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.
Want safety? Here are three threats we have to overcome:
1) THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT CAN’T BE TRUSTED. Almost a century ago, they took a wrong turn, and went down a road marked SOCIAL ENGINEERING. The problem for everybody else is that these ideologues hope to wreck the society we’ve got, so they can build the collectivized world they dream about.
They justify the planned transformation with this bit of fluff from John Dewey: “Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal.” What a quack. After all, it’s new knowledge that typically leads students to self-realization. The Left wants to use schools to turn kids into compliant comrades; they can’t tell the truth about their plans, so a lot that goes on in our schools is dishonest. Educators prattle endlessly about “education,” but their true passion is making sure that very little of it, in the ordinary sense, occurs.
2) BIG MEDIA AND ELITE UNIVERSITIES ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. The media seems to think they should take orders from the NEA, etc. I see this pattern unfolding in Norfolk, Va., where the local paper will run 50 articles about one of its favorite liberal issues, but not one line about why a quarter of the kids don’t learn to read, or drop out of school.
Professors at the best universities should have jumped into the education wars, the math wars, the reading wars. But I can’t discover a single professor at my Ivy League school who stepped forward to support Rudolf Flesch or to decry the decline of the public schools.
We have to be disappointed that so many professors and journalists allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Education Establishment. Bottom line, we can’t expect help from the people who SHOULD be saving us.
3) WORSE STILL, MOST BIG SHOTS DON’T CARE. Talk to doctors, lawyers, bankers, brokers, Indian chiefs, executives, psychiatrists, movers and shakers of all kinds. Try to find one who knows anything about education or cares. They went to a good school years ago. Their kids went to private schools. Public schools are for them like a bad neighborhood on the other side of town; there’s no reason for them to think about it.
LISTEN TO ME, YOU RICH SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE IN YOUR BIG HOUSES. A bad part of town will stay put, but the neighborhood called bad education is oozing along your street. It’s seeping through the walls of your house, and into your living room. You might not escape. Tens of millions of people who can’t count, can’t read, can’t do a job correctly, don’t know enough to care about voting--this uneducated horde will hurt every part of your life. What stake do they have in sustaining a civilization they don’t understand and know little about?
So what is the answer to this hopeless situation? Here it is: practical, successful people--in order to save their own skins--have to get more involved.
The Education Establishment has a genius for finding the counter-intuitive, likely-to-fail approach. Almost everything is backwards. Business executives, forced to spend a day in a public school, might have nervous breakdowns. But you know what the even goofier problem is? A bunch of business leaders, eager to make improvements, would hire consultants from some place like Harvard Graduate School of Education! The very people who created all the problems. That’s how cowed and bamboozled everyone is.
No, the practical, successful people have got to stick to their MBA guns. Ignore the faux-experts. Do what works, for a change.
I’d argue that the biggest hoax of the last 100 years is Whole Word. (It’s the reason we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates.) So a good first step is to understand WHY sight-words don’t work. When you personally understand the deception, you’ll be angry. Maybe then you’ll get busy and get bold. We need you.
Then find out why New Math and Reform Math were evil jokes; why Constructivism is much ado about nothing; why every slogan used in the public schools--self-esteem, multiculturalism, and 25 others--is really just an excuse to teach less. At some point you’ll be mad as heck, and you won’t take it anymore.
(Improve-Education.org has articles on many of these topics, for example, “42: Reading Resources,” “36: The Assault on Math,” and “34: The Con In Constructivism.”).