Episode 156: The Waste of Systemic Ignorance (Wed., June 26, 2024)
The situation is simple. The professional educators, as they deceptively call themselves, don't believe in education. They like ignorance.
Learn, baby, learn. That should be the chant and the cheer of all educated people.
Good School, Bad School.
How to tell the difference-- see short video
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Word-Wise Education
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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.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Wed., June 26, 2024
Episode 156: The Waste of Systemic Ignorance
One of my big ideas is: there are no good ideas left in our schools. It seems that the progressives, totalitarians, quasi-Marxists, whatever they call themselves, have one abiding compulsion: limit academic content and knowledge generally. Keep the children dumb, our time will come.
When anyone first studies K-12 education, they'll probably be astonished to find that the people in charge are not much interested in education. Look at some of their recent obsessions. Critical Race Theory. Black Lives Matter, Social Emotive Learning. Goals 2000, DEI, Outcome Based Education. Our professors love to talk-talk-talk about education, but when it comes to knowing what happened in the French Revolution or how the automobile age got started, they don't care.
And one of the theories in education that undermines everything else is that students should not memorize very much. Waste of time! It’s on the internet!
Years ago, children knew, for example, the names of presidents, states, and capitals. It’s helpful to know this basic knowledge about your country. Predictably, our K-12 geniuses scorn all of it. Name even one simple fact that you could be sure that American children know. I don't think there is one.
Let's consider a memory paradigm, learning a new language. No sensible person would dream of saying, well, you don't need to learn about verbs, nouns and adjectives. In reality, you do. And you need to learn vocabulary, thousands of words if possible? But our pretend-educators say, sure, of course, but we don’t approve of too much memory stuff. Basically, they don't want anybody to master anything, just sort of nibble around the edges and stay dumb.
I've recently become very appreciative of what actors do when they memorize whole speeches, which must be delivered in front of lots of people with cameras going. Wow. Teachers can explain that poetry started as a mnemonic device. Give the children dramatic passages and famous poems, let them play at acting. You can nudge them into being curious about so many different things.
It's when you try to learn to read English that the most shocking discovery will hit you. The druids at Columbia’s Teachers College worked out the dominant theory in the 1920s. The best way to learn to read English is to memorize sight-words. But memorizing sight-words is like memorizing license plates, telephone numbers, or the full name of friends. You might master 50 or 100 words of any kind. But when you reach 200 or 300, this is overwhelmingly difficult. Consider the irony. The professors hate memorization, but their favorite reading method is intensive memorization. That's when you should start suspecting they are phonies.
Now we reach an impasse in American K-12. Every day we hear people complaining about systemic racism. Haven't you yourself heard this allegation 1000 times? It illustrates how Saul Alinsky wanted liberals to use guilt to change social patterns. Meanwhile, our society rots from inside because average citizens know less and less.
Latest, sickest gimmick in K-12 is that the people in charge devote virtually no time trying to help children memorize information. They simply say, don't bother with that. You can look it up.
I want to summarize by saying don't accept anything that the official educators say. They are pretenders. Encourage children to memorize as much as they reasonably can. I believe that every bit of information interconnects with every other bit, and you get smarter that way.
Help students to memorize knowledge. Organize information and present it in helpful sequences. Don’t suddenly spring the names of all the states in the sixth grade. Start in pre-school. You have a map of the United States; every day you find some pretext to point to this or that city or state. If you do this endlessly the children will learn up to whatever their ability is.
Finally, the war on memorization is a war on education and culture generally. If children know the multiplication tables, for example, they will advance much faster in different kinds of arithmetic When you take away the multiplication tables from their memory, you slow them down to their version of mediocrity.
So what do our children count on, fingers and toes? That used to be a sick joke but the reality is we give kids less and less of a chance. I propose, give them all a chance. I think sometimes we have the most cold-hearted class of people running our schools.
So the schools won't teach academics, and the schools won't bother with vocational training, and the endless messages is that knowing facts is not important. That phrase "the deliberate dumbing down of America” is not an exaggeration.
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PS: Memorization is crucial. Some children have a great memory, some have a bad memory, but you don't throw out memorization for everybody, unless your imperative is to make everyone equally ignorant. Who would be so destructive?? OK, maybe a Communist.
