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
BUMP
9) NO TEACHERS UNIONS, get rid of The NEA. They are Public Employees.
10) Eliminate “Tenure”, see above.
I think that is why people want plastic instead of paper...
Teach the CONSTITUTION again.
Don’t reform.
Privatize.
Charter schools are choked by unions?
That’s right; that one step would improve the schools dramatically (if teachers would be let go for non-performance, like most people at their jobs). When the teachers come up with a list of issues outside their control that prevent learning, concede and reduce their pay (and BENEFITS) to those of daycare workers.
Critical thinking skills, civics, and real history.
WRONG!
Until Marxists are removed from the Education and Journalism Depts. in colleges and universities, public schools remain brainwashing centers.
And no one has a proposal for a way to do that.
I went to a one room school thru 7th grade.
I cannot express how grateful I am for that education.
God bless you. It breaks my heart to see college students with such low knowledge, skill and motivation. Most of them know they have been robbed somehow, but they don’t really see the route to overcoming it.
They get themselves to a college that will take them, but then the colleges give only simple assignments and pass them along pretty much no matter what—rather than chase away their government-funded customers.
As soon as you simply privatize the feds become the private schools’ main customer—and start calling the shots there just as well.
Privatize all education. Government has no responsibility to educate. Use tax money to help with tuition, not infrastructure, curriculum, or teacher salaries. Let the market determine what is needed and private institutions will make it happen.
“....and the big thing these kids were nuts for — cursive writing!!”
Please tell us more about this. In all the discussions of cursive I’ve seen, nobody mentioned what the kids like.
I.e., the Education Establishment is even more derelict than I thought.
I meant to write: ConservaTeen was in line, and he said that cashier told the people in front of him: 'People shouldn't give her change, it confuses her! ' ConservaTeen gave her lots of change for his purchase... 2.64 cents along with a 6 1 dollar bill for his 8.64 purchase.
Are you sure they were nuts for Cursive Writing? Maybe they thought you said Cursing Writing... 😀
Abolish the DOE, then salt the Earth.
eliminating cursive writing in schools eliminates the ability to read the documents that were written by our nation’s founding fathers...
Cursive script is a symptom of a disciplined mind. If you want reform, you won’t get there by teaching cursive script. That’s the cart before the horse.
Besides, we are digital now. Documents and Sütterlin is for paleographers.
Break teachers unions.
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