Knowledge is Power

It’s not enough that the Education Establishment of this country has dropped tons of stupid policies on us. No, they have done something else almost as diabolical.

They have blurred the distinction between teachers, that is the people in the classrooms, and educators, that is, the bosses at the top. These two groups have no more to do with each other than management and labor typically do. Educators devise policies, often very flawed policies. Teachers have no choice but to carry them out.

For most of American history, this distinction was understood and required no explanation. Now, however, there is an epidemic of confusion. Make a comment about educators, or even education, and teachers wonder why you are saying mean things about them.

I think the Education Establishment has pulled off a cute trick here. They have deliberately tangled up the terms. How often have you heard kindergarten teachers referred to as “educators”? Here’s why this happens. Most people like and admire teachers. But more and more people are figuring out that “educators” are not people that you should like and admire.

I think the guy in the street gets it completely. Teachers are the people in the local schools struggling to educate his kids. Educators are the people in faraway cities who create the insane policies and methods that make educating his kids almost impossible.

So who doesn’t get it? Teachers often don’t get it. They are touchy and sensitive. So if anybody dares to criticize a counterproductive policy in America’s public schools, the teachers react as if the criticism is directed at them personally. Indignation fills up their souls. And they stop thinking altogether. It would be much more helpful if teachers would examine the policy being criticized and ask this question: how would my life be improved if that policy were changed? Probably a lot.

I’m always very careful to refer to “elite educators,” “top educators,” or the Education Establishment. I always stress that I’m talking about ONLY the people at the very top, the commissars with PhD’s and power at such places as the Harvard Graduate School of Education, people who are 1,000,000 miles away from the teachers. But still there is confusion. Somehow those elite commissars have managed to bamboozle teachers into thinking that the two groups have tea together every day.

The whole thing is preposterous, but you can easily see how all this confusion serves the interests of the Education Establishment. They are only too happy to hide behind the skirts of a kindergarten teacher. That part is easy to understand. The weird part is that the kindergarten teacher actually thanks the educators for their dishonorable behavior.

It reminds me of the Stockholm syndrome, where kidnapped people identify with the kidnappers. In extreme cases, and that’s the one we find ourselves in, the victims defend and protect the perpetrators. You also think of abused spouses who adamantly refuse to criticize their abusers. Enough. This perversity is getting in the way of all educational reform.

It seems to me that the Education Establishment has created three separate sets of victims: students; parents; teachers. They are all equally the victims. This is mainly what I write about, that the Education Establishment went off track because of ideology. They became committed to social engineering. As a result, they embraced one counterproductive idea after another, all of which impact destructively on almost everyone else.

If we’re going to improve public schools, we–everyone–has got to be more cold-blooded and analytical. The schools didn’t get dumb by themselves. The bad ideas were carefully created and promoted. That is, forced on the country.

Was anyone asking for the total hoax known as Whole Word? Were students demanding that sensible arithmetic be abandoned so that we could have New Math and Reform Math? I could take you through a dozen policies that our Education Establishment concocted and then imposed on us. My take is that these policies are bad for the country, bad for students, bad for parents, but ESPECIALLY bad for teachers.

Just to take the simplest case: if you are forced to use a hoax to teach reading, and few of your kids become good readers, where does that leave you as a teacher? There is no polite way to say it. You’re the walking dead. Going through the motions, working hard, giving tests, staying after school, but a huge percentage of your kids never become literate. The USA has 50 million functional illiterates. Undoubtedly, there were teachers teaching all those illiterates. But not really…

Aha, you say, so that’s the game?! The Education Establishment uses bogus methods to create the illusion of teaching and even of success, but it’s all make-believe? Exactly. And my message to teachers is, if we can get rid of all these bad ideas, your professional life would be so much better.

Look closely at the people who craft and praise the dubious ideas. In all other areas of human activity, when there is failure, you fire the bosses with the dumb plans. That’s what we need to do now.

(For more analysis of all the bad ideas, see “38: Saving Public Schools” on Improve-Education.org.)

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see “42: Reading Resources.” Another focus is math reform; see

Listen To Me, You Rich Successful People In Your Big Houses:

I know, I know, you don’t want to think about all the bad public schools out there. Nothing to do with you, right?? Wrong. The effects are oozing through the society. You are in danger.

Want safety? Here are three threats we have to overcome:

1) THE EDUCATION ESTABLISHMENT CAN’T BE TRUSTED. Almost a century ago, they took a wrong turn, and went down a road marked SOCIAL ENGINEERING. The problem for everybody else is that these ideologues hope to wreck the society we’ve got, so they can build the collectivized world they dream about.

They justify the planned transformation with this bit of fluff from John Dewey: “Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal.” What a quack. After all, it’s new knowledge that typically leads students to self-realization. The Left wants to use schools to turn kids into compliant comrades; they can’t tell the truth about their plans, so a lot that goes on in our schools is dishonest. Educators prattle endlessly about “education,” but their true passion is making sure that very little of it, in the ordinary sense, occurs.

2) BIG MEDIA AND ELITE UNIVERSITIES ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM. The media seems to think they should take orders from the NEA, etc. I see this pattern unfolding in Norfolk, Va., where the local paper will run 50 articles about one of its favorite liberal issues, but not one line about why a quarter of the kids don’t learn to read, or drop out of school.

Professors at the best universities should have jumped into the education wars, the math wars, the reading wars. But I can’t discover a single professor at my Ivy League school who stepped forward to support Rudolf Flesch or to decry the decline of the public schools.

We have to be disappointed that so many professors and journalists allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Education Establishment. Bottom line, we can’t expect help from the people who SHOULD be saving us.

3) WORSE STILL, MOST BIG SHOTS DON’T CARE. Talk to doctors, lawyers, bankers, brokers, Indian chiefs, executives, psychiatrists, movers and shakers of all kinds. Try to find one who knows anything about education or cares. They went to a good school years ago. Their kids went to private schools. Public schools are for them like a bad neighborhood on the other side of town; there’s no reason for them to think about it.

LISTEN TO ME, YOU RICH SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE IN YOUR BIG HOUSES. A bad part of town will stay put, but the neighborhood called bad education is oozing along your street. It’s seeping through the walls of your house, and into your living room. You might not escape. Tens of millions of people who can’t count, can’t read, can’t do a job correctly, don’t know enough to care about voting–this uneducated horde will hurt every part of your life. What stake do they have in sustaining a civilization they don’t understand and know little about?

So what is the answer to this hopeless situation? Here it is: practical, successful people–in order to save their own skins–have to get more involved.

The Education Establishment has a genius for finding the counter-intuitive, likely-to-fail approach. Almost everything is backwards. Business executives, forced to spend a day in a public school, might have nervous breakdowns. But you know what the even goofier problem is? A bunch of business leaders, eager to make improvements, would hire consultants from some place like Harvard Graduate School of Education! The very people who created all the problems. That’s how cowed and bamboozled everyone is.

No, the practical, successful people have got to stick to their MBA guns. Ignore the faux-experts. Do what works, for a change.

I’d argue that the biggest hoax of the last 100 years is Whole Word. (It’s the reason we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates.) So a good first step is to understand WHY sight-words don’t work. When you personally understand the deception, you’ll be angry. Maybe then you’ll get busy and get bold. We need you.

Then find out why New Math and Reform Math were evil jokes; why Constructivism is much ado about nothing; why every slogan used in the public schools–self-esteem, multiculturalism, and 25 others–is really just an excuse to teach less. At some point you’ll be mad as heck, and you won’t take it anymore.

(Improve-Education.org has articles on many of these topics, for example, “42: Reading Resources,” “36: The Assault on Math,” and “34: The Con In Constructivism.”).

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, a high-level education and intellectual site. One focus is reading; see “42: Reading Resources.” Another focus is education reform; see

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