The sabotage of K-12 education is easily implemented by rejecting good methods that work, while simultaneously forcing phony substitutes into classrooms.

QED: our experts embraced a far-left ideology that prefers control and leveling. Weirdly enough, our Education Establishment ends up promoting anti-education agenda.

Here are the five most egregious examples of this totalitarian strategy in action:

1. Sight-Words Versus Phonics. All the main European languages are phonetic. You first learn the alphabet, then the sounds represented by the letters; and then the blends of those sounds. This approach has always worked. It's the method used in Hebrew, Arabic, Phoenician, Greek, and Latin. But the saboteurs said no, no, no, you have to memorize each word by itself, as a visual shape (such as a currency symbol). Quite silly. Rudolf Flesch wrote a whole book explaining Why Johnny Can't Read (1955). Please read at least Chapter 1 of this wonderful book. You will understand the curse that befell us. (Available on Archive.org)

2. Constructivism Versus Direct Instruction. The main faux-strategy throughout the 20th century was to announce that children can't be taught directly. You must let them figure out everything for themselves. Students capable of independent work might get along fine in high school or college, but not young children. Most can't even read; you can’t expect them to do original research in the library. The main impact of Constructivism is that the simplest facts of history, geography, and science can easily be baffling. The children may never figure out the significance of July 4, etc., etc. Remember that Direct Instruction is what all humans do every day since the beginning of time. But Progressives want modern-sounding jargon that can be sold as magical ways to take children to higher ground. Probably low ground is the actual goal all along. (See The Emptiness of Constructivist Teaching.)

3. Traditional Arithmetic Versus Phony Replacements. New Math in 1962, Reform Math in the 1980s, Common Core Math around 2005—all were laborious concoctions that wasted everyone's time. The main gimmick, once again, is to destroy proven methods, and replace them with unworkable methods. So children reach middle school and high school but cannot do basic math. Then the school announces, sorry, this child can’t do decimals, percentages, and other math once traditionally learned in middle school. So the children are basically consigned forever to mediocrity in math. (One video beautifully explains this whole predicament in 15 minutes: An Inconvenient Truth by M J McDermott.).

4. Cursive Versus Block Letters. In all the years before 1950, every human on the planet who wanted to read and write English started with phonics and cursive. The saboteurs tried to discredit both as quickly as possible. Even now, Cursive is routinely written off as irrelevant and too much trouble. So we have kids in public schools who can't read the Ford logo and many others such as General Electric and Hallmark. A recent article on the internet sneered at cursive for being bad design. That's dishonest. Cursive logos have usually been more stylish, but you could probably find a poll claiming more than half the population can't read them. So instead of fixing the public schools, careless executives are eager to kill off their logos. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that cursive speeds the acquisition of literacy because cursive helps children memorize the shapes of letters. Furthermore again, cursive lets children read our historical documents. Public schools in general always opt for teaching less of everything. That's bad policy recommended for bad reasons. Teach more.

5. Memorization Should Be Encouraged. If you want to speak French, you have to memorize French vocabulary. Similarly, if you want to do arithmetic efficiently, it greatly helps if you memorize the multiplication tables. The saboteurs hate memorization because (my theory) they love ignorance. They typically lament rote memorization, which is for them clearly a dreadful disease. They tell the students straight out, don’t bother with dates and other historical information; or with oceans and continents; the 50 states; other countries around the world; the many basic facts that everyone should know such as the days of the week, mph, AM/PM. The only reason you could be against memorizing basic information is you want to keep students out of touch with reality. Do the opposite. Have a map or two in every classroom. If students show interest in something, take advantage of this: embellish with details. Use the various national holidays to explain points of history. Everything that's in the news every day can be used as the springboard for discussing context.

Summing up these five examples: imagine all these destructive strategies working in tandem. It's like a gang of thugs overwhelming a victim. (Saving K-12 is your best guide to this complex destruction.)

Everybody accepts the idea that we have tens of millions of people who can't read, even kids in college. Time for more people to accept the obvious: we have continual decline because the wrong people are in charge. One simple solution is to return to education ideas that actually work.

Bruce Deitrick Price is the author of Saving K–12 and The Education Enigma. His new novel is The Boy Who Saves The World (suspense, crime, A.I., romance). See Lit4u.com for info on Price’s books.