Free Republic

The last two years have been another reminder that education is not equivalent to competence, intelligence or experience, let alone wisdom, as an administration of people who have hardly held actual jobs outside of academia have proven that they are very good at assigning blame and conducting internal rivalries, and absolutely terrible at everything else. William F. Buckley famous opined that he would "sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University". We have spent the last two...

An American government exam taken by all high school students in Maryland would be eliminated next year under the proposed state budget, a surprising shift in policy that comes just three years after the test was made a graduation requirement. Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposal cuts $1.9 million from the Maryland State Department of Education budget that would pay for the test and its grading. However, the legislature could still restore the test if it found the funding. Some educators expressed immediate concern that social studies would get less attention in high schools if the test is eliminated. "I don't understand...

Recently, a retired general wrote an article in the local paper that started this way: "Is our troubled educational system posing a threat to our national security? The Defense Department estimates that a shocking 75 percent of young Americans are not able to join the military --and one of the leading reasons is poor education." His solution was that everyone should support the new Core Standards proposed by the Education Establishment. But isn't it obvious that these are the same people responsible, in the first place, for rendering the majority of young Americans educationally unfit for military service? Why would...

...According to the Associated Press the president "described himself as a "Christian by choice" who arrived at his faith in adulthood because "the precepts of Jesus Christ" helped him envision the kind of life he wanted to lead." Some conservatives and political opponents have questioned Obama's Christian faith... "my mother was one of the most spiritual people I knew, but she didn't raise me in the church" "So I came to my Christian faith later in life, and it was because the precepts of Jesus Christ spoke to me in terms of the kind of life that I would want...

Rene Lozano Jr. once lost control of his patrol car while chasing a traffic violator. The vehicle slammed into a utility pole, fatally injuring a rookie officer riding with him. A bullet narrowly missed another officer's head when Lozano's pistol accidentally discharged. He was the passenger in a stolen Mercedes-Benz driven by a friend. The bolt cutters used to steal the car were stashed under the seat. And he once was fired for making false statements about his arrest on charges of driving while intoxicated, a case that ultimately was dismissed because the arresting officer was unable to testify. That...

Starting in 1975, Pol Pot and his Communist revolutionaries killed almost 2,000,000 Cambodians, out of a total population of 5,000,000. Why?? Pol Pot lived in Paris for many years where he became a Marxist intellectual. Sitting in classrooms and cafes, he visualized the perfect Cambodia. He went back to Cambodia to eliminate foreign influences, purge educated people, and thereby create an agrarian workers paradise. Pol Pot was a fanatic, a true believer. The best one-word summary is to say that Pol Pot was an ideologue. He had ideas in his head; he knew they were right; and he was thereby...

At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men were tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it...

Our Education Establishment tends to describe John Dewey as The Greatest Human Who Ever Lived. I've taken to calling him America's Favorite Quack. Truth is, when the Far-Left finds somebody saying what they want said, they will praise that somebody to the skies. Thus, the apotheosis of John Dewey. An essay called "Phooey on John Dewey" provides some perspective:======= "First off, let it be stated that John Dewey was a phenomenally brainy and productive guy. During a long life, he wrote more articles and books than you could read in a year. Indeed, he wrote so much on so many...

Okay, it took me 3 years but here's what I finally figured out. Not only is Constructivism a mostly useless gimmick but it hurts younger, less educated, and poorer kids the most. Here's a short new article that explains why:------------ "Constructivism versus Minorities and the Poor.... Constructivism is the latest fad burning through American public schools. Here’s a quick definition: children are supposed to invent their own new versions of all knowledge, while teachers (now called facilitators) are supposed to stand back and encourage the process. I’ve been writing for some years about how unrealistic and time-consuming this approach is....

Summary: The Education Commissars have long used TV as a whipping boy, an all-purpose excuse for their own incompetence. Consider the irony. More and more, television is the country's real educator. Public schools get dumber. But the History Channel, etc. know how to teach, and they want to teach. Who could have predicted it? Television rescues us from our Education Establishment! Of course, the point of mentioning this is to shame these fairly shameless people into doing a better job.

"Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.  The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed. I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are...

Samuel Blumenfeld is one of the country's few great educators. His book of essays explains just about every aspect of our problems. Highly recommended. ---------------------------------------- "Concerned About Education? Read this! (Review is for "The Victims of Dick and Jane"): --------------- I urge everyone to read at least one book by Samuel Blumenfeld; and this may be the best place to start. There are 18 essays, mostly written in the 1980s and 1990s. You can read them in any order. You will find that this book is an excellent guide to the treacheries and nonsense everywhere evident in education. Blumenfeld is...

The best thing we can do for the country is to make sure all children read by the second grade. The Education Establshment continues to push non-phonetic methods that don’t work. Here’s a graphic video (only 3 minutes) that explains why Kindergarten Sight-Words Are Not A Good Idea. This hoax requires that children memorize words as SHAPES or graphic designs, as we all memorize flags, currency symbols, hieroglyphics, cars, etc. A few hundred is difficult but doable; a few thousand is beyond most people. Even then, it takes a lot of time, so all of education is undercut. Once parents...

Perhaps you saw the exchange on television. One guest said, “The administration’s approach is destructive; they must be trying to hurt the country.” The startled moderator exclaimed: “Do you mean they’re doing it on purpose? Why would you think that?” The guest explained his reasoning: “Because nobody’s that dumb.” Eureka! There you have it, a perfect condensation of everything that I’ve been able to figure out, over the past ten years, about education...

When you make a list of all the stupid ideas enshrined in the public schools, there will be many contenders for Stupidest Idea Of All. It’s tough to pick the absolute worst but let me mention for your consideration the common practice in public schools of teaching children to GUESS what words mean. This is the central gimmick in whole-word or sight-word reading. But here’s the good news. Guessing is a clear signal that a child cannot actually read. It is thus the quickest diagnostic we have. If a child looks at “car” and reads “house,” you see immediately that...

I see comments on the Internet, especially on the conservative side, that might be summed up this way: “Public schools are a disaster. They should be shut down. Homeschool your kids, that’s the only way.” It’s not the specifics that bother me. (Some very smart people have proposed privatizing the public schools.) It’s the idea that you can turn away, or that you can turn inward, and thereby avoid all that unpleasantness over there, on the other side of town. Homeschooling seems to me a wonderful option, as are private schools, charter schools, etc. Together they can save about 10%...

Last week I posted background on FreeRepublic about a column published elsewhere titled “Education as Neurotoxin.” This column tries to explain why the US has 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Were these people born this way? Or had bad education methods produced the impairments? Someone left a half-dozen irate comments insisting I was “delusional,” “illogical,” “irrational,” “nonsensical,” etc. I’m not sure which part offended him most, 1) that sight-words cause mental problems; 2) or that the far-left could knowingly promote the use of destructive educational methods. This commenter embraced the Dolch Dogma that kids must memorize 300...

Article blames Education Establishment for decline in public schools, and says the simple, cheap, and easy fix is to start teaching facts again. That is, foundational knowledge and basic information. If children are taught just one little fact each day, we can turn this country around. So what’s the problem? The Education Establishment is hostile to content and facts. Excerpt: “As surely as 1 + 2 equals 3, foundational knowledge is what we need to return to, immediately. Observe that no new laws are required. No new books. No new funding. No new training. No new schools or facilities. No...

As a teenager, I heard rumors that the Russians put flouride in drinking water, presumably to wreck our minds and make us easier to control. I heard this only a few times; and I never heard of evidence. As I said, rumors. But as I’ve researched and written about education a great deal, those rumors have come back into my thoughts. And here is what I want to report to you today: the Russians had absolutely no need to put flouride or anything else in the water. Ever since 1932, they had look-say in our public schools! As subtle poisons...

"One word. Two different worlds... No wonder so little genuine communication—or progress—occurs in education I had been writing about education for more than 25 years when I finally realized the divide, the scam, the silent sophistry, call it what you will, that renders so many discussions about education close to pointless. When most people say the word “education,” they mean something very specific, and almost everyone knows exactly what it is: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, to be followed by history, science, literature, and the arts. Now, if everyone in the discussion has this meaning in mind, they can make progress....