Oh Hale Yeah interviewed me for a YouTube video. Glitch wiped out first nine minutes. Otherwise a long and lively rampage through a lot of topics. After all this time I’m still an excitable boy. There is so much craziness in our public schools, just thinking about it makes me want to shout Oh Hell No!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This video contains a lot of links to things I’ve…

Traditionally, K-12 was in the hands of fairly dull, safe, ordinary people. They didn’t have any fancy theories. They wanted kids to be able to read, to add, and to divide. They wanted kids to know the capital of France. Nothing grandiose. Just the basics. (And I would argue, that’s precisely what we really need today.)

John Dewey and his gang, starting more than 100 years ago, did have grandiose theories.…

The linked article shows that literacy in 1910 was almost 99%.

Isn't that shocking? Didn’t you assume it was much worse? Our Education Establishment tells us every day how difficult reading is and how children can’t learn without another billion added to the budget.…

Excerpt: 

It's a common problem in the US. Children in the second and third grades, even the fourth and fifth grades, are struggling readers. They guess; they skip ahead; they search for clues from context; they look at pictures to read words. Did I mention they guess? Typically, these children are unsuccessful in most school subjects and very unhappy.…

An interesting new look at Aldous Huxley’s most famous book. 

All those famous scenes of embryos in glass jars were not about the industrial technology but about a very simple gimmick unseen at the center of the process. Something is not there. Something the organism desperately needs. And this deprivation is the gimmick that is replicated billions of times in our elementary schools, where children are not…

My starting point was that the US could not create 50 million functional illiterates if the people at the top cared. It’s shocking to me that this decline has gone on for so many decades. Flesch spelled out the whole thing in 1955 but somehow our Education Establishment went on with their social engineering schemes.

So for the last few months I’ve been wondering: how do we wake up the rich, the successful,…

K-12 is a jumble and a jungle. Picking out the three biggest problems is probably impossible. There are so many.

But simplicity is a good place to start. To start the project rolling, here are my three nominees:

First, the schools are getting dumber by the month and this is something we can start reversing by the simple trick of teaching…

I've never been very interested in Ayn Rand until someone told me about a 1970 essay where she explains how Progressive education turns children into monsters. This is everything I’ve been writing about for the last 20 years. But she took it further and deeper. Nothing escapes her clinical gaze. She is actually a great child psychologist.

If you’ve always suspected there are a lot of suspect ideas in…

Curriculum design, that’s where basically all the crimes are committed. That’s where the bogus theories and the defective methods are integrated into every classroom so that no child will be left unscarred.

None of this could happen if the process were rationalized. Experts would propose ideas that are then carefully tested in the field, that is, hundreds of classrooms. Nothing would become operational…

Main revelation (in linked article) is that Sight-words (also known as Whole Language, etc.) is more destructive of boys than of girls. Could you guess why?



Boys by large are confident and cocky. They can climb up on a roof and then jump off the roof. But what if you put something in front of them, an obstacle, that keeps them from ever climbing up on the roof. They will be frustrated and…

Everyone should know the Berys Dixon story....Schoolteacher does what she’s told until one day she realizes she’s been lying to her parents. The method she was teaching does not work. She does her own research, finds her own answers, and for the first time helps most of her children to read.

This woman is so down-to-earth, so straightforward, so honest (I think we can assume) that even a professor of…

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Patreon's basic idea is crowd patronage. Lots of people contribute small…

Whenever the Education Establishment is gung-ho about something, I assume it’s going to be a disaster, perhaps not for the Education Establishment but for education itself.

People selling digital technology are naturally overjoyed to find billions of dollars coming their way. I get that part.

The role of the teacher will be further diminished. I know the…

As progressive education has successfully replaced traditional education, it has filled up every classroom within an array of dubious theories and methods.

Particularly interesting is the absolutism of the people doing this. The propaganda is relentless that Sight-words are a valid way to teach reading, that Constructivism is the only way to go, that Common Core is the best way to organize a school,…

This is the biggest question in K-12. All success in elementary school pivots on this question.

The answer is obvious. Sight-words become vocabulary words when the child sounds them out. At that point, we might say, the child transcends cold, almost useless graphic design and appropriates it at a phonetic level.…

....sight-words and dumbing down.

Yes, there's a big cosmic battle going on. The Education Establishment likes to discuss reading as a dry scientific subject. Of course, they say, we need sight-words because phonics doesn't work all the time. So they say.

Meanwhile, here's what does work all the  time. Sight-words dumb down their victims…

There is a famous picture of a little girl crying because she can’t do a second-grade math problem, and neither can her mother. Probably millions of people have seen this picture. Certainly the experts in charge have seen this picture. They do not relent. They keep on pushing this idiotic pedagogy. The kids cry. The parents don’t know how to help them. It's all captured in this one picture.

In the…

A meditation on why the schools are bad. Is it enough to discuss what the Education Establishment does with Its vast budgets?

 Maybe it's also necessary to contemplate what we put up with. The Education Establishment does not function in a vacuum. It's functioning in the middle of 300+ million people. Maybe if our standards were higher...Maybe if we put pressure on the professors to do a better job...Maybe if…

Here is one of the most important fault lines in American K-12....

Many children in elementary school don't learn to read in a timely way. The school naturally doesn't want anyone to think it's their fault. So they blame the pupils. The  children have something wrong with their brains, some genetic mistake, some disability. It's not the school's fault if they can't teach a damaged child to read.

Quite commonly in the US, this genetic mistake is…

 Ever since 1931, when our Education Establishment terminated phonics in the public schools, literacy has been in free fall.

This whole thing is grotesque. The Emperor has no clothes; he's covered with red sores that suggest a horrible infection, probably syphilis. But 1000 professors of education ooooh and…