One of my favorite intellectual activities is trying to explain sight-words so that the ordinary doctor, lawyer, or politician  understands what I'm saying.

This has turned out to be extremely difficult. Rudolf Flesch thought, in 1955, that he had said the final word on why phonics is essential, and why Whole Word will inevitably destroy children by the millions. Unfortunately, he didn't  make his case well enough. So we do have more than 40 million functional…

This little article  explores the big paradox of the 20th century. Social reformers (particularly, socialists, communists, totalitarians of all types) always make very big claims about what they will do for the People. Finally, we are told, the People will have fairness, equality, and justice.

 Almost inevitably, the People get more misery than they had before. That is really the underlying theme of George Orwell's 1984. The various power-seeking groups fight among themselves;…

That title is the central conflict that has been playing out over the last hundred years.

 Academically successful schools tend to do what has generally been termed "traditional education." 

Progressive schools, on the other hand, do what is generally termed social engineering. Such schools are not primarily concerned with knowledge. They are focused on creating new kinds of children and preparing them to live in a Brave New World.

 As this trend…

Orson Welles made a great point, get an audience interested, and they can understand ANYTHING.

 He was talking showbiz, movies, plays. But I immediately realized the same insight applied to education.

 I wrote a little tribute to Orson Welles, as last month was the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Let me…

This article is titled "The War against Black Children." But it's really about the war against defenseless children,  no matter what color they are or what group they belong to.

 Truth is, there are lots of dysfunctional and destructive methods used in our public schools. If parents run screaming to the school, the education commissars will back off.

But if there's nobody to defend those kids, the bad methods will be…

There are many education critics or analysts who think they see a convergence at the very top of the society: rich capitalists somehow on the same page with far-left ideologues. Does that make sense?

 But what exactly is a Bill Gates? He gave $1 billion, give or take, to force Common Core on the country. Many people think this will make the country dumber, despite all the rosy claims. But what's in it for Bill…

There is still a big debate going on about the value of the lecture. 

 Here's an article that mainly explains why it's good:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/05/in_praise_of_the_lecture.html

The point I'd like to make here is that the attack on the lecture is, covertly, an attack on knowledge. In other words, a good lecture by a good…

Once upon a time, believe it or not, kids routinely learned to read in the first grade. Having learned to read, they then started reading to learn. Wow, what a beautiful thing that was.

 Our Education Establishment has very skillfully undermined this age-old template. Now, due to an onslaught of bogus approaches, we have children in the sixth, seventh or eighth grades who are still in the first grade, by traditional standards.

 You know this is true because…

How many know about Richard Mitchell, one of the great figures in American education? He was known as the Underground Grammarian and is famous  as the author of books such as "The Graves of Academe." (One interesting footnote. I bet that you would have to explain to MOST college students  these days why that title is witty. If true, that fully  justifies Mitchell's wrath against the dopiness of so much K-12 theory and practice.)

 In researching Mitchell for…

There is so much bad science in education. There is so much money in education. There also seems to be a lot of hostility and perversity in education. All this stuff is slopping around but in general tending toward mediocrity and malaise.

 Now Common Core wants to pile on. Lock everything in by legislation. Centralize authority in Washington DC. Where does all this end up? Arne Duncan sends out a memo at 9…

 It has probably happened to EVERYONE in education. They have read a memo from on-high, they have observed a classroom practice, they have overheard a conversation, they have been lectured to by their principal or superintendent, they have read something in the newspaper.... and a huge red flag unfurled, buzzers  began sounding, and a voice started booming in their head: well, that's just nuts.…

 A melancholy acknowledgment that our Education Establishment has successfully sabotaged traditional education in virtually every situation.

 Instead, public schools tend to do things in the most chaotic and least efficient ways. You can look at reading, math, history, science, you can look at every grade, and every corner of the school, and you will find that progressive education muddles everything and makes it less…

 Is anyone following the  Atlanta cheating scandal?  It’s the biggest in the nation’s history. Last week  a dozen people were sentenced to jail. Two participants have so far died.

Here for me is the really interesting part. You can read a long article in the New York Times (that being the preeminent symbol of media that no longer does investigative journalism) and not have any idea what actually happened.

 When you hear people talk about…

 Last week, I was looking at "Why Johnny can't read" (Rudolf Flesch, 1955) where Flesch quotes some  professors's advice about what readers  should do when encountering new words.

There is a list of a half-dozen items. The last one is phonics. The student is supposed to use phonics only as a last resort. This is quite nutty but it's the official doctrine of K-12 education for many decades.

 At about the same time, I saw a video where a professor from Minnesota,…

My sense of the world is that our Education Establishment is doing a crummy job on purpose, and even worse our local media stand silently by, and our local leaders remain relentlessly passive.

Every organization I look at –  the media, elite groups like PEN, Ivy League universities, Chamber of Commerce, religious groups-- all…

Statisticians say this country has 50,000,000 functional illiterates? How is that possible?  Clearly, you need many educrats willing to push a bad idea for many decades. I say that because the method typically taught in our public schools plainly does not work.

Whole Word (known by at least a dozen…

Georgia has always had a bad reputation. On top of that, in the last 10 years there have been some major cheating scandals. Ask yourself, why?  Probably because the performance of the students is sinking to an embarrassing low, so the school officials have to cheat in order to protect their own reputations. But why has the situation gotten so bad?

 One of the striking things about Georgia is that most of the public schools have their own websites; and many of these…

After six years of teaching, Josh Waldron gave up. He was perfectly qualified, an excellent teacher,  smart and sincere, everything we want in the classroom. But he had not anticipated all the hoops he would have to jump through, all the ridiculous paperwork he would have to fill out, all the  trivial requirements he would have to attend to.  He finally had to make a practical decision on how to best serve his family and himself.

 At the time I first heard about Josh…

I would submit to you that an elementary school's policy on recess tells you everything you need to know about that school's seriousness.

 Our Education Establishment for decades has flirted with a total lack of seriousness. How do we know this? Because they found many reasons to downplay or eliminate recess. That means you have millions of restless, unhappy kids who are unlikely to learn anything at all. And when these children squirm and complain, they are labeled ADHD and…