Episode 127 of "Let's Fix Education"

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American K-12 drifts ever downward. If you doubt that, this podcast is for you. 

(Spoken or transcript. America needs to hear/read this. Pass it on.)

For years I’ve claimed there are few good ideas left in K-12. The good ideas have been systematically discredited, and then buried.

Now I say we are in free fall. The public schools get worse each year. Grades, testing, and anecdotes prove this.

Here is some more proof. Recently, I've seen several new series of street interviews, where the dumbest possible questions are asked, often on a college campus, and many students don't know the obvious answers. 

Some questions are supremely simple. You have to be a genius to think of questions like this: “How long is a quarter hour?.… How many states are in the country?… What country is Hawaii in?….In a century, what year will it be?….What is 3×3×3?…..How many states in the US?” 

Everyone, especially those of you sitting lazily on the sidelines, should spend an hour looking at as many of these little Q&A’s as you can. You'll realize that 1) you are participating in one of the great cultural scams of all time and 2) you're probably on the wrong side.

Here is my new favorite question, "If you were born 13 years ago, how old would you be today?  Students generally pick 8, 10 or 12. I have no idea why.

In a nutshell this is what the education professors have done to us. There is a scorched-earth war against reading, arithmetic, geography, history, science, literature, and general knowledge. Everything that was once considered essential knowledge in K-12 is now dismissed as trivial, something children will supposedly pick up as they go. Further, children need not memorize anything easily available on the Internet. Why bother?

The good news is that some of these videos have inspired thousands of comments. Apparently there are millions of people who never heard that education is gone to hell. Now many people are angry, depressed, shocked and, we can hope, galvanized to resist. 

One part of the problem is that teachers are touchy and defensive. They hear criticism and hunker down, thereby keeping the bad ideas in play for another generation. 

I think that knowledge is beautiful. It is for sure powerful. Non-teaching, at today’s level, is a massive dereliction of duty, like a nurse giving the wrong pills to patients. 

Come on, teachers, you know that students are being cheated and damaged.

In a nutshell this is what the education professors have done to us. There is a scorched-earth war against reading, arithmetic, geography, history, science, literature, and general knowledge. Everything that was once considered essential knowledge in K-12 is now dismissed as trivial, something children will supposedly pick up as they go. Further, children need not memorize anything easily available on the Internet. Why bother?

The good news is that some of these videos have inspired thousands of comments. Apparently there are millions of people who never heard that education is gone to hell. Now many people are angry, depressed, shocked and, we can hope, galvanized to resist. 

One part of the problem is that teachers are touchy and defensive. They hear criticism and hunker down, thereby keeping the bad ideas in play for another generation. 

I think that knowledge is beautiful. It is for sure powerful. Non-teaching, at today’s level, is a massive dereliction of duty, like a nurse giving the wrong pills to patients. 

Come on, teachers, you know that students are being cheated and damaged.

At this point in a trial, lawyers can move for summary judgment, thus: “Your Honor, clearly the so-called education experts are the most incompetent people who ever lived OR they are ideological gangsters.”  

The Supreme Court would have to see the point, thus: “Yes, these students do seem to be horrendously uninformed about the simplest things. The professors at the top would seem to have secret agenda….”

After 1950 everything started downhill, a little bit each year. Now we're on the eve of destruction. I’m asking every American, why are you putting up with this? Can America sustain itself as a democracy when the citizens are so ignorant? Everybody should be terrified because the people subverting education, the Marxist totalitarians, are smart and relentless. They assess their targets with a killer’s eye. We are now a fat turkey and they’re thinking, Oh, look what we have here. Dinner.”

Communists and such have been engaged in a war against knowledge, against truth, against fact, against correct information, for a long time. 

For more than a century, in fact.

Here is John Dewey, the Father of American Education, telling you in professor prose that knowledge, as far as he's concerned, is a mere nothing:

“The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively an individual affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.”

Feel the contempt. “Mere learning” dismisses everything cerebral or academic that goes on in schools. Dewey had one big word in his little head. Cooperatively. He wanted children to work cooperatively, quietly, passively. People who will do what they're told.

The professors of education have done two cunning things. Eliminated most good ideas, along with most knowledge. And they shrouded anything educational in a thick fog of jargon and lies. Nobody knows what's going on, not the children, not the parents. Not even the teachers. And most disappointing to me, the rich and successful people in this country don't know what's going on. They hang around on the sidelines watching the Titanic sink. Thanks, fellas.

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See sites asking questions; and some comments on the Internet

https: //www.buzzsprout.com/1792553/episodes/14089702
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