Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 106: Reading is under attack in our public schools (Wed., June 12, 2023)
One phenomenon that still shocks me but shouldn't is that our Education Establishment has one peculiar gift: they can riff for hours about literacy and other vital subjects without ever saying anything important.
What our professors tell us is that sometimes birds fly to the east and sometimes they fly to the west and sometimes they move both wings at the same time but sometimes they just glide. In any case we are told just the obvious in weird loops. But we aren’t told causes, or what it means, or where we should go from here.
When Shakespeare talked about a tale told by an idiot, he was talking about our education elite.
Instead of all that, here is the nitty-gritty, the basics of reading that everyone should know.
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BACKGROUND ARTICLES:
Reading Makes Children Smarter
(conversely, not reading makes children less smart)
18 ordinary English words that Julius Caesar spoke
Reading Is Easy (four minute video)
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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New novel: Art and Beauty.
Crime fiction. Set in Manhattan.
Dangerously well written.
Published by Web-E-Books.com /// Editor says: “Bruce Deitrick Price puts
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< Enjoy Chapter 1. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY >
< Enjoy Chapter 2. MISS BABBAGE >
Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 106 June 12, 2023
Reading is under attack in our public schools
Ladies and gentlemen…
There are 50 million functional illiterates in America. Clearly, the people in charge are incompetent. Or ideologically misguided.
As a practical matter, Americans who value literacy should think of themselves as the Resistance fighting Nazis in France.
You can find dozens of articles on the Internet explaining that reading makes children smarter. What sort of evil phonies would take away the best tool for making kids smarter.
Our situation is desperate. Here are six ways, big and small, you can fight back. And then a thought experiment that ties everything together.
First of all, don't accept nonsense you hear about theory. Phonics is essential. Non-phonics is a fraud. The jargon for phonics these days is the Science of Reading. Embrace that science. Almost every child should be reading by the end of first grade. If that's not happening in your local schools, fire the people in charge.
Second, don't let anybody tell your child to memorize the shapes of words. The Education Establishment rejects memorization except in the one place where it will be most destructive. Ah, these cosmic con artists. Children might memorize 100 or 300 or even 500 sight-words; but that takes a huge amount of work and hardly puts a dent in a vast language like English. If you want to learn lots of English words, you don't master them one by one, you learn the rules and patterns that shape all English words. That's the essential genius of phonetic languages.
Third, don't read to your kids, read with your kids. Side by side. Touch the letters and words as you talk about them. You can read Japanese to kids for the next three years, do you think those kids will then be able to read Japanese? Very unlikely. Kids learn to read a phonetic language when they understand that letters stand for specific sounds. So the teacher might point to the letter at the beginning of bat. “This is a b-word, pronounce the first letter buh-. Add a, pronounced ahh and you get ba-. Add t pronounced tuh and you get a blend pronounced bat. It's very logical.”
Fourth, have fun with language but especially have fun with rhymes, jokes, knock-knock jokes, puns, cheers, advertising slogans, famous songs specially with word play in them, interesting etymologies. Explain to children that the Potomac River is an indigenous word. Indeed the Potomac Indians used to live in Northern Virginia. American maps are full of exotic words. Help children to analyze them. You can teach history, geography, and language all at the same time.
Fifth, learn cursive. I see this question all over the Internet: why should we learn cursive? Because it makes children deal with the actual shapes of individual letters, not whole words. My favorite reading expert says a phonics reading program without cursive is incomplete.
Sixth, one of my proudest projects is titled “333 common words letter-for-letter identical in Latin and English.” Latin, a long dead language, is alive all around us. A short version of the same project is titled “18 ordinary English words that Julius Caesar spoke.” Exit, which everybody should know, is Latin for he/she/it goes out. Credo is simply the Latin verb, first-person singular, meaning "I believe." The same root flowered into credibility, incredible, credence, credit, and now back to the root itself, cred. Trivia. Latin for road is via, as in Via Cassia. An intersection of three roads was called a trivia. People tended to stand around and talk, thus trivia for gossip.
The points made so far can be taught by a thought experiment. The charlatans in charge of schools constantly tell the American people that children should learn to read with sight-words. Imagine a child has a lecture about the sight-words he will soon be memorizing and then, plot twist, he’s in solitary confinement for a year. Would a child be able to figure out how to read the books in the room? No, because the child doesn't understand how to unlock the phonetic clues. He will be able to read only those words he learned in that first lecture. Illiterate at the start, he will be illiterate at the finish, that's the great genius of sight-words.
But if a child knows that each letter represents a sound, he can work his way letter by letter, syllable by syllable, word by word, until he's actually reading. And then it's like riding a bicycle, practice, practice, practice. So finally, words become automatic. I suppose you can call them sight-words if you want but that's where you end up, not where you start. You start with the sounds of each letter.
So now you see why we have 50 million functional illiterates. They never actually learn to read past a very rudimentary level. Basically they memorize a few hundred sight-words, guess as cleverly as they can, and struggle along. The Education Establishment calls this early literacy instruction, but they intend early literacy destruction.