The Education Establishment has a funny prejudice. They don't like facts and knowledge, especially not for average kids in public schools. (That's why Charlotte Iserbyt wrote a famous book titled "The deliberate dumbing down of America.")

 Our elite educators are clever at coming up with sophistries to justify teaching less and less. The big new sophistry  goes like this: there are billions and billions of facts on the Internet, so why should children know even one?

 The gimmick says: whenever you want to know one of these facts, you simply search for it on Google. But which ones would you want to look up? Given that you don't know anything, where do you start and how do you organize anything?

This nihilistic sophistry, which I've called the Google Con, is exactly like pointing out that a dictionary has all the words in it you might want to know, so why should you bother learning even one of them??

 The importance of learning basic skills and basic information has never been more obvious. When you don't teach children to read fluently and you don't teach them elemental facts from history, geography, and science, you paralyze them for the rest of their school years and beyond.

 Furthermore, the social justice people want to talk about the inequality of school budgets, as if more money is always the answer to everything.  I think this is a lie.

The real difference between the lower-class kids and the upper-class kids is in all the peripheral education the latter got from being in a home where parents talk about the news, where there are newspapers and magazines,  where the TVs  might be tuned to the History Channel now and then, etc. etc.  These kids are, let's put it this way, culturally enriched the day they arrive at school.

So what should we do with the kids who are not culturally enriched? If you listen to our Education Establishment you will keep them dumb by promoting such sophistries as the Google Con. The obvious true answer is to offer a crash course on basic information for these kids. In six months you could have them up to speed with hardly any effort at all. You just have to teach the basic stuff, a little each day. Our public schools are organized to discourage people from doing the obvious.

 But let us suppose you actually do want to improve education.  Easy. Lift each child as far as each child can be lifted. Don't sell them short before they even begin.

 K-12: the Google Con -- on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/k-12-google-con-bruce-deitrick-price...

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"The Crusade Against Knowledge" has been one of my main themes for many years. Here's an article on education's fundamental evil: http://www.improve-education.org/id70.html

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