Suppose that clever enemies managed to eliminate the good theories and methods from our schools. Finally, there's nothing left but bad ideas.
What would that look like? Probably just what you would now find in your local schools.
Podcast and transcript are short so you can savor what has happened to us.
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Good background article: The War Against Children
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/k12_the_war_against_children.html
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 125 Wednesday 22, '23
Know the enemy. K-12 is full of nonsense. Few good ideas are left.
Imagine all these methods operating in millions of classrooms day after day, dumbing down another generation.
1) FAKE READING INSTRUCTION DESIGNED NOT TO WORK -- Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words, and Balanced Literacy have created 50 million functional illiterates. Common denominators are hostility to phonics (which works) and full support for guessing from pictures and context (dumb gimmicks).
2) NO-MATH MATH -- New Math, Reform Math, Common Core Math, etc. are variations on make-believe math. No memorization. No mastery. Requires spiraling from topic to topic, and promotes using a calculator to compensate for lack of basic skills.
3) COOPERATIVE LEARNING -- Students work in groups. A good approach for fostering a herd sensibility. A dreadful approach for creating independent thinkers and self-starters.
4) CONSTRUCTIVISM -- Teachers, called facilitators, are not allowed to teach. Direct instruction is forbidden. Children must construct new knowledge for themselves.
5) WAR AGAINST CONTENT -- A witless policy pursued since the time of John Dewey. The apparent goal is to make sure that children learn as little as possible.
6) NO MEMORIZATION -- This is SOP in all grades and all courses.
A silly policy that will ensure cultural illiteracy and societal amnesia.
7) SELF-ESTEEM -- Students must be praised even when they do bad work. Concern for self-esteem can justify eliminating most content from classrooms, on the grounds that some students won’t be able to handle the material.
8) MULTICULTURALISM -- This sophistry requires children to learn more about faraway cultures, both in miles and years, than about their own. As the children have no frame of reference for understanding other cultures, little information is retained.
9) HOSTILITY TO GENUINE TESTING -- A helpful policy if you wish to conceal that children aren't learning much. Problem is, in the schools today, there is a lot of disingenuous testing of trivial things that didn't need to be taught in the first place.
10) TOO MANY IMPOSTORS -- Ideologues pretend to care about education even while focused on messing up the minds of millions of children. (Keep these extremists away from the schools, and the other nine problems will miraculously vanish.)
Podcast and transcript are short so you can savor what has happened to us.
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good background article
WAR ON CHILDREN
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/k12_the_war_against_children.html
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Another kind of background.
Excellent book.
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Commies.
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COMING NEXT WEEK: The War Against Truth
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