By Cambridge Who’s Who Contributing Author Bruce Deitrick Price

Here’s an odd thing to confess: I have been writing about education for 30 years. It has been an exciting adventure; it has also been at times totally mystifying.

We have grown to expect that there are faster, more pleasant ways to accomplish any task; conversely, there must be slower, ineffective ways of doing so. It is the second methodology that the education establishment seems to prefer. Our public schools appear almost intentionally designed to perform at a mediocre level. How can this tendency be explained?

When you look at the statistics and surveys, you will notice that they paint a consistently bleak picture. We spend billions every year on public education, yet SAT scores continue to fall. Our top students do not compete well with top students from other countries. The general public seems to know barely enough to read a daily newspaper. And then there is the really big mystery of 50 million functional illiterates. Who let this tragedy happen?

To answer these questions, I researched further back in history. I tried to understand how the early educators from a century ago looked at life, children and this new field they had created. The unexpected reality is that they were not primarily focused on education as most of us understand the term, but were preoccupied with social engineering. Education was a set of tools with which they intended to build a new, more leveled society.

Many of the articles I have written attempt to explain where and why our educators got off track. I have been especially fascinated by the Reading Wars, a significant conflict in American education and a clear illustration of what can happen when elite educators lose their way. Basically, phonics was scorned; a flawed method called whole word was enshrined and literacy promptly started to decline.

As I gained more understanding about the damage caused by bogus reading methods, I began to have a clearer sense of what we need to do across the board to improve our public education system. We simply have to identify the failed ideas and get rid of them.

Education reformers typically try three other approaches: spend money, recommend new policies or point out best practices. I do not think these techniques will work now. The problem is that the education establishment is married to its bad ideas; these people are set in their ways. We need an intervention.

Oddly enough, we are engaged in an education war with our own educators. I want to persuade the public that this is an intellectual war – we must fight the bad ideas with good ideas. I do not think we have any hope of improvement unless we confront what happened to American education: namely, that our schools were made ineffective by design.

So now we have to move in the opposite direction: discard the gimmicks that were smuggled into the system; then restore basics and academics to their proper prominence, albeit taught in the most ingenious ways. Our first job is to zero in on the dozens of overhyped “progressive” innovations that turned out, in practice, to be destructive and regressive. We will be better off without Whole Word, Reform Math, Constructivism, No Memorization, Self-Esteem, Bilingual Education, Cooperative Learning, Fuzzy Anything and a dozen others.

Many people like to believe that our educators are clumsy or befuddled by fads. No, I am afraid not. You would have a much clearer sense of what happened if you were to imagine a bunch of guys like John Dewey seated around a table discussing their ideological goals, devising tactics, and trying 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 cannot create this kind of disaster in a few years or by accident. No, the perpetrators have to keep plugging away, decade after decade. I think the evidence proves that our education establishment did just that.

It is painful to deal with such an unpleasant history, but it is also very liberating. Suddenly, everything makes sense. Dewey and his friends were socialists; they were trying to create a socialist America. This goal is clear in their writings. For them, the obvious first step was to reduce individualism and to raise more cooperative children. How do you do this? Dewey’s answer–and it is still in play–is that you drastically limit the time spent on reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, etc., while giving much more time to group activities. And when you do teach substance, you teach it in muddled, ineffective ways. There is the whole agenda in a nutshell. It is only a matter of time before everybody knows a lot less and thinks much less clearly.

I should mention, by the way, that I never criticize teachers. I am concerned only with top education theorists, administrators, etc. These people are responsible for what happens in American education. Teachers are as much the victims of these educators as the children and parents are.

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Bruce Price deals with all of these topics on his website Improve-Education.org and in his fifth book “THE EDUCATION ENIGMA – What Happened to American Education.”