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1) UNEXPECTED JOURNEY: I’ve
been writing about education for 25+ years. There was never intent or plan. Typically, I would read some startling detail
in a magazine that didn’t make sense to me. I would wonder: so WHY can’t these kids read? so WHY are people showing
up in college who don’t know what 6 x 7 is? so WHY do schools use techniques that turn out counterproductive? Etc.,
etc. I enjoy working on these puzzles.
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2) UNEXPECTED CONCLUSIONS: I’ve long been wary of our elite educators, because they didn’t seem to be
good at their work and they tended to use a lot of jargon, which I think is a symptom of intellectual decay. But I didn’t
anticipate that the more I researched, the more negative my verdict would be. These people, I concluded, became obsessed with
social engineering, and slighted education. As a result, they have been dumbing down our country for 75+ years, and getting
away with it to a remarkable degree. We have a lot of work to do if we hope to fix this damage.
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3) UNEXPECTED ACCOMPLICES: Perhaps the most disgraceful thing is that the mainstream media and big universities
stood mutely aside while the country was being dumbed down. (If anyone knows of a single Ivy League professor who jumped into
the reading wars beside Rudolf Flesch, I want to hear the name.)
My local paper, and probably yours, covers education
in a trivial way: as community affairs, bureaucrats hired and fired, test scores up and down. There is never curiosity about
why, for example, test scores might be down.
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4) UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES: American educators created 50 million functional illiterates, and high school graduates
who can’t find this country on a map. I’ve
recently discovered Arthur Bestor’s book “Educational Wastelands --The Retreat from Learning in Our Public Schools.”
Bestor was a distinguished professor and historian. You may sometimes think that I’m too critical, but I promise you
that Bestor was more so. Consider how direly he worded his title. Wastelands. Then consider that this book was published
in 1953!
I urge everyone to do what they can -- in the community, at work, through politics and the local media--
to put pressure on the public schools. Support diversity in education--private schools, vouchers, charter schools, homeschooling.
Especially support the teaching of basic knowledge and a greater concern with making sure kids learn to read in the first
few years of school.
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5) UNEXPECTED BOOK: I woke up one day with the thought, why not make a book out of all these articles I have
on the internet. That book is titled "THE EDUCATION ENIGMA--What Happened To American Education." Naturally I hope
you’ll go to Amazon and order a copy. It’s a good gift.
This little book presents the information which
people need to understand that the country’s schools were dumbed down deliberately, and now we have to improve them
deliberately.
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6) UNEXPECTED VISTAS: I think there are three sets of victims in education today: students, parents, and teachers. A lot of times,
unfortunately, teachers don’t realize they have been co-opted into helping with their own degradation. If schools were
run intelligently, teachers would have a better life.
A formative anecdote from about 1990: A young teacher told
me that she was having problems with her seventh graders. She asked the principal for help and he said: “The classroom
is your problem.” I was tremendously offended by this. It’s his job to set the tone for his school and to back
up his teachers. An Education Establishment that would create principals like this wasn't serious about education. A theme
throughout this site is that the Education Establishment talks a good game but, in truth, they are not very interested in
education as most parents define the term. Our top educators are slaves to ideology. In the last few years I've become especially
interested in reading because it seems to be a paradigm: an essential skill that everyone must have but educators somehow
devise methods that don't work. If you doubt me, please see "42: Reading Resources"--the opening portion explains
why we have so many millions of functional illiterates. For ideas on fixing the schools in 2012, see "38: Saving Public
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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