1: SELF-ESTEEM

Carefully-timed praise can be an effective motivator. But telling somebody every day, “You’re wonderful,” will soon have no effect at all.

Why try harder if you get praise for doing nothing?

It gets worse. Self-Esteem is the all-purpose terminator for serious content. No matter what you try to teach, some children won’t learn the material. They will feel bad; they will lose self-esteem. Which must be prevented at all costs.

Solution: don’t teach that material. Don’t teach any material.

2: COOPERATIVE LEARNING

Kids have to do everything in groups, which means they don’t learn to think independently.

Smarter students will probably be slowed down. How can any students be graded accurately?

For a change of pace, working as part of a team might be helpful. But Cooperative Learning is another of those dictatorial dogmas that seeks  total control. Kids must be in groups all the time.

3: CONSTRUCTIVISM

The basic idea is that children should, create their own new versions of all knowledge. Teachers can’t say that 7 + 8 = 15. Children must figure this out for themselves.

Teachers. renamed FACILITATORS, must not teach. Instead, they must carefully steer children toward their discoveries.

Constructivism takes time. It virtually guarantees that children will learn only a part of the knowledge that educated people should have.

4:  NO MEMORIZATION

For the past century, as part of a crusade against knowledge and content, modern educators have denigrated memorizing ANYTHING.

A constant refrain heard in public schools is: “They can look it up.”

Children are not expected to know even the most basic things. All of education is slowed down. Millions of adult Americans end up cultural illiterates.

5: GUESSING

A common theme in all subjects is that children shouldn’t know–they should guess. Guessing is good.

The whole point of being educated is to stop guessing, except for unknown things like, “Who’s going to win the World Series?”

Schools traditionally helped children learn the information in dictionaries, encyclopedia and libraries. Now schools teach as little as they can get away with. Students have no other choice but to guess.

6: READING

The main sin of modern education is to pretend that English is not a phonetic language and should not be taught phonetically.

The Education Establishment promotes Sight Words, Dolch Words, Whole Words, Instant Words, Fry Words, Memory Words — everything but phonetic words, which is what English words are. The result is 50,000,000 functional illiterates.

Destroying the teaching of reading is the best way to destroy any chance a child has of becoming educated.

7: ARITHMETIC

Modern educators have shown considerable ingenuity at devising methods for teaching math that don’t teach math.

New Math circa 1960 was the first attempt in this direction. The public laughed. The educators went back to their labs and came up with a dozen new programs collectively called Reform Math.

All these curricula have several common traits: advanced concepts are stirred in with simple arithmetic so that kids and parents stay confused; basics and mastery are not stressed; calculators are really stressed; students go off to college not knowing what 6 times 8 is.

8: FOUNDATIONAL KNOWLEDGE

The secret for success in all education is to start with the simplest bits of information (i.e., Foundational Knowledge). Whether it’s arithmetic, reading, geography, history, or driving a car, we crawl first, then walk, then run, then we can move on to dancing or acrobatics.

Intelligent education teaches a LOT, teaches it EARLY, and teaches it in a SMOOTH, ORGANIZED way.

Modern educational theory finds endless reasons for teaching LITTLE, teaching it LATE, and teaching it in a JUMBLED, CHAOTIC way.

9: NO HANDWRITING

Handwriting –the way we write our signatures–is very beneficial for learning a language.

Modern educators try to skip penmanship. Students reach the end of high school and can not “write” English words except as printing.

Many phonics experts express the belief that cursive handwriting is an excellent discipline in itself and for mastering all aspects of language: letter forms, spelling, reading, and writing.

10: FUZZINESS

Modern education tends to accept (or even prefer) inaccuracy.

Invented spelling is good. Guessing is good. But precision is dismissed. Grammar is not taught. Close counts.

All that matters, we are told, is that students are trying. The process is important. Results are not.

Kids are trained to accept being ignorant, sloppy and vague.

Each of these bad ideas is a leech sucking blood out of the educational process.

It’s amazing that some people still think all this inefficient nonsense could happen by accident. Not likely.

The genius of American education has been misdirected into concocting methods that sound good but work badly.

Schools that wish to improve have a clear path to follow: get rid of the bad ideas.

Review the article. Do the opposite of what each method requires.