Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 7, August 11: The Proof Is In The Plodding (23:11 min)

August 11, 2021 Bruce Deitrick Price
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 7, August 11: The Proof Is In The Plodding (23:11 min)
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Show Notes Transcript

Episode 7: The Proof Is In The Plodding (23:11 min)


When students are happy and excited, they're probably learning a lot. However, our public schools are characterized by a lot of plodding, by students and administrators both. Plodding is the giveaway that you're doing it wrong. 


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The Proof Is In The Plodding
by Bruce Deitrick Price.
Episode 7 on Let’s Fix Education

Let's start with one of my main conclusions. Our schools are in much worse shape than most people imagine.

If the people at the top were sincerely trying to do their best, we would be fine. I don’t believe they're trying to do their best.

I believe there's too much mediocrity, too much dysfunction, too much half-baked theorising, and let us confront it, too much malfeasance, subversion, and betrayal.

Please decide for yourself how bad things are. I say the proof is in the plodding. The students are slow and unsteady, like people who are walking through mud. Look at where children are in each subject, that's amazing. Are they learning to read at all? Do they learn geography, even a little? What history do they know if any?

Here's my impression. Our students don't advance aggressively to the front lines of education, singing battle songs and banging on drums. No, they plod along, no smiles, no enthusiasm, no fun. There's pouting and moaning most of the time. Do they have to learn this? Oh, you mean I have to do homework, oh no? It's not an open book test—why? Do I have to be able to spell my name correctly? Oh no, so unfair.

So I say the proof is in the plodding. You can judge the students you have in your house or down the street, or the other people you're related to.. Talk to the kids, ask them questions. What do they know about this or that event, or topic? I think I can walk through the halls of any school and ask simple questions and accurately assess the school. Tell me about the sun the moon and the earth. Draw picture showing what goes around what.

I might be too negative on some occasions...but I think most of the time the students would look me with amazement. Nobody ever talked about what goes around what, who knows stuff like that??????????

I'm going on like this because I can’t enlist you as a reformer if you doubt that we need reform.

So you say, how do I know I can trust this guy Bruce Price. Reasonable. Fine, I don't mind. I'm doing this more than 30 years. If you are a reformer, you're always on the outside, against the school system, the universities, the media, the foundations.

Why does the education establishment have the power to go on destroying what took so many years and billions of dollars to build?

But they don't have to prove themselves because the media and they are the same.......but If I have to prove myself, I say you okay, go and look at any student you can talk or that you're related to. Ask your cousins and nieces and nephews, where is Australia on the globe, or Alaska? I'll bet most people you talk to won’t get within 500 miles of the right answers Or even the right continent.

Jay Leno started Jaywalking 20 years ago. That's been a tremendous help to to people trying to understand how bad our schools are. Ten years ago Jesse Waters and Mark Dice got into this action. Probably the single greatest moment was Jimmy Kimmel sending out a crew with a map of the world with this challenge: "Point to a country and name it." The outlines of all the countries are on the map, just not any names. Surely people will be able to identify the big countries...Many people couldn't do it. They don't even think to say, oh that's the USA right in the middle. It's clear that this particular sample of people have simply never had a geography lesson, had never been encouraged to look at a map.

The teaching of geography is apparently taboo. The cops come and arrest you if you try to teach geography. We seem to have a weird convergence in Brave New World and 1984.

. Everybody is now semi-educated, semi comatose. They're plodding from one unexciting point on the map to the next.

Plodding is what our school system does and what our students do. They plod wearily from one half-baked effort to the next. They're depressed. They're not excited.

So let's look ahead to where we should have been all these years. The proper goal of a real school system is steady advance, some degree of excitement. Here is a great anecdote about what the other side looks like. I was interviewing a woman on the phone, the principal of a classical academy, she said to me, “When I walk through the hall, listening to the voices and noises coming from the classroom, if the kids are laughing, she insisted, I know everything's alright. Freeze this frame. This woman is telling us a deep secret. I suspect if you heard laughter in a public school, it would be the wrong kind of laughter, somebody being made fun of.

Point is, plodding is not what you want in our schools. Education should be fun, entertaining. The goal is that students want to be there. They look forward to school the next day. You know if a movie is not good, people walk out of it; but at school we can’t walk out . A couple years ago I read that in Virginia some schools wanted to create what they call the block. 90 minutes. My first thought was that's the length of the average movie. That's a long time if you don't like the movie. You'll be restless you want to walk out. Give students the option of walking out, even just as a test, and you will quickly find out if anything positive is happening in the classroom.

I read a story years ago about the great movie producer, Jack Warner. How did he know when something was good? Well, it wasn't about a message and ideas and cinematography and famous stars or any of the artsy smartsy angles. If he wanted to leave, he knew it was a bad movie. If he was restless in his seat, it's bad. That cuts through everything.

.The problem is, kids can’t leave, so nobody plays to them. But we should. Let's make schools and curricula that respect the audience.

It very interesting that our education experts can rarely come up with better ways of doing things. Oh, they will say so. They often describe their innovations as if they were the final link on some road to education heaven. But typically their so-called improvements are tedious and uninteresting.

But the thing everyone should be aiming for is that children enjoy being in that classroom. They want to go back to school the next day. Too many schools are both boring and dangerous. We don't want schools that are blackboard jungles. The idea of people fighting or teachers getting hurt should be virtually impossible, as it was 50 years ago.

The first requirement is that schools be safe and peaceful. The community, administrators, the parents, everybody involved should embrace this goal. I think the top administrators should create a graduated table of responses....from a brief frown to calling the police for help.

Years ago I learned years ago about a tribe in the Philippines the does not believe in punishing children. Their main technique is to change the subject. The child will feel this change as a rebuke but such a gentle one, there is no need to be offended. YouTube is full of videos showing animals capable of feeling guilt when they do something their owner does not like. My point here is to start low and slow, but without any hesitation about advancing in time to more stern responses. As it is, the worst students are allowed to set the tone. That's a good way to guarantee mediocrity.

Another way is to let the professors of education promote theories and methods that they know are feeble. Sure, these guys have to advance their career and get publishing credits and all that academic stuff.

But we would like these people to be aiming higher from pre-K to 12 and beyond. Stop settling for the half baked. I think there're no more good ideas left in our public schools. The ideas now are destructive or at best trivial. The very notion of children learning a lot is dead in the US. Professors of education don't think this is even possible. Learn a lot?? Don't be preposterous. A boat adrift at sea is plenty fast enough for them. But for me, kids learning a lot is the only goal we should be thinking about.

I start with the assumption that there are 1000’s of basic facts that everybody needs to know. Let's start teaching this stuff in kindergarten and don't ever slow down. Start with the most exciting, interesting items, the things that everybody acknowledges are great. The Great Wall of China, the Grand Canyon, the surface of the moon, an amoeba moving and eating a paramecium. You don't have to teach these things. They're fascinating and unforgettable by themselves.

Another phrase I like is "teach the WOW.” Teach the lightning bolts. Teach the fun. Teach what's entertaining. Teach that is, the WOW.

Also, I often think about the rich families going on the grand tours 300 years ago. They went went from museum to museum, all very elegant, nothing pushy, nothing involving exams. But by the end of the tour these children would know a tremendous amount about culture. The concept here is you show the great treasures to the children..... and let education happen.

The reason our Progressives can't manage this little trick is because they're not fundamentally interested in education. They are fundamentally interested in social engineering and that gets in the way of letting education happen.

So let's teach the stuff that is easiest to teach at the beginning. Give the children confidence that they can learn anything. Give the children confidence that education can in fact be something they want. It's not supposed to be like going to the dentist, but that's what our K-12 system often does. The main thing you want to see in the classroom is momentum.

Teachers today have a great advantage. They can go on Internet and find a video showing anything they can use, a five minute clip from a famous movie. There are wonderful video reconstructions or digital reconstructions of Vesuvius erupting on Pompeii.

Fires, floods, waterfalls, animal in the jungle, everything is in YouTube and easy to get.

Probably most people would say there is no insect that can take down a bird. But a praying mantis can attack and eat a hummingbird. The praying mantis is no fool. He waits on a feeding station, as sly as a lion on the prowl. You see this, you don't forget it. I always think that the praying mantis, pound for pound, is the greatest killing machine on the planet.

Showing illustrations of an insect and how many species there are in Brazil, it's not exciting. That's not Wow. The Wow is the action in dramatic situations.

And you let the children offer their opinions on what is the most interesting aspect of anything you show them. That's how you draw them into a process that will lead to critical thinking. You can ask which traits the animal has that will be good offense or good defense.
What is the most advantageous features an insect or animal has?

I think every school should use anything near at hand, museum, river, factory, naval base— doesn't matter. You build the teaching around anything near at hand..

So, there’s probably a billion videos on YouTube, tens of thousands that would interest any kid. There are film clips from famous movies.

Summarizing, if you're doing it right, there is no plodding. What we want to see but often don’t is students marching along with their chests out, arms swinging, what a marching band at a good college does at the halftime of football games. That's what learning should feel like.
I can watch ten minutes and know how good or bad the school is.

Here's a sophisticated tip. Don't do anything that's been a fad for the last 50 years. Anything that the school system and all the authorities said was the cat's meow, you know it's on his last legs and the vultures are circling overhead.

Use your common sense: what would you find interesting?

I would think a great way to get a grip on education is to imagine that you have been hired by a cruise ship to lecture retired assembly line workers, that is ordinary people. So what are you going to do to wake them up and make them give you a five minute ovation.

If you don't make it interesting, they won't hire you again. Or maybe throw you to the sharks. I predict that you will start thinking in a whole new way. Showmanship, that's another way of talking about it. Making memories, that's another way. Unforgettable, that's a song by Nat King Cole. Make your instructions unforgettable.

Bottom line, the schools are waging war against the consciousness of our children. They want to make the interior empty, drab, and uninspired. But what we want in reality is exactly the opposite.

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