By Bruce Deitrick Price ——Bio and Archives--March 9, 2014
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
“After a career as a private teacher for about 30 years, it amazed me to substitute in nearly every school within a couple of school districts and find that I was not SUPPOSED to teach, just herd cats for the most part. I finally got the memo when sitting for a while with four sixth-grade girls in a reading group outside of their main classroom. They were supposed to be strengthening critical thinking skills. At least that was my initial perception by the instruction on the ever present computer printouts they carried (textbooks are soooooo passé). I listened to the facilitator – one of the girls – give her thoughts on the paragraphs they all read, ask the designated questions about what they’d just digested, and accept the most banal answers without question and go on to the next question. No further thought was required (nor desired).”Suppose someone’s real goal is to minimize the amount of education taking place in our country. Clearly, the simplest way to do that is to order teachers to shut up. Here’s an experiment that anybody can conduct, a mind experiment. Think of a subject you know a lot about. Imagine you have an hour to communicate to a room of people all the stuff you know. Think how many individual facts you would be able to talk about--dozens or even hundreds. Now, however, imagine you’re in front of this class and all you can say is “maybe the Internet has some information on that.” At the end of an hour, the number of subjects discussed in this class will be very few. All that knowledge you acquired over many years remains inside your head. None of it is given to the students. They remain as ignorant as when they walked into the class. Here is the big, bad picture: Whole Word (i.e. sight-words) keeps children from learning to read; Reform Math keeps them from learning arithmetic; add on top of that that they are not learning any basic knowledge, thanks to teachers being made into facilitators. You have an almost total shutdown of the educational process. Apparently that’s what the Education Establishment prefers. And that total shutdown will probably last until Americans say, “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” The only way to really understand these developments is to note that the Education Establishment has for 85 years waged war against content, against facts, against knowledge. The Education Establishment is winning. The country is losing. Most of these trends were in play before Common Core. But instead of replacing or fixing these bad ideas, Common Core seems to have embraced and recycled all of them, and dropped the whole toxic mess on the children of America. Constructivism is absolutely central to Common Core, and the foremost reason that Common Core will result in further dumbing down of the public schools. When Common Core permits direct instruction, it is scripted and uniform. Again, a babysitter could do it.
View Comments
Bruce Deitrick Price has been writing about education for 30 years. He is the founder of Improve-Education.org. His eighth book is “Saving K-12—What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” More aggressively than most, Price argues that America’s elite educators have deliberately aimed for mediocrity—low standards in public schools prove this. Support this writer on Patreon.