Wow! When you really look, our elite educators have been busy-busy-busy. At first glance, you think these people are clumsy, or misguided, or they have very bad judgment. Then you start to see patterns — for example, everything they’re really excited about is usually a bad idea. So bad it takes a kind of genius to concoct it! 

In reading, they fell in love with Look-Say, Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words. Call them what you will, they are a lousy way to learn to read. Then, in math, they’ve had a long romance with New Math, New New Math, and Reform Math. The commercial names are TERC, Everyday Math, Connected Math, MathLand, etc. Again, all these things are the worst way to teach math. 

See what I mean by patterns? If a bad idea is available, they will find it, take it home, marry it, and make offspring we would rather not deal with. Ah well, you see that I can wax rhapsodic about these people. I am endlessly fascinated by all their craziness. With regard to reading, I’ve just added a comparison chart — see “37: Whole Word versus Phonics — to my site Improve-Education.org. I tried to boil the whole debate down to the essentials. If you’re still confused about why Whole Word doesn’t work, you will find this a useful read. As for math, I added “36: The Assault on Math” to the site. This is a short, sharp critique of what might best be called Anti-Math. Join my crusade. 

New software lets me create some very useful videos (actually they’re more like animated slideshows). Here are some of the titles you can find on YouTube:

Phonics vs. Whole Word

The Truth About Robots

John Dewey and the Burden of Ideology

World’s Easiest Test

Total is now about 20. Enter any of these phrases in their search window. Once you find one, you’ve found them all! Many of the themes discussed in my posts on this blog are dealt with in these videos. The longest is less than 7 minutes.

As I’ve written about the reading wars—Whole Word vs. phonics—and argued that Whole Word was never anything but a sophistry, I’ve become increasingly fascinated by a collateral question: how were our educators able to get away with their scam?? (If that sounds harsh, please Google: “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” which is on Improve-Education.org.)

Here’s the answer that is haunting me. Whole Word could be pushed upon the country, and phonics driven out of the schools, because our media and academics stood silently by and let it happen.

Remember, Flesch wrote his first Johnny-can’t-read book all the way back in 1955. Everything you need to know is in the first chapter. But educators mobilized against him. Who came to his defense? The media, who should be reporting the truth and the news? NO, not that I can discover. Academics, who should be protecting standards and literacy? NO, not that I can discover. A shameful silence spread across the land.

Please, if you know of examples where media or academics did rally to Flesch’s side, I’d like to know. Any year, any publication, any college. Leave a comment.

****announcing an important new article****

Here’s a summary of my school years: all my schools were highly-rated, but not one class was taught as well as it could have been. Why?! I’ve been totally intrigued by this question for a long time.

Here’s my suggestion: we need to look at classrooms the way an engineer looks at problems. How, in short, do we teach the most info in the fastest time with the least effort? That’s the ergonomic question.

I’ve finally condensed all my notes into an article titled “How to Teach History, Etc.” (#26 on Improve-Education.org). Here’s the main points:

1. School and teacher must commit to subject.
2. Use every teaching aid, every trick or technique that will make classes more memorable and effective.
3. Repeat, repeat, repeat. And then say it again some other way.
4. Every course is ideally a gigantic mnemonic device, a cluster of interconnected facts, a mind molecule, a matrix.

If you search “ergonomic teaching” or “ergonomic education” in Google, virtually everything you find will deal with the physical world–chairs, lighting and computer screens. That’s physical ergonomics….The educational establishment has been ruinously sidetracked by a second kind–social engineering…. My own fascination is with the third kind: intellectual engineering. The Greeks and Romans were equally fascinated. You’d think all my ideas would be old hat. In fact, it seems that nobody is bothering with this vital frontier. Well, surely somebody must be! But until I know for sure I’m dubbing myself the Father of Ergonomic Education, and inviting all of you to join me in a crusade to make our schools more efficient.

Goods News! Princeton Alumni Weekly ran my letter–the one below. My faith in Princeton is partially restored. I think it’s a smart letter, and written in a fairly low key. So why not run it? Well, I’ve noticed more and more how the liberal media help the educators by the simple device of standing silently aside. Enough silence. We will not fix the problems in the schools until more people say, “Hey, you know what, these problems did NOT fall down out of the sky. So-called educators did the dirty work. Now, those same people can fix the problems–not likely–or they can get out of the way and let a new generation of real educators improve education.” Here’s the letter:
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“I want to compliment Norman Augustine ‘57 *59 for his article on American education and productivity. I agree with all his points. So, why are we having these problems?

This article echoes many of the points made in the famous 1983 report titled “A Nation at Risk.” No progress in almost 25 years? Can that be by accident?

Antonio Gramsci, a Communist theoretician, said that if you wish to help poor children, make sure they got a good basic education. Unfortunately, our ed establishment became enamoured with an ideology that emphasizes social engineering over learning and literacy.

There’s a hundred policies and promises I could point to. But the emblematic program for the 20th century will always, I believe, be Whole Word (sight reading). Said to be the best way to teach reading, it is in fact unworkable. Let’s do the numbers. The goal ls that children will memorize 800 words each year, which evidently guarantees semi-literacy through high school. Futhermore, only people with exceptional memories can memorize 10,000 of anything–faces, phone numbers, antiques, houses, or sight-words. But you really need to memorize 25,000 or even 50,000 sight-words to be literate in English (which has a huge vocabulary).

The more you study Whole Word, the more you’ll probably conclude with me it was never anything but a sophistry. I find it especially troubling that the media and academia appear to have stood aside and let educators have their way.

I say it’s time for an Education Revolution (I have a blog by that name). The first step might be to politely suggest that our top educators are not likely to fix problems they have created.

We need lots of new ideas and new blood–people from the arts, business, the military, and the professions. Put Norman Augustine and Bill Gates in charge of the schools. Ah, there would be a fine start.”

Bruce Deitrick Price
Norfolk, Va.
Improve-Education.org

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NOTE: Bruce Price’s EDUCATON REVOLUTION (just Google those 4 words) is on Squidoo.com

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

Finally, all of “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch” is on Improve-Education.org. Part I is mainly about PHONICS versus LOOK-SAY. I worked hard to make the fundamental issues as clear as possible. (Alternate title: Why Frank Smith Is Wrong)

Parts II and III broaden out to be, for their fairly short length, a very good history of how American education got off track. It covers all the early people, the weird ideological matrix, and the Communist “double whammy.” All this craziness is still reverberating 100 years after John Dewey fired the first shots….Here are two of the concluding remarks:
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“I’m always struck by the moral aspects here. It’s not all right to kill your neighbor’s child. Surely it can’t be all right to kill that child’s prospects. What sort of person would want to? Here’s the thing I find the most repellent: our educators actually appear to share an indifference to children, not to mention the more obvious contempt for country. These educators have their agenda, and if children are in the way, too bad for the children…

Let me close with my vision of what education should be concerned with. Simple: pushing and cajoling each child as far as each child can go. It seems to me this approach is better for the child; they’re more likely to be happy, self-fulfilled, and earn a higher income. This approach is better for the society, because our human resources are our most important asset. There is no way to know what talent or skill or contribution lies within each child. Why foreclose anything? Why not nurture and encourage all that is there?”
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If you want to understand why John Dewey and Company took us away fom this sensible philosophy, please check out #21 on Improve-Education.org.

As part of my research on Flesch, I actually read or tried to read “Reading Without Nonsense” by Frank Smith. Not easy to understand. It’s almost druidical, sort of floating above the real world. He casually mentions children learning 50,000 sight-words. He casually mentions children memorizing new words as easily as they memorize new faces. Sounds good, until you try to imagine somebody memorizng thousands of faces. Or tens of thousands of faces.

Reading Smith made me really focus on how insanely difficult look-say (or whole word) is for children. Mainly, there’s a vast quantity of words in English–almost a million now. (A person has to know at least 20,000 words not to be illiterate, for all practical purposes.)

Second is a factor nobody talks about, certainly not Smith. English has lower case and upper case letters. The same word has many forms, for example: teachers, Teachers, TEACHERS. Plus, there are the italic and hand-written variations. Plus, there are the exotic typefaces we have so many of. Consider this word: dale. Having memorized that shape, would you even realize that DALE is the same word?

Smith and Company like to pretend that look-say simply means an American child is learning English words the same way Chinese children learn their ideograms. Wrong. Those ideograms come in only one form; and there’s not nearly as many of them; and most of those ideograms contain picture elements–i.e. the symbol for “man” will reappear inside many other symbols, so there’s visual clues all over the place. The English alphabet is lean and efficient when used phonetically. Used ideogrammatically, it’s hopeless. Too many similar shapes, too many variations.

In my article “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch,” I conclude that look-say is a form of child abuse. If you have a photographic memory, maybe then it could work. Otherwise, how could it?

Please see #21 on Improve-Education.org.