Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 90: An Act of War: what the professors of education did to our schools (March 22, 2023)
40 years ago, a congressional commission concluded that our public schools are so bad they might as well be an act of war by an unfriendly foreign power.
The congressional report was titled A Nation at Risk. This is a big deal. It's not some scholar’s opinion. It's not a reconstruction of something far away. It's what the best people in 1983 thought had happened to us. Namely, the wrong people controlled our schools.
The perps were the far-left and the professors of education. They are very skilled at sliding around in the shadows, trying not to leave any traces as they trample to death the very thought of superior public education.
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“An unfriendly foreign power.” And who might that be?? History tells us that the USSR was on the attack internationally as soon as the Russian Revolution was consolidated in 1920. See article: Lenin’s Train Goes Chugging Through American Education.
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NB: transmogrification is a wonderfully fancy word that perfectly describes a long complex process by which you transform something mediocre into something excellent or, as in our national tragedy, the opposite.
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Episodes Are Not In Any Order. Start Reading Anywhere.
Word-Wise Education
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
Let's Fix Education -- by Bruce Deitrick Price -- March 22, 2023
Episode 90: An Act of War: what the professors of education did to our schools
We have reached a major anniversary. Forty years ago a congressional commission revealed to Americans how terrible their public schools had become.
This shocking report— titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform —announced that:
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a People... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
The 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education is a landmark in American educational history. The report contributed to the ever-growing assertion that American schools were failing, and it touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts.
Yes, a wave perhaps but we need a tsunami. The professors of education squirmed their way into the foundations of the country and every day, while pretending to care about improving K-12, they labor to come up with clever new ways to make everything worthless.
This 40-year-old document serves a wonderful purpose. It writes our decline in stone, as it were. No one can dispute that things were so bad by 1983 that a large group of congressmen spent months investigating the depths we had descended to.
"A Nation at Risk" cited statistics such as: "The average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched," and "[The SAT demonstrates] a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.”
It's important to understand that America didn't casually walk off a cliff. Decay and decline in the school system had been in progress for 100 years. John Dewey started it off circa 1910, building lots of so-called progressive ed schools and emphasizing, in classrooms, what were called activities. Note that an activity is not the same as learning French or biology. An activity is anything that sounds important to parents but has little academic content. Basically we had death by a million cuts as a multitude of professors found ingenious new ways to justify burying this and killing that.
This was a deformation as fantastic and unimaginable as a Machiavellian prince turned into a seven-legged frog. Every molecule has to be involved in changing colors and switching sides. Contemplating this fantastical process, I remembered the word transmogrification, a word I never used and hardly understood; but I realized that this big pretentious word was the only word that actually conveys the size and complexity of our school malaise.
In 1931 the schools got rid of phonics and thus literacy. In 1962 came New Math which was an attempt to destroy traditional arithmetic and make kids learn stupid stuff like the lattice method. Constructivism got rid of direct instruction and is a massive, across-the-board corruption. And all the little things that encourage children to achieve have simply been tossed out the window— memorization, homework, mastering material instead of just skimming over it, classrooms that are safe and orderly.
There’s no easy remedy for what we have suffered. Namely, our schools are largely engaged in a Soviet-style indoctrination. Compare an infestation of termites or crab grass. Hundreds of bogus ideas are interconnected in a matrix, and each dumb idea reinforces all the others.
Make no mistake, woke is just cute Commie code for what we've had for 100 years. The prince is no longer princely. The frog is quite a hoot if you don't mind pond scum
Traditional notions of scholarship, research, precision, and factuality are mangled, as we see throughout the culture. The White House lies every day as does the New York Times. I'm worried that the educational system in general is now so enfeebled, we might not recover the ground we have lost.
Act of war is not a mere metaphor. We have millions of walking wounded, Americans who can hardly read or do arithmetic. They know only negligible geography, science, history, and literature.
For a good summary of what happened to us, and suggestions for what to do, please look at article titled K-12: The War Against Children.