New book explains the crisis in the public schools, and how we fix it

6:46 PM Diposkan oleh arfa

I’ve been writing about education more than 25 years. It’s been a fascinating but puzzling journey. So much in education is counterintuitive. We would expect that there are quicker, more pleasant ways to do any task; conversely, there must be slow, inefficient and unsuccessful ways to do everything. It’s the second kind that our elite educators (the ones who run the system) gravitate toward. How can we explain this? It’s almost as if our educators merely pretend to believe in universal education. What they seen more deeply committed to is universal mediocrity.

When you consider all the studies, statistics, reports, and books, you realize that they all paint the same bleak and depressing picture. We spend more and billions every year but SAT scores fall. Our better students do not compete well with the better students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. Can most Americans find Idaho on a map? Never mind Japan? And then there’s the really big mystery: 50 million functional illiterates. How could this happen?

To answer all these puzzles, I researched further and further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators, a century ago, looked at life, at their country, at children, and at this new field they had created. You want to know what’s really funny? These people in fact were not primarily interested in education as most of us understand that term. They were obsessed with ideology, psychological breakthroughs, and cultural transformations. They saw the school as a tool. Education was the factory in which they intended to build a new society. Note that nobody asked them to do this; they arrogantly appointed themselves our saviors. They didn’t do us any favors.

At this point I have more than 120 articles on the web trying to explain how and why our educators got off track. I’ve been especially fascinated by the reading war, which is far and away our biggest, dumbest scandal and a blazing paradigm for everything else. As I understood the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board: simply enough, get rid of all the failed ideas.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in a war with our own educators. I want to persuade people that this is an intellectual war; and we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. So I’ve collected my 50 favorite articles in a book titled THE EDUCATION ENIGMA (What Happened To American Education). Partly it’s a history book. It’s also a guidebook to the toxic nonsense in American schools. Most importantly, it’s a map to a better future. It’s also entertaining. What other book talks about Pavlov, Mick Jagger, the Tao, John Dewey and robots?

My thesis is that we have no hope of improvement unless we understand exactly what happened to American education: our schools were made dumb by design. Then we have to identify and deconstruct all the gimmicks that have been smuggled into the system. Throwing more billions of dollars at the problem won’t help. Writing more glowing policy recommendations won’t help. Giving money to so-called best practice won’t help. Our educators are set in their ways; they often seem addicted to worst practice. We need an intervention.

So our first job is simply this: we have to grasp that our house is dirty and then clean it. We have to get rid of the overhyped “progressive” innovations that turn out in practice to be destructive and regressive. For example, Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, Self Esteem, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything, and much more. We need to restore basics and academics to their proper prominence.

Many people are comforted by the idea that our educators are clumsy, inept, or befuddled by fads. No, I’m afraid you really have a much better sense of what happened to us if you imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey gathered around a table discussing their philosophical goals, devising strategies, and trying to figure out how to keep the public from interfering. I know people who shy away from the word conspiracy. But let’s be realistic. This track record goes back nearly a century. Let’s show respect for those 50 million functional illiterates who spent their lives in a twilight zone thanks to John Dewey and his pals. You can’t create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade.

I should mention by the way that I never criticize teachers. I’m concerned only with the top educators, people with Ph.D.’s at Teachers College and such. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much their victims as children are.