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.  

Well, I have to say I’ve had quite a run with reading, reading disabilities, and then trying to figure out how it was all connected, and how it all started. This country had 98% literacy a century ago, but then our educators went to work and took care of that!! Now we have 40,000,000 functional illiterates. Who are the geniuses in charge of this program? How can we thank them enough?As some of the earlier posts chronicle, I first became fascinated by Rudolph Flesch’s apparent common sense (use phonetics to teach a phonetic language) and the hysterical condemnation this poor guy aroused from the nabobs of non-education. Wow! What was this all about? Many months and a lot of research later, I was finally able to write “A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch.” In the process I ran smack into John Dewey, the Father of American Education, or as I recently nominated him, the Father of Dumbing Down.You can’t understand all the anti-intellectual tendencies in American education without confronting Dewey. This guy was willling to trade off academic content in order to have more passive, more dependent, more socialized children. Bingo, that’s where it started. Next stop, growing illiteracy and, because Dewey’s clones promoted a reading pedagogy that did not work, growing impairments such as dyslexia. I just finished a summary of all these weird developments: “Phooey on John Dewey.”Both articles are on my site Improve-Education.org.  The following video is titled: John Dewey and the Burden of Ideology.