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.
Someone asked this question on Quora: Is there a flaw to the American school system? Why do so many teens have depression? Why don't people do anything about it?
My answer: Okay, let's suppose you're a ninth-grade student in the school system. What are some reasons you might feel anxious and depressed?
Constructivism is not just another educational gimmick. It can be used in every class, for every subject, and with students of all ages. It is multifaceted, ubiquitous, and grandiose.
In fact, the Education Establishment wants you to believe that Constructivism is the King Kong of instructional theories. The educrats want you to take it home for dinner, marry it, and live happily ever after.
Many practical people say the situation is hopeless. The Education Establishment controls the country's public schools with an unyielding grip.
Unfortunately, these educrats seem to be socialist ideologues. (That's not surprising as their Godfather--that is, John Dewey--was a socialist ideologue.) They are obsessed with social engineering, not academic gains. The school is for them a laboratory where they can design the brave new child that will populate their Brave New World. Whether these new children can read, write, or do arithmetic does not seem to be a major concern.
Study education for any amount of time, you will be struck by the disappearance of many things once thought essential and permanent. Such useful features as direct instruction, maps and geography, cursive writing, multiplication tables, phonics, important dates and events, in short, basic skills and foundational knowledge taught in an orderly classroom. Where did they all go? Why did they go?
Here's irony for you. Many who claim moral superiority for themselves are guilty of aiding and abetting educational inferiority for everyone else.
When they assign themselves a fancy title—Social Justice Warrior, no less--are they then excused from further concern for fairness and justice?
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.
