Episode 150: K-12 -- S.N.A.F.U. (Wed., May 15, 2024)

Episode 150:   K-12 --  S.N.A.F.U.  (Wed., May 15, 2024)

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Welcome to K-12 where education goes to die.

Come on, people, get involved. Kids are dumbed down every day. There's no excuse for it.

Every sane idea has been sabotaged and sent into exile.  Now we see nothing but counterproductive ideas. Naturally, we have epidemics of illiteracy and ignorance.

(S.N.A.F.U. is military slang for Situation Normal -- All Fouled Up.)

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Podcasts are presented as voice and print  (i.e., TRANSCRIPT)

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Here are two ways to help…

Visit  Education Reform 
for a 2-page explanation
of what we can do.

When you need a smart gift,
give Saving K-12 .

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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.

(For a list of literary titles, visit Lit4u.com. 
Still under construction but worth a look.)

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LET'S FIX EDUCATION:  OVERVIEW

 Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION     --    by    --      Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 150     --     Wed., May 14, 2024

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   K-12: SNAFU

I write a great deal about education. I have almost 800 pieces on the internet, including several videos on YouTube. I'm a crusader for better schools. Very briefly, I want to share with you my overall conclusions: 

1) Researching education for any length of time will make you cynical and probably depressed. Here's why: this field is doing a poor job but can't or won't fix itself. Education seems to me to be one of the world's largest living dinosaurs. As you know, these animals aren't smart; they don't evolve very quickly. Even the people in the field refer to the education establishment as The Blob. Same idea.

2) Ever since John Dewey a hundred years ago, American educators have adorned themselves with the term "progressive." Progressive suggests not only modernity but advanced humanitarian views. But what do you actually find when you study our public schools? Nothing progressive, that's for sure. You find an array of theories that hurt everybody but especially the poorer children and the less gifted children. The rich kids, the smart kids, the kids from stable, supportive homes-- they will survive the bad ideas, the non-teaching of basics, the dumbing down; they will escape. Who doesn't escape? The most defenseless, that's who. They will often drop out before the end of high school unable to read in any real sense, unable to do arithmetic without a calculator, unable to find Japan or Iraq on a map, ignorant for the most part of history and science. Progressive education is actually regressive.

3) Reading, in particular, is a nightmare. For 75 years our educators have ridiculed phonics, and pushed Whole Word (it has many other names). The result is a lower level of literacy. English uses an alphabet to construct phonetic words (that is, they convey sounds). Whole Word foolishly pretends that the alphabet is irrelevant, that English is an ideographic language like Chinese, and that children must therefore memorize words as designs, one by one, as you would memorize logos or houses. One by one by one. People with an ordinary memory don't have a chance. They won't retain even 5000 words; they won't be able to read a cereal box or a map, and they will therefore be classed as functional illiterates. The USA reportedly has 40,000,000 of them. (Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld says that Whole Word also causes dyslexia and behavioral disorders as nasty side-effects.)

4) When I try to figure out how the schools might be saved, I end up thinking that the rescue has to come from outside the field. We need, for example, people from the arts, sports and the military. Concerned parents can obviously be a great lever for change. It would be also helpful if the students themselves became more demanding consumers: "Don't dumb me down, I've got plans.”

Teachers also can rebel against a stagnant bureaucracy. The best teachers have always taught beyond the bare minimum--we need more of that. Recently, I've been writing articles urging the business community to become more involved. Educators are often sort of dreamy and theoretical; but what we need is a practical, common sense approach. Business people can provide that, and I hope they will take more active roles in their local schools.

5) Finally, here's a simple way for people to identify the best approaches. If the education establishment loves an idea, it's bad. So you know right off that bigger budgets are not the answer. Conversely, if the Education Establishment hates an idea, that's the one you want. So you can be sure that we need more competition (e.g. charter schools). We need higher standards, tests, homework, basics, real math, memorization of important information, foreign languages, real history, not Social Studies. The goal must be to lift children as far as they can go--smart and smarter, not dumb and dumber. (I'm sure, by the way, that FUN is an essential part of pushing children to their potential.) Some of our top-tier educators were probably hippies in another era. I bet that in their younger days they were shouting, "Fight the power!" And that is what we need to do now.

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PUNCH LINE: this article was first published almost 20 years ago. But every sentence is true and relevant today. In other words, the Education Establishment has the situation locked in; improvement is NOT  allowed. 

Please pass this article to friends. Ask them, do you see any flaws in this article? What can we do to help? (Only change in text was 80 articles up to 800.)