Episode 90: An Act of War: what the professors of education did to our schools (March 22, 2023)

40 years ago, a congressional commission concluded that our public schools are so bad they might as well be an act of war by an unfriendly foreign power.

The congressional report was titled A Nation at Risk. This is a big deal. It's not some scholar’s opinion. It's not a reconstruction of something far away. It's what the  best people in 1983 thought had happened to us. Namely,  the wrong people controlled our schools.

The perps were the far-left and the professors of education. They are very skilled at sliding around in the shadows, trying not to leave any traces as they trample to death the very thought of superior public education.

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“An unfriendly foreign power.” And who might that be?? History tells us that the USSR was on the attack internationally as soon as the Russian Revolution was consolidated in 1920. See article: Lenin’s Train Goes Chugging Through American Education. 

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NB: transmogrification  is a wonderfully fancy word that perfectly describes a long complex process by which you transform something mediocre into something excellent or, as in our national tragedy, the opposite. 

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LET'S FIX EDUCATION:  OVERVIEW

 Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.

Transcript

Let's Fix Education -- by Bruce Deitrick Price --  March 22, 2023

Episode 90: An Act of War: what the professors of education did to our schools

We have reached a major anniversary. Forty years ago a congressional commission revealed to Americans how terrible their public schools had  become. 

This shocking report— titled A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform —announced that:

"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a People... If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

The 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education is a landmark in American educational history. The report contributed to the ever-growing assertion that American schools were failing, and it touched off a wave of local, state, and federal reform efforts.

Yes, a wave perhaps but we need a tsunami.  The professors of education squirmed their way into the foundations of the country and every day, while pretending to care about improving K-12, they labor to come up with clever new ways to make everything worthless.

This 40-year-old document serves a wonderful purpose. It writes our decline in stone, as it were. No one can dispute that things were so bad by 1983 that a large group of congressmen spent months investigating the depths we had descended to.

"A Nation at Risk" cited statistics such as: "The average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is now lower than 26 years ago when Sputnik was launched," and "[The SAT demonstrates] a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980. Average verbal scores fell over 50 points and average mathematics scores dropped nearly 40 points.”

It's important to understand that America didn't casually walk off a cliff. Decay and decline in the school system had been in progress for 100 years. John Dewey started it off circa 1910, building lots of so-called  progressive ed schools and emphasizing, in classrooms, what were called activities. Note that an activity is not the same as learning French or biology. An activity is anything that sounds important to parents but has little academic content. Basically we had death by a million cuts as a multitude of professors found ingenious new ways to justify burying this and killing that.

This was a deformation as fantastic and unimaginable as a Machiavellian prince turned into a seven-legged frog. Every molecule has to be involved in changing colors and switching sides. Contemplating this fantastical process, I remembered the word transmogrification, a word I never used and hardly understood; but I realized that this big pretentious word was the only word that actually conveys the size and complexity of our school malaise.

In 1931 the schools got rid of phonics and thus literacy. In 1962 came New Math which was an attempt to destroy traditional arithmetic and make kids learn stupid stuff like the lattice method. Constructivism got rid of direct instruction and is a massive, across-the-board corruption. And all the little things that encourage children to achieve have simply been tossed out the window— memorization, homework, mastering material instead of just skimming over it, classrooms that are safe and orderly.

There’s no easy remedy for what we have suffered. Namely, our schools are largely engaged in a Soviet-style indoctrination. Compare an infestation of termites or crab grass. Hundreds of bogus ideas are interconnected in a matrix, and each dumb idea reinforces all the others.

Make no mistake, woke is just cute Commie code for what we've had for 100 years. The prince is no longer princely. The frog is quite a hoot if you don't mind pond scum

Traditional notions of scholarship, research, precision, and factuality are mangled, as we see throughout the culture. The White House lies every day as does the New York Times. I'm worried that the educational system in general is now so enfeebled, we might not recover the ground we have lost. 

Act of war is not a mere metaphor. We have millions of walking wounded, Americans who can hardly read or do arithmetic. They know only negligible geography, science, history, and literature.

For a good summary of what happened to us, and suggestions for what to do, please look at article titled K-12: The War Against Children.