Thomas Jefferson famously said: "A little revolution now and again is a good thing." Nowhere do we need it more than in education.

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FOR PARENTS, STUDENTS, TEACHERS, AND COMMUNITY LEADERS--THIS SITE WILL HELP YOU FIGHT FOR BETTER SCHOOLS. THERE'S MANY SMALL SECTIONS. PLEASE STOP BY WHENEVER YOU HAVE A FEW MINUTES.

LATEST NEWS: Big new piece called "31: Teacher Liberation Front" put on Improve-Education.org. Idea is that teachers must distance themselves from elite educators, who are hopelessly bogged down in tired old theories. Article was inspired by very provocative quote from a new book called "The Great Reading Disaster" where the authors sum up the last 50 years in UK like this: "The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so." Victimized. Brainwashed. I suspect a lot of American teachers will see themselves in this quote. Please check out "Teacher Liberation Front."------------------

:MORE NEWS: For years I've been working on an article called Toward More Efficient Education. Sort of an engineering or ergonomic approach to the classroom. How do we teach the MOST info in the SHORTEST time with the LEAST effort??? Problem historically is that our educators got so lost in ideological concerns, they forgot what education has been throughout the centuries: giving knowledge to kids. Even now, if you Google ergonomic teaching, you'll find lots of stuff about chairs, lights and computer screens, but not the "intellectual engineering" I'm interested in. FOR REFLECTIONS ON HOW WE CAN MAKE CLASSROOMS MORE FUN AND EFFECTIVE, VISIT "26: HOW TO TEACH HISTORY, ETC." (on Improve-Education.org).
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The Big Pretend
Saturday, October 13, 2007 4:07 PM

The biggest mystery of the 20th century is this: how did American education get lost in its own private wilderness??

Here's the short answer: John Dewey and his "progressive" pals decided that public schools should be primarily interested in a child's "social activities," with a corresponding decrease in emphasis on reading, writing, arithmetic, etc.--and all those finer things that Dewey dismissed as "mere learning." (This tragic shift started about 100 years ago, financed mainly by John D. Rockefeller's guilty millions, which is one of history's big ironies--the world's most successful capitalist paid for the undermining of capitalism.)

Next step: the Third International--with its waves of meddlers, subversives, and front groups--buffeted us with insults on top of injuries, all of THESE people being primarily concerned with doing whatever would weaken Russia's main enemy.

Note that the people behind all of this activity could never tell the truth about their goals. They had to say they were concerned only with better education. (As in, "Give us more money and we'll provide better education.")

The result from 1925 onward is one of the most startling edifices in the intellectual history of the world--a gigantic Rube Goldberg contraption that went through the motions of educating but somehow ended up producing uninformed citizens and 40,000,000 functional illiterates. So many wheels and gears turning. So little product. Hmmm. It's almost as if some of our top educators weren't all that interested in education.

I call this whole charade The Big Pretend.

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1) One of our smartest pundits, David Gelernter (a professor at Yale), last year proposed shutting down the public schools. He thinks the schools are so bad they can't be saved!

2) Here's a sad and shocking comment recently left on IllinoisLoop.org (link below): "Mom of a 7 year-old. Hi, I was living in France for the last 2 years where my child attended kindergarten and 1st grade. The French have a national curriculum in the schools where it gaurantees every child is getting the same education no matter if you are poor or rich. In 1st grade, the French national curriculum emphasizes addition, subtraction, geometry, memorizing a poem per week, a spelling-b with 10 new words every week, cursive writing every day, reading every day, once a week the following courses: science experiments, music, art, history, gym. Homework in math, poetry, reading, writing are sent home every evening. Now he is attending 2nd grade in Illinois and I can see the big difference. THere are no high expectations in any of the subjects being taught. He finds school easy. Schools here are not challenging our children. Where are the high expectations for all the children of Illinois?"

Now, you can claim she's lying or that French children are smarter than American children. Otherwise, I think you have to agree with me that this is a devastating indictment of our educational establishment. The French schools are evidently trying to smarten up their kids. Our schools settle for mediocrity from the get-go. Why do we put up with this?

3) For several years I've been researching the "reading wars"--Rudolph Flesch, phonics, look-say, whole word, Frank Smith, and all the rest going back to John Dewey. I kept hoping there might be a benign explanation for why our educators promoted look-say so aggressively, even though it appears to be without merit. My conclusion--presented in "A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch" (link below)--is that there is no benign explanation. Basically, it was all about social engineering and preparing students to be well-adjusted members of a collectivist state. The problem is, to get there you have to wage war against the potential of each individual student (you are, after all, deliberately dumbing them down) and against the prosperity and success of the whole country (when you create dumber citizens, you subvert the whole society, don't you?).

American educators will finally, I think, be judged very harshly for pushing such a destructive idea. Once you confront the intellectual bankruptcy of look-say (or whole word), you start to wonder if the people behind this thing would be capable of anything but bad ideas. 
LATE NEWS
HELP: I'm thinking a lot now about THE BIG SILENCE of the media and the academics, while all this is going on. If anyone knows of an academic (especially in the Ivy League) who supported Rudolph Flesch, I'd love to hear about it. If anyone knows of a big city newspaper that criticized Whole Word, I desperately want to hear about it. I asked my local paper (Norfolk, Va.) and the reporter piously says, "We can't take sides." Listen to me, buddy. That silence you hear is you taking sides!  

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The first three links below are to articles on improve-Education.org. The rest will take you to some of the real heroes of American education:

Samuel Blumenfeld,

John Taylor Gatto,

Charlotte Iserbyt,

and Martin Kozloff.