Summary: Bad ideas are killing the public schools. Education activist Bruce Price describes the clunkers in 150 words. How do we improve? Easy. Get rid of all the bad ideas.
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Okay, you’re a busy person. You have only a few minutes to think about education.

Fine! That’s all we need to take a quick look at the 10 worst ideas in the public schools. Here they are:

1) Math is chaotically taught so that children don’t master even simple arithmetic; they reach college unable to multiply and divide

2) Flawed reading instruction is used (one-third of children never read “at grade level”)

3) Basic facts and skills are not taught; academic content is belittled; foundational knowledge is ignored so that Americans, as students and adults, end up uninformed

4) Guessing is encouraged in all subjects (this is especially devastating in reading as real readers don’t guess, they read)

5) Constructivism is injected into every course (children must “reinvent the wheel” and create their new versions of everything)

6) Group learning is everywhere enforced (children don’t learn to think independently)

7) Memorization is scorned (children are discouraged from actually retaining information)

8) Self-esteem is relentlessly pushed in all situations (do a really bad job, get a gold star)

9) Handwriting is not taught even though this skill helps with reading, writing, vocabulary, etc.

10) Standards are kept low (fuzziness praised; precision disdained; sloppiness tolerated; ignorance accepted)

Presumably for ideological reasons, our Education Establishment appears more passionately focused on social engineering than on intellectual engineering. The result is that they tend to favor inferior pedagogical methods. That’s what I believe this list is: deeply inferior and counterproductive pedagogical methods.

There’s an easy solution: get rid of them. Toss them in the garbage. Do the opposite of what each bad idea suggests.

Remember, all of these gimmicks are working behind-the-scenes 24/7 to undermine whatever education is offered in any given school.

Put aside for the moment whether a school is rich or poor, the teachers good or bad, the students smart or not so smart. Put aside all the factors usually said to be important. A lot of these items are exploited as alibis or excuses. Typically, however, these are surface phenomena.

Look deeper, inside the gunked-up engine. That’s where you’ll find the 10 worst ideas in education doing their damage.

(Conversely, we can clean out these bad idea and quickly have a good school. That’s obviously a school where students master arithmetic; read fluently; learn lots of basic knowledge; don’t guess and don’t invent knowledge--they learn knowledge; they can work and think independently; they retain information; they earn praise by doing good work; they learn handwriting; and they try to set high standards of accuracy and discipline.)

For a brief explanation of how each of the bad ideas hurts a school, please see “46: Public Schools Seem Designed To Fail” on Improve-Education.org. Also note: "47: Teach One Fact Each Day." Many other articles explain how our public schools might be improved.