Episode 139: You can’t handle the Truth about K-12
(Wed., Feb. 28, 2024)
Summary: At every level, in every classroom, the education experts limit knowledge, as if it’s some terrible disease that children should avoid.
In a real school, experts do everything possible to encourage children to learn more. Our schools do the opposite, as explained in this podcast.
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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 139 (Wed., Feb. 28, 2024)
You can’t handle the Truth about K-12
In 2017, I was invited to Milan to give a speech about educational malpractice, specifically in reading. I tried to give the audience the big picture, very quickly. Here's an even quicker version of that speech.
The Education Establishment promises to teach X, Y, and Z The goal is to give the appearance of education. Wheels turn; children lurch about with 50 pounds of books on their backs. But finally it seems to be make-believe. Children don’t learn much X, Y, and Z. That's the Truth.
The perpetual trick in American K-12 is to discard something proven, and substitute inferior methods. That’s exactly what has happened many times. Children, and the country, get dumber.
In 1931, education officials eliminated traditional ways of teaching children to read, known as phonics. Instead, the children are burdened with rote memorization of sight-words. Many children end up functionally illiterate.
Something similar happened in math instruction. Traditional ways of teaching arithmetic were dismissed so the schools could use New Math (1962), Reform Math (circa 1985), or Common Core Math (circa 2010). Instead of teaching simple things first, they teach difficult things first. New Math bragged that second graders would now be learning complicated math that had once been taught only to high school students. Kids did not learn anything except that they hate math.
Constructivism has been a raging fad for 40 years. The basic gimmick is that teachers are no longer allowed to teach. Children must create their own new knowledge. But how would a child learn the American Revolution by this method? Slowly, very slowly. Constructivism (also known as Investigations, Discovery, and Inquiry) is now used in every grade from K to 12, and in every subject. All by itself it terminates much of what used to happen in public schools.
The Education Establishment is almost never creative when it comes to teaching children MORE. All the creativity goes into devising more reasons why children must be taught LESS.
For example, Multiculturalism dictates that children should study other times and places, so they don’t learn anything about their own country.
Or the schools go the other way and emphasize Relevance. Children study only the local and the immediate, so they don’t end up with a balanced perspective on the world.
Then you have Self-esteem which dictates that children should not be asked to learn anything that some of them won’t be able to understand. This one little sophistry can destroy real education. How? Because there will always be children who can’t master the simpler things. Those kids are used to undermine the other kids.
Another gimmick is called thematic instruction. You divide the course material into themes. For example, American History could be taught as Damaging The Landscape, Exploiting Workers, and other woke slogans. Note that there is little mention of dates, relationships, or sequences.
Each theme is a stand-alone subject. At the end of the year, students might not know even the simplest things that children once learned. So there are now students in college who don’t know which side won the Civil War or when it happened.
Sometimes a course is organized in an incoherent way, as if professors looked at the traditional sequence (let’s say 26 items A-to-Z) and they tossed out B, H, P, and T. They flipped letters and moved some from one place to another. Children cannot see the structure because there is no structure.
Let us suppose that the material in a course is perfectly organized. The people who concocted Reform Math found an easy way to sabotage this perfection. The technique is called “spiraling” and requires that teachers change, arbitrarily and abruptly, from topic to topic. This guarantees endless confusion.
The Deliberate Dumbing Down Of America (the title of a well-known book) has been accomplished by dumbing down each individual part of the curriculum. One of the favorite excuses is this silly assertion spoken with a smug sneer: Our kids don’t need
t-h-a-t. ....whatever t-h-a-t is.
Prof. E. D. Hirsch, one of the really smart people in American education, has been waging his personal war on behalf of Cultural Literacy. That phrase refers to all the basic information that every citizen should have. Who was George Washington? Where is Kansas? Note that all this basic information is some of the simplest stuff there is. Anybody can learn it, even six-year-olds, if only the schools bother to teach it.
In closing: the fundamental problem in American K-12 is a genuine hostility for knowledge. The original reason for building schools is now largely ignored. The Education Establishment is devoted to social engineering. Facts and knowledge are not primary. Cultural suicide seems to be the plan.
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