Outspoken Education Site Celebrates 7th Birthday, Urges Public To Confront What Wrecked Our Schools
Submitted by: Word-Wise Educational Services
2012-10-04 00:05:56
(OPENPRESS) October 4, 2012 -- "The most important task in education reform," comments Bruce Price, founder of Improve-Education.org, "is to understand what went wrong. It's obvious that a lot did go wrong. Education statistics coming in from every direction confirm that."
"Let's face facts. The people in charge of public education, for the past 100 years, are very far to the left. They call themselves Progressives. They're infatuated with social engineering. Naturally they try to use the schools to reconstruct society. They don't do a good job on the academic side for a simple reason. They're not all that interested in academics."
"It's amazing," Price says, "how logical everything becomes once we face that sad truth. Our Education Establishment is almost indifferent to education as most parents understand this term. Ergo, we get the mediocrity and dumbing-down that we see all around us."
What's the next step?
"I think we need to correct the standard education narrative," Price explains. "Our Education Establishment claims to be experts at education and to care about children. Where's the evidence for this? The reality we see in many public schools suggests that our elite educators are neither skilled at education nor very concerned about children. Their main concern seems to be gaining more power so they can implement their ideological schemes. To facilitate that agenda, our elite educators have introduced a lot of bogus ideas into the classroom."
The best route to education reform is to look closely at the theories and methods that control what goes on in public schools. You soon realize that many of these approaches are wrong-headed. The good news is that we can get rid of them.
In reading, Whole Word (aka sight-words) virtually guarantees illiteracy, as Rudolf Flesch explained in 1955. What's the answer? Systematic phonics.
As for math, Reform Math curricula (there are 12 of them) virtually guarantee innumeracy, as 25 years of math statistics show. Few students can do even easy arithmetic without a calculator. What's the answer? Get rid of Reform Math. Use Singapore Math or similar.
In general, public schools tend to denigrate knowledge. Children are told they don't need to memorize facts. Content is continually diluted. Schools teach an intellectual sloppiness which justifies guessing and fuzziness. There's little focus on finding the one true answer. What should we do? The opposite of current practice.
The point is, we can identify these bad methods and then systematically eliminate them. Our Education Establishment is contemptuous of what parents want. On the other hand, parents win many victories and can win many more. They just have to push.
Improve-Education.org, founded in 2005, provides ammunition for that push. Many of the site's 65 articles explain dubious theories and methods. Here are a few of the most relevant titles:
"23: The Creativity Question"
"26: How To Teach History"
"30: The War Against Reading"
"34: The Con in Constructivism"
"36: The Assault On Math"
"38: Saving Public Schools"
"45: The Crusade Against Knowledge"
"51: Learning Styles--How Educators Divide and Conquer"
"56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education"
"57: Cooperative Learning...Another Gimmick?"
Additionally, Price puts articles on many other sites. Three recent articles pretty much cover all the main problems in education:
READING: "High-Frequency Lie: Some Words Can't Be Sounded Out"
These articles explain our decline. Read them and weep.
"On a personal note," Price concludes, "I admit that five years ago I had no clear sense of why so many things had gone so wrong. People continually said, our educators mean well, they just can't get their act together. I guess I hoped it was true. But if you study education at all closely, you realize it can't be true. Some of the methods are obviously counterintuitive and dysfunctional from day one. Finally, you see that the top educators are dedicated to transforming America via the classroom. It's a conspiracy. You can't avoid that word. And once you use it, everything makes sense. These people want to create mediocrity because they think it's fairer. It's the Marxist perspective on economic matters brought over into intellectual matters. Redistribution or leveling is the name of their game. You see the result in every school."
To contact Bruce Price, call Word-Wise Education, 757-455-5020.
Contact Info
Word-Wise Educational Services
Phone: 757-455-5020
Website: http://Improve-Education.org
Word-Wise
Suite 611
3500 Virginia Beach Blvd.
Virginia Beach, Va. 23452
