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 116: Tens of millions of Americans can barely read. Everyone should know why. Wed., Sept. 20, 2023
Let's get serious about reading. You can teach it only with phonics because English is a phonetic language.
All the other stuff is bogus, a distraction, counterfeit. a perversion, a crime against the next generation.
If you are preparing pedagogy for a slave population or workers who need to read only short instructions, then sight-words are okay.
Otherwise, phonics is the correct prescription.
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Biggest Crime in American History (3 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfzo02gWqF0
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My favorite phonics guru is Don Potter. He recommends
Blend Phonics by Hazel Loring.
http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/blend_phonics.html
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Please help me improve K-12...
Americans should have great public schools.
We could so easily have them....
Here are my solutions and
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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 116 -- Wednesday, Set. 20, 2023
Tens of millions of Americans can barely read. Everyone should know why.
Recent letters in my local paper argued about why Americans don’t read well or often.
There’s a deeper question: why can’t our schools do a better job of teaching children to read? Which plunges us into a controversy that has raged for more than 75 years: how should reading be taught? This debate, generally called the Reading Wars, is both fascinating and murky. Even highly-educated people don’t know the issues in this war.
Americans need to understand why phonics is essential, and why Whole Word, the opposing theory, is an empty suit. The arguments back and forth are convoluted. Here’s a quick explanation of why many Americans don’t read:
English uses a phonetic alphabet to construct phonetic words (i.e., words that convey sounds). Once children remember the letters, and several dozen rules of pronunciation, they can read the million words in the English language. More crucially, they can recognize in print the 25,000 words and names which, even at age 7, they recall having heard. It’s simplest to think of phonics as a gigantic mnemonic device. English words tell you approximately how to say them. Then, as years go by, if you forget, they remind you again and again.
Whole Word throws all these reminders out the window. Whole Word turns the clock back 4,000 years and foolishly pretends that the alphabet is irrelevant; that English is an ideographic language like ancient Egyptian; and that children must memorize words as graphic designs, one by one, as you would memorize logos, faces, cars, houses, famous paintings, or hieroglyphics. This process is memory-intensive. People with an ordinary memory don’t have a chance; they won’t retain even 1,000 non-phonetic symbols, which is what Whole Word turns English words into.
That is Whole Word’s central flaw: it wants to teach a phonetic/alphabetic language such as English as if it were a picture/symbol/ language such as Chinese.
Obviously, this scheme doesn’t work. The USA reportedly has 50,000,000 functional illiterates, people who can’t read a cereal box or a newspaper. Furthermore, when phonetic words are treated as Whole Word symbols, something terrible happens in a child’s mind. A cognitive schizophrenia, one might say. Sound out words OR memorize them as if they are logos? That fork in the road is a child-killer. The resulting confusion we call dyslexia, ADD, etc.
My research suggests that Whole Word particularly victimizes the poor and minorities. The parents aren’t informed enough to defend their children against faulty pedagogy. Boys, especially, are harmed because they may not accept all the memorization required, in which case they will be labeled as slow learners or dyslexics, and that justifies a prescription for Ritalin, etc. Robbed of self-esteem, crippled by an artificial disability, such boys are disproportionately likely to turn to crime.
Phonics is back; but there are still pockets of Whole Word across the country, as the latest fad calls for a mixture of ideas. Tragically, there are millions of people functioning and earning at a reduced level, and they usually don’t understand what has been done to them. Most of these victims can start over and learn to read properly (much as a two-finger typist can start over and learn to type professionally).
` For 75 years our top educators have dismissed phonics, and pushed Whole Word (also known as Sight Reading, Look-Say, Balanced Literacy, and other names). This departure from common sense remains a great crime and a great tragedy.
Reading instruction is now at a point of crisis and confusion. A return to the Science of Reading is a good sign but the jargon is confusing. Here is the absolute bottom line: public schools should discard sight-words and embrace phonics, nothing but phonics.
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PS I’ve made a number of graphic videos to explain these concepts.
On YouTube. Just search “Phonics versus Whole Word.” Six minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F63zjs-jChY
PPS "Sight-Words Are A Sick Joke" Good article. https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/10/k12_sightwords_are_a_sick_joke.html