Hello, America

 I'd like to make one suggestion. Please learn a little more about what's going on in public schools.

 K-12 is increasingly mediocre because the preferred theories and methods are dysfunctional. They were designed that way; or they turned out that way. Either way, our Education Establishment does not seem interested in making things better. They're more interested in cajoling the public into accepting whatever is offered.

To summarize, you can't teach children to read with Sight- words (or whatever it may be called in your area); you can't teach arithmetic with Reform Math (in any of its many varieties); you can't teach knowledge with Constructivism (under any of its many names).

This stuff is to education what sitting is to running.

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What to do? Learn how these various gimmicks work. You will no longer respect them or the people pushing them.

My main education site Improve-Education.org has articles on most of these methods. See "Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education" HERE for the list, and a recommended article on each idea.

 Or search Google for a subject you are interested in plus the name Bruce Deitrick Price; you'll find a selection of articles.

Or obtain a copy of "Saving K-12-- What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?" Available on AMAZON.

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Update: "Saving K-12" is available as e-book on Kindle. 

https://www.amazon.com/Saving-K-12-Happened-Public-

Schools-ebook/dp/B079YHYQ87/ref

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Education’s New Gettysburg Address

    Four score and seven years ago our progressives brought forth in this country a new notion, conceived in socialism, and dedicated to the proposition that all students must be created equal.

        Now we are engaged in a great civil debate, testing rather that notion, or any notion so arbitrary and totalitarian, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that debate. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for the ideologues who here told lies that this infamous notion might live. It is altogether fitting and propitious that we should do this.

       But, in a larger sense, we can not deconstruct -- we can not debunk -- we can not satirize -- these extremists. The brave reformers, living and dead, who struggled here, have exposed them, far above our poor power to add or detract. It is for us the free, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- we here highly resolve that this country, under God, shall have a new birth of enlightenment -- and that education of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
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“Only the educated are free.” -- Epictetus

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be. If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed." -- Thomas Jefferson

“Education makes people...easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.” --  Henry Peter Brougham

“The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.” -- John F. Kennedy

"Deliberate Dumbing Down"....Iserbyt explained

Wade through several hundred discussions about education. You finally realize it all comes down to one question: did all this crazy bad stuff happen by accident, or do the people at the top get up every morning scheming to keep kids semi-literate, unable to do much arithmetic, and ignorant in any direction you look? 

I'm fascinated by this question because, for one thing, the crazy bad stuff seems too vast to be accidental. You can’t take your eyes off it. Watching Rome burn must’ve been a similar experience. The waste, the incompetence, the reckless malice. Whatever the exact cause, finally you’ve got a city on fire. Not just any city. The world’s greatest city. And what have we got today but what should be the world’s greatest education system--and it’s on fire. But not in a good way.

Second, one of the most successful people in America told me years ago, "Bruce, I agree with a lot of what you say but I can't go along with the conspiracy stuff." That puzzled me. "Conspiracy stuff? You mean when John Dewey and his whole gang of socialists went to a conference and schemed to take over the ed schools, infiltrate the public schools, and thereby brainwash all the students?  Why don’t you want to call that a conspiracy? Obviously it is one." For my money, it's a conspiracy the size of Antarctica. QED: we're not going to make progress in our public schools until people start facing the obvious facts. Probably everybody in the Education Establishment for the past 100 years was part of this conspiracy. It was these people who deliberately dumbed-down the public schools.

 Third, once I got used to the idea that all the “crazy bad stuff” was surely the result of clever human activity, then my interest shifted to HOW. Wanting to win a fight, and being willing to do anything to win, is not the same as saying you have found the best strategy. Well, our Education Establishment is brilliant at sophistry. So what they did was to create schools with relentless, manifest activity that never seemed to advance very far. They turned public education into a Potemkin Village. That was the pretty but fake little town that Russian officials created so that Empress Catherine would think she was ruling a prosperous and happy country. Similarly, parents and community leaders are supposed to think that their public schools are doing just fine.

But that’s not the case. According to Charlotte Iserbyt’s famous phrase “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” our public schools are engaged in a deception. The key word, of course, is “deliberate.” The con, as I would term it, was carried out by the simple device of finding inferior methods, and using them whenever possible, to whatever extent was possible. For example, the Education Establishment might say that Whole Word was superior and phonics was obsolete. Well, not everyone accepted this nonsense. So the Education Establishment didn’t always win all the time. On the other hand, they never stopped trying to win. When one of their bad ideas was rejected, they came up with two or three more bad ideas. The public schools are now encumbered by dozens of bad ideas. Have you ever seen a caterpillar weighed down by parasitic wasp larvae? It was this sad sight that made Charles Darwin doubt his religion.

 For a quick rundown of the bad ideas, see "Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education" LINK 

Warning to parents: teach your children to read before school starts

Many public schools still teach sight-words. Take precautions.

School starts in a few months. Take steps now to make sure your kids understand the basics of reading. The basics are simple. You can teach them in a few minutes.

Problems occur if children are made to memorize sight-words without ever hearing about the basics. So here are the basics 1-2-3:

1) Children must learn to say, and then to print, the alphabet (the ABC's). They can identify any letter they see. 

2) Then they learn that the letters stand for certain sounds, A is for aaa. (Some experts say, skip the names of letters and just teach the sounds.)

3) Then children learn the blends; that’s when you say the T-sound (tuh-) and an A-sound quickly....and you get "taa."

That’s phonics!

That’s the basis of everything that goes on in a phonetic language. Most children will figure it out for themselves given enough time. The problem is that less-verbal kids need direct instruction the most.

If the child ends up at a school that still teaches sight-words (also known as high-frequency words, Dolch words, whole words and other names), that child can be slowed down drastically.

Here are some resources you can use. They all deal with the same problem from different directions. So pick one and start:

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"54: Preemptive Reading" 
provides quick intro to phonics concept.
LINK 

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Best video on reading.  
If too small, view on YouTube.

4th of July Meditation: Why Socialists Hurt Education

One bizarre aspect of any discussion about public education is that everybody tiptoes around the real reason why the schools are mediocre.

We spend billions of dollars. Millions of people work in this area. The whole country embraces public education.

So why do we have low literacy rates, widespread ignorance among ordinary citizens about simple things, etc., etc.??

The people in charge can’t be trying to do a good job. Put another way, whatever it is these people mean by “education” is not what most parents want for their kids.

John Dewey and everybody else in charge of public education from 1900 onward was a socialist, a communist, a collectivist, or something of the sort. This is not a secret. Most of these people used the word “progressive” to describe themselves, and this was a common synonym for socialist. 

The only thing that seems to be hidden is the degree to which these people would push their socialist agenda--rather than focus on the educational services they are paid to care about.

Bottom line, it clarifies every discussion about education if we understand that the DNA of this field is far to the left. Socialists want to eliminate private property, religion, family, and freedom. To accomplish all this, they try to dumb down the public through education.

Clearly, the American Revolution was not fought on behalf of these disgraceful goals.

For a longer discussion, see “Socialism versus Education.""” 

http://www.examiner.com/article/socialism-versus-education

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