On Quora (a discussion site) someone posed this question: “Who are the most innovative thinkers in the world of education reform?”
My answer went in a contrarian direction: “I want to decry the proposition that our first need is innovations. The first order of business is to get rid of all the junk and gunk in the schools. Most of the approved ideas are wrong. You cannot teach reading with sight-words. You can't teach arithmetic effectively with Reform Math curricula. You can't teach knowledge efficiently with Constructivism. Etc. Do you know what these gimmicks are? These are ‘innovations’ from a previous era? Sold to the public as panaceas, they were soon revealed to be poisons. But they're still there! Today, if somebody comes along with a wonderful innovation, it will be laid on top of a rotten foundation. In effect, the ‘innovation’ becomes concealment, a cover-up, an enabler for the rot in the basement.”
So, on the inside of public education, we’ve got bad ideas and deceitful educrats committed to social engineering, which is code for leveling everybody down to mediocre. Only a few extreme ideologues want this totalitarian outcome, but they seem able to impose their theories on a hapless society. How? They work tirelessly to keep all their bad ideas in play, tangled up together like a clump of lobsters biting each other. These educrats seem content to make the system as schizophrenic and paralyzed as possible. Genuine reform becomes unlikely.
Simultaneously, on the outside of public education, we've got overwhelmed communities and outwitted leaders. The result is a lack of understanding about what is really going on in the public schools, and a lack of confidence that improvement is even feasible. Political leaders are passive. The useless media stand silently by. All the people who should be working together to improve the public schools are uninformed, confused, and inert.
So you see that K-12 education in the US is paralyzed inside and outside. Fraudulent ideologues rule. The situation does seem hopeless.
On the other hand, whenever communities fight back, they do get results. Even when individual parents fight back, they get results. Here’s why. The Education Establishment is big and rich but not that bright (look at the mess they made of Common Core) and not that secure. The Education Establishment does not want bad press. It does not want hostile feelings. It does not want to be hated all the time (although they’re getting close). It wants you to shut up and give up, without a fight. Don’t do it. Every gesture of defiance is a constructive and necessary act, given the state of K-12 education.
Looking back 60 years, Rudolf Flesch published his famous book Why Johnny Can’t Read in 1955. The Education Establishment quickly formed the International Reading Association in order to crush Flesch. Here was one of the great opportunities in American history for saving our educational system. Imagine the chairmen of the English Departments at Harvard, Princeton and Yale standing on the steps of the Library of Congress to announce: “We support Dr. Flesch. He is right.” Just three men making a gesture. They would have been the equivalent of Eisenhower’s army landing in Normandy.
Even now it’s not too late. What if the current chairs of those departments marched to the steps of the Library of Congress and said, “We must end the Reading Wars. You’ve got stop this nonsense of making children memorize sight-words. It doesn’t work.”
The problem is that our elite institutions do not provide leadership in these important intellectual matters. Apparently, K-12 education is not considered a politically correct subject for our Ivy League professors. We need to change these attitudes.
Stop and consider that there are thousands of professors in a field called Linguistics. They’re involved as well in the field called Education. Wouldn’t you think that some of them would have something helpful to say about the illiteracy crisis in our public schools? Rationally, you would think that.
There was once a great scholar who did try to help, a Yale professor named Leopold Bloomfield. He authored a famous text called Language (1933). He died in 1949, several years before the reading wars heated up and Flesch wrote his famous book. Even so, Broomfield took some powerful shots at our illiteracy professors:
“The basic teaching of our schools in reading and writing, in standard language and composition [….], is still dominated by educationists who, knowing nothing about language, waste years of every child’s life, and leave our community semi-literate.”
“Nothing could be more discouraging than to read our educationists’ treatises on teaching children to read.”
Take that, you phonies! Nothing much has improved in 75 years. So much could have been improved. It’s satisfying to imagine that Bloomfield had lived another 10 years. He and Flesch could have swept the field.
Who now will take up their standard? Who will free us from the domination of petty tyrants and the paralysis they have created?
To paraphrase the famous line by Edmund Burke, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil education ideas is that true educators do nothing.”
ADDENDUM: Bloomfield’s ideas for school instruction were suppressed by the Education Establishment during his lifetime. Later, these ideas were published in a book titled, “Let’s Read: A Linguistic Approach,” which is still published and very popular. Start your own counterattack. Make sure your local schools teach systematic phonics and no sight-words.
