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Summary: Socialists tend to believe in grandiose social engineering plans. Students who know too much, citizens who can think for themselves, tend to be a problem. What’s the answer? Talk a lot about education; but make sure nobody has much of it.
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All the way back in 1848 (the year Karl Marx published his Manifesto), Alexis de Tocqueville captured the essence of socialism in this short paragraph:
“Democracy extends the sphere of personal independence; socialism confines it....
•French Class As the Perfect Way to Teach Everything
Summary: 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. There’s a message here.
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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...
•Education: The Conspiracy Question Persists
Summary: The case for conspiracy is simple: the public schools couldn’t have become so dysfunctional by accident. When bad things keep happening, maybe somebody likes it that way.
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Education statistics in the United States tell a grim story. The news always seems to be bad. Why is that?
I’ve argued for many years that The Biggest Mystery In American History is that the public schools can’t seem to do the fairly straightforward job of educating the young. How, by the way, do you explain...
•Explaining the Cynicism of Our Top Educators
Summary: The premise of public education is that children will be educated and thereby lifted up to a better future. The reality is sometimes more cynical, as our elite educators scramble to promote their ideological agenda.
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Probably the most famous example of world-class cynicism is the wrought-metal sign above the gate into Auschwitz. Three German words: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (usually translated “work makes you free”).
The sign undoubtedly provided hope to many prisoners. (If we work...
•How to Improve Public Schools Without Spending More Money
It’s generally agreed that the public schools are sub-par and could be much improved. But how?
Everyone seems to assume we need some big new concept, and who cares what it costs. We hear relentless shilling for Constructivism, 21st Century Skills, and now National Standards. Right on cue, Obama is out of the gate with Race to the Top, which is supposed to make kids College-Ready and Career-Ready. Excuse me. Could we first make them Book-Ready? And perhaps even High-School-Ready?
All of...
•Television Teaches What Public Schools Used To
Imagine the chagrin of our elite educators. They have labored for a century to purge content, facts, and knowledge from the classroom.
This was a long march indeed, finally culminating in almost total victory. Students were taught little. They learned little. They knew little. As the great John Dewey said years ago, school is properly concerned with the social activities of the child. And to hell with all that learning stuff.
Imagine you are there in the final days, as this great victory is...
•Good Teachers -- Unite!!
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,...
•How Do Public Schools Dumb Down Their Students??
All statistics tell the same story: we’re living in a period of educational decline. Despite ever larger expenditures, American students know less and less.
“This is a huge and unexpected mystery," according to Bruce Price, founder of Improve-Education.org. "One-room schools, where a solitary teacher might have to deal with 30 students of different ages and backgrounds, succeeded in teaching far more. Why are our public schools so inept? It’s almost as if there’s a secret lab somewhere which...
•Could the Education Establishment Be That Dumb????
Perhaps you saw the exchange on television.
One guest said, “The administration’s approach is destructive; they must be trying to hurt the country.”
The startled moderator exclaimed: “Do you mean they’re doing it on purpose? Why would you think that?”
The guest explained his reasoning: “Because nobody’s that dumb.”
Eureka! There you have it, a perfect condensation of everything that I’ve been able to figure out, over the past ten years, about education.
Again and again, you find the USA’s...
•How American Public Education Became a Doomsday Machine
Summary: In dumbing down the country, the Education Establishment had dumbed itself down!
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Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.
The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the...
•“The Educators Are Coming! The Educators Are Coming!”
Summary: Never Mind the Barbarians Outside the Gates. What About the Ones Inside?
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Ever since history began, there were always bad guys trying to smash through the gates. Sometimes the barbarians had a bigger army or greater cunning; but by common agreement “barbarians” are always the less civilized, the less educated. They were the outsiders, rude and crude, trying to pull down temples of wisdom they did not value or understand.
Goths and Vandals, Visigoths and...
•Flesch Forever: Facts & Fluency Vs. Falsehoods & Failure
Summary: Rudolph Flesch was right in 1955 when his wonderful book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” attacked Whole Word and promoted phonics. Our Education Establishment, which did the opposite, was wrong.
Happy Birthday. Cheers all around. Rudolph Flesch’s fabulous and justifiably famous work--“Why Johnny Can’t Read”--turned 55 in 2010.
Old? Dated? No longer relevant? Hardly, brothers and sisters. Flesch’s book is in the catbird seat, on top, in charge, totally triumphant.
Fact is, his egregious...
•The Busy Person’s Checklist of Bad Education Ideas
Summary: Bad ideas are killing the public schools. Education activist Bruce Price describes the clunkers in 150 words. How do we improve? Easy. Get rid of all the bad ideas.
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Okay, you’re a busy person. You have only a few minutes to think about education.
Fine! That’s all we need to take a quick look at the 10 worst ideas in the public schools. Here they are:
1) Math is chaotically taught so that children don’t master even simple...
•Keeping Boys From Reading
Summary: our schools are skilled at making sure boys don’t read.
Not to worry. Our top educators have pretty well got this thing figured out. It’s a two-punch combination, researched-based, that almost always works. Bingo, you don’t find American boys wasting precious time inside the pages of a book.
First of all, you want to make sure they don’t hear much about the alphabet (shhh!), letters, sounds all that right-wing nonsense. They have to learn to read with sight-words, Dolch words, whole...
•What Do the Educators Mean When They Say “Education”?
One word. Two different worlds. No wonder so little genuine communication--or progress--occurs in education...
I had been writing about education for more than 20 years when I finally realized the divide, the scam, the silent sophistry, call it what you will, that renders so many discussions about education close to pointless.
When most people say the word “education,” they mean something very specific, and almost everyone knows exactly what it is: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, to...
•What do Knowledge, Kids, And the USA Have in Common?
Here’s the common denominator: the Education Establishment is comtemptuous of all three.
Do you think I jest or exaggerate? Not at all. The truth is straightforward, and easy to explain.
In the matter of Knowledge, John Dewey and his successors made clear that facts, learning and knowledge were not, for them, primary. The relevant thing was each child’s social activity, because the real goal was a new social order. Knowledge was usually a nuisance, and often an obstacle. For the past one...
•Rudolph Flesch Rocks the World of Reading
Summary: The top educators in most English-speaking countries have waged a relentless war against Flesch. His crime: being correct about reading. Their crime: being comfortable with illiteracy.
Rudolph Flesch wrote two famous books, "Why Johnny Can’t Read" (1955) and "Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read" (1981). I read both books twice, years apart, and had the sense that Flesch was intelligent and honorable. (My reviews of these books are on Amazon.)
In short, I had a high opinion of Rudolph Flesch....
•21st-Century Skills: Same Old, Lame Old
The Education Establishment is all goo-goo gaga over the newest pedagogical approach: 21st-Century Skills. This phrase refers to all the high-level “literacies” that students supposedly need to survive in the brave new world acoming.
I suspect there’s little new here and that “21st-century skills” is yet another formula for reaching a favorite goal: education with as little scholarly and academic content as possible.
Ever since the 1920s, our elite educators have pushed the idea that Content...
•Let’s Save Public Education: A Five-Point Plan
(Summary: Bruce Price, founder of Improve-Education.org, says that improving public schools is easier than many people think. For one thing, we definitely don’t need more money. Here are five concrete steps for making our schools more successful: ignore the official experts; get rid of their bad ideas; rescue reading; save math; emphasize facts and knowledge.)
The public schools have been in decline for the past century, according to education activist Bruce Price. Worse than that, this...
•Education Site Uncovers Conspiracy in "Educators, O. J. Simpson, And Guilt."
The big question, when discussing American public education throughout the 20th century, is this: was there a conspiracy? A bold new article says YES.
“Many people shy away from the word conspiracy,” says education writer Bruce Price. “It’s a loaded word. People don’t want to think of the Education Establishment as a criminal enterprise.”
However, Price warns, there’s a problem. The relentless mediocrity, the compulsion toward dumbing down, the apparent inability to create world-class...
•Free Service For Parents: Improve-Education.org Introduces American Basic Curriculum (ABC)
Here’s the problem: public schools are sometimes mediocre; children learn little; but parents don’t find out until it’s too late.
Question is, how can parents check on a school’s performance? How can they know if children are falling behind schedule?
“What parents need,” according to Bruce Price, the founder of Improve- Education.org, “is simple benchmarks suggesting the subjects that children would typically study in each grade. I’m talking about really simple rules of thumb, comparable to...
•Here’s What Happened to American Education--The Really Short Version
I asked my doctor what he thought of President Obama’s proposals for health insurance.
The doctor shrugged with annoyance. Evidently he didn’t like the president’s approach.
The doctor remarked: “Obama’s saying, this is what’s good for you -- whether you like it or not.”
Hold that thought! It’s everything you need to know about American education for the past one hundred years.
John Dewey, universally acknowledged as the founder of American education, knew what was good for Americans. He...
•Rush Forgets to Mention Education
Rush Limbaugh has been talking a lot about the four corners of deceit. They are, he says, Journalism, Government, Science, Academia.
But Academia refers to colleges and professors. So Rush has left out one of the worst offenders of all. Education!
Deceit? If Education had a middle name, that would be it.
Education typically refers to everything going on in the public schools, K-12. This “everything” includes more funny stuff than a Saturday Night Live anthology.
Quick review: in 1983 the US...
•Creating the Perfect School
As long as there have been schools, people have been asking, “So, how would we create the perfect school??”
I think the answer is obvious. You would not do any of the things that our Education Establishment likes to do. Indeed, you would do the opposite.
I believe I know exactly what they would do. They would sweep through the Warehouse of Current Educational Fads, grabbing stuff off the shelves with drunken abandon. Of course, their school would have Constructivism in all classes, with the...
•What to Do When Public Schools Hide Failure
Here’s the problem, and some things we can do about it.
The public schools are geniuses at Chatter. That would mean proposals, press releases, announcements, alibis, pedagogical breakthroughs, denials, new methods, claims, innovations, sophistries, statistics, excuses, reorganization schemes, cover-ups, revised test scores, lies, explanations, more excuses.
What the public schools are not good at, unfortunately, is Content. That would mean such mundane things as where Spain is on a map, what...
•Bad Education Considered As Neurotoxin
More than a century ago, Maria Montessori reached a brilliant insight. Observing children at a mental institution, she wondered: “Suppose we created a lush, sensuous, mentally-jazzed environment that constantly challenged, provoked and inspired these young minds...?”
Montessori acted on her insight. She created a new kind of school for supposedly retarded children. Very quickly, her students were equal to “normal” children. She became the toast of Europe; as she deserved to be. Montessori’s...
•Unique American Intellectual Site Enters Fifth Year
At the end of 2009, Improve-Education.org celebrated its fourth birthday and reached 100,000 words of original content, recently adding such major new pieces as “41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt” and “45: The Crusade Against Knowledge.”
Bruce Price, the site’s founder, continues his aggressive critique of American public education. Price’s work is part of a changing narrative, as academics like to say. More and more, it’s common to distrust our elite educators. “Their approval rating,”...
•Six Ways Young People Can Do Better in School
1) APPRECIATE THE SWEET DEAL. Unless you plan to run away from home and live on the streets, you’re going to be in school. It’s the law. Why waste energy complaining that you can use in more productive ways? Children 10- or 12-years old used to go to work in factories or fields. Instead you get to sit around all day, never breaking a sweat, never getting your hands dirty. A lot of people have worked very hard and sacrificed a lot so you can enjoy this free, all-you-can-eat buffet. So enjoy...
•So You Want to Improve Education???
Well, first of all, be stone-cold realistic about this project. The Education Establishment, that is, the people in charge, don’t give a darn what you want. They have been dumbing down the schools of the US for almost 100 years, relentlessly, ruthlessly. They won’t look kindly on your efforts to improve education. They will think you presumptuous and insubordinate. They are in charge of education, you are not, and that’s that. So you should anticipate that they will mislead you, obstruct you,...
•America's Most Urgent Business Aside From the Economy? Improving the Public Schools
Public schools could do a lot better; everyone agrees. What nobody agrees about is the reason for their low performance. I call this mysterious mediocrity "the education enigma." The question is: what the heck happened to American education? Remember, this country spends vast amounts of money on education, but somehow manages to create 50 million functional illiterates.
You might almost suspect that our Educational Establishment is not genuinely committed to education as most parents define...
•"Critical Thinking" Is Often Just a Dumb Slogan
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 or art; then they 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...
•My New Book Explains The Crisis In The Public Schools, And How We Fix It
I’ve been writing about education more than 25 years. It’s been a fascinating journey...but puzzling
So much in education is counterintuitive. Our schools seem to do everything in the slowest, most inefficient ways. How can we explain this? It’s almost as if our educators merely pretend to believe in universal education. What they seen more deeply committed to is universal mediocrity.
When you consider all the studies and statistics, you realize that they all paint the same bleak and...
•Constructivism: Why It's So Destructive
Constructivism is a huge fad in contemporary education. Usually wrapped in big bouquets of jargon, Constructivism is not easy to evaluate. So what is this thing?
Used in a reasonable way, Constructivism is just a fancy word for the Socratic method, where students talk their way into discovering new insights. Here’s the ideal scenario. A group of students, by discussion and argument, with little nudges from a teacher, discover a destination they did not know existed. When educators promote...
•Education Activist Challenges Education Establishment: Stop the Lies
Here’s what the USA is faced with: declining literacy rates and more than 50,000,000 functional illiterates. How could the Education Establishment get away with creating this massive damage to our society? The quick answer is they told a lot of lies. I’m asking them to stop.
For 75 years the Education Establishment has promoted Whole Word and tried to marginalize Phonics, as much as possible in both cases. Still today, after eight decades of disaster and dyslexia, and despite their own claims...
•Dolch Words: How Dummies Teach Reading
I never stop being amazed: some public schools are still pushing Sight Words and Dolch Words. This is highly irresponsible.
Whole Word rarely works. It expects children to memorize words as graphic designs, which is exceedingly difficult to do.
Please note, there is nothing special about our words that makes them easy to memorize. Memorizing 1000 sight-words is comparable to memorizing 1000 paintings, flags, cars, monuments, or movie stars. Indeed, memorizing English sight-words is probably...
•Unholy Alliance Wrecks American Education
You can hardly imagine two people more different than John Dewey and John D. Rockefeller. But these two guys, and their assembled forces, joined in an unholy alliance that is still devastating American schools.
John Dewey, now considered our greatest educator, was a brainiac, a socialist, a nerd. In his pictures, he looks like a man who never played sports, understands nothing about business or finance, and doesn’t have a penny in the bank.
John D. Rockefeller, on the other hand, was one of...
•Education: Excuses, Excuses, Excuses
Our educators aren’t very good at raising SAT scores, increasing literacy, or spreading knowledge. But they are world-class at making excuses.
Let me rattle off a few. Money! You know money is always the problem. If only taxpayers weren’t so selfish. Violence! This is a big deal. All the students are in gangs or fighting in the halls. Broken homes, divorce, domestic tensions! How can children concentrate? Even if the home is stable, kids are watching TV or goofing off on the Internet. That’s a...
•A Critical Look at Reform Math
First, there was New Math, which everyone said was a failure. So the educators went back to their labs and came up with Reform Math. But the public knew this was just the same old stuff, and called it “New New Math” to show contempt. A more accurate title might be Muddled Math.
Reform Math is actually an umbrella term for a dozen programs such as Connected Math, Everyday Mathematics, MathLand, TERC, etc. What they have in common is an inability to teach math. (And they’re very expensive.) By...
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