Bruce Deitrick Price

(Summary: some schools would rather have a tornado pass by than actually teach anything It’s this country’s number-one medical problem: brains rarely used, now atrophied

The August 2 cover of TIME magazine screamed: “The Case Against Summer Vacation” With this subtitle: “We romanticize it

For a few years I thought the worst possible gimmick in education was Whole Word, basically a device to make sure kids don't learn to read In the last few months, the clamor grew about Core Standards and National Standards, and I started to focus on arithmetic

Summary: Schools don’t teach facts, apparently because the Education Establishment prefers empty-headed kids who can be told what to think But kids need facts, want facts, and can learn facts

Summary: when you understand why educators scorn geography, you know all the reasons why American public schools keep getting dumber It’s easy to point out that public schools don’t teach much geography

Summary: even liberal media are starting to realize that we are sliding into an educational swamp, most of it caused by liberal educators Okay, liberals, everything’s cool

Summary: Media are supposed to be neutral and state the facts Instead, most newspapers have rushed to promote new, unproven ideas coming from federal government

Summary: A lot of modern education is incoherent and not really trying, except for foreign language courses There, teachers still proceed in a logical and sequential way toward ambitious goals

Imagine the chagrin of our elite educators They have labored for a century to purge content, facts, and knowledge from the classroom

The following plea--written 55 years ago and addressed to all the teachers of America--is still solid gold today: "You are a grade-school teacher I know that you are doing a conscientious job, that you work overtime for very little pay, that you love children and are proud of your profession