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 188: What IsThe Right Amount Of Linguistic Education For American Students? Wed, Feb 5, 2025
Many pundits have noticed that American students almost never learn a second language. This is a tragic loss.
What's the reason?
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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LITERARY NEWS:
"The Boy Who Saves The World"
now available in ebook and paper
A Thriller For Intellectuals
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visit my lit site: Lit4.com ( book # 7 )
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PHONICS ALPHABET -- where you start
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVeP6JISfyw
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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 188 Wed,, Feb 5, 2025
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What Is The Right Amount Of Linguistic Education For American Sudents?
The ideal amount of linguistic education would be that young children quickly learn to read and write English in a fluent way. And then in addition, they learn a second language.
Experts have long agreed that this process should take place in the early grades. Children have unusual linguistic ability even when they're in primary school.
I believe it's fair to say that almost every private school follows this traditional plan.
Now, I invite everyone to consider what would be the obstacles, if any, to this schema? The best plan, the one pursued by the best schools, is somehow not acceptable in our public schools? Why?
Reading instruction is nutso in the US so you wouldn't expect our self-appointed experts to come up with intelligent recommendations throughout the school. That's because our public schools are relentlessly anti-phonics. But what is the big problem with phonics, according to the American Education Establishment?
I'm guessing that most people won't be able to figure this out. On the other hand, when you look back, you're going to say, well, of course.
Phonics starts with an emphasis on individual letters, the names of the letters, and the sounds represented by the letters. Starting out this way, most students are able to read in the first year of their schooling.
However, when children are made to memorize sight-words, which is a Herculean task, they typically become "struggling readers." We have millions and millions of them. Naturally they wonder why they can't learn English the same way people learn French, Spanish, and similar. The presence of phonics anywhere in the school is a heads-up about how you should be doing things.
Bottom line, sight-words damage the ability to learn to read English, and the damage doesn’t stop there. They keep you from learning any second language the school may recommend.
I write many articles about sight-words versus phonics. The Education Establishment spends a fortune in their continuing propaganda against phonics. The reading scores continue to decline because Americans don't know enough about the basics. English is a truly huge language. Nobody can memorize 10s of thousands of words on sight. So the students are unhappy and restless. They don't want to memorize sight-words. If they see any possible escape anywhere, they will gravitate toward it. They will think, What's this, how does this work? Why don't we do this?
The people pushing sight-words have to be ideologues without mercy. They want desperately to keep phonics far away from most students. To support that goal, they don't mind eliminating second languages altogether. These people are guilty of malfeasance.
I don't mean to be even a tiny bit subtle here. I want to scream, to tell the truth. If the children never hear of phonics, then they can't ask for it. But if they saw phonics used anywhere else for any purpose, their brains would say, Wait a minute, what's all this? Why don't we try this?
Knowing all this, you see it's predictable that our Education Establishment would systematically eliminate second languages.
So our students are not taught to read English properly, and they're entirely prevented from learning French, Italian, German, Spanish and so on.
I hope many of you are deeply offended by this chicanery.
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Learn why kids can't read, see Episodes 180 and 184