I have a piece on TCS titled "The Biggest Mystery in American History" (i.e., the decline of public education). The most interesting thing that emerged in the responses is that everybody has a DIFFERENT theory about why the schools are messed up. I've heard more than 20. Please, people. These are distractions.

Ask yourself this simple question, if the people at the top of the Education Establishment wanted better schools, wouldn't we have better schools?? I think so. I believe any 400 names out of the phone book would deliver better schools!

Ergo, I conclude that these faux-educators, these clones of John Dewey, are all tangled up in their social engineering schemes (i.e., let's get ready for socialism), to the extent that reading, writing and arithmetic are not priorities. Indeed, they are nuisances. So here's my proposal: if you want better schools, we have to get rid of all the ideology-driven educators at the top, or at least get rid of the many flawed methods they introduced--Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, Self Esteem, No Memorization and many, many more.

As part of my ed crusade, I created a new blog called EducationImproved.blogspot.com, which is composed of only short pieces, news-related. This is a good introduction to the many aspects of education that I like to research. 

I’ve been working on this question for more than five years. I would argue that it’s a lot more complex and murky than most people would ever imagine.

Haven’t we all watched, for decades, as the government dumped billions of dollars on the public schools without accomplishing very much?

Haven’t we watched the big foundations try to make a difference? And as well the think tanks, commissions and pundits? But what changes?

Keep in mind that we are the richest country on the planet, and that we spend more dollars per student than anybody else. Probably two or three times as much.

Note that in every city in this country there is an excellent private school. These schools are your templates if you are trying to create an outstanding public school. Why do our educators seem to ignore best practice, and instead perpetuate worst practice?

The closer you look, the more the mystery grows.

Okay, I do want to create some drama here. I want to pull everyone into the puzzle. The mediocrity of the public schools is a great problem that we need to solve, otherwise we will keep recycling the same failures.

I’ve just published a complete solution to this mystery on my site Improve-Education.org. Here’s the mini-version:

The historical fact is that, starting a century ago, our educators got sidetracked by social engineering schemes. It was a private decision they made; and they didn’t want the public to know. So at that point we entered a twilight zone, and we are still there. There’s a big pretend that public schools are primarily trying to serve academic ends. Not true.

My pathway into this whole thing, more than anything else, was the reading wars. Specifically I really focused on Whole Word for about a year until I could finally say: this thing can’t possibly work; it’s a hoax; it’s child abuse. Now, place those assertions next to this fact: our educators kept Whole Word in play for 70 years and created 50 million functional illiterates. Something’s rotten at Teachers College. I don’t think you can intelligently argue that our educators were simply making mistakes for 70 years. The number 50,000,000 is way too big. They got bad results; but they kept going. So I conclude the obvious: they were comfortable with those bad results. They were comfortable with lots of Americans not being able to read well.

And once you suspect that this reading pedagogy was never intended to teach reading, you can look at all the other methods more objectively. I’m thinking of constructivism, reform math, self-esteem, bilingual education, no memorization, multiculturalism, cooperative learning, and many others. I believe that these methods were not designed to work academically so much as they were designed to work socially and psychologically.

The pattern was clear to me: none of the most popular pedagogies delivers as publicly promised. But I suspect they all deliver as secretly intended. That is, kids are kept busy in ingenious ways but nobody learns very much.

And that is the reason why it’s so difficult to improve public schools. There is a lot of gunk and goo in the wheels of education. So the first order of business is to identify these bad ideas, expose their flaws, and then eliminate them. That’s the message of “38: Saving Public School--A New Paradigm” on Improve-Education.org.

Read the report and decide for yourself.

My broader thesis is that we can’t save the country if we don’t first save the schools. The progressive educators deliberately dumbed down the schools for ideological reasons. Now we need to deliberately smarten them up by deconstructing the phony ideas put in play by John Dewey and pals, while simultaneously restoring basics and academics to their proper prominence.

(My new book THE EDUCATION ENIGMA also deals with these themes. Available on Amazon.)

Public schools could do a lot better; everyone agrees. What nobody agrees about is the reason for their low performance. I call this mysterious mediocrity THE EDUCATION ENIGMA. The question is: what happened to American education? Remember, this country spends vast amounts of money on education, but somehow manages to create 50 million functional illiterates.

You might almost suspect that our Educational Establishment is not genuinely committed to education as most parents define that term. This, precisely, is my own conclusion.

I've been writing about education for 25 years; the more I researched, the more cynical I became. At this point I would argue that our public schools are crippled by an array of bad ideas because our Educational Establishment was often more committed to leveling than to academic excellence. And the proper strategy now is to confront this regrettable history; expose and eliminate all these bad ideas; and create a better future.

I've collected 50 of my favorite essays and excerpts in a book titled THE EDUCATION ENIGMA -- What Happened To American Education. It's a fast, lively read covering a great variety of entertaining topics. But the central message is very sober and serious: our public schools have been deliberately dumbed down; and we can deliberately smarten them up.

If you are concerned about education in the US, please skip over to Amazon and order THE EDUCATION ENIGMA. This little book, I believe, can do more to save the public schools than anything else out there. In less than 140 pages, the reader gets a sweeping view of the history of American education, the thinking of the top educators, the inner workings of many of the major sophistries, a guidebook to all the problems in our schools, and a map to a better future.

Not convinced? If you really want to confront the madness of American education, you need only stare at this number: 50,000,000. That's how many functional illiterates our educators created. They did this by promoting a reading pedagogy that cannot possibly work. This gimmick has many names but perhaps the best-known is Whole Word or Sight Words. I'm particularly fascinated by this fraud because it's blatantly unworkable and it turns out to be a paradigm for almost a dozen other bad ideas. Without the presence of Whole Word in American education, we couldn't be so sure -- so serenely confident -- that our educators were often dealing from the bottom of the deck. For more about the flaws in Whole Word, please see "37: Whole Word versus Phonics."

For immediate release::::::::::Anyone can reprint any part of this::::::::::Please discuss the ideas:::::::::::::


Education Activist Explains How We Win The Education Wars


Norfolk, Va.--Statistics indicate that students aren’t learning. Parents complain about being dragged into “reading wars, “math wars,” and “education wars.” Businesses have to provide a lot of remedial education. Everyone wonders why public schools, with their huge budgets, can’t do a better job.

Bruce Price, a novelist, artist and education activist, enjoys trying to explain the confusion. “For me,” Price says, “American education is like a big crime scene. You find much destruction and many wounded. I keep seeing the statistic that we have 50 million functional illiterates. Isn’t that dumbfounding...but also totally intriguing? Who allowed this to happen? What were their motives?”

Despite all the gloomy stats, Price is optimistic about the future. “We have to push the schools back to their traditional role of teaching the important, permanent stuff,” he says “That’s what society needs. But how do we do this? Just in the past year, I’ve figured out that more money isn’t the answer, nor are more ingenious policy recommendations. The top educators are too set in their ways. Here’s my suggestion: we have to systematically deconstruct and eliminate all the bad ideas now so damaging to American culture. We can't expect good ideas to succeed until we get rid of the blight. I mean Whole Word, Cooperative Learning, Critical Thinking, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, No-Memorization, Reform Math, Fuzzy Anything, et al. These things are presented as panaceas; but usually they are counterproductive. I try to expose this. I want parents to understand WHY their children aren't learning."

The flagship of Price’s crusade, since 2005, is his site Improve-Education.org, which now presents 38 original articles and 80,000 words of content. He has another 100 articles on other sites, including 35 book reviews on Amazon.com and 18 education videos on YouTube.com.

Price has been writing about education for 25 years and is now one of the country's more aggressive activists. He acknowledges that his investigations have made him cynical about the country’s top educators. “They are much too comfortable with dumbing-down,” he says. “I’m obsessed with smartening-up! Perhaps I should add that I never discuss teachers. By educators I mean the people with PhD’s, the tiny group that actually dictates policy.”

If you’d like the one best paradigm for all the foolishness in modern education, Price suggests Whole Word (which is also known as Sight Words and Dolch Words). His research convinces him that virtually nobody learns to read using this method--that is, by memorizing the shapes of words; but some schools still use it. “I’m always trying,” he reports, “to devise more succinct ways to explain this impostor. I’m very pleased with a chart that compares Phonics to Whole Word--see #37 on Improve-Education.org.”

Bruce Price, who studied English Lit at Princeton, is the author of four books, an artist who has had many shows, and he has always operated a small design firm. “Being in the arts and in business,” he says, “gives me a broad perspective. I know what good schools look like; and I’m very interested in the practical, ergonomic aspects of giving children a superior education. I have a very simple goal: let’s take all children as far as each one can go.”

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Price writes on a surprising range of topics--robots, constructivism, Taoism, birds, Pavlov, language, sophistry, and many more. His big theme is that all education can be taken to a more productive level. Recent titles include:

Thinking Critically About So-Called Critical Thinking
A Speech to Teenagers About Education
36: The Assault on Math
Education: Excuses, Excuses, Excuses
Educators versus Education
30: The War Against Reading
34: The Con in Constructivism
Saving The American Newspaper (S.T.A.N)

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Find these articles in Google. Please contact for quotes, articles, or more information on any part of this release:

Word-Wise
757-455-5020
Bruce Price
Improve-Education.org

Bruce Deitrick Price
wisewords@earthlink.net
Improve-Education.org
Lit4u.com
ArtNorfolk.com
Ieducate.info
Price.myexpose.com

It has been said that teachers are the hope of the future. This was never so true as it is today. More and more I think that if American education is to be rescued, teachers will have to do it.

I write a lot about our educators and their counterproductive theories. I always explain that when I speak of educators, I never mean teachers. I mean the people at the top, the bosses with PhD’s who control policy in the ed schools and the bureaucracy. (Indeed, my work is dedicated to America’s teachers--I always feel they are as much the victims of bad theory as students are.)

Unfortunately, teachers often allow themselves to be co-opted and controlled by these elite educators with their hidden agenda. Here is a better paradigm: teachers should distance themselves from these education commissars, and focus on what is genuinely best for children....

Mona McNee and Alice Coleman, two remarkable British teachers with more than 80 years of experience between them, have just published a searing new book titled ‘The Great Reading Disaster.” McNee and Coleman analyze education in the UK during the past 50 years, and reach this sad conclusion: “The real villains were not the victimized teachers who carried out the intellectual child abuse but the training establishments that brainwashed them into doing so.”

Victimized. Brainwashed. How many American teachers recognize themselves in that quote? Indeed, how many teachers have always known that they were being manipulated and managed in a variety of ways, and sent forth to do the ideological bidding of their trainers?....

Thomas Jefferson said: “A little revolution now and then is a good thing.” What we need, I believe, is for teachers to take that message to heart, and revolt against the secret manipulation by educators. Why not return to the real business of teaching--which is to raise children as far as you can. Not control them, not level them, not shape them to somebody else’s blueprint. But to enable them to achieve all that they can achieve--for their own good and for the good of society.... 

The USA seems to have two types of educators that cause most of the damage: the Rousseauvian/Hippie/Romantic/Permissive sort that scorns standards of any kind; and the Collectivist/Socialist/Communist/Totalitarian sort that hates this country and this civilization. The synergy between these two types is predictably negative: less and lower, dumb and dumber. Neither group is overly concerned with whether children can read or count. Indeed, academic success actually seems to get in the way of the social engineering schemes the top educators are often in love with.

It’s not that these people are evil. It’s that their field is contaminated, encrusted, weighed down by lame ideas and inane sophistries. Even the most motivated people are kept from doing their best. 

So, it’s a good time for teachers to pull back from the smothering embrace of educators. Teachers should turn toward doing what is best for their own minds, their own souls. As the Carnegie Foundation stated: “Teachers must think for themselves if they are to help others think for themselves.”....

Many teachers know in their hearts that they’re caught up in a huge con. What they don’t know is how to escape.

Well, first of all, with regard to educators, let’s just point out that the Emperor is quite naked. Educators since Dewey have been playing power games and ideology games, and many of these games got tangled up with money games (need I mention Big Publishing, Big Psychiatry, Big Pharma, Big Labor, all in a steamy bed with Big Ed). So here’s where we are now. The guy’s naked. Yes, the Emperor of Education is totally naked. Educators who would create 50,000,000 illiterates have no credibility. They ought to be laughed out of town, perhaps arrested. It’s child abuse, for one thing....

Teachers need to be liberated from their oppressors. We need to see some new political movements. Teachers should join, at least in their hearts, the Teacher Liberation Front. TLF! Power to the Teachers!

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These five excerpts provide a short version of a much longer article: "31: Teacher Liberation Front" on Improve-Education.org
Article has epilogue titled: Educator Liberation Front.