An Open Letter to Bill Gates about Education

Two years ago, I watched with fascination as you and Norman Augustine (once the CEO of Lockheed Martin) prepared a report called "Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century." Here's the part I liked best: your report sternly warned that the future of our society is jeopardized by the low standards in our public schools.

There was another aspect, however, that was disconcerting. I didn't sense that you had correctly measured the obstacles arrayed against you.

Most people know that Bill Gates and Norman Augustine are two of our most successful business leaders. Both of you, I assume, are always practical and sincere. But what happens when you venture into a world where practicality and sincerity are not the most visible commodities?

You seemed to assume that if you gave good ideas to our Education Establishment, and pointed at the best road for the future, they would say "thank you" and immediately follow your advice. I doubt that.

I've been writing about American education for more than 20 years. The main thing that strikes me is how rigid our elite educators are. They assume that John Dewey, our preeminent educator, worked out the right answers a century ago. Why should they change? (Perhaps it needs mentioning that Dewey crafted a program intended to take the country toward collectivism; arguably the same tendencies are still dominant in the field's DNA.)

In short, your findings and recommendations were excellent. But I worried that you underestimated the difficulty of having the smallest effect on these people. Here's my guess: you can spend all the money you have, twice; write up glorious policy recommendations from now until the year 2222; wax poetic over best practice until cows sing opera. Our educators won't hear you. They may smile and say thanks but nothing will change.

I know there's humor here: the threadbare intellectual worrying about the billionaire. But really, have you looked closely at the people you are trying to influence? Education is what you might call a bad part of town. Gentlemen could go strolling there and never be heard from again.

So, rightly or wrongly, I worried. And I asked myself what might actually work when dealing with the Dewey Gang. Bring your heavy artillery, that's my advice. Consider yourself to be in a war, albeit an intellectual one. When they promote a bad idea, you have to blast it to smithereens, and replace it with a smart, sensible idea.

I think we need to look back over the last 100 years and deconstruct, one by one, all the bad pedagogies that our top educators concocted, namely, Look-Say, Reform Math, Constructivism, Self Esteem, Cooperative Learning, No Memorization, Multiculturalism, Critical Thinking, Fuzzy Anything, and so many more.

Here's the key point: all these ideas are sold to the public as Wonderful New Ways To Increase Learning. At the end of the year, I submit, all of them function in actual classrooms to decrease learning.

Bottom line: any good ideas you bring to the public schools will be smothered by these clever sophistries. Ergo, wouldn't it be prudent to dispose of the trash before the trash disposes of us?

Let me show, with just a few quick examples, how easy it is to deconstruct these impostors. It´s simply a matter of ignoring the bogus claims and focusing on the real-world consequences.

1) The quintessential unworkable pedagogy is Look-Say, which arrived around 1930. This method has created 50 million functional illiterates. Here's how: Look-Say (a/k/a Whole Word, Sight Words, etc.) is based on the myth that people can learn to read by memorizing words as SHAPES. Memorizing 500 shapes of any kind (flags, car, buildings, faces) is extremely difficult. But 500 sight-words is just the threshold of literacy; and English words, for a variety of reasons, are among the hardest shapes to memorize. Only those with extraordinary memories can learn to read this way. Ordinary humans don't have a chance.

2) We have equally dishonest practice in the teaching of math. Bottom line, the top educators overwhelm parents with fancy verbiage and hyperbolic marketing, while utterly refusing to teach mastery of the basics. These flawed pedagogies are generally referred to as Reform Math (or New New Math). They are to arithmetic what Whole Word is to reading, a toxin.

3) The panacea called Self Esteem is an easy one to demolish. Suppose a curriculum wants to teach X, Y and Z. Always, there will be some students who can't earn a good grade on Z. They will feel bad. What to do? Eliminate Z! See how it works? Self Esteem is an all-purpose jackhammer for dismantling any content left in the curriculum. When Z is gone, you know they'll come gunning for Y.

4) Meanwhile, Cooperative Learning trains children so they can't function alone, which they'll often have to do...Meanwhile, Constructivism declares that no learning is valid unless children construct new knowledge for themselves, an absurd requirement which means that students can't be told the simplest things...Meanwhile, No Memorization means that even if kids learn an interesting fact, they should never be expected to retain it. In one ear and out the other, that's the official policy of the Educational Establishment.

Any one of these scams can damage teaching; but these highly-promoted scams typically work in devilish synergy to sabotage education in the classroom. We need to explain to teachers, parents, and the community why these ideas are injurious and must be rejected. Then, as we create space for good ideas, we bring back an emphasis on basics and academics, on facts and knowledge. The correct approach seems obvious: start with reading, writing arithmetic and geography; segue in a few years to history, science, literature and the arts. Eight points of light that will light up our world.

And so, Mr. Gates, please don't assume our elite educators are interested in listening to anyone's good ideas. I believe they're hoping you go away. But I'm also sure you can outmaneuver these old ideologues. Bold tactics can save the day.

Bruce Price, who founded Improve-Education.org, is the author of The Education Enigma--What Happened To American Education; on Amazon.