Episode 138: Traditional Education is what we need now (Wed., Feb. 21, 2024)
Watching progressives wreck education is a kind of sport. Maybe some of you think it's fun. I remind you it's tremendously expensive. And your kids will be almost as dumb five years from now as they are today.
Socialists and Communists always want to dumb down the people. The basic plan is, keep the public dumb and our time will come.
By my tally, there are virtually no good ideas left in our public schools. All the good ideas from traditional education have been replaced by nonsense that professors at Harvard dare to call “progressive.” In reality, it's regressive/repressive.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
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LET'S FIX Education by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 138 Wed., Feb. 21, 2024
Traditional Education is what we need now
Traditional education has taken a real beating the last 100 years.
It's fair to say that Progressive education is dishonest and a destructive waste of time. Progressives never wanted children to learn more. They want them to learn less, and be satisfied with that.
Apparently, giving children lots of knowledge is what our Socialist professors hate about traditional education. So these ideologues came up with a parade of sophistries and insults, all designed to stop schools from fulfilling their essential function.
We were told that traditional schools regard students as "empty vessels" to be filled with facts. We're supposed to think this is a terrible thing. But what if these vessels are filled with intellectual silver and gold? Why is that so bad?
The attack on traditional education has been so unrelenting and so successful, that many people may struggle to remember what this approach looks like. The distinguishing feature is: students are there to learn as much as teachers can teach. That's what we need.
Compare that to what we have now. Children run in place. There is a lot of pointless make-believe activity and far too much disorder. As a matter of doctrine, very little factual information is allowed in these schools. The Education Establishment has virtually outlawed memorization of anything. In many schools, Constructivism prohibits teaching altogether. Reform Math specifically forbids mastery. Self-esteem says that you should not have to learn anything that makes you feel challenged. Finally, multiculturalism says you can learn only about foreign countries, while relevance says you can only learn about your own neighborhood. Satisfying those requirements means eliminating everything. That is pretty much what has happened.
Progressive education is code for what socialists want; the basic idea is to keep children ignorant and obedient
Counterproductive methods have devastated the teaching of science, history, math, and literature. Children spend 30 hours a week in the classroom, or 1,000 hours a year. At the end of all that time, they might know not one bit more than they knew at the beginning of the year.
Fortunately, there is one area where traditional education survives. If you want to know how to fix our schools, just look at this one area, and copy all of its salient features.
Consider the typical Spanish class. The students arrive ignorant and empty. The teacher is a Sage on the Stage, a towering expert on the Spanish language. The clearly understood goal of this class is for the teacher to transmit all of his knowledge to all of the students, as rapidly as possible.
The teacher starts with the smallest bits of knowledge. You learn the things that most people would want to know first: the words for boy, girl, street, mom, dad. You learn to say mi casa es su casa. You learn the simplest words and sentences.
Imagine the Spanish class in operation. The teacher presides – teaching, teaching, teaching. Students listen respectfully – learning, learning, learning. Everything the teacher is asking the kids to do is reasonable – not like Reform Math, where each step seems to be devised by insane psychiatrists.
Imagine how history or biology or English literature would be taught if it were taught exactly as Spanish is taught. Spanish class preserves for us the naturalness and logic of traditional education.
Here is the essence of Progressive education: doing nothing at all, or doing something that's intellectually perverted.
In fact, modern education seem to have only one big idea, which is that students should interact more, i.e., work as a group..
Here is a wise comment in the 1955 book titled Retreat from Learning by a teacher named Joan Dunn. She complained that "[e]verything is done in a group. The child loses his identity and his responsibility for himself. Praise is group praise; blame is group blame."
And you can probably figure for yourself that the real goal was never education. But that part about the kids losing identity, Socialists love that.
As for recovering traditional education, everyone can visualize the foreign language courses he or she took, assuming they were done with reasonable competence. Then transplant into that course any other subject you want: American history, arithmetic, geography, biology, whatever. There you have it. Now you know how the course should be taught.
Traditional education is real education, now and always. Anything you can do to make it more fun and entertaining, that’s great, but don't sacrifice the core focus on knowledge. That's where Progressives defeat everything that schools exist to do.
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Note large map of USA behind the teacher. This is the smart, efficient way to teach geography. Every day the map is there to simplify discussions of current events and past events. Do I have to mention that Progressives tend to dismiss maps? Maps are a big help in teaching both geography and history. Did I mention that Progressives hate the teaching of knowledge?
Episode 135 is related.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1792553/episodes/14413879