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Someone asked this question on Quora:Is there a flaw to the American school system? Why do so many teens have depression? Why don’t people do anything about it?My answer: Okay, let’s suppose you’re a ninth-grade student in the school system. What are some reasons you might feel anxious and depressed? First, you sense from the early grades nothing very serious is going on in your school. People never really learn to read. They don’t know any geography, any history, any science. Many students can hardly add and subtract. People sometimes think that taking it easy is a good idea. Yes,...

The whole point of American education was preparing people to pursue their interests, and their version of the American Dream. This blueprint has faded. Many kids today don't learn enough to have vivid, inspiring dreams, nor do they master abilities needed to fulfill dreams if they had any. Jimmy Kimmel sent a crew to the street with a map of the world and the challenge, "Point to a country and name it." Many people could not name even one country, even though the USA was in the middle of this map. At Notre Dame, Professor Patrick Deneen concluded that many...

(A look back. This article was first published seven years ago. The public didn't know this sort of information, but you can be sure the people running education knew everything. Did they move to fix things? No! Everything got worse and more reckless until the big cheating scandal broke this year and we had the spectacle of athletic coaches accepting bribes to say that kids played sports they had never played. K-16 in America has become increasingly corrupt.) ––––––––––– Pundits routinely assert there is a cheating epidemic in American education. A few statistics can confirm the extent of the problem....

Every time I hear about an industrial accident or a Navy ship catching fire, I wonder if the real cause is that the workers can’t read the manuals. On the good side, we have a stampede of wonderful new gadgets and apps to play with. On the other hand, that means many new instruction books to comprehend and many features we never figure out. An instruction book for even a thirty-dollar item can go on and on. Personally, I wing it a lot. And I can read. What happens to all the people who can barely read? They are accidents...

Many practical people say the situation is hopeless. The Education Establishment controls the country’s public schools with an unyielding grip. Unfortunately, these educrats seem to be socialist ideologues. (That’s not surprising as their Godfather—that is, John Dewey—was a socialist ideologue.) They are obsessed with social engineering, not academic gains. The school is for them a laboratory where they can design the brave new child that will populate their Brave New World. Whether these new children can read, write, or do arithmetic does not seem to be a major concern. Just as unsettling, our Education Establishment has created a far-reaching support...

Few people have the opportunity to create bold new fake pedagogy. This is an elite, exclusive world. Fake means something guaranteed not to work. You say you teach reading but the kids are illiterate. You say you teach history but your kids don’t know Ben Franklin from Ben Affleck. You say you teach general knowledge but your students can’t find Washington DC on a map of the US. Who can get away with swindles like these? Well, of course, members of our very own Education Establishment can get away with anything. But not ordinary people. Fair warning, this fake-pedagogy business...

[Professor Ludwig analyses developments in New York State to show what our Education Establishment probably wants to do everywhere. Scary.]America's education system is driven decade after decade by a never-ending stream of jargon. Left-wing educators seemingly never get tired of reproducing their pap in schools of education and not-for-profit organizations. Their jargon continuously reconfigures and is infinitely creative in saying the same thing in different ways; decade after decade educational jargon expresses educational models that produce fewer and fewer diligent, capable, informed, goal-oriented students. The successive models since the 1890s can, in a general sense, be called "progressive education." These...

Here’s irony for you. Many who claim moral superiority for themselves are guilty of aiding and abetting educational inferiority for everyone else. When they assign themselves a fancy title—Social Justice Warrior, no less— are they then excused from further concern for fairness and justice? The far-left is always posturing as morally superior, as better than everybody else, but in fact they focus on policies that narrowly advance their ideological goals. What happens to ordinary people along the way doesn’t seem to be a big concern. Let’s consider education. Do Social Justice Warriors make any special contribution in that area? Seemingly...

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,...