151: How Can We Motivate Underachieving Children Who Don't Want to Learn? (question on Quora; first answered on my Substack) Wed. May 22, 2024

Episode 151: How Can We Motivate Underachieving Children Who Don't Want to Learn? (question on Quora; first answered on my Substack)

Wed.,  May 22, 2024

NB: the public schools are probably much worse than you suspect. But people don't want to deal with that information, so the Education Establishment gets away with doing a lousy job. I'm trying to persuade everybody to be more judgmental, more demanding, more of a catalyst.

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Relevant article: K-12: In Praise of WOW! 

Joan Dunn’s book Retreat from Learning is available in Archive.org


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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. 
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 151         Wed.,  May 22, 2024

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151: How Can We Motivate Underachieving Children Who Don't Want to Learn? (question on Quora; first answered on my Substack)

Wed. May 22, 2024

I'm not a teacher, not a parent. How do I dare comment on this? Well, over decades of writing about education, I’ve encountered many gold nuggets, ideas and insights that I think everyone needs to know.

Always remember that if you want to teach anything, you have to know that our education system often seems dead-set against education. You have to out-maneuver these pretend-experts. The professors said they would educate children in a new way but what they meant was, they would create a new socialist child. These people are expert at bait-and-switch, nothing else.

Let me set the stage by quoting my favorite teacher in the whole world. That would be Joan Dunn; and here is my favorite quote from my favorite teacher about what she confronted in 1952: 

“I found [my students] interested in three things: sex, noise, and violence, in that order. They were fascinated by stories of great fires, bombings, destructions, upheavals, earthquakes, and gruesome tortures. They cared less that Lincoln was assassinated than that he was shot from behind and the murderer fled, stabbed in many places, in a trail of blood. Shakespeare was a bore, but London with its bearbaiting and its barbaric hangings quickened their pulses. If I taught them according to their interests, their spelling lists would only include words like murder, robbery, and rape. Their introduction to literature and reading would number only recitals of atrocities and the overthrow of  authority, for they dearly love to see or hear of authority being circumvented. The more legitimate the authority, the more genuine their enjoyment.”

What wisdom would the gurus of K-12 take from Joan Dunn’s soliloquy? They would be sure to completely miss the point. They would use inane progressive nostrums to justify all the dullest aspects of everything. They would subvert every syllable of this passionate appeal.

I was in the army for two years and the thing that impressed me most was that basic training came down to three words: stop the bleeding. Well, American K-12 is clearly bleeding out before our eyes. But nobody seems to care, or to know how the bleeding could be stopped.

Here are the giant obstacles confronting education. First, the school system is run by ideologues who don't care about knowledge or even basic skills such as reading.

Second giant obstacle is that even when teachers and schools insist that they want to teach, they tend to be boring  and uncreative. They will drone on. They will turn everything into a lesson on how to do your taxes.

In sum, schools are designed to make sure that children will be underachievers who don't want to learn.

I  say let the children eat cake. Good cake. It's impressive to me that fireworks continue to be exciting each year. (Has everyone realized that you can go on YouTube and watch the fireworks in Berlin, Tokyo, Paris, and so on.) Let the kids look at spectacles of every kind. Let them look at marvels of engineering. Let them look at those five huge galaxies recently discovered. 

I've got a phrase for this. I've used it for several years: Teach the WOW. Start with the stuff that makes you go oh-my-God. Mix in tiny packets of wisdom if that's all your kids can handle. But now the schools are violent, everybody's bored, students are dropping out sooner, teachers are quitting younger.  I've given up on the professors at Harvard, because they are insincere. They know their theories are fake. But what about the leaders of this country, the politicians, the CEOs of major corporations, they should be jumping into the Ed Wars now, while success is still possible.

I love Joan Dunn because she’s smart, tells you exactly what she thinks, and what you need to know. All of our leaders, if they really want to make a difference, have to start dealing with that level of candor. The collapse of our K-12 is not about money. It's about the intelligence and honesty of the people in charge.

NB: the public schools are probably much worse than you suspect. But people don't want to deal with that information, so the Education Establishment gets away with doing a lousy job. I'm trying to persuade everybody to be more judgmental, more demanding, more of a catalyst.

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Article:    K-12: In Praise of WOW! 

Joan Dunn’s book Retreat from Learning is available in Archive.org

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