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 113: America Urgently Needs Better Public Schools (Wed., August 30, 2023)
Public schools are bad. There's no excuse for this but there is an explanation.
The Education Establishment is far-left, and they don't mind dumbing down education if they can thereby dumb down the country in general.
If you want better schools you have to reverse the whole process. Bring back the good ideas that liberals got rid of. Dump the intellectual monstrosities now in the schools.
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"SUPPORT EDUCATION REFORM"
Please help me improve K-12...
Americans should have great public schools.
We could so easily have them....
Here are my solutions and
how you can help.
http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12
Available on Amazon.
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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
a new spin on the all-American, sexy, fast-talking detective story by creating
a truly fresh crime-fighter personality and placing his original P.I. character, Jon Dak, among movers and shakers in the NYC art and fashion world.”
< Enjoy Chapter 1. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY >
< Enjoy Chapter 2. MISS BABBAGE >
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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 113 -- August 30, 2023
America Urgently Needs Better Public Schools
Intro: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the big picture, presented very quickly.
Every American needs to know this.
I appeal to everyone: keep a shrewd eye on our unscrupulous Education Establishment. There are millions of reasons for doing so.
Our schools waste hundreds of millions of dollars on educational strategies that are ineffective. You know this is true because, despite all that money, our students don’t compete well with students from other countries (which typically spend much less per pupil). The business community has to waste hundreds of millions of dollars each year on remedial education. The USA has lost millions of jobs to India, for example, because our schools don’t teach children to read, write and speak Standard English. Perhaps most tragically, we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates.
Bill Gates and Norman Augustine, in a report called “Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century,” concluded that the US is already at a tipping point: Unless public schools are improved, our standard of living will deteriorate. This report is more than 10 years old so you know that we are now on the downhill slope.
A century ago we had a literacy rate of 98%. Young adults knew the basics of history, geography and science. Then we began a plunge toward mediocrity and less than 60% literacy. Could this long-term decline happen by accident or incompetence? Not likely. On the contrary, I think this decline was brought about by extraordinary effort by ideologues on the left.
If you want to understand the malaise of American education, you need to meet John Dewey. He is often called the Father of Modern Education. Starting more than a century ago, he pushed the idea that we need less emphasis on school subjects, and more on cooperative activities, specifically “cooking, sewing, manual training, etc.” Today, Dewey-inspired educators are comfortable with programs that downplay academic subjects. Reading is, of course, the school subject on which all others depend. Revealingly, our educators do a poor job of making sure that children learn to read.
Fifty years ago, Rudolf Flesch (a language and reading expert) addressed this crisis. In his bestseller titled “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (1955), Flesch explained that phonics is the logical way to teach a phonetic language. He explained why--if schools rejected phonics and used sight-reading (or Whole Word)--children would never become good readers. Our top educators sneered at Flesch. I have spent the last dozen years trying to find the explanation for this hostility. The evidence seems overwhelming to me: our educators were eager to shortchange the basics, including literacy, in exchange for societal leveling. This was Dewey’s clearly-stated plan. Goodbye to real education, hello to politics and ideology.
As reading is so crucial, I want to make clear, in a few words, the flaw in Whole Word. Suppose you are a typical six-year-old; and you are told to memorize English ONE WORD AT A TIME. You must memorize each English word as a design or shape, as if it were a logo. Your quota is typically less than 200 symbols a year. By adolescence only the smarter students will be able to read even 1500 symbols. If you try to read a newspaper or cereal box, you always see many shapes you haven’t memorized; and you have no way of deciphering them. You never become a fluent reader. Your competence and self-esteem sink. You are categorized as “functionally illiterate.”
Here’s the big, awkward question: can we expect improvement from educators who are still entangled in the rhetoric of social engineering? I believe we need new thinking and new people--from business, the military, the arts, the professions. We need an affirmation of this simple principle: let us respect each child’s talent and intelligence so that we can raise each child to his or her potential.
What we especially need is that our community and political leaders demand better schools. Our Education Establishment, let's say it plainly, is doing a horrible terrible job, and probably on purpose.
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Our schools could be much better. Here’s how.
by Bruce Deitrick Price