Saving education
It's fairly common knowledge that our public schools have turned into holding pens for illiterate students. For example, California schools can no longer suspend K-8 students for using phones. And of special note, Starting in 2020 Public Schools Across California Will No Longer Suspend Students for Disobeying Teachers, Because Too Many Students of Color (Non-Whites) Get Suspended, VDare, January 1, 2020:
First data point you need to know: white students represent just 23 percent of public school enrollment in the state of California.
Second data point you need to know: though black students make up just 5 percent of the public school enrollment in the state of California, they represent the majority of students suspended (even though the state banned suspensions based on “defiance and disruption” in 2014 . . . to try and stop too many non-white students from being suspended).
Also of note, the article Can You Locate Iran? Few Voters Can by Morning Consult, January 8, 2020 states that "[only] 28% of registered voters could point out Iran on a zoomed-in map of the region...". Check out the map of where respondents thought Iran was located. The amount of geographical ignorance revealed by respondents is utterly astounding:
When I went to school, I actually had to learn something. What went wrong?
The book SAVING K-12: What Happened to Our Public Schools? How Do We Fix Them? by Bruce Deitrick Price explains what happened. The book is on my reading list, however reviews of the book are excellent. The following review itemizes key points of how our K-12 schools have been deliberately engineered to fail:
K-12: The War against Children, by Bruce Deitrick Price, American Thinker, January 9, 2020:
... Each year, traditional education has less influence on public schools. Meanwhile, the theories and methods generally called Progressive grow more dominant....
Another thing is clear. Our Education Establishment is brilliant at concocting attractive jargon and clever marketing slogans, even for the most destructive practices. Who could oppose such melodious proposals as whole language, student-centered learning, higher-order thinking skills, experiential education, cooperative learning, project-based learning, constructivist instruction, Bloom's taxonomy, Common Core, reform math, whole language, discovery teaching, digital literacy, social-emotional learning, and so many more? ...
Let's look quickly at some of the more harmful inventions:
Literacy: Children must learn to read with sight-words (even though this approach won't work except for children with photographic memories). Progressive instruction has created 50 million functional illiterates...
Common Core Math: Endlessly hyped "reform" methods prevent children from mastering even simple arithmetic. Fewer children are able to pursue STEM subjects. A bust.
Constructivism: Teachers are now called facilitators and can no longer teach. Children must create their own new knowledge. So we have millions of kids who know nothing about their own culture...
Memorization: Often demonized and treated as irrelevant. But why? If you can't use your facts in conversation or debate, you don't really possess those facts....
Spelling: There are no rules, according to "invented spelling." And no grammar, either....
No cursive: Cursive is scorned, but it has many advantages. Children are forced to deal with individual letters, which accelerates reading. Furthermore, cursive is often a child's greatest and perhaps only contact with precision, design, and aesthetics....
Student-centered classroom: Curiously, this phrase ends up describing a classroom that is teacher-centered, because the teacher's rules must always be followed — in particular, the injunction against traditional approaches. John Dewey makes lack of structure its own structure, its own prison. Kids need structure.
Experiential Learning: Everything has to flow through the child's experiences. But what about the experiences of the parents, the family, and the larger society?...
Permissiveness: Progressive thinkers like to eliminate rules and boundaries....
So yes, there was, and is, an evil plot aimed at our students. Progressive education turned out to be anti-education and anti-American. John Dewey and his followers were obsessed with social engineering. They wanted to make a new kind of child who would prefer a new kind of country, a socialist country....
Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving K–12: What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them? (a good gift for smart friends). He deconstructs educational theories and methods at Improve-Education.org.