FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Our Education Establishment, no matter how many millions of children end up illiterate, is able to suppress debate and elude public outrage. Critics are typically ignored. After all, if they disagree with the Education Establishment, they must be wrong.
“So it was a strange surprise,” Bruce Price explains, “ when education reformers in Italy contacted me for help in their fight against sight-words in public schools. Must be a mistake, I thought. American experts constantly stress that a phonetic language would never need sight-words. Oh, they wail, if only English were perfectly phonetic like Italian!!
Here’s a shocker. Italian public schools had, in fact, detoured into sight-words, causing all the problems we have here, namely, dyslexia, ADHD, and too much reliance on psychiatric-plus-pharmaceutical solutions. Apparently, social engineers everywhere love illiteracy; and nothing delivers it better than sight-words.
Many phonics experts stated for years that dyslexia is almost never a real disease. In fact, it should be called dysteachia.
Italian reformers reached the same conclusion. Their website (note it can be either English or Italian) asks: Learning Disorders or Teaching Disorders?
Price has been an informal consultant to Pensare Oltre for almost 4 years. “They are a unique group," he believes. “Smart, sophisticated, scientifically inclined. They’re thinking through the weird practices of their Education Establishment so they can persuade their country to get back on track.”
Italian is beautiful, entirely phonetic, and possessed of a proud literary and operatic heritage. The people who would teach Italian with sight-words announce to the world: I, Dunce.
Two years ago Price wrote up his involvement with Pensare Oltre (which means thinking ahead) under the headline: "Education Reform: Italian Group Shows Americans How It’s Done"
This year they’ve invited Price to speak twice at their two-day conference in Milan, a great honor. One speech is called “Know Thine Enemy,” which investigates what kind of people are making a mess of our public schools. (Typically they are called Progressives.) A second smaller talk is titled “Broken Promises.” Again and again, our public schools promise to teach X but years later nobody knows much X.
The conference on October 20-21, 2017 mixes a lot of themes: education, psychiatry, culture, science, entertainment. “I don’t believe,” Price says, “there is another group in the world like Pensare Oltre, certainly not in the US, and, boy, do we need one.”
Pensare Oltre is particularly offended by the tendency of school officials to attribute every problem to an alleged psychological disorder, such as dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, dyscalculia, and dysorthography. If you teach something incorrectly, you should expect problems. The more incorrect you are, the more deep and ugly the problems will be. That’s been the quiet history in the United States since 1931 when sight-words were pushed into the schools.
Addendum: “Saving K-12— What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” is intended to help ordinary citizens understand the machinations of our Education Establishment. To be published November 17. See more info: Lit4u.com.
This post first appeared on Education Improved -- We Can Dream, please read the originial post: here
