LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 137 Wed., February 14, 2024
Enjoy Real Education
A friend complained that I know more interesting YouTube videos than she does. I tell her she has to ask complex questions that force YouTube to find complex answers. If you ask what's with color TV?, there are probably a million links that respond to that search. Not very helpful.
I know she's interested in Chopin, so I needed a good question to show what Google can do with Chopin. I suggested: what movies featured Chopin’s music? Above average query; smart enough to reveal some interesting stuff.
I am a child of rock 'n' roll, not one of Chopin's fans, so I was surprised to see how many movies featured his work, and to learn that this guy was a moody Polish genius who liked to perform his works in the dark.
Somehow in the middle of this I was linked to a website I hadn’t seen before. Apparently it has a section devoted to Chopin. That's how I learned about ArtsandCulture.Google.com.
It’s a remarkable website. Genuinely educational and inspiring in all the right ways. I love it.
It reminds me yet again that our K-12 schools might as well be shut-down factories for all the good they do to the world. They don't educate kids. They anti-educate kids. If you want to see what education looks like, go to ArtsandCulture. Free and the doors are always open.
Professors at our ed school specialize in constructing perverse, difficult, painful, mostly useless methods. The goal, always, seems to be to teach as little as possible, with as much despair as possible.
I'm usually a good student but if you give me boring difficult stuff, I want to escape. What about average students when you give them impossible tasks, such as memorizing lots of sight-words or multiplying with the idiotic lattice method? It's a wonder we don't have more psychological breakdowns, mysterious injuries, and self-mutilation. (Maybe we do have all that. I read that nearly a quarter-million school kids have disappeared from the rolls. Maybe they just told their parents, "Every day is horrible. I'm not going back. You can’t make me.”)
The excellent new site has to cost big bucks so perhaps this is Google returning money to the community. I approve 100%. There's no preaching, no woke, no attitudinizing, no tedious professor prose. It's quite a large site and even displays a map of your “NEARBY” geography showing interesting places to visit.
Never forget that John Dewey was a devout Socialist who regarded K-12 schools as prep for Socialism. But the Bolshevik emigres after 1920 got more pushy; education was viewed as a way to dumb down the arch enemy, i.e., America. So there is gloom and tension throughout K-12 that should not be there. Finally, I realized that the Google site is a free bird, wafting and drifting from one interesting place to another, with no attempt to deform American children.
The secret of real education is to make it fun. Also pretty (i.e., aesthetic) and engaging (i.e., intellectually engrossing). Show kids how to navigate the site and let them explore it.
This website is perfect for homeschoolers, for anybody the least bit curious, perfect for someone confined to home or bed. It’s like a living encyclopedia, so to speak. A lot of the recommendations lead to immersive museums where you can navigate through the works of art.
I don't claim to have looked at very much. I looked at the care and the love and I'm thinking whoa, this is absolutely marvelous. Admittedly, I love this quasi-museum because it illuminates the shoddy goings-on you’ll find in most of our public schools. Our pretend-experts don’t create ways to teach more. Always less. They don't celebrate knowledge, they malign it.
Every new advance, like internet search or AI, is used to make the schools worse. Our sophists say, Oh well, if everything’s on the Internet, you don't need to bother learning anything. Same with AI. They say, Great, now kids won't need to learn how to write an essay! AI can write it. You see, everything turns to rot and ruin, even as our professors smile smugly.
So I congratulate ArtsandCulture.Google.com for showing something better.
To paraphrase the Beatles, love of knowledge is all you need.
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Also of interest to teachers:, Episode 104,
which discusses reaction videos.