Posted on 07/16/2018 4:36:34 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
One thing our public schools do well is undermine real education.
K-12 education is a big swirl of unnecessary problems and impasses. Millions of children are damaged by what seem to be ideological decisions. Our self-appointed experts, which I call the Education Establishment, appear unable to improve the schools. Worse, they don't seem to want to.
Let’s identify the three main problems as the first step toward fixing them:
First, our schools seem to become dumber by the year and probably by the month. Government statistics say that the majority of our students, in both fourth grade and eighth grade, are below “proficient" in reading and math. Jay Leno, Jesse Waters, and Mark Dice have created scores of videos where people on the street are asked simple questions. For example, who won the Civil War? A woman looked wildly around and blurted out, “France?” Now, if an American doesn’t know who won the Civil War, you have to ask: what does that person know? The obvious answer is: shockingly little.
Prof. Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame, finding that many students on his campus did not know the answer to this Civil War question, was appalled. He wrote a bitter complaint and posted it on the Internet, asserting that his students were “know-nothings.” He concluded that our school system is intended to produce “cultural amnesia" and is doing a superlative job.
Here’s how this amnesia trick is performed. American public schools discourage memorization. Furthermore, teachers are virtually prohibited from teaching knowledge directly; students must create their own new knowledge. School subjects are not studied in an orderly logical sequence. No, subjects are divided into odd chunks, which are then studied in illogical sequences. A school system cannot achieve something as vast as “cultural amnesia" without a serious, sustained effort. This array of malpractice has created extraordinary failure. In a commonsense world, the people in charge would be fired. All the many theories and methods leading reliably to mediocrity would be abolished.
QED: the decline in all academic subjects is obvious; this is obviously caused by the Education Establishment’s bad decisions.
Second problem: all this dumbing-down takes place on a silent, uncomplaining landscape. A great passivity prevails. Our upper-class people, our celebrities, our movers and shakers of all kinds, our community and political leaders, our foundations, our great universities, and most shocking of all, our media—all seem not to care that our culture is dumb and getting dumber. Where is the protest? Where is the resistance? Where is the counterattack?
Does anyone complain at all? For example, we have almost 50 million functional illiterates. Has your local media mentioned this as something wretched and unforgivable? Everyone seems to be an Honorary Member of the National Education Association and its program of steadily eliminating traditional methods and standards.
QED: Our upscale people and achievers from all parts of the society must be more involved. Make some noise. Provide the leadership that your community needs.
Third problem: people do not understand the nuts and bolts of what is going on in the classroom. How can they fight back?If children are dumbed down, there must be programs and methods that make this happen. These need to be understood and then rejected.
Every American has to be a little more interested in the mechanics of bad education. Everyone has to understand why Sight-words don’t work, why Reform Math is a phony, why Constructivism is a hoax. All of these are cheap tricks. Once you recognize how a cheap trick works, you say, oh that’s all there is to it? Yes, that’s all there is to it.
For example, Constructivism dictates the teachers must stand to the side as facilitators, as passive guides. No direct teaching is permitted. Isn’t it a safe bet that much less education will take place. The school starts by preventing teachers from doing their essential job. It’s downhill from there. Similarly, in Common Core Math, children are confused and defeated by many kinds of unnecessary complexity. Get rid of that complexity, and children will learn arithmetic again.
Then you get to Sight-word reading, which all studies for the last hundred years indicate will give you inferior results compared to phonics. What word can you put on this? If a man hits himself on the head with a hammer, we would tell him to stop hitting his head with a hammer. If teaching Sight-words means kids can’t read simple English, we should scream: Stop teaching Sight-words.
QED: as long as you're ignorant of the basic tricks used throughout the school, the Education Establishment will sneer at you. They’re con artists and you’re the mark, the victim. Refuse to play the part.
So that’s the big picture. First, schools are getting dumber and everyone should try to reverse this process. Second, the leaders who should be forcing reform and improvement stand passively aside, when they should jump into the battle. Third, Americans don’t understand the cheap tricks used throughout their public schools – but they need to.
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Make High school competitive:
You can’t get in for free unless you’re in the top 50% of your junior high class.
That’ll fix everything, fast.
The only problem to address is the one where the Constitution grants exactly no authority to the Feds to control or fund education.
Underground Guide to American Education; or anything else he has written. Listen to his lectures. American schools are a disaster.
ML/NJ
Three big problems to be fixed:
When the school principal has the portraits of the Founding Fathers taken down and burned, make sure the size of the Obama framed portraits are big enough to cover the faded wall paint underneath.
Make sure mandatory white male supremacy toxicity training sessions include public shaming where all guilty males state their own failings and sins to the classes in public assembly,not just in private.
Increase funding for private investigator services to look into lives of all pupils’ parents and grandparents to search out any pro-Trump or gun owners and turn them over to intimidation squads without delay.
I wrote a congratulations message to my great niece upon her graduation from high school. I wrote it in cursive as I do all my letters and cards. My niece could not read it because she was not taught to write in cursive. Sad. They can’t even read and write in cursive as young adults. Who would have thought that beautiful cursive writing would ever go by the wayside.
They left out a biggie - the “inclusive” classroom that has emotionally disturbed children hurling tables and chairs around the classroom while biting teachers, students and principals all the while. The entire class suffers just so little Johnny and his parents can pretend that he’s normal.
Parents are responsible for their children and their training
Don’t credit or blame schools for anything
Or you’re a weak parent
The deep state has been around a long time....they have infiltrated our schools...on purpose.
I encountered my first communist professor at Portland State in 1974....I dropped his class.
No PARENTS ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for the schools not teaching what my school taught me back in the 50s and 60s...are you a democrat?
I told a colleague not long ago that what has happened is that mental illness has been normalized through mainstreaming.
They’ll just inflate the grades.
They are just trying to make as many new Democrats as possible before normal people catch on and put a stop to the nonsense.
You forgot to add Christians to that list.
inclusive classroom with student biting and hurling chairs....
Then, all will be shocked to learn he gets firearms and shoots classmates, followed by the people who had nothing to do with it and who were nowhere near the school losing gun rights to gun grabbing bigmouth politicians.
Sick.
I’ve just retired from my second career, teaching engineering topics in a high school.
The average incoming freshman cannot read 1/16” on a standard student ruler, and don’t even think about calculating a radius for a hole 2 1/8” diameter.
On the other hand, they seem to have terrific self esteem.
You’ve hit the nail on the head. Get the influence of the Democrat party out of education. Hillary Clinton’s purely political award is the perfect example. I had a Democrat principal tell me that children do not need to know how to spell because they have spell checker and they do not need to know how to do math because they have calculators. I despise these people.
A friend told me that almost all children in her grandchild’s class were on some kind of drug.
This says it all. The killer technique that schools use is simply to ignore stuff that 50 years ago was routinely taught. The basic foundational stuff that you need to keep going further is deleted.
You would think that this situation would be so terrifying to average citizens that they would want to fix it. There is an amazing acceptance of bad educational ideas throughout the society.
Here is what might be called the devil’s paradigm. You teach something incorrectly, so that most children don’t have a chance of learning it well or quickly. You don’t give them enough exercise so the kids are restless and anxious. Then when their failure begins to weigh on the students and make them more and more agitated and unhappy, you tranquilize them with Ritalin, etc.
This is why I say it would be easy to have much better schools at less cost. if you teach things correctly the first time, then there wouldn’t be the second, third and fourth time. There wouldn’t be the extra remediation, tutoring, and testing. There wouldn’t be the psychiatric services and drugs.
K-12 is a big lucrative business for a lot of people.
A Democrat? You’re joking.
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