"New American Curriculum" was crafted to meet several goals: to be short but comprehensive; to indicate which methods are failures and must be rejected and as quickly spell out what needs to be added; finally, to enable ordinary citizens to reclaim their schools and make them become what all of us know they ought to have been all along.
"New American Curriculum" is intended to spark debate and to inspire your own reform ideas. print this out and use it to start discussions.
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one). REAL READING. No more Whole Word, Sight Words, Dolch Words. No more identifying words by their shapes. No more guessing, picture clues, and functional illiteracy. Basically pick a lovely phonics program, mix it up with singing and poetry. Teach all students to read by the age of seven. (Google 42: Reading Resources for a list of programs.)
two) REAL ARITHMETIC. No more New Math or Reform Math. No more so-called Standards Math because the standards are wrong-headed. No more spiraling, fuzzy, guessing, or mixing advanced topics in with simple arithmetic. No more Constructivism. Pick Singapore Math, Saxon Math or any other highly popular program and make sure children master arithmetic step at a time.
three) REAL FOUNDATIONAL KNOWLEDGE IN ALL SUBJECTS. No more demonizing memory. No more scorning facts. Students needs basic information; and the brain is designed to need it. No more so-called critical thinking about things nobody knows anything about. In lieu, students actually learn basic facts, the simple ones first, and then you build from there. Why? Because facts are fun; and knowledge is power.
four) REAL HISTORY, GEOGRAPHY, GOVERNMENT. No more Social Studies. No more propaganda, indoctrination, and political correctness. No more multiculturalism for its own sake. History is taught by individuals who majored in History. You learn names, dates, places and events. You understand why things happened the way they did. Everybody loves a lovely story. History is a million lovely tales.
five) REAL EDUCATION. No more playing games. What do you think is going on at lovely private schools, and the best colleges? Schooling is not about what children feel. Its about what they know. There is no fuzzy, no guessing, no bull. Imagine, for example, you take a work in French; you actually learn French--speak it, read it, write it. That is the paradigm. At the finish of each day you know over at the beginning. Sure, games, jokes, laughter, field journeys, movies, sitting in the grass staring at the sky. There's no rules except that children must be learning, continuously learning.
STARTING POINT: people now in charge of public schools--the Schooling Establishment--are focused on social engineering and have thus made a hash of public schooling. They say to the scholars, Its about you. No, its about them. Their politics. Their designs for our future. These faux-educators ought to stand aside. To work in the public schools, people ought to possess knowledge, love knowledge, and need to communicate knowledge to the next generation.
END POINT: better schools at less cost.
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