Free Republic

Our Education Establishment tends to describe John Dewey as The Greatest Human Who Ever Lived. I've taken to calling him America's Favorite Quack. Truth is, when the Far-Left finds somebody saying what they want said, they will praise that somebody to the skies. Thus, the apotheosis of John Dewey. An essay called "Phooey on John Dewey" provides some perspective:======= "First off, let it be stated that John Dewey was a phenomenally brainy and productive guy. During a long life, he wrote more articles and books than you could read in a year. Indeed, he wrote so much on so many...

New article argues that a lot of modern education is incoherent and not really trying, except for foreign language courses. There, teachers still proceed in a logical and sequential way toward ambitious goals. These practices should be used in all subjects.======= "There is one constant throughout the 20th-century: professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes 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) and a phalanx of resistance-is-futile jargon. Somehow the proposals didn’t translate into gains. One might...

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If every school principal gave this speech at the beginning of the next school year, America would be a better place. To the students and faculty of our high school: I am your new principal, and honored to be so. There is no greater calling than to teach young people. I would like to apprise you of some important changes coming to our school. I am making these changes because I am convinced that most of the ideas that have dominated public education in America have worked against you, against your teachers and against our country. First, this...

Loss of language among the younger population -- that is to say, the ability to formulate and enunciate properly constructed sentences that reflect clear thought -- is growing at a staggering rate in the United States. Even among students whose academic aptitude is well above the national average, my years as an undergraduate business professor show that four out of five will make grave spelling errors in written assignments or exams, and about half that regularly commit grammatical blunders. The ubiquitous confusion between "there" and "their" may still be considered a quaint and negligible fluke that nearly creates a...

My name is Sam Besserman, I'm eleven years old, I live in Beverly Hills, California, and ever since I can remember I have been subjected to political bias in school. The first time I noticed the bias was actually in preschool where the teacher was reading a book about the importance of mothers and the inferiority of fathers. I tried to tell the teacher that dads might be just as important. The teacher responded in a sing-song, "No, listen to me, I'm the teacher." Of course, the girls loved the book and most of the boys hated it, except for...

Anyone who has ever tried to sue a school, change a PTA, join a school board, or in any way to manipulate what a public school was doing, please share your experiences and suggestions. To start the discussion, here are a few options: YAHOO GROUPS: anybody can form a group on Yahoo. I know of a group in Jersey City where parents share notes about teachers, courses, and candidates. This is an easy way to mobilize 100 or 200 people so they’re all on the same page when they deal with the school. PARENT-TEACHER ASSOCIATION: Martin Gross, in his book...

Self-Esteem Bottoms Out Malcolm A. Kline, June 25, 2010 While everyone from Middle American parents to the U. S. Secretary of Education are expressing a lack of confidence in the ability of ed schools to deliver qualified teachers to public schools, the deans of those institutions have no such angst. “Universities say we’re going to protect this because it is something we can do better than anyone else,” Dr. Sharon P. Robinson, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) said at a lunch on June 18, 2010. “Deans and department chairs were much more...

Teacher’s Self-Defense Manual Malcolm A. Kline, June 24, 2010 An interesting flip side of the victimology that permeates public schools is that teachers are frequently expected to play the villain. One self-help expert who literally advises educators to turn the other cheek is Dr. Eric P. Hartwig. “He is experienced and licensed as a Director of Pupil Services, District Administrator and a School Psychologist,” his web site tells us. “Presently, he is the Administrator of Pupil Services for the Marathon County Children with Disabilities Education Board and is the author and principle trainer on the Just-in-Time: Behavioral Initiative Project.” “Dr....

Dennis Prager explains what is the greatest threat that America faces today: “We have not passed on what it means to be an American to this generation.” (see video and partial transcript) [...] I would just add that I -- I have never said this, so I have good credentials to say this now -- it's common for commentators to say every election this is the most important election in American history or in our time.

Forty-seven years ago, the body my Dad lived in for 58 years, was gently lowered into the ground in Mt. Vernon Cemetery in the heart of beautiful Teays Valley, West Virginia. Today as I have nearly every day since his death, July 1, 1963, I thought of him - again trying to do the utterly impossible task of putting into words, feeble and faltering words, all that he means to me. He gave me and all his family priceless treasures, treasures beyond all earthly value, in both quantity and quality. He gave me love. I never knew what it was...

Front-page headline in my New York Post this morning: 2 + 2 = 5 NY passes students who get wrong answers on tests The accompanying story describes a further dumbing-down of state math tests for kids in grades 3 to 8. Half marks are given for fragments of work; also for wrong answers arrived at via correct methods: “A kid who answers that a 2-foot-long skateboard is 48 inches long gets half-credit for adding 24 and 24 instead of the correct 12 plus 12 . . . ” For us New York parents the only surprise here is that any...

Okay, it took me 3 years but here's what I finally figured out. Not only is Constructivism a mostly useless gimmick but it hurts younger, less educated, and poorer kids the most. Here's a short new article that explains why:------------ "Constructivism versus Minorities and the Poor.... Constructivism is the latest fad burning through American public schools. Here’s a quick definition: children are supposed to invent their own new versions of all knowledge, while teachers (now called facilitators) are supposed to stand back and encourage the process. I’ve been writing for some years about how unrealistic and time-consuming this approach is....

Powerful Failure: How the National Education Association Fails to Use Its Influence for Education is released today by the Association of American Educators. The booklet chronicles the development, growth, and politicization of the largest educators’ union in America, the National Education Association (NEA). Although it started out as a professional association in 1857, the NEA has become a union behemoth that does not represent its members’ beliefs, but rather attempts to reorder the priorities of the United States of America. Powerful Failure highlights a number of policies supported by the NEA that have no relation to education. Federal standards for...

Here is a factoid that will amaze you. Almost 7,000,000 people have reviewed books, etc. on Amazon. Some people go nuts and start reviewing every product that Amazon sells. I stick to serious books about education; and it has taken me several years to reach 50 reviews. For example, I just reviewed a book on New Math and another on censorship in West Virginia. (Such books can be time capsules. You jump back 30 or 40 years, and learn a lot about how we got where we are today.) Amazon has a feature called Listmania, which lets you put together...

Teacher Work Days Deconstructed Malcolm A. Kline, June 1, 2010 Malcolm A. Kline Those of us who find Teacher Work Days a relatively recent phenomenon, if not an oxymoronic one, can get a bird’s eye view of what they sometimes consist of from an inside account of an educational conference held late last year. Mary Grabar, who teaches at two colleges in Atlanta, delivered her report on the National Council of Social Studies conference on the website of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. “There, 3200 teachers were continuing their studies in pedagogy, gaining continuing and graduate...

The following plea--written 55 years ago and addressed to all the teachers of America--is still solid gold today:------- "You are a grade-school teacher. I know that you are doing a conscientious job, that you work overtime for very little pay, that you love children and are proud of your profession. Aren't you getting tired of being attacked and criticized all the time? Every second mother who comes in to talk to you tells you that she is dissatisfied, that her child doesn't seem to learn anything, that you should do your job in a different way, that you don't know...

This sad letter from an elementary school teacher provides a quick look at what the public schools are doing to the country: “...I was told today at a job interview that, even though I get great results with my students, they would rather hire someone who already believed in Constructivism and Cooperative Learning....My kindergarten students can dissect a sentence like a second grader, and I am very proud of that. Still, I get marked down and ridiculed on my evaluations. My superiors complain that I need to have my students in cooperative groups (useless chatter), in learning stations (playing with...

It has been the dirty little secret of higher education for decades: Tens of thousands of college students can't do the work.Developmental education — reteaching basic skills in reading, writing and math — is a $200 million-a-year problem in Texas, funded by taxpayers, colleges and the students themselves. Private groups also spend millions of dollars on the issue.But relatively few students who need the classes go on to earn a degree, raising questions about whether money spent on developmental education is a wise investment. “It's all about efficiency,” said Jim Pinkard, a program director at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating...

Professors and Social Media Deborah Lambert, May 20, 2010 If you think that today’s professors spend their free time roaming through dusty library stacks, think again. Apparently 80 percent of today’s faculty members “have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Linkedin, MySpace, Flickr or GoogleWave,” . . . and nearly 60 percent keep accounts with more than one, and a quarter use at least four, according to InsideHigherEd.com. And that’s just the beginning. The study also showed that over 50 percent used social media as a teaching tool. The survey of just under 1,000 professors said...

A mother in Oregon left some provocative comments on an article I posted about dumbing-down. She didn’t like what was going on in her local school; neither did her children apparently. They were evolving ways to deal with this problem. Maybe there are ideas here that others can use. People seem to assume there are two roads: homeschooling (which isn’t practical for millions of parents); or living with the nonsense (which is killing the country). This mother’s “third way” was talking to her kids, explaining things, openly sharing her concerns, trying to undo damage as fast as it happens. These...