Let's Fix Education / by Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 21: A Quick Guide to the Reading Wars   (Nov. 17, 2021) Reading is the single most important skill. But our public schools insist on teaching it wrong. This is well-known because ed professors have done a lot of research over the last hundred years. Everyone should get involved in winning this debate. If you want children to read, teach them phonics. ------------------- More detail on the...

Episode 20:  Reflections on the Ultimate Goal of K-12 Education  (Nov. 10, 2021) The purpose of this podcast is to tell you gently that our public schools are deformed by two kinds of educational malpractice. Children are intentionally dumbed down by pedagogical nonsense. Additionally,  and here we have an assist from Ayn Rand, children are kept infantile, and never encouraged to become mature adu...

Episode 19:  Big Lies in K-12   (Nov. 3, 2021) Public school are full of dishonesty and deception. Parents have to deal with this.  First, understand what's going on. Second, take steps to work around the problem.  Here's the background. The Education Establishment has concocted many ways of undermining K-12 education, typically by lying about what is possible or helpful. The simplest te...

Episode 18:  Why Liberal Arts Education is Good for Everyone   (Oct. 27, 2021) Why have American public schools gotten dumber and dumber over the last hundred years? Simple. Because the schools have systematically driven out the most important ingredient: knowledge. And the importance of knowledge is not knowing lots of miscellaneous facts, it's being able to analyze and assess those facts. N...

Episode 17:  Who Can Control The Control Freaks?  (Oct. 20, '21) What is the real flaw in progressive education? What is the secret sin? Mainly, progressives act as if they are trying to create the best schools possible. That's a con. They're trying to create schools that will produce the socialist dreams they have. RELEVANT ARTICLE: Normal healthy people don't want to be dicta...

Episode 16:   Have the American media betrayed us?  (October 13, 2021) True story,  most of the work I've done in my life is related to journalism, writing, publishing, editing, et al. I wanted to think the professionals controlling our daily papers are people  like me.  I wanted to think well of them. Big mistakes. Fifteen years late, I realize that the people running the New York Times are...

Episode 15:   Sir Ken Robinson was wrong and destructive.  (Oct. 6, 2021) The grand tradition throughout the history of progressive education is to claim you have solved every problem in the schools, but what you've actually done is make everything worse. The great new ideas typically function as viruses, parasites, invasive species, and similar.  Contrarians like me suspect this is the real...

Episode 14 (Sept. 29): Socialism versus Education. A lively run-through of the major developments that will take you to socialism or communism.  A key player throughout is education, or education that has been corrupted to serve ideological purposes. Once this process starts moving, usually it turns out badly because too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the ambitious and ruthless p...

Episode 13:   How We Can Save K-12 The people running the schools are the people ruining the schools. They think of themselves as saviors from a higher plane.  But look at the damage they do. They're more accurately called parasites.  The public needs to understand what's going on in the schools. Specifically, Americans need to understand how all the bogus methods function in the classro...

Episode 12: what does student centered even mean? Anything?  Sept. 15, 2015 When our top educators start suggesting that children can do their job better than they can, we need to let these people retire. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The three recommended guides and an excellent work by each: Why Johnny Still Can’t Read by Rudolf Flesch Crimes o...

Episode 11: We Can Have Better Schools At Less Cost (Sept. 8) More than most people imagine, the entire education sector is set up as a profit-making enterprise. Sure, most of these people are socialists and communists wanting to transform this country. But why should they pay for their political agenda? The cute trick is to make you pay for their agenda. Pay and pay. --------- Testimonials for Sa...

Episode 10, Sept. 1:   Max Efficiency: How To Study A New Subject Some suggestions on how to make education more efficient. School is starting. There are many clever young people, probably on a trajectory toward college, who will find value in these ideas. Weird but true, I don't think the Education Establishment thinks in terms of efficiency. If we would let them, they will spend a whole yea...

Episode 9 summary : why dyslexia is for the most part a fraudulent spin on a common school problem. Children don't have dyslexia so much as the schools give them dyslexia-like symptoms. Public schools routinely claim that 15-20% of children have dyslexia. Done deal. Nothing you can do about it. Phonics experts say real dyslexia is virtually nonexistent. The problem is that our schools insist...

August 18 -- Episode 8: How To Teach In The Third World (15.11 min) Poor schools can do great work, conversely a rich country like America can have many dreadful schools. The “third world” is more a state of mind.  If the leaders are smart and sincere, kids will be well educated, no matter where. Podcast Overview Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are so bad. The people in...

Episode 7: The Proof Is In The Plodding (23:11 min) When students are happy and excited, they're probably learning a lot. However, our public schools are characterized by a lot of plodding, by students and administrators both. Plodding is the giveaway that you're doing it wrong.  PODCAST OVERVIEW AT END For more info about "Saving K-12", see Lit4u.com/saving-k-12  Let's Fix Edu...

Episode 6:  Why Teach History? (24.09 min) History is fun. It's also fundamental. You have to know how the world got where it is. Sadly, most of our students have no sense of time, no sense of what came before what. Students can rarely name a date within 50 years, or point to a geographical location within 500 miles. Because nobody ever required even this small degree of precision. Reviews of...

Episode 5: What's Missing In Education?? (13:30 min) What's missing is education. The traditional content, the basics, the essential skills, the vital academic center—-all of that is missing. The whole reason for building schools has been undermined and continually tossed aside. Bruce Deitrick Price's main education site: Improve-Education.org Let's Fix Education explains to America...

Episode 4: The Crisis In Education: What Caused It?   (18:48 min) A quick look at the personalities and philosophies that shaped American K-12 education starting more than 100 years ago. These people were mostly Progressives (i.e., Socialists). They had a new vision of why we build schools in the first place. For them, the goal is to create a new kind of child who will then build a new kind of Ame...

Episode 3: Hey! Teach Those Kids To Read   (17:16 min) The United States has 50 million functional illiterates, primarily because the public schools insist on using an inferior method known as sight-words. Phonetic languages, such as English, are best learned phonetically.  Fix the reading crisis and we will have a renaissance. At present, many children advance very slowly, if at all, for a simple...

Episode 2: How I Became An Education Reformer (21:14 min) I had no grand visions. Rather, I was fascinated by the unnecessary failure throughout the school system. In sports they talk about unforced errors. K-12 is crawling with unforced errors. Why?  I want everyone to understand the bogus theories and methods that cause all the failure. My goal is to turn everyone into an education reformer. Wed...

Episode 1: Students Don’t Know Anything (18:39 min)  Look at any stats. Listen to K-12 teachers and college professors. The message is always the same. Our young people don't know much, especially the ordinary kids. We can safely say that our Education Establishment hates facts and scorns the teaching of  knowledge. June 30, 2021 Let's Fix Education explains to Americans why their schools are...