Episode 157: why do Public Schools hate Geography? (Wed., July 3rd, 2024)
There are no good ideas in our public schools, only garbage expressed in protective sauce.
Instead of telling you how to reach your destination, the schools will lay out a program of scuba diving, mah Jong, and fashion tips. You won't get to where you wanted to go. After a while, you won't remember you wanted to go anywhere.
A good illustration of this pessimistic view is the triumphant non-teaching of geography in order to promote the criminal non-teaching of history.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Listen to PODCAST or read TRANSCRIPT,.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here are two ways to help my work…
Visit Education Reform
for a 2-page explanation
of what everyone can do.
When you need a smart gift,
give Saving K-12 .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.)
------------------------------------------------------
-
LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
Support the Show.
LET'S FIX EDUCATION -- by -- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 157 -- Wed., July 3, 2024
Why do Public Schools hate Geography??
Inescapable truth one. There's far too much fraud and foolishness in K-12 for it to be accidental. So there must be a secret cabal laboring 24/7 to dumb down everything in sight.
Inescapable truth two. Sophistry is the indispensable weapon for the professors keeping America dumb. Sophistry is a fancy term for the BS killing our schools
Here's how it works in practice. If you dare try to improve anything, to use better ideas, you will be hit by 3 tons of half-truths and broken logic. This slime mold for the mind will convince everyone that you are a menace to society.
For sure, Geography, once called the Queen of the Sciences, is essential. We must know the landscape, so we can then study the history which takes place there. That's when students start to know where we came from and where we're going.
Here are some magnificent quotes from no-doubt distinguished professors of education. Their goal is to destroy any praise of geography. Look how disingenuous their use of language is. Please read these things a couple of times. This is nihilism’s sublime poetry.
Professor A: “The problem is that there is information overload today....The total knowledge available is growing exponentially. If you look at any of the technical or scientific areas and what you learn is obsolete in a year or two. So who is to determine the appropriate material to teach?....Instead of teaching specific facts or even skills the teacher should concentrate on three things: #1. Teach them to love learning....#2 Teach them how to teach themselves and show them how to cooperate with friends to help each other learn instead of competing.” Empty nonsense.
Professor B: “Geography’s hard to teach because children don’t have a chance to travel, so it’s hard to maintain an interest in other lands....Poverty has a lot to do with not understanding geography. I constantly say how important it is to take your children traveling. It instills an interest in them to learn about other cultures.” More nonsense.
Then a weird insight from Professor C: “Knowing where California, Hawaii, and Alaska are is not useful information in day-to-day activities. Knowing such ‘facts’ does not translate into higher intellect or useful skill development....Most knowledge is domain specific. Our education system might be a mess, but not knowing the location of a state is trivial and not proof that the entire system is crumbling. Facts are nearly useless and most ‘facts’ are facts from one understanding only. ‘Facts’ do not equate to teaching intellect.” Silliness.
Facts are nearly useless? Isn't that asinine? As opposed to what? Lies? Yes, I think that's it. The Education Establishment clearly loves lies more than facts. That is the pattern we’ve seen since John Dewey strutted his little self upon the stage.
Professor D commented: “A lot of the stuff you learn one year is obsolete the next year.” Does he think Paris is no longer the capital of France? Does he think all the assertions in French textbooks, chemistry textbooks, and biology textbooks have all changed?
We have children in our schools, even in high school, who can’t do decimals and fractions. Has anything about fractions and decimals changed in a hundred years?
Thanks to an abundance of excuses, we’ve lost our love for the perennial educational paradigm: knowledge is out there; we must help children find it and learn it.
Instead, the Education Establishment likes to pretend that children don't need to learn anything factual. Instead they should become experts at critical thinking, creativity, networking, and other soft skills, as a pretext for creating a fact-free universe.
Sophistry was the legal trickery developed by fifth-century BC lawyers. Zeno, a famous sophist, proved that the rabbit can never overtake the turtle. Mathematicians are still fascinated by this little trickery. now known as Zeno’s Paradox.
The Education Establishment aims low. Tthe society tolerates and even encourages these pretenders. Where is the shame and guilt that would be appropriate? These people should be screaming, mea culpa, mea culpa. We have a huge Education Establishment, many millions of students, a million teachers; and the whole thing is a shambles. They don't know what the American Revolution was about or who the sides were. They don't know where Germany is in relation to France.
The primary job in just about every field is to strip away the fluff, the inane improvisations, and return to the basics, the fundamentals, the stuff that was true 100 years ago and will still be true 100 years from now.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
excellent companion article
"IN PRAISE OF KNOWING STUFF"
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/let_us_now_praise_knowing_stuff.html
