Gentle readers, I strongly recommend that you study Bruce Deitrick Price’s excellent Web site: http://improve-education.org/index.html

I have learned an enormous amount from his site. He explains how and why many of the educational approaches that are routinely used in public schools in the United States do not work. The interesting question is why the Educational Establishment, by which I mean the people who run the teachers’ colleges and make decisions at a state and school district level, insist on forcing teachers to use ineffective teaching methods. I hope to answer this question studying the historical record, by reading the books written by people such as William Torrey Harris and John Dewey, and by looking at the financial relationships among the key decision-makers. Fortunately, a lot of this information is becoming available for free over the Internet.

We seem to have an equal contempt for the Education Establishment. Ruthless SOB’s. But you are quicker to say that these people are serving the business community, whereas I think they’re serving John Dewey’s progressive vision. What we really need is for some of the top professors at Harvard, etc. to come out of the educator’s closet and tell us what in fact they were really trying to do in their meetings.

Rendering children illiterate and ignorant is not an easy job. I would say it was somewhat like running the gas chambers in Germany. Surely some of these people know the evil they do.

My own analysis is that the people in the middle and lower levels of the Education Establishment may be sufficiently simple-minded that they don’t actually know what they’re doing. But there have to be people at the very top, maybe only 10 or 50 of them, who know that when, for example, they banish phonics from elementary grades and force children to memorize sight-words, they are condemning millions to illiteracy (or semi-literacy).

Please, if any ruthless education commissars are out there, weighed down by heavy consciences, please contact this site with your confessions, or contact me. I would love to interview you.

Bruce Deitrick Price