The Education Establishment tends to dilute and delete everything that was traditionally in the classroom.
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Even worse, the Education Establishment introduces a stunning amount of jargon, vagueness, and airy dishonesty. We must return to what is real.
1. Real Reading
No more Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words. No more identifying words by their shapes. No more guessing, picture clues, or functional illiteracy. Pick a good phonics program, and mix it up with singing and poetry. Teach all students to read by the age of seven.
2. Real Arithmetic
No more New Math or Reform Math. No more Standards Math, because the standards are wrong-headed. No more spiraling, fuzzy guessing, or mixing advanced topics in with elementary arithmetic. No more Constructivism. Pick Singapore Math, Saxon Math, or any other highly popular program and make sure children master arithmetic one step at a time.
3. Real Foundational Knowledge
No more demonizing memory. No more scorning facts. Students need basic information, and the brain is designed to want it. No more so-called critical thinking about things nobody knows anything about. Instead, students actually learn basic facts — the easy ones first, and then you build from there. Why? Because facts are fun, and knowledge is power.
4. Real History, Geography, Government
No more Social Studies. No more propaganda, indoctrination, and political correctness. No more multiculturalism for its own sake. History is taught by people who majored in history. You learn names, dates, places, and events. You understand why things happened the way they did. Everybody loves a good story. History is a million good stories.
5. Real Education
No more playing games. What do you think is going on at good private schools and the best colleges? Education is not about what kids feel. It’s about what they know. There’s no fuzzy, no guessing, no bull.
Imagine you take a course in French; you actually learn French — speak it, read it, write it. That’s the paradigm. At the end of each day, you know more than at the start.
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Sure, games, jokes, laughter, field trips, movies, sitting in the grass staring at the sky. There are no rules except that kids must be learning, continuously learning.
People now in charge of public schools — the Education Establishment — are focused on social engineering and have thus made a hash of public education. They say to the students, “It’s about you.” No, it’s about them, their collectivist politics, their plans for our future. These faux educators should stand aside or stand trial. To work in the public schools, people should possess knowledge, love knowledge, and want to communicate knowledge to the next generation. Such people are the real educators.
It’s my summary that the so-called Progressives never wanted to improve education. They merely used it to bring about the socialist transformation they did want. If you seek good schools, systematically eliminate all the modifications introduced by John Dewey and his followers. None of them is real. Look around at the best private schools near you. Make a list of all the features and protocols they commonly embrace. You will know how to proceed.
Don Potter was for years the go-to phonics guy. Now his site is left and has a lot of references you might enjoy. Also see BlendPhonics.org. Another name you can trust 100 percent is Samuel Blumenfeld.
Personal note: I’ve read way over 1 million words and published way over 1 million words. I still don’t know most of the jargon. We can all walk quite well without knowing the names of the muscles or how we walk. Don’t trust anything that seems to be more complicated than it needs to be. Phonics is a simple idea. In the same way that if you mix blue and yellow, you get green, any two sounds you blend will yield a third sound. All of Western civilization started with phonetic languages, such as Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and English. Who had the stupid idea of eliminating all that history? Children have to start with the names of the letters, then the sounds represented by the letters, and then the blends of those sounds. That’s phonics.
Marva Collins, a dynamo who started a school in Chicago, announced that she would accept every child who applied, and all of them would read by Christmas of their first year! Take that, you wretched Progressive pretenders.
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Image: jarmoluk via Pixabay, Pixabay License.