Or as Marie Antoinette said: “Let them eat cake.”
For most people, the field of education is now a big swamp of claims and counterclaims that never seem to be resolved. People give up trying to make sense of it. It’s a safe bet that the Education Establishment likes this surrender just fine.
A baffled public will be a passive public that pays taxes but otherwise shuts up. If the public is confused, they can’t possibly mount a resistance to the foolishness in public schools.
If people want reform, they have to understand the basic issues. This is not difficult to do. Here is a quick look at the grim reality suggested by the phrase "In your face, peasants.”
First of all, starting in 1931, all public schools used Look-say to teach reading. This method is also known as Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy, and many others. No matter what the name is, it doesn’t work, not in large doses or small doses. The basic idea is that children are told to see English words as graphic designs and memorize them one by one as you might memorize astrology symbols, weather symbols, or electrical symbols. (In the traditional school children learn to read phonetically in the first year and then they use reading as a way to explore geography, history, science, etc. That’s the world we need to reclaim ASAP.)
Second, all of math education is now conducted under various curricula contained within the phrase “reform” math. We hear a lot of talk about the meaning, the theory, and the highfalutin significance of this or that numerical operation. At the end of the year, however, children know much less math than they used to. I assume this is by design. New Math and Reform Math incorporated all the least efficient ways to teach and do math.
Third, all of contemporary education is disfigured by an idea called Constructivism (a.k.a. Inquiry and Discovery). Teachers must not teach directly. Children must learn for themselves. This can happen, of course, but not at a rapid rate. Constructivism relegates the teacher to a marginal role (the so-called facilitator). The idea of giving the children a collection of knowledge is now regarded as obsolete. With this one policy (that is, promoting Constructivism), our public schools reduce all but the self-starters to dunces.
Fourth, all the bad ideas in the 20th century have been rolled into one big ball of malarkey called Common Core Curriculum. It’s a huge government takeover; it seems to be totalitarian in intent; and you know it’s completely bogus because Common Core perpetuates the terrible trio of Whole Word, Reform Math and Constructivism (along with a long miscellany of new and old gimmicks). Case closed at this point.
Fifth and last, even as public education is debased, our “free press” has ceased to function as intended by the Founding Fathers. The press doesn’t want to be free. It wants to be the life partner of the Democratic Party. If a bit of information is not part of the official White House story, that information will rarely appear in major newspapers. In particular, the media does not explain the many flaws and fallacies seen in typical educational practice.
There is a news blackout on the insights that parents need. It is precisely this news blackout that enables the New World order to say, “In your face, peasants.”
in her new book “Credentialed to Destroy,” attorney Robin Eubanks lays out a comprehensive picture of what that phrase implies:
“What is being marketed as the Common Core national standards and accompanying ed reforms is actually a planned, centrally coordinated, interrelated, complete reorganization of American education….For now though we should best view education as a re-imagined means for an international political class and their business cronies to obtain the same type of riches and control as what the nomenklatura sought globally under Communism….We either have to confront what is really going on in American and global education directly and stop this nonsense once and for all, or it will destroy us.….An alliance of government and its bureaucracies, plus colleges and universities and big business, controlling and planning our economy for their benefit cannot deliver prosperity.”
Of course, for brevity at its most brilliant, you can’t beat Orwell’s “Ignorance is Strength.” That’s what our Education Establishment is trying to sell us now. Under-educating children will somehow make the country stronger. That is the very essence of “In your face, peasants.”
To fix the situation, we just have to reverse all the bad tendencies that have loomed up in the last 75 years. Don’t accept ignorance and illiteracy as normal. This country has hundreds of great private schools. Copy their blueprint, that’s a simple enough solution. Or look carefully at what our public schools are doing and then do the opposite. There seem to be few good ideas left in public education and that's why the whole sad spectacle ends up shouting at us: “In your face, peasants.”
