If you are interested in poetry, I hope you’ll experience THEORYLAND, a serious poem you will actually enjoy. Laugh-out-loud-and-cry enjoy.

There are several excellent scholarly aspects….1) THEORYLAND is a fond riff on Prufrock and The Wasteland. Eliot loved to allude to earlier poets; and I have returned the favor….2) THEORYLAND is a witty satire of the highfalutin Criticism known as Theory. (When you stand back and look at what our academics have been doing the last several decades, you start to suspect that Sophistry was the main game in town, which has had a very negative effect on education. For more on sophistry, Google “Philosophy Weeps,” an essay by same writer.)…3) THEORYLAND tries to show that serious poetry can be enjoyable poetry. Too many academic poets accepted the notion that serious poetry had to be pretentious and dull.

I have been serializing THEORYLAND in several places. Now, all five Cantos are up. Visit Improve-Education.org (#14) or Theoryland.blogspot.com. Your comments and reviews are welcome….Bruce Deitrick Price

I knew a very smart graduate of Vassar. She next enrolled at Hunter College to earn a degree in education. We were arguing one day about educational philosophy. Well, I said, we may disagree on a lot but I’m sure we agree on one thing. Students should be able to look at a map of the world and know where Japan is.

She amazed me by saying, No! They can look it up. And I thought: It really is all over. Hunter teaches this nonsense, and a Vassar grad accepts it.

Of all the many foolish strategies that educators have concocted, these five words are perhaps the Grand Canyon of Foolishness. In the real world, people read newspapers quickly or they half-hear talking heads on television–…an epidemic hit Japan... You have to learn a little before you can learn a lot. If you do not know what an epidemic is or what Japan is, the sentence might as well be syllables spoken in Minoan. People can run to dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of course. But typically they muddle through with what they already know.

In the world of education, They can look it up is carte blanche for teachers to teach next to NOTHING. If you wish to keep people ignorant, repeat this mantra daily. Conversely, if you wish people to be informed and involved, make sure they know all the basic stuff.

More and more, my research suggests that many of the smartest people in education spend their time devising pretexts for teaching less. If you know examples of this, please leave comments.

Recent surveys showed that Americans 18-24 don’t, in huge numbers, know where California is, or Louisiana, or Iraq, or much of anything. About one-third are totally illiterate, geographically speaking; half are nearly as bad. The problem is that our educators (I mean the top people who shape the system) can find many theoretical reasons for teaching less…but few compelling reasons for teaching more.

Here is how to teach geography: every classroom has a map of the world and a map of the USA (or whatever country you live in); at least once a day every teacher, from K to 12, points to one of those maps to help explain the news, to discuss people and places mentioned in textbooks, novels, TV, etc., etc. Any pretext for pointing to those maps is a good pretext. Results: maximum gain, little pain.

Want to dumb down a country? Easy. Do not point to maps. Do not have them in the schools. Never mention maps. Instead, encourage students to think of the world as vast, vague, mushy and unknowable.

(For more on maps, see “Map Alert” on Improve-Education.org.)

The general idea in all my education work is that we can do better. Trying to understand why some people don’t actually want us to do better is a constant theme in this work.

Here’s my guess. Two kinds of people don’t stress improvement….1) You have people that might be called Rousseau’s Children, permissive hippies, soft-hearted liberals and such, and their attitude is, “Hey, leave the kids alone, they’ll learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it.” I’m not sure that’s true, but I can agree that these are attitudes which a reasonable person might have. You just hope they won’t push these views too far.

2) Then we have people who move into the field of education precisely so they can serve a subversive or destructive role. I just wrote a piece for Artisticnetwork.net called “Malevolence at the top,” dealing with this thought. Basically, there just seems to be too much inefficiency in education to explain it away as an accident.

If you’d like more discussion along this line, please see Essays #6 and #13 on Improve-Education.org, my main site. I’m also working on an article about Rudolph Flesch, which asks the question: why did we use teaching methods that don’t work?? It really does seem that many top educators, going back to Dewey, wanted to slow down the learning process. They wanted children sitting in a communal circle, none doing too badly, BUT NONE DOING TOO WELL EITHER. Dewey was especially offended by the sight of a child sitting alone enjoying a book! Look-say was designed to make sure that Dewey and his ilk weren’t offended by such distasteful sights.