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."

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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