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.
I know, I know, you don't want to think about all the bad public schools out there. Nothing to do with you, right?? Wrong. The effects are oozing through the society. You are in danger.
A logic bomb is code designed to destroy data in a computer.
Imagine you programmed someone to ask people on the street, "Are you from Jupiter?” If people don’t say, “Yes, of course,” you knock them down. Thus they are bombed one by one, as you work your way across the city, until no one is left standing. All very logical.
There is one constant throughout the past 100 years. Professors of education came up with ever more exotic schemes and nomenclatures for how education should be organized, even as these schemes confused students and destroyed achievement.
A mother in Chicago wrote for help: "Dear Abby: All of my grown children are underachievers. When contemporaries talk about their children getting jobs, getting married, having kids, going on vacation, buying a house/car, I have nothing to contribute. My children do not have lives; they work low-paying jobs and scrape by. Worse, they have no ambition to do better."
To understand the failures of public education, we have to understand the dreams of socialism.
It has always had three main targets it hopes to destroy: family, religion, and private property.
Siegfried Engelmann is the real thing, an educator who loves to teach children and knows how to do it, both personally and in his books. As far back as the late 1960s, he told the Education Establishment: you're doing it all wrong.
The people in charge of literacy in most English-speaking countries are literacy’s worst enemies. This counterintuitive turn-about has to be one of the planet’s more bizarre stories.
Many people use the phrases “sight-word” and “vocabulary word” interchangeably, when they are quite different. This confusion, I believe, serves a sinister purpose for our Education Establishment.
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."
The date is 1900. Professor John Dewey and his cadre of "Progressives" launch an ambitious scheme to transform the country. They want a more collectivist society. For convenience, let's call their goal European Socialism.
However, the United States is hostile to Socialism and Communism for another hundred years. Beatrice Webb, founder of the Fabian Society in London, decrees that the word Socialism shouldn't be used in America. The recommended euphemism is "Progressive" and, later on, Liberal.
Socialism, as that term is generally understood, is what Dewey plans for us but he can't say it. He and his gang must dissemble at every turn. They have to lie and, little by little, work outside the law.
