A column I have in several places on the internet starts like this: “Most major American newspapers are scoring a painful trifecta: losing readers, waving goodbye to advertisers, and firing journalists. Why is this happening?” I discuss two causes. The first (in brief) is the papers are too busy pushing their political agenda. The article continues:
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“A second reason for the newspapers’ decline is that the liberal media unthinkingly support the education establishment, on the mistaken assumption that this group represents some sort of progressive or liberal high ground. In fact, the educational establishment is often better described as regressive, for keeping students uninformed, giving future workers few tools for success. and favoring oddball reading theories that cause dyslexia and functional illiteracy.

There is in fact no necessary link between the politics of our education establishment and anyone’s progressive values. Antonio Gramsci, a real Communist, advocated giving poor children lots of basic academic skills, so they can escape poverty. What, pray tell, is “progressive” about schools that allow children to graduate without being able to read or write properly? No, the only sure link is the one between the media’s support of intellectually flabby educators and the continuing decline of the media themselves. Why don’t they see it: the schools are killing off their customer base!

Experts say this country has more than 40,000,000 functional illiterates. People are ignorant about even the most basic stuff. Where’s New York? Which way is the Pacific Ocean? What is France?…How can people who don’t have any background information enjoy reading a newspaper?

If our newspapers had better judgment, they would demand more achievement in the public schools.”
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This link between the ed establishment and our media is much on my mind. As I’ve studied the reading wars and concluded that Whole Word was always a dubious proposition, the thing that haunts me is that the media and academia stood silently by. Hardly a peep out of the best people and brightest minds. Please, if anyone knows of a professor at Harvard, Princeton, etc., who jumped into the fight along side Rudolph Flesch, I’d love to hear the name.

WHY ARE TEACHERS LOSING RESPECT ??

a letter sent to the Princeton Alumni Weekly:

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In “The Road Back to School” (Oct. 11, ’06), Caroline Horowitz ‘04 is quoted as saying that teaching has lost much of its prestige. Sad if true; but I don’t think it is. People still respect teachers.

What the public is figuring out is that educators can’t be trusted. (By educators, I mean the people with PhD’s who control the educational establishment.) The perception is that these people always want bigger budgets to pay for ideas that invariably turn out to be counterproductive. Whole-word and New Math are two familiar examples.

For an essay titled “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” (easily found in Google), I studied education back to the 1880’s. It’s a shocking story and a sad one: educators conspiring against education. John Dewey and his colleagues decided that, if they were going to turn America toward collectivism, they needed to dumb down the citizenry. This foolish scheme is still hurting us a century later.

My sense of it is that our educators are much too invested in social engineering. Unless they reform, they’ll become one of the least trusted groups in the country, and they’ll drag teachers down with them.
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signed: Bruce Deitrick Price