Virginia Beach, Virginia Nov 6, 2019 (Issuewire.com) - Bruce Deitrick Price, the country's most prolific education critic, urges the public to be more involved with fixing public schools.
“That's the only way we save K-12,” Price states. “Americans need to understand the mechanics of what went wrong, then they can help to repair it."
Price studied K-12 education for several decades and realized that Progressive educators had steadily eliminated all the proven traditional ideas. Instead, they promote dysfunctional theories and methods that never live up to their marketing claims.
“Public school classrooms,” according to Price, “are the land of sophistry and gimmicks. That's what makes K-12 education so intellectually fascinating, much more than most people would guess.”
Most destructive example: children are made to memorize sight-words. Why? English is a huge language, but even the smart kids cannot master 200 sight-words each year. Illiteracy is guaranteed.
Price demands: "Why make children start this doomed journey? That's the question that parents should be screaming.”
Eliminating phonics in 1931 triggered the Reading Wars, still going strong. It's a war about which method should be used to teach children to read. An impossibly complex method? Or a simple natural method? Fortunately, many people are waking up to reality here. Phonics is now making a comeback.
Bogus Math Instruction: New Math in 1962, Reform Math in 1985, and the Common Core Math now share the same sinister compulsion: make the simple complicated.
“Typically,” Price says "these programs find something difficult and teach it in the early grades. There is a good reason why children never studied such things as algebraic matrices—much too difficult except for a whiz kid. But what did New Math do? It had third graders studying algebraic matrices.”
Worst Way to Teach Content Subjects: Constructivism is jargon that nobody understands. This protects it from the destruction it deserves. Constructivism claims that children must create their own new knowledge. If a teacher tells them something directly, that doesn't count. Traditional teaching is thereby abolished. Well, you can imagine already that telling kids about the American Revolution is going to take a long time.
“Here's the most generic example of everything mentioned," Price elaborates. “Good instruction is logical and coherent, one step at a time. Bad instruction mixes up the sequence or leaves out an important step. All those parents know for sure is that the kids are working three times harder for much less progress.”
Price has published 400 articles on the internet explaining the problems in K-12. His recent book is titled "Saving K-12–What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?”
“My strategy," Price says, "is to alert people to the hidden mechanics of the classroom. When parents understand what is being done to their children, there will be a rebellion. Saving K-12 is the easiest way to grasp what children are dealing with.”
Finally, why have all of these bad tendencies turned up in our public schools? Simple answer: because John Dewey and his colleagues were Progressives, that is, Socialists. They wanted to use the public schools to create a new America. They were reckless and clumsy; they mainly succeeded in dumbing down the country.
The Contents page gives a sense of the book’s range:
1-CULTURE WARS
Somebody does not like our culture
2-READING WARS
Why we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates
3-MATH WARS
Students reach college not knowing what 7 x 8 is
4-HISTORICALLY SPEAKING
100 years of dumbing down
5-THEORIES AND METHODS IN THE CLASSROOM
Every fad turns out to be a foolish idea
6-COMMON CORE ENSHRINES THE WORST
That’s how you know they aren’t sincere
7-LITERARY FLIGHTS
Who says serious has to be boring
8-GUILTY
Are they merely clumsy or carefully aiming for mediocrity
9-MOVERS AND SHAKERS
We need our big shots to move and shake more than they do
10-WHAT TO DO
Suggestions for repairing the damage
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Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer. He graduated with Honors from Princeton in English Literature. He is one of the few people who write about all aspects of K-12.
“There is nothing more important than your child's education, and no one has a better grasp on what is happening in the schools of the current day than columnist/author Bruce Price.” Judi McLeod, Publisher of Canada Free Press
Robert W. Sweet, Jr., long-time President of the National Right to Read Foundation, said: "Bruce Price’s SAVING K-12 is a MUST read! It is precise, concise and powerful. Action is required…for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and the future of the American Republic!"
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“Saving K-12” is on Amazon
“Saving K-12” is published by Anaphora Press, Quanah, Texas
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