--"Once upon a time, schools tried to improve the character of their students. Be neat. Be punctual. Be accurate. Do your homework. Don’t copy anyone else’s work. Dot your is and cross your ts. Remember, practice makes perfect.

"In a similar way, the Boy Scouts urged boys to be little gentlemen. Scout Law dictates: “A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful,…

My goal is to help more people understand the reality of our public schools, which are dumb by design. This takes a lot of cleverness. The professors have to design bogus methods that don't teach the subjects they are claimed to teach. Then they have to surround the bogus methods with an impenetrable fog, so that nobody catches on to the damages caused.

These ideas are more fully explained in a new press release:…

Ten years ago, a phonics guru told me that a reading program without cursive is inferior.

He said that mastering cursive accelerates the learning of the letters, which is the critical first step for phonics.

Since that time I've become fascinated by the education establishment's weird hostility to cursive. After all, what is cursive getting in the way of? Not much is being taught in our schools.

I believe that cursive is much more valuable…

There is a lot of craziness in the public schools. For example, bogus theories and defective methods.

One question always simmering under the surface is: do teachers realize what they are doing to the children? 

In an article on reading, I encountered a startling quote by a teacher who does feel guilty. Unpleasant but perhaps it's helpful.…

From the beginning of the Russian Revolution, the Communist Party devoted vast resources and brainpower to creating the best possible advertising, public relations, marketing, propaganda, and outright lies.

The Russian Revolution was hanging in the balance for years. Probably their superior marketing kept them going. Lenin, the great orator, believed in aggressive…

The weirdest event in American history Is the elimination of phonics and the introduction of an unworkable method known as Whole Word.

This happened in 1931. Flesch explained the whole fraud in 1955. But here we are sixty years later still wallowing in this swamp.

Illiteracy Is the biggest problem in our schools. It's also the easiest to fix. Eliminate sight-words. Restore…

My new American Thinker article is a quick recap of Rudolf Flesch's famous "The Big Alibis." Forty years old but still the latest news!

Many comments from parents give stark view of K-12 today. 

K-12: Ten Lies Teachers Tell You…

In the last few years, I've become more and more fascinated by the silence of the media.

The public needs to know what's going on in the classrooms. The media won't tell them.

Look in the typical newspaper.  It will tell you how to cook a fish. It will tell you where to find a tattoo artist. It will tell you which Chevrolet is a good…

We hear a lot of criticism about public schools et al.

Normally, teachers feel forced to defend their institutions. They don't speak very candidly.

But Quora found a way to obtain more honest reactions. Someone asked the question: What are the most appalling things about today's students?

Lots…

It all comes down to this simple question. If we had smart, sincere people running our public schools, could students end up so illiterate, so clueless about math, and so ignorant about general subjects???

Are you kidding? it's not remotely possible.

Well, that's my take. I think you have to work backward and decide these people are not smart and not sincere. They…

 Many people agree that 1984 is a book everyone should read. Especially so now that Democrats talk about Communism in favorable ways, and so do some students.

The problem is that 1984 is a very traumatic book for many people. I used to think it would be too much for teenagers. But now that kids know so little, I changed my mind. The other problem is that many teenagers cannot read an…

After sight-word phoniness, Constructivism is the biggest fraud in American K-12.

Constructivism dominates and perverts education from K to 12.

Now the fun part. Try to find anyone in K-12 who can explain the problem. The Education Establishment is good at murkiness and mystery. Teachers are made to use methods they cannot…

I wrote an attack on Warren Buffett's foray into the newspaper business. Nothing personal.. I just wanted to make the point that the people in charge of our newspapers don't even know how to help themselves, never mind help the public.

Warren Buffett could've used newspapers to encourage literacy, to encourage school subjects generally. The more informed readers you have, the more newspapers you can sell. I don't believe he ever thought of…

In his excellent new article, Prof. Jeffrey Ludwig explains why most educational reform is doomed. Education Can Be Saved, he states, But Not By The Left. Their ideological compulsions are killers. Please read this article. …

Churchill said Russia is “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” That’s hardly more of a puzzle than American K-12, which is sophistries wrapped in lies inside a thick fog.

The problem in understanding K-12 is that you have a surface at odds with dark secrets inside. Imagine a beautiful $10 million mansion full of glamorous people leading expensive lives. Lots of good times. Life…

SJW posture a lot.

But on one of the most important issues, whether children can read or not, they don't have much to say. 

Illiterate kids don't have social justice.

The US is said to have almost 50,000,000 functional illiterates. This injustice must be fixed…

Bottom line, for the last hundred years, American history has been moving on two levels.

The one we can see where despite…

Imagine the German retreat after Stalingrad. A thousand-mile front moving steadily backwards toward Germany. Very painful for the Germans but bliss for the rest of the world.

Similarly, developments this past year point to phonics finally defeating a fake pedagogy known as  sight-words, Whole Word, balanced literacy, Dolch words, high-frequency words, all the same…

"I dare not tell a lie..."

--attributed to George Washington

It's a long fall from there to rampant cheating, lying, dishonesty. All are epidemic throughout our society.

CNN lies all day. The truth is not reported in our newspapers. Facts are not reliably taught in our…

Some days, when I think I'm clever to see that the people controlling our public schools are very disingenuous, I'm reminded once again that the brilliant H L Mencken got there first, and almost a century ahead of me.

So this article is a twofer. First, what K-12 is really all about and has been for a very long time.…