improveeducation » dumbing down

Why The Public Schools Are A Mess

Bruce Price — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:12:52 +0000

I spend a lot of time trying to solve one of the most interesting crime stories there is.
Why, despite vast sums of money and massive concern by the public, are our educators somehow able to achieve new depths of dumb?
Why?? Because they know what they want and they work at it!
I just put a piece on the web titled “Educators Best Understood as Ignorance Engineers.” It’s not easy these days coming up with an original phrase. But Ignorance Engineers actually seems to be new. And it exactly captures the essence of what I’m more and more confident in saying: these educators are not wayward little waifs lost in the big city; they are cold-hearted ideologues trying to achieve John Dewey’s collectivist dream.
The reason they get away with so much mischief is that people give them the benefit of the doubt: they’re trying; they’re confused; they mean well. Actually, they don’t.
(Please Google: “Educators Best Understood as Ignorance Engineers.“)

Helping the non-reader, the dyslexic, the illiterate

Bruce Price — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:15:17 +0000

Please, if you know a non-reader or you are connected to a literacy program, check out what I believe is a very important new article: 33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read, on Improve-Education.org. The country is said to have 50,000,000 “functional illiterates.” Typically, these are people once trapped in Whole Word classrooms. They mange to memorize 1,000 or 2,000 “sight words.” But they can’t read phonetically, which is to say, they can’t really read. They can’t read a newspaper. Their academic and employment prospects are limited. In addition, they often suffer from a common side-effect of Whole Word—that is, dyslexia. Have you ever tried to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time? Your brain is divided against itself. There’s confusion and anxiety. In the case of dyslexia, the brain has two strategies when it encounters a word: pull up its meaning from memory; OR sound it out.

Public schools are pushing Dolch Words at kids as young as 4 and 5. Once the child learns the strategy of treating words as graphic objects to be memorized by their shapes, that child is basically finished as a fluent reader. Sure, the smarter kids will find their way back to phonics in time; they will see the sounds inside the Sight Words. But the slower, less verbal kids are not that flexible. They try to do what they are told—guess, use context, memorize shapes, don’t sound out. Their reward is a reading disability.The whole thing seems like a sick joke….until you glance back at that number 50,0000,000. Our educators have been busy, haven’t they? This new article provides quick diagnostics for assessing the damage. The idea is that a good reader will guide a poor reader through the article, and together they will begin a journey of discovery and recovery. 33: How To Help A Non-Reader To Read.

Why We Need A “Teacher Liberation Front”

Bruce Price — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 21:41:01 +0000

I just reviewed an old book for Amazon.com called “The New Illiterates” by Samuel Blumenfeld. Published in 1973, this book is still amazingly fresh. How can that be? Because our elite educators still hang on to all their excuses and sophistries, still refuse to work for genuine academic improvement.

In this book Blumenfeld points out that the locus of our problem is “the teachers of teachers,” the ideologues, that is, who run the ed schools. What has changed in 35 years??

More and more I suspect that progress will come from radicalized teachers. To promote this idea, I’ve just added “31: Teacher Liberation Front” to Improve-Education.org. The starting point for this article is a quote in a new book titled “The Great Reading Disaster” by Mona McNee and Alice Coleman. Writing about the UK experience, they state:

“The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so.”

I urge teachers to savor every word in that quote…Victimized…Brainwashed…”Training establishments” are, of course, the ed schools in England.

As you’ll see in the next post, my site Improve-Education.org says that Jay Leno is Educator of the Year, that Leno is doing more than anyone else to showcase the failures of our public schools. Isn’t it significant that our educators have managed to make Jay Leno, a stand-up comic, appear to be a major intellectual force? (See video in next post for more analysis.)
Should I apologize for being so tough on educators (i.e., the managers at the top)? I feel they’ve earned it. I’ve been studying this field for many years, and let me tell you, it’s like walking through some bizarre lab. The goal seems to be to create unintelligent life forms. Start with Whole Word, so that most kids cannot become fluent readers. Move on to Fuzzy Math, so they can’t count. Filter out all facts from the real world, the scientific world, the historical world, the scholarly world, the industrial world…
Really, I’d like to suggest that, for teachers, the most radical thing you can do is TEACH MORE. That’s the theme of Teacher Liberation Front. Join today.