Posted on 03/08/2018 5:00:11 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
Phil Saviano, starting before he was 12, was repeatedly molested by a Catholic priest in Boston. Decades later, believing he was dying of AIDS, Saviano passed up hush money from the Church so he could expose the pedophilia problem in the Church.
Saviano approached the Boston Globe in 1998. They weren’t interested. Then they wrote about individual priests but not the broader problem. In 2001 the Globe published increasingly aggressive articles about the Church’s dirty— and widespread— secret. There were scores of abusers, and hundreds of victims, in Boston alone. But Bishops were protected, and individual priests were moved around from church to church, and even from country to country.
This exposé became Spotlight (2015), a well-received movie starring Michael Keaton and several other stars.
Director Tom McCarthy stated the movie’s central question: “These moments where we know people have done things wrong and we don’t, as a society, we don’t stand up to them, it takes years and years and years and the question is why? Why does it take so long?”
The same question can be asked about the reading crisis in our public schools. Rudolf Flesch explained this problem in 1955 but here we are 60 years later, still beset by the same abuse. “And the question is why? Why does it take so long?”
Some may point out that pedophilia is a more horrific crime against children. Unarguably the rape of children is indeed a horrific crime, and not taken seriously enough by many governments. The trauma may be so severe the victim never recovers. Even so, illiteracy— caused by bad reading instruction– can also last a lifetime. There are today 40 or 50 million Americans needlessly stunted by this neglectful abuse of the developing mind. I contend that the lack of attention given to the physical abuse of children also applies to the systemic mental retardation by policy of our children in the education system.
There is another interesting parallel. Saviano could not believe that Catholics were not much more indignant. According to a Catholic publication;
“What irked Saviano in 2002 still irks him today: how little Catholics seem to care about all this. He saw that again during Francis’ visit here in 2015. The Pope back-burnered the abuse crisis. Yet he was rapturously welcomed.”
Exactly. Flesch spent a lifetime stunned by the public’s surrender to destructive teaching methods. Flesch died thinking he was a failure because he could not fix the situation. Everybody who tries to improve education runs into this brick wall. The Education Establishment is able to perpetuate the use of proven failures. Apparently, these elite educators believe that limiting literacy is the quickest way to achieve their collectivist dreams. If leveling and political control are the goals, semi-literacy is a sure way to get there.
According to Truthdig, "The illiterate and semi-literate, once the campaigns are over, remain powerless. They still cannot protect their children from dysfunctional public schools."
Catholics put up with the abuse of children. American parents put up with the stunting of children. In both cases, debased experts betray everyone who trusts them. In both cases, the victims are tormented ruthlessly but the solution is always obvious: stop doing this.
The hell of illiteracy, for millions of children, can start in the first grade Many children cannot memorize more than a few dozen sight-words, the method of choice in most public schools. Very quickly, these children realize they cannot do something the other children can easily do. Parents are informed that their children may have something horrible called dyslexia. If the children express too much discontent at their abuse, they are given Ritalin. In any case, they become part of statistics in the National Assessment of Education Progress: two-thirds of our fourth-graders and our eighth-graders are “below proficient” in reading.
As Flesch and many other reading reformers have explained, most children should routinely learn to read in the first grade Then they would be happy students and able to move on in their education. Sight-words cripple individual children; sight-words cripple the entire educational process.
As Spotlight’s director noted: “We know people have done things wrong and we don’t, as a society, we don’t stand up and the question is why? Why does it take so long?”
That exactly sums up the country’s pusillanimous relationship to our Education Establishment as these pretenders continue to get away with abusing children.
Educator-author Siegfried Engelmann coined the phrase "academic child abuse," a precise way of referring to the many dysfunctional theories and methods preferred by our public schools, theories, and methods that seem to be used in the schools precisely because they are flawed and inefficient. The prime example of academic child abuse is sight-words. Why don’t we stand up?
ADDENDUM: Want to see depravity in action? “When the boys were in Sunday catechism classes, Holley would appear in the room and pull faces, mimicking the nuns behind their backs. He would show them card tricks.
“The boys loved it. The young priest was picking them out to be special. Little did they know of the horrors to come.
“'He was grooming us,' Saviano told Daily Mail Online in the living room of his cluttered second-floor apartment in the Roslindale area of Boston. "The priest figures out ways to get closer to either the child or the parents...
“But soon Holley's jokes became more risqué. His deck of cards suddenly featured black and white pictures of nude women, then color shots of men and women in sexual acts.
“Soon the priest was an unofficial sex-ed teacher to boys at an age when they were only too willing to learn.”
The priest does all this—betraying vows and destroying lives—to serve his personal appetites. Elite educators probably think they are also serving a higher truth.
(Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and methods on his education site Improve-Education.org. His new book is Saving K-12 — What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” Support his work on Patreon.com/BruceDeitrickPrice)
That's a perplexing statement to me, and even alarming. The child is an active agent, and if the school is "dysfunctional", I can't see how this diminishes the power of the child to develop. I guess to me, school was always "dysfunctional" ... I didn't pay that much attention to it.
Well, I hope you understand me.
Public schools? Catholic priests? Misnomer here. I will agree that public schools engage in child abuse. Not directly but they’re simply out for themselves. A child with a problem at home will go to school and come out worse.
Phonics is how I learned how to read. It was really very easy. Just simply sounding out the words. What I saw lots of times is that the kids did not want to do school work and their parents did not care. Many times the schools were places to warehouse the children during the day.
I don't think public education can substitute for family, and I don't think this was ever the idea of public education. It seems to me that family was always intimately involved in it. Certainly as I experienced it.
Thanks for the article Bruce, once again spot on target. In deference to my fellow Freepers I was married to a teacher for 19 years and sight reading and all the other mumbo jumbo that passes for Education these days is dumbing people down. Gone are the days of foundations like Syllables, phonics etc that enable you to build a vocabulary and essentially unless you happen to catch a break you are stunted in your ability to progress educationally. Per many states charters or constitutions the Edutocracy or so called public education system is charged with and granted a virtual monopoly over providing education for K-12 or essentially 13 years. By most if not all of them they are not paid for any level of education provided, needed or not past the age of 18.
So then looking at the graduation (so called) rates why do numbers of 65% or better unable to read or right at a workable level appear on a regular basis?? And for those who say that is a problem mor for black children I say hold on, not always true. From the professional i.e. employment side of things were I play going to college is referred to as the “New High School” in effect stating the obvious, a high school education is not worth spit these days and the teachers do not care and are in no way incentivized as we are in business to achieve a standard quality measurement. Or to put it another way do their friggin job and what they are paid for! Add on top of all of this numbers showing that 45% of white and 75% of black students come from Single parent environments, further adding to thew problem
And last on this if you allow alternative education like homeschooling or academies the funds flow through the established educational system and they force you to use Union Teachers and other things that hamstring you. They are not keeping up with their side of the bargain and no one calls them on it. Let’s not even go to the Parochial (Catholic) tuition based system you are paying taxes and paying again for education.
Nice
What a pathetic comparison. I am no fan of the public school system overall but in certain locations it does provide a very decent education. To claim that failing public schools expose children to abuse akin to rape. Well, just check yourself.
This is an incredibly tasteless comparison for the author to have made, to the point that it negates his objective.
I recently skimmed my granddaughter’s history book. Very little in it you could actually pin down as actually wrong - but the cumulative effect was Democrat propaganda. Scant mention of George Washington, or any other founder. Gloss over the founding era. Spend all your time learning about women and blacks. Mention Ronald Reagan? Yes - and ask the student to consider what benefit accrues to the country by having an actor for a president.The “dysfunction” is absorbing the child’s time and energy having to learn things of little import - and calling it “History.” You read that book, you know very little more history than if you never even saw its cover.
Ordinary sexual abuse is something people are familiar with. But cognitive abuse, where you mess up someone’s thinking, is rarely thought about. These things are separate but run on somewhat parallel tracks. There are tens of millions of cognitively abused children and the results can last a lifetime. Nothing trivial about that. The other interesting point is that 35 years ago nobody wanted to think about child abuse in Boston, just as now few people want to think about what the schools are doing to children. If nobody wants to think about it, then it will continue.
Tucker Carlson, this month, is doing a bunch of programs about what has happened to men. Why are all the statistics so negative? I think there are instructional methods that are more kind to girls, but difficult for boys. So the war on boys has been all too successful. The men having trouble now were damaged, 20 and 30 years ago, by what Engelmann calls “academic child abuse.”
I agree that it is also an often devastating type of chlld abuse. But it is not the same as rape of a child. Sorry, not sorry.
OK, point taken.
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