Unmasking Education Swindle
Look at the long history of criticism of the education system. It’s a wonder that this field still exists — quackery, wasteland, 12-year sentence . . . There was even a legal symposium in the 70s on “Suing the schools for fraud”. The lawyers speculated that there would be a successful case within 5 years ! Didn’t happen.
Bruce has productively spent the last decades unmasking some of the frauds in education, particularly the disasters dumped on us by seemingly deliberate reading failures. Bruce finds a long history of culprits and economic factors that have enabled wholesale acceptance of questionable practices. Scientific evidence is definitely not a factor in education decision-making, is it?
Patrick Groff (1924-2014) was heavily involved in the reading issues of the day. Here is a digest of what he saw as fueling the whole-language fiasco: http://www.readinghorizons.com/research/whole-language-vs-phonics-instruction#special
“The Special Attractions of Whole-Language (WL)
1 . . . educators historically have been notorious for their inability to resist the lures of educational innovations, regardless of whether or not they have been empirically validated.
2 . . . WL relieves educators of much direct personal accountability for the results . . .
3 . . . WL appeals to many educators’ romantic and/or humanistic interpretations of what is healthy child development . . . honoring children’s freedom and dignity is held to be more essential than how literate they become.
4 . . . in the past, educators have ignored or rejected most of the empirical findings in practically all aspects of their field of endeavor.
5 . . .the apparent simplicity of WL is alluring for teachers . . . With WL, teachers do not have to submit to pedagogical discipline that a prescribed course of direct and systematic instruction demands.
6 . . . educators who have liberal social, economic, and political views doubtless are charmed by WL’s decidedly left-wing agenda . . . ”
Until there is legislation and laws forbidding quackery in education and science is no longer held in disdain we will continue to see spotty education quality from our schools. Thanks to people like Bruce for keeping on exposing the frauds. At least some parents, if they had real choice, could then choose evidence-based schools.
[ Posted as comment to American Thinker, article by Bruce Deitrick Price, “K-12 ‘Alien Covenant” http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/05/k12_alien_covenant.html ]