Summary of press release: Improve-Education.org, a unique intellectual site, presents 110,000 lively words on a range of topics. A major focus is explaining the decline of public schools and urging the public to get involved:"There's a new Congress and a new mood," says Bruce Price, founder of Improve-Education.org. "Maybe now we can fix things. Everybody says that public schools are wallowing in mediocrity. What people have trouble understanding is why so-called educators would permit this to happen. And what do we do next? Explaining--and reversing--the decline of American education is the mission of Improve-Education.org."This unique site has grown to 60 original articles on a range of intellectual subjects from Latin and birds to sophistry and Taoism. But the focus is on the false theories and phony methods often used in public schools. Price is a strong critic of the Education Establishment, those professors at the top who seem to have a fatal weakness for every sophistry that strolls by.
"Our Education Establishment," Price notes, "pretends to be a technocratic elite interested in the education of children. In truth, the top educators seem to be ideologues obsessed with creating a collectivist country. If public schools got back in the knowledge business, and forgot the social engineering, we'd see immediate progress."
The paradigm for all our mistakes, Price argues, is reading. The Education Establishment, for 75 years, has forced teachers to use the method called Whole Word or Sight Words. "Which clearly does NOT work," Price emphasizes. "Never forget that we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. This has to be the biggest blunder in our history. Even 40 years ago, some analysts were speculating about 'planned illiteracy.' Think about that phrase. The departure from common sense was so drastic."Some of the most arresting articles on Improve-Education.org deconstruct Whole Word, the flawed method that has been embraced by most of the big names in the Education Establishment. The bad judgment shown by these faux-experts, Price believes, is the root-cause of the problems in our school system.
"But here's a reason for optimism," Price says. "There are many people who feel the way I do, and many sites fighting to save American education. I run into the most remarkable people across the country, waging their own battles in their communities. Local media often do little to help education. So people undertake the battle themselves. The internet allows people to communicate and fight back."
Price, who is both a writer and a painter, has always been an enthusiastic explorer of the new digital tools. He was a full-time digital artist for many years and is featured in the current issue of Computer Graphics, published by IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
More kudos: A book coming in February, "Faces of Learning," edited by Sam Chaltain, features 50 teachers, politicians, thinkers, etc., Price among them. "Basically," Price says, "I'm the contrarian."
Price is also the author of five books, a member of Mensa and PEN, and is listed in Who's Who. He has 250 education articles on more than a dozen sites, including 55 book reviews on Amazon and 50 videos on YouTube.
"Here's my standard challenge throughout," Price concludes. "Start your own crusade. Or join mine. We have to get serious about saving education. We are wasting a vast amount of money and getting poor results. Many smart people, including Bill Gates, have concluded that public schools are a threat to our national security. This country should be disgusted."Price believes that the solutions normally discussed, for example, bigger budgets, are secondary. "What matters," he says, "is the intent of the people at the top. If they sincerely want children educated, those children will be educated to whatever limit is possible. What we're doing now is taking children who could learn to count to 100 and making sure they never count past 30. It's pathetic."
Our most urgent tasks, Price believes, are eliminating Whole Word from public schools; eliminating Reform Math and Core Standards (replacing them with basic arithmetic); and discarding Constructivism, the biggest fad today. Fundamentally, Price would like to see a better class of intellectuals running our schools. Here's the main requirement: people who really love knowledge.
For more background on the reading crisis, please see "42: Reading Resources" on
Improve-Education.org. (For other topics, simply use SITE-SEARCH feature on homepage of Improve-Education.org.)
For a quick explanation of the major bad ideas, Google "Volunteer To Help Educate America" ( bit.ly/fXc0HO ).
To interview Bruce Price, please call Word-Wise Education, 757-455-5020.
(The three videos are titled: HOW TO TEACH ANYTHING; 8 REFORM IDEAS; and THE BIGGEST CRIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY.)