Episode 181: My Italy Speech Revisited (Wed, Dec. 18, 2024)

Episode 181: My Italy Speech Revisited  (Wed, Dec. 18, 2024)

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Italian is said to be the most beautiful language, the most phonetic language. Unfortunately, their Education Establishment was like ours and wanted to replace beauty with sight-words.

A reform group invited me over to give a speech. It's a quick summary of what the Reading Wars were about. I say the whole thing is a con. You have to give it to these meddlers, they know how to take down a country.

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The contents page from Saving K-12 shows clearly the kind of themes that I enjoy analyzing:

INTRODUCTION
          1. CULTURE WARS
Somebody does not like our culture
          2. READING WARS
Why we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates
          3. MATH WARS
Students reach college not knowing what 7 x 8 is
          4. HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
100 years of dumbing down
          5. THEORIES AND METHODS IN THE
CLASSROOM
Every fad turns out to be a foolish idea
          6. COMMON CORE ENSHRINES THE WORST
That's how you know they aren't sincere
          7. LITERARY FLIGHTS
Who says serious has to be boring
          8. GUILTY
Are they merely clumsy or carefully aiming for mediocrity
          9. MOVERS AND SHAKERS
We need our big shots to move and shake more than they do
          10. WHAT TO DO
Suggestions for repairing the damage

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Listen to PODCAST or read TRANSCRIPT.
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For a 2-page explanation
of how everyone can help,
visit  Education Reform 

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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price

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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet,
and education reformer.

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W   H   A   T      T   O       E   X   P   E   C   T

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.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION      by     Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 181.         Wed,  Dec. 18, 2024

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My Italy Speech Revisited.

The following is a reprise of the speech I delivered in Italy, in 2018. Background: Italian schools were dealing with the problem we call reading wars. Specifically, experts wanted to use sight-words instead of phonics. A reform group searched Google to find an American counter-expert. It’s a great honor to mention they picked me, and after a year or two of correspondence, they invited me to speak in Milan—

“By way of introduction, I was born in Virginia, graduated from Princeton, spent two years in the army and then 30 years in Manhattan as writer, artist, and graphic designer. Along the way I became totally intrigued by the weird failures in K-12.

I don't mean the administrative and financial details. It's the unforgivable stuff: the sophistries, lies, and misinformation, the crime scenes, the millions of young people who can't read a book for pleasure, can't find Spain (or almost any other country) on a map, and don't know the multiplication tables because the schools tell them not to bother.

Here's the whole thing in a nutshell. K-12 is much sicker than you imagine and much more intellectually engaging. 

Is there any hope? Not much. The fix is in. 

Professors of education have done a great job of promoting the worst ideas provided by European social engineers. At the same time these professors conceal their maneuvers in an all-enveloping semantic miasma. Everything is blurred because the professors have concocted endless jargon, shifting terminology, and new marketing slogans every few years.

21st century skills for example include constructivism, investigations, and inquiry. These mean the same thing. Mrs. Jones and her neighbor cannot have a useful conversation about their children's school problems because each thinks the other is talking about something else entirely.

I like to say there are three groups of victims in our schools: the students, the parents, and the teachers. We must give up any presumption of innocence where our Education Establishment is concerned. They scheme for control of our society. They want everyone to be part of the group, so they are the real fascisti.

We need better leaders, clearly. The irritating thing is that the most capable people running our society often stand apart from K-12. They probably think it's beneath them. Or perhaps they’re afraid that tricky educrats from Columbia University will use their dishonest jargon to pretend to prove a point and thereby make honest scholars seem clueless.

I urge business executives, billionaires, and the people who run the publishing and media operations to bring their maturity to this discussion. Make everyone define their terms. Don't apologize for disagreeing with faux-educators. Announce that your goal is better schools, and nothing less is acceptable.

Let me summarize the central conflict by saying that sight-words are always bad; you need phonics. Here's the really interesting puzzle for most people. They don't want to accept the idea that their own educators at places like Harvard are dumbing down the public. But you know immediately they are because you know no normal people would accept the flawed instructions, such as sight-words, that we encounter in such abundance.

K-12 is a big swamp and is protected by interlocking networks of Marxist ideologues of all persuasions. Charlotte Iserbyt coined the phrase “The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.” This great title summarizes all my work in a few words. If you are intrigued by the question of how could this be brought about, that's what my  books and hundreds of articles explain.

Dip into Saving K-12 and The Education Enigma, you'll soon learn the central strategies used by our professors. They want to eliminate all the  traditional ideas that work, such as phonics. They want to replace such ideas with things that don't work, such as sight-words. Do that a few dozen times and you can wreck a country.

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The contents page from Saving K-12 shows  the kind of themes that I enjoy analyzing.  See the podcast page. 

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