Posted on 01/12/2015 6:49:43 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Suppose someone wanted to dumb down a country. How would they accomplish this?
In fact, no research is required. We don't need to speculate about what the most brilliant Pavlonians might do.
American public schools have been dumbing down students for most of a century. The best techniques have been discovered, refined, and locked in place for many years. All that’s required is frank admiration for professionals who know their job. Simply apply their methods full-strength, and wait. You will have dumber schools, dumber kids, and a dumber society.
First and most important, using any possible pretext, eliminate academic content. Kids don’t need to know X. Kids will find Y too difficult. Z is racist, sexist or something bad. Look back at a typical public school curriculum for 1950 and you’ll probably find that half of that curriculum, fact by fact, has vanished into thin air. And good riddance, according to our top-tier educators. Bottom line: make the classroom as fact-free as possible.
Second, prohibit teachers from teaching. Schools mumble incantations about something that Piaget said 75 years ago. He generalized that learning something deeply is better than learning it shallowly. You don’t say? The Education Establishment then decreed, if kids don't learn knowledge deeply and personally, it does not count. This flimsy sophistry is said to mean that teachers have to stop teaching. Students must teach themselves. (This folly is called Constructivism.) Bottom line: if there is any information left to teach, no teaching is allowed.
Third, if teachers do teach, they must do so in a way that virtually guarantees failure. Reform Math has been breaking the sound barrier in this area. Typical problems mystify most adults. The Internet is now overflowing with examples of nonsense math. Let the kids struggle. Most of them will slowly give up—that seems to be the goal. Bottom line: nothing should be done in the most efficient way.
Fourth, maintain a high level of chaos in the classroom. Announcements blare from loudspeakers. Students drift in and out. Unruly students are not disciplined. Principals and administrators give teachers little support. Teachers are often absent so that substitutes are common, disrupting continuity. If you were to tape-record the classroom, you would probably find that more words are spoken by students than by teachers. Noisy chaos is the norm. Bottom line: make the school as much like a mental institution as possible.
Fifth, anything resembling a rule, a blueprint, a truth, or any kind of precision, is ignored or ridiculed. In every respect, softness, fuzziness, guessing and imprecision are praised. The goal, according to the most advanced Pavlovians, is a constant state of intellectual disorganization. After a while, kids don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other, cognitively speaking. Bottom line: make the school incoherent, like a broken machine.
Sixth, some of the most brilliant work entails using big complicated theories to overwhelm the public. Common Core is an example. There are endless claims of higher “standards,” even as achievement gets lower. Similarly, Cooperative Learning requires that children always work in groups, even if that prevents children from becoming self-reliant, independent thinkers. Self-esteem, which should be a good thing, basically freezes the entire school system because the instant you teach something to Bob, you might hurt Jack’s self-esteem if he doesn’t understand it. In short, a huge cockamamie theory, instead of serving the students, incapacitates the system. Bottom line: grandiose claims are used to disarm support for what actually works.
Let’s state a generalized paradigm expressing everything that has happened in public schools for the last century. With great fanfare, officials announce a pretentious new theory that is the be-all and end-all of education. New Math was like that. You claim a lot of research, you specify a lot of details about how the task will be accomplished, and you quickly demonize and discard everything that doesn’t fit into the new paradigm. Look-say was especially like that.
The bold new theory dominates for 5, 10 or 20 years. Schools of education have to be reorganized. Procedures from K to 12 must be revamped, all at great expense. Finally, it becomes apparent that grades are going down. The authorities stop mentioning the new theory, and phase out the details one by one. With great fanfare, the next theory is introduced. We may be told that children learn best when they’re upside down or they have to hop.
Do you think any of that is overstated? Not at all. These two new theories are no more silly than Look-say as a way to learn to read. The non-teaching mandated by Constructivism is as counterproductive as anything you can imagine, but it now controls a lot of what goes on in the public schools.
Big claims and confusing fanfare are used to bludgeon the public. Today, we are told that Common Core is the ultimate end-point of all education. That’s how you know it’s just another hustle.
Bottom line: our Eucation Establishment will pay any price, bear any burden to make sure public schools stay stuck on mediocre.
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Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org. END ARTICLE
Would have to make us generally smart first.
Public school has decreased the average IQ of American students by over 25%
Make reading uncool amongst children.
In other words, give the liberals free reign.
Wouldn’t change a thing.
By presenting ebonics as an actual learning tool, promoting thug lifestyle as an actual cultural event and by flooding American public schools with illiterate illegals, diverting billions of taxpayer’s dollars into these parasitic spawn that will never contribute to America’s greatness.
The Left has implemented a plan about as good as any.
Yes, reading now is just for fags;
“But once, people made movies where you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe those days can come again!!”
Teaching stupidity in schools is just the icing on the cake.
I’d do just what we do in America: pay the media for dumb viewers.
Advertisers pay for sales, smart viewers don’t give them many sales. So media offers news and entertainment that fosters the dumb viewers they profit from.
I think this was not so well written and rambling, but you did make good points.
I agree with your observations.
I would remove God from the schools and make it illegal to pray and teach the Bible in the classroom . . . wait . . . we already did that in the 60’s
. . . and we are reaping the fruit of it in 2015.
I would’ve just limited it to liberalism and Common Core, but I don’t disagree with the article.
Tough crowd.
No.
Constructive friendly criticism.
The big tool used is the heavy head trip. Make things so convoluted in order to make the student feel stupid. It even happens in college, when I had a course in differential equations. The first professor I had took great joy at starting with the most difficult example and baffling the student. I dropped that one.
The second time was with a graduate assistant, who would start a lesson with a basic illustration of the principle and proceed from there. That way I found how I got lost the first time. I wound up aceing diffy-q.
I’d add stop teaching the Constitution, which they’re obviously not doing anymore. When I was a kid, we had “Civics” class and learned about the Constitution. That’s how I know that when the Congress doesn’t send the President exactly what he wants, the President can’t just then go ahead and use his pen and phone to fundamentally transform the country with countless executive orders. A lot of people I’ve encountered actually think that’s the way our Republic works.
You start with the children.
Which is exactly what the left of this country have done for quite a few years (over 50).
Immerse a whole generation into the shallow pursuit of transitory and ephemeral objectives frittering away their lives trivialities and the consumption of trash. I’ve never seen so many morons. I’m serious. The younger set say the same things, wear the same clothes, and pursue the same inanities all the while festooning their bodies with ink. This is the most self-indulgent generation in human history, bar none. They have no tastes, no standards, no benchmarks of excellence. They’re easily diverted from pursuing anything of value. They’re mindless consumers spending money they don’t have on things they don’t need. Of course, there are exceptions but too few to mention. And somehow the Democrats have everyone worked up about inequities. My God, never in human history have more people lived above the level of subsistence than now. I see fat hogs everywhere I go festooned with tattoos and uttering gibberish. The forces of conformity have never been stronger than now. There is no diversity, no regionalism, no different dialects, no art to mention, with filthy morons and imbeciles making millions of dollars spewing misogynistic lyrics and being invited to the White House to boot. Make no mistake, Obama is the one person distillation of the American people. God help us!
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