Episode 136: The K-12 Gulag (Wed., Feb. 7, 2024)
INTRO
Our schools are doing a lousy job, but the public is so befuddled, there is hardly a squawk.
Every American should ask this question: why are we putting up with second-rate schools while paying top dollar?
ARTICLES THAT GO WITH THIS PODCAST:
Recent NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) figures continue to indicate that only ONE-THIRD of American teenagers are "proficient" in reading. (https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/
Meanwhile new numbers have appeared from PISA (Program for International Students Assessment). Psychology Today states our plight with unusual candor: "US scores show that our education system is flatlining.” (!!!)
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NAEP and PISA scores are confusing. Here is a 5-minute article that clarifies what's going on. See “K-12: Are low scores a problem?” (on American Thinker) https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/12/k12_are_low_test_scores_a_problem.html
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There are two ways to help my reform efforts….
Give Saving K-12 when you need a smart gift for smart people….
Visit Support Education Reform for a 2-page explanation.
Main goal is to help Americans understand what happened to the schools and how we fix them. Please pass this on to parents and community leaders.
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Word-Wise Education
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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Episode artwork: © "5 important Russian books
about the Gulag and Stalin's Great Terror"
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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 136 Feb. 7, 2024
The K-12 Gulag
The Gulag Archipelago in Russia was Stalin’s personal penal system, 1934-1953, where more than 2,000,000 people died from hunger and exhaustion. Hundreds of prisons were strung out across the vast emptiness of Russia. The novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn perceived an archipelago not of islands but of hellholes.
Together these prisons comprised a separate existence cut off from everything desirable or normal. Everyone was cold, hungry, frightened. It was a horrific world defined by a lack of basic necessities.
The K-12 Gulag in the US is softer, more mental. It is a world defined by a lack of basic skills. In both cases, prisoners are operating at a low level, one that borders on less-than-human. The prisoners can go home each day but they can’t escape the incoherence of their instruction.
Many American students can read only in a fumbling, struggling way. Simple arithmetic is difficult for them. They don't know much basic knowledge such as where they are on a map. They don’t learn much.
High school grads often have only a middle school education. Soon enough they are adults. Many never read a book in their whole life. If they did, it would be hard work. Adults who can read for pleasure are more and more rare.
Knowledge is the first casualty. Then the K-12 Gulag goes to work on your character. The message is: don't bother doing things properly. Don’t try hard. Give up.
Public schools in the US specialize in cognitive disorientation. Nothing is studied to mastery and topics change every few days. You are not encouraged to concentrate on anything in particular. Finally, you lose that essential skill: focus. You are restless but without ambition. You can’t put three sentences together to make a coherent paragraph. You can’t think critically or independently because you are trained to practice cooperative learning, where you are always part of a group. You've been under-educated and non-educated.
The Dean in Animal House said that “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.” Neither is dazed and mindless.
K-12 students are told that they are now college-ready and career-ready. They are neither. Any good college would tell such students they need remediation in everything. Do they know that something is missing? Perhaps if they meet a well-educated person and wonder vaguely what that feels like. But with people like themselves, why would they be reminded of anything else?
Contrary to propaganda, we had excellent public schools 100 years ago. Now, all the proven theories and methods valued a century ago, and still today around the world, have been ignored and trashed.
There is no physical pain in the K-12 Gulag, no hunger. It is defined by absence and emptiness, by things you can't do and thoughts you cannot have.
Now we have to ask the big questions. Why do our professional educators want to dumb down the children? Why does the public let them get away with it? When will Americans start fighting back?
Many pundits talk about descending into the rabbit hole. It’s easy in the case of the K-12 Gulag. Who has the power and the motives for wanting Americans dumbed down?