The truth is daily trampled. I'm not joking or exaggerating.
For example, phonics is necessary but schools deliver sight-words, which will damage children. Schools won't teach elementary arithmetic. Too difficult or racist. And constructivism fills the rest of the day. Kids are told to construct their own new knowledge. Good luck.
So we have hopelessness defended by an army of lies. Please, we have a special red pill for education issues. Take one.
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MEMO TO K-12, TEACH KIDS TO READ IN FIRST GRADE
https://www.tumblr.com/edworld/732927928834441216/memo-to-k-12-teach-kids-to-read-in-first-grade-or
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Important info. This podcast appears every WEDNESDAY, usually by 9AM.
There is the spoken version... And a print version, aka TRANSCRIPT.
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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Saving K-12 and The Education Enigma, books by Bruce Deitrick Price.
Both available as e-book and paperback. Order on Amazon.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
Support the Show.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION --- by --- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 126 --- Nov 29, 2023
The War Against Truth (Part 1)
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Ladies and gentlemen
There are no good ideas left in K-12. That's been my summary for many years. Proven methods were replaced by bogus methods. These useless usurpers had to be promoted by lies and alibis. An army of sophists and hustlers must devise new jargon, nomenclature, and claims.
In summary, lies always require new lies.
This pattern is best illustrated by the relentless crushing of phonics, so it could be displaced by Whole Word, Whole Language, Sight-words, Balanced Literacy, and similar impostors.
Here’s the amazing background. Circa 1927 Dr. Samuel Orton, a neurologist, conducted a large-scale study on children learning to read. He had a Guggenheim grant arranged by the Education Establishment in the hope that he would prove phonics to be inferior. Instead, Orton found that Whole Word did not work and even worse, it damaged children for life (i.e., gave them dyslexia). Everyone in the field knew about this shocking study because it was in a professional journal. But guess what. In 1930 and ’31, the Education Establishment proceeded with their plans to discredit phonics and make sight-words the lie of the land. Thus began the decline of literacy, leading up to our present educational dystopia.
Recently I was in a meeting when one self-proclaimed expert defined Constructivism so narrowly that it wasn't worth thinking about. This expert seemed hardly to know that Constructivism has been a massive and destructive fad for the last 30 years. Teachers were told that they should not teach directly. Rather, each individual student must create their own new knowledge. Constructivism ended up being an attack on teaching, and a surefire way to limit the amount of knowledge conveyed in the average class room. The expert did not seem to see the problem.
I started to wonder, did this teacher make up all these misleading claims? Or was this teacher merely repeating information heard in ed school? We tend to forget how many there are (1500) and how powerful they are. These ed schools form a matrix that controls what is happening educationally in the United States, which is to say not much. If public schools are full of lies, it's because the professors of education put them there.
Which bring me to the wonderful Rita Kramer, who wrote a wonderful book called Ed School Follies, 1991. She traveled the country interviewing the people who run the asylums. More than thirty years ago she surveyed the educational landscape and concluded that ed schools were not a place to find truth. They existed to start the process of dumbing down American K-12; and the first step was to dumb down future teachers.
My favorite anecdote was of a gung-ho student who can't wait to get in the classroom with kids. She complained to her supervisor that they were wasting time on Mickey Mouse, that is, trivial stuff that students are often required to do, like making scrapbooks instead of learning a subject. This eager beaver was clearly a threat to the system. The supervisor sadly pointed out to the student, “My dear, I don't think you are cut out to be a teacher. You should consider another line of work.”
Rita Kramer sent me some final quotes via her daughter. She passed on in the spring of 2023. I'm going to write a final tribute.
I want to speak now just to liberals. Have you ever heard of a Communist regime that had a happy ending? Once they have power, these regimes tend to kill a lot of people, revolutionaries and liberals along with everybody else. All of this was summed up by the Wall Street Journal in 2017: 100 years of Communism, 100 million deaths.
When you create a fact-free world, anything can happen to you. The most organized and relentless will win. Truth will make you free, according to the Bible. What do lies make you? They make you a prisoner of a much smaller universe than the one we actually live in.
Everyone should try to slow this process whereby truth is ignored and lies become reality.
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CODA: I think now The War Against Truth is the overriding conflict of our era. So there will eventually be Parts 2, 3, etc.
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CODA 2: George Orwell used the idea of 2 + 2 = 5 in an essay of January 1939 in The Adelphi; "Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell"
Orwell wrote: "It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so."
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