Free Republic

Bottom line, many of my articles conclude that our public schools operate at an unacceptably low level; that this mediocrity is the result of a strategy cunningly pursued by our Education Establishment for ideological purposes; and finally that the techniques employed in this strategy can be singled out, explained, and rejected. Let serious educational reform commence! Alas, the public is perennially confused and unsure what to believe. They don't want to think badly about the people in the local school. They don't want to feel guilty about letting their children attend an inferior school. They would have no idea how...

Control and pervert education, and you can convince the masses that they no longer want what their parents and grandparents wanted so desperately. Educated people can reflect on what is being done to them. Ignorant people do not know enough to reflect on much of anything. More and more, American students lack basic skills and fundamental knowledge. How can they understand proposals made by politicians, media, and government? Igor Shafarevich, a famous Russian mathematician, wrote a 1980 book called “The Socialist Phenomenon.” Shafarevich explained that enforced equality was a constant obsession of socialists. To achieve it, they were willing to...

Bill Gates is among the richest, most successful people on the planet. He enjoyed a lot of victories until he ventured into a dangerous part of town called Education. He squandered a few billion dollars by becoming entangled with a shady character named Common Core. Since 2010, Gates endured a long, slow defeat, as more people turned against Common Core, and he himself realized that it was not what he had dreamed of. So how did Bill Gates lose his golden touch? Gates, computer man and businessman, trusted data neatly arrayed on monitors. Digital tools could give predictability, consistency, and...

The most striking thing about our public schools is that they have been in perpetual decline for many decades. Why? The government has its own tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP); these tests regularly suggest that two-thirds of fourth-graders and eighth-graders are "below proficient" in reading. That's what decline looks like. It's guaranteed those two-thirds will never be literate, as that term has been traditionally used. Some may learn to read in a painful struggling way, but they won't be reading a daily paper or curling up with a good book. And yet, a century ago, this...

Vanity: Video, made 10 years ago, is still a good summary of what happened to our public schools. 3-1/2 minutes. https://www.youtube.com/user/BruceDeitrickPrice/videos

I know, I know, you don’t want to think about all the bad public schools out there. Nothing to do with you, right?? Wrong. The effects are oozing through the society. You are in danger. Want safety? Here are three threats you have to overcome: 1) THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT CAN’T BE TRUSTED. Almost a century ago, they took a wrong turn, and went down a road marked SOCIAL ENGINEERING. The problem for everybody else is that these ideologues hope to wreck the society we’ve got, so they can build the collectivized world they dream about. (The honest term would be...

(Summary: In many ways, public schools seem deliberately organized to diminish intellect, not to enlarge it.)An acquaintance sent this note: “My sister tells of teaching math to college freshmen. The question was: If X plus 5 = 10, what is the value of X? It took her an entire week to get the kids to finally say ‘5.’ So the following Monday, just on a hunch, she gave them another problem: If Y plus 5 = 10, what is the value of Y? And no one could answer!” Remember, these students have been admitted to a community college. Presumably, many...

>>>>I've been told that Siegfried Englemann (born 1931) passed away. We lost one of our greats. Anything this man said, you can take it to the bank. I did this email interview two years ago and tried to cover his main interests:<<<<< Siegfried Engelmann is the real thing, an educator who loves to teach children and knows how to do it, both personally and in his books. As far back as the late 1960s, he told the Education Establishment: you’re doing it all wrong. Engelmann takes a scientific approach. He believes you formulate programs, test them, revise them, and keep...

--The Left Never Knows When To Stop-- It was a shock. Jay Leno went Jaywalking and revealed the startling fact that a lot of Americans didn’t know much history, geography or anything else. Who won the Civil War? What country is Mount Rushmore located in? People didn’t know and didn’t seem to care. Many thought that was the high watermark of dumb. What could be dumber than not knowing who won the Civil War? Jimmy Kimmel has astonished the nation by showing that America is even dumber than we worried it is. He sent a crew out to the streets...

(More about reading): The biggest promises in K-12 involve reading and sight-words. Children are told: Learn your sight-words and you will be good readers! There is a strange tautology in sight-word instruction. When you learn to be a successful reader, you will be a successful reader. That's the weird boilerplate found throughout K-12. Suppose you tell a bunch of six-year-olds that tight-rope walking is easy. Put one foot in front of the other; don’t look down; smile confidently and walk. Children, you stress, cannot enjoy fun on the high wire until they have learned to walk comfortably on the high...

Some of my articles generate lots of comments from angry parents who had to fight with an unresponsive school system year after year. People not familiar with how bad K-12 has become might find these comments both revealing and scary. They tell the truth about K-12, a truth-in-the-trenches you won’t find in our media. (Sad to say, our media seem to feel it’s their job to wrap academic decline in a protective silence. Shhhh, Don’t Disturb The Saboteurs!) Here are comments left on an article about reading: “I had the Sisters of Mercy. Everyone read at least at grade level...

The goal of education has always been to achieve critical thinking. Needless to say, this involves a two-step process: first, students learn a great deal about a topic, whether in history, science, art, or anything else; then students learn to arrange the information in new ways, to set one fact against another, to find new insights among this knowledge. Not anymore. Today's educators are in a hurry; they don't bother with the first step. They jump directly to step two. In this scenario, students who know nothing are expected to talk intelligently about it. What absurdity.Having just heard about X,...

Sue Dickson is best known as the creator of Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, one of the most popular phonics programs. Now in her 80s, she is still active as ever, pushing phonics however possible, and refining a new approach. The ups-and-downs in her career tell us a lot about the sad state of American education. In her college’s pre-teacher program, she was taught nothing about phonics. Not only that, when she started to teach first-grade, her superiors constantly emphasized their verdict that phonics is useless and even dangerous. Sue Dickson recalls: “I was told that phonics doesn’t work, that...

A real OMG moment occurred last week when the New York Times awoke from a long sleep and published the truth about reading. Yes, it’s true. The New York Times came right out and told the world that if you want children to learn to read, they need phonics. No ifs, ands, or buts. No weird digressions into context and balanced this-or-that. No claims that people can learn to read simply by picking up a good book and reading. The article is titled “Why Are We Still Teaching Reading the Wrong Way?” Why, indeed? Here’s the gist of it: “First...

I had a surprise on Thanksgiving weekend. The e-book version of "Saving K-12" reached #5, for a few days, on Amazon in its education category. It's only $3, that may explain the jump. The paperback is $20. There's also a hardcover. The full title tells you the book's purpose: "Saving K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” My theme is that we can't have much education reform unless the public is more aware of what games the Education Establishment is playing.For testimonials about the writer and info about the book, please see: www.Lit4u.com/saving-k-12/ -------------------------------------------...

A mother in Chicago wrote for help: “Dear Abby: All of my grown children are underachievers. When contemporaries talk about their children getting jobs, getting married, having kids, going on vacation, buying a house/car, I have nothing to contribute. My children do not have lives; they work low-paying jobs and scrape by. Worse, they have no ambition to do better.” Dear Abby responded with little insight: “Your children are adults. If they were motivated, they would be doing more with their lives than scraping by. Be glad they are independent and have good relationships with each other—it’s a plus, and...

Is there a law somewhere which requires that public schools must aim for mediocrity?Nobody denies that our toys, including games and robots, are smarter than ever. Meanwhile, everyone seems to agree that we humans are moving in the other direction: dumber and dumbest.The unanimity of opinion is rather shocking. You see on the Internet a lot of headlines like this: “Are we becoming more STUPID? IQ scores are decreasing — and some experts argue it's because humans have reached their intellectual peak.” As for why, there is a colorful variety of opinion. Some people blame pollution, diet, and/or environmental degradation....

Older-but-wiser principal named Edwina Educator apologizes for dumb decisions she made when running a big public school. Only three-minutes long, this little video tells you everything you need to know about the public school system. Please share. ------------------------------------------------------------- I made it 6 years ago. The primary purpose was to test new video software called Xtranormal. You first type your script, then you can have characters move around and speak your words as you see in this video. Quite remarkable. Some of you would enjoy experimenting with it. Unfortunately Xtranormal, which was free, is dormant. Other options are now available but...

Summary: 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...

There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement. Each scheme had a catchy name (Open Classroom, Life Adjustment, Multiculturalism, Constructivism, Common Core) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might cynically conclude that the jargon was a goal in itself (to get a grant, to build a career, to impress ordinary citizens). You may even suspect that the larger purpose of all these schemes is...