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 176: The Goal Is Not The Goal (Wed., Nov. 13, 2024)
Episode 176: The Goal Is Not The Goal (Wed., Nov. 13, 2024)
There is a lot of bait and switch throughout K-12, in all subjects.
The professors promise you’ll be educated, but instead they make you learn minor stuff, irrelevant stuff.
The crucial stuff is forgotten.
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet,
and education reformer.
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 176 Wed., Nov. 13, 2024
The Goal Is Not The Goal
Cutting-edge academics love paradox, which can sound impressive, not to mention fun in a deeply nihilistic way.
My thesis, however, is serious and useful. It quickly explains the collapse of American education, in all subjects, in all directions.
The most important goal in education is learning to read. Typically today, in the first week, students are told to memorize sight-words. You don't know the names of the letters or the sounds of the letters; instead, you learn to see a design such as LAND and immediately say “land.”
Note that already you are not pursuing the stated goal of reading but a substitute goal of memorizing lots of strange designs. These two goals are very different.
Sorry, you could pursue this phony goal all year and never be a reader, not a good one. You were kept from pursuing your real goal. Precisely this detour has happened to tens of millions of Americans.
Rudolf Flesch reported that his best sight-word memorizer mastered 2500 sight-words and could seem to read at a high school or early college level. But a college student needs 100,000 words at minimum.
It's not humanly possible for more than a tiny percentage of children to learn to read with sight-words; instead they become stunted, unhappy readers who will never curl up with a good book. Do you call that learning to read?? Our Education Establishment does.
Everyone should appreciate the cold-blooded skill needed to kick out a higher goal to make room for a lesser goal. Learning to read with phonics takes a few months. In the first grade you’re reading slowly but you can pick up a newspaper in the second grade, and make sense of it. Memorize 500 sight- words and the best that can be said is that you are a functional illiterate.
I always thought there must've been a Pavlov Institute in Moscow. They are the most bitter cynical scientists, concocting ways to make people defective. The Pavlovians like to torment rats and guinea pigs, devising ever more elaborate ordeals.
In language courses generally the common goals are learning grammar, spelling, and punctuation. But in the modern school, those legit goals are replaced by the fake goal of letting this information enter through your pores, as in osmosis. The official goal becomes letting nature take its course, which is very slow and could well be called ignorance. In other words, the fake goal is not to learn grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Now let's think of elementary arithmetic. You start by memorizing all the simplest arithmetic, 2+3 is 5, 2+4 is 6. That’s what you learned in the first and second grade and then you modulated into memorizing the multiplication tables. And that's how you move on to advanced math. But these steps are gone now. Memorization (of anything other than sight-words) is not approved by the Pavlov people. They make education impossible by the simple device of eliminating the first step pursued by traditional education for thousands of years.
All of this could be called bait and switch, or even better hate and switch. You really do have to hate the kids to come up with these little gimmicks, these cheap tricks that guarantee children never become educated.
I believe the basic gimmick throughout K-12 is to substitute an inferior goal that doesn't work for a superior goal that does.
(For more details on how public schools have been debased, see my book Saving K-12.)
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By the way, Trump promises to get rid of the Department of Education.
That means there will be room for experiment and improvement in all communities. Let's get rid of the bait and switch. Let's focus on the things every student should be learning from day one.