I love WIRED magazine. I read it cover-to-cover every
month.
If you want to know about a complex digital phenomenon such
as Stuxnet, for example, read the story in WIRED. That's where Israeli and American
brainiacs planted viruses and other malware in the Iranian nuclear
program, thereby crippling it for several years. The complexity of
this operation was almost beyond human grasp. Most of Iran's centrifuges
and gauges were controlled by foreign enemies. Motors ran at
destructively high speeds, but the gauges said everything was fine.
In one area, however, WIRED disappoints me greatly.
The editors don't seem to grasp that Stuxnet-like phenomena
abound throughout American K-12.
As with Stuxnet, you have viruses and malware planted in
every public school. Genuine, efficient education is virtually impossible
to achieve. Every aspect of the school's operation is compromised.
Gauges don't give good readings; centrifuges run at the wrong speeds.
Hostile forces seem to control everything. One is reminded of the
famous A Nation At Risk report (1983), which declared:
"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the
mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed
it as an act of war."
It was. It is.
Good pedagogical techniques are like an efficient machine
or a well designed circuit. You get the most results with the least
energy. That's what science is all about.
Well, here is some tragic news. You won't find such
fancy outcomes in our K-12.
What our schools are full of is bad science and egregious
engineering. That's where I tell you that to learn to read or do arithmetic,
you have to hop on one foot, wear only denim, or
whistle "Dixie." In other words, the pedagogy includes
unnecessary and destructive steps.
Bad science, intellectually speaking, is almost as
fascinating as good science. How exactly does it work? Who sets out
to design something blatantly inefficient? Who funds and authorizes a
clunker? (It's not just bad science. It's bad faith, and it should
put people in jail.)
Throughout World War II, sabotage was a constant menace. The Germans relied
heavily on slave labor; slaves often figured out how to create failure by
design. Anything with a motor has ball bearings. A grain of sand
can cause early malfunction. Or drop bearings on the floor and warp them
a little; months later, a torpedo might veer off course instead of destroying
an enemy freighter. That inaccuracy is exactly equivalent to some of the
misguided theories and methods used in our public schools. These
educational torpedoes, so to speak, are not intended to hit their announced
targets.
Good educational practice requires not just sincere people,
but lots of research and testing. Education has a lot in common with
cooking and chemistry – they are all empirical sciences. You have to test
and refine many recipes until you are sure you have found the best quiche, the
ideal plastic, or the perfect way to teach arithmetic.
Any time a massive new educational scheme is imposed on the
country more or less overnight, you know it's bad science and a fraud.
The people in charge can have no idea whether they have the optimal
answers. Whole Word was pushed into every school in 1931, as
fast as resistance could be smashed. New Math was imposed the same way circa
1962. Reform Math was imposed the same way circa 1985.
And then we had the onslaught known as Common Core around 2009. All of these things had
the delicacy, and the helpfulness, of Hitler invading Russia in 1941. All
were failures from the point of view of better education. But if your
goal is to subvert the country, these initiatives were successful. They
are all bad science and, in varying degrees, still damaging the local kids.
By contrast, let's look at what serious educational
research looks like. Operation
Follow-Through, from 1967 to 1977, pitted a half-dozen major educational
theories against each other, using 200,000 students. Siegfried Engelman's
Direct Instruction won overwhelmingly. The federal officials had promised
Engelmann that the winning ideas would be put into practice throughout the
country. In fact, the treacherous feds reneged on their promises and went
on supporting the worst theories – i.e., various varieties of bad science.
Operation Follow-Through shows you two things: what the
best theories are and that our Education Establishment is staffed by phonies.
No similar testing has since been attempted, as the experts know that
their ideas would lose.
WIRED and other educational publications should be
interested in all facets of education. They should be especially
fascinated by the blatant breakdown of common sense and logic that we see
throughout our school system. Weirdly
dysfunctional methods are preferred even though the proper methods are
well known. Why? All these bad methods are like running centrifuges
at excessive speeds. You wouldn't do this if you had benevolent goals.
Bad science appears in endless manifestations, like ugly
prison tattoos. Let us consider a tiny example. Several decades
ago, schools started emphasizing a gimmick called self-esteem. Anything that reduces a child's
self-esteem is said to be bad; it must be eliminated. If the goal is to
count to 20, and a few children can't learn this, what is the remedy?
Should we give extra help to the kids who can't count? No. We
stop expecting any kids to count to 20, so no one will feel bad.
All by itself, self-esteem can destroy a school system.
Multiply this tiny example by dozens of other gimmicks and millions of
kids. You will have a wasteland cleverly created by bad science.
The problem with our school system is that the lower-level
people seem poorly trained to pursue excellence, and at the top there seems to
be a cadre of dedicated subversives who deliberately sabotage our schools for
ideological reasons. Socialism prefers leveling.
K-12 is the land that smart, well intentioned
people abandoned. Education is a field where science is much
more critical than is normally thought, and where science is routinely
flouted more than anyone imagines.
Conversely, education
well-crafted is a thing of beauty, and all students benefit. Why
isn't WIRED leading the charge to find the best theories and methods?
Donald Trump promised to eliminate Common Core and return
schools to local control. When this happens, the goal for
all these newly liberated forces is simply stated: put good science back
into the schools.
Bruce Deitrick Price explains theories and
methods on his education site Improve-Education.org.
For info on his four new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.
