, we NEVER were taught with the “New Math”, but we were told about it and YES we learned to read and write using Phonics.
So how did this happen if these programs were replaced in 1962 and 1931 respectively??
Not All school districts complied, especially before we had Unions.
bkmk
“The Education Establishment is devoted to social engineering.”
It’s what they’ve learned in college themselves.
The leftists work with Germanic thoroughness. Karl Marx would approve.
“In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words.”
I’m trying to learn French. While French has systematic rules with regard to pronunciation, it’s quite helpful to hear the words pronounced.
A mixture of the two methods is required, but phonics should be the base.
Sounds like an apt description to me.
“The smartest people should be working on this problem”
The smartest people will want to teach the things they had to learn rather than what is most useful to most people.
Junior high students here in Florida are often tutored on topics only 1% of college students would really need to know.
Imagine having to learn both Greek and Latin before getting into college.
“In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words.”
That was NOT so in the Boston Public Schools——I attended and later taught there(1954-1956)———It was 100% phonics.
When my kids started school,mid 60s,it was sight words———(a different public school system).
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