Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Savvy, practical insights on where our Education Establishment went wrong and how most schools can be improved.LET'S FIX EDUCATION explains the many dysfunctional theories and methods operating within our schools. This podcast is intended for parents, teachers, and community leaders who want education reform.
Each week, LET'S FIX EDUCATION examines another problem in our public schools, such as: Constructivism. Learning styles. Sight-words. No memorization. Cooperative learning. Prior knowledge. Reform math. The dilution of knowledge. Common Core. Project-based learning. Student-centered, etc. In fact, there are DOZENS of counterproductive learning and teaching theories, all made worse by ideological motives.
Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, and education reformer. He has analyzed the problems in education for more than 30 years. Price is the author of "Saving K-12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" (190 pages) His main education site is Improve-Education.org. For more information about book and author, visit Lit4u.com. Newest novels are "Frankie" (about a harmless robot) and "The Boy Who Saves The World" (about a boy who saves the world).
"Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!” Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of The National Right to Read Foundation
Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 107: Top 10 Worst Ideas in K-12 (Wednesday, July 19, 2023)
Garbage in, garbage out, it's an infallible rule. If you make students do something the dumb, inefficient way, everything goes downhill.
If a benevolent alien were to tour our country, his first comment is likely to be, Hey, mate, somebody's playing games. You’re using all the worst ideas known to the universe..
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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12
Available on Amazon.
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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New novel: Art and Beauty.
Crime fiction. Set in Manhattan.
Dangerously well written.
Published by Web-E-Books.com /// Editor says: “Bruce Deitrick Price puts
a new spin on the all-American, sexy, fast-talking detective story by creating
a truly fresh crime-fighter personality and placing his original P.I. character, Jon Dak, among movers and shakers in the NYC art and fashion world.”
< Enjoy Chapter 1. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY >
< Enjoy Chapter 2. MISS BABBAGE >
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Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in charge prefer mediocrity because they are socialists of one kind or another. If people work together to promote real education, we'll have it.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 107 July 19, 2023
Top 10 Worst Ideas in K-12
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Ladies and gentlemen
Public schools systematically got rid of what had always worked. In their place, the public schools used inferior, counterproductive ideas. Finally there was nothing left but snake oil.
Here are the worst 10: fake reading instruction, reform math, cooperative learning, constructivism, war against content, no memorization, self-esteem, multiculturalism, hostility to genuine testing, too many imposters. From the top:
1) BOGUS READING INSTRUCTION -- Whole Word, Sight Words, and Dolch Words (there are many aliases) have created 50 million functional illiterates, for the simple reason that this method does not work. (No one learns to read fluently with Sight-Words. Some people learn to read, if at all, IN SPITE OF of Sight-Words.) This hoax and the accompanying gimmicks known as guessing, picture clues, et al should be eliminated from the schools.
2) COMMON CORE MATH -- Arithmetic jumbled and mumbled. Reform Math is a monster with many names (Connected Math, Chicago Math, Mathland, etc.) created by the same people who gave us New Math and then Reform Math and now Common Core Math. These phony replacements forbid mastery, require spiraling from topic to topic, and promote using a calculator to compensate for a lack of basic skills.
3) COOPERATIVE LEARNING -- Students always work in groups. A good approach for fostering a herd sensibility; a dreadful approach for creating independent thinkers and self-starters.
4) CONSTRUCTIVISM -- A destructive fad. Teachers are reduced to facilitators, their knowledge and academic training rendered moot. Students are required to invent their own new knowledge. This process will be long and slow. After all, the human race has been around for millennia and has collected thousands of prime facts, insights, discoveries, theories, etc. What sort of loon turns a child loose with this order: try to recapitulate the intellectual history of the human race? (A far better approach is to give children a wide range of foundational knowledge ASAP.)
5) WAR AGAINST CONTENT -- A witless policy pursued since the time of John Dewey. The goal is to make sure that children learn as little as possible. In any case, that is the result.
6) NO MEMORIZATION -- This is standard operating procedure in all grades and in all courses. It is an excellent policy if you wish to ensure cultural illiteracy and societal amnesia.
7) SELF-ESTEEM -- Another destructive fad now rampant. Students must be praised even when they do bad work. Furthermore, a concern for self-esteem can justify eliminating virtually all content from classrooms, on the grounds that some students won’t be able to handle the material. A quiet plague.
8) MULTICULTURALISM -- This sophistry requires children to learn more about faraway cultures, both in miles and years, than about their own. As the children have no frame of reference for understanding other cultures, little information is retained, other than the persistent message: your own country is no damn good. Multiculturalism helps in the war against content. Kids are kept busy, going nowhere.
9) HOSTILITY TO GENUINE TESTING -- A helpful policy if you wish to conceal that children aren't learning much. If schools are genuinely trying to teach knowledge, they will want to find out how much the students are learning. Same as it ever was. Problem is, in the schools today there is a lot of disingenuous testing of trivial things that didn't need to be taught in the first place. Common Core Math illustrates this phenomenon.)
10) TOO MANY IMPOSTORS -- Ideologues pretend to care about education even while focused on manipulating the minds of millions of children. (Keep these extremists away from the schools, and the other nine problems will miraculously vanish.)
Finally, the Top 10 Worst Ideas work in perfect harmony to dumb down the schools, and make the entire society more feeble.
Imagine for yourself how each class would decline after these ideas have been put in play.
Big problem is that many Americans cannot believe that our Education Establishment really aims for bad results. Sorry, that's what they aim for.
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BACKGROUND:
Recent article I wrote about self-esteem, #7.
"Self-esteem: good or bad?"
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/06/selfesteem_good_or_bad.html