DAY 7: The Skin­ner Hor­ror Files The Influ­ence of Thorndike Lives On.…   Edward Thorndike“Thorndike intro­duced the con­cept of reinforcement.” Beware! When the media mouth­piece for the neo­con­ser­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion agen­da (The Wall Street Jour­nal) uses words “true mas­tery” and “prac­tice,” par­ents MUST under­stand that “they” are rec­om­mend­ing use of the Skin­ner­ian Direct Instruc­tion although “they” obvi­ous­ly aren’t going […]

Day 5: Skin­ner Hor­ror Files Skin­ner Trou­bles with Direct Instruction/Mastery Learning The fol­low­ing blog post is an excerpt from Appen­dix XXV of my book the delib­er­ate dumb­ing down of amer­i­ca. It is the sec­ond of a two-part alert series in the late 1990s that com­prised this par­tic­u­lar appen­dix. This is the best sum­ma­ry of what exact­ly […]

A Couple Loose Analogies Pic­ture total­i­tar­i­an­ism on one end of a scale and anar­chy on the oth­er. Both have issues but for dif­fer­ent rea­sons. Total­i­tar­i­an­ism is like Cap­i­tal “D.I.” Direct Instruc­tion where they attempt Pruss­ian style edu­ca­tion of forc­ing knowl­edge into heads. Here’s your task, repeat it. Con­struc­tivism is akin to anar­chy. Anar­chy always always […]

Day 3: The Skin­ner Hor­ror Files Pro­grammed Instruc­tion: An Introduction Exhib­it 1, p. 163 Exhib­it 1 is from a 1971 text­book Psy­chol­o­gy Applied to Teach­ing by Robert F. Biehler (Houghton Mif­flin Co., Boston). This pho­to illus­trates the ear­ly use of Skin­ner’s PROGRAMMED INSTRUCTION in the class­room using a “teach­ing machine” com­put­er. In order to under­stand what has […]

Sac­ri­lege! Direct Instruc­tion is bad??? By the end of this 3 part arti­cle I hope to explain what I mean by this before my home­school and char­ter school friends storm the cas­tle, though they do have some­thing to ponder. Back­ground: What Moti­vates Us I recent­ly lis­tened to a book on tape called “Dri­ve,” by Daniel Pink. […]

31 Days of B.F. Skin­ner Hor­ror Stories   Because so much edu­ca­tion reform rests upon Skin­ner’s meth­ods and ide­olo­gies, it is time to tell the truth. The next 31 days this blog will be post­ing cur­rent and his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion about the true nature of Skin­ner’s “edu­ca­tion” that has been foist­ed upon our nation’s children. “I […]

Day 2: The Skin­ner Hor­ror Files It depends on what the mean­ing of the word “char­ters” ‘is’… Salon arti­cle pub­lished HERE Here are excerpts from the Salon arti­cle above: Bill Clin­ton weighed in on the debate over char­ter schools this week, warn­ing that the pub­licly fund­ed yet autonomous schools must keep their “orig­i­nal bar­gain” if they want […]

The prob­lem with cen­sor­ship, apart from the loss of per­son­al lib­er­ty not to have gov­ern­ments inter­vene in what we think and how we must act, is two-fold if you are a wan­na-be Steer­er of Human Keels in the 21st Cen­tu­ry. Some infor­ma­tion always gets through and every­one knows that their flow of infor­ma­tion is being […]

Many of us have seen news reports in recent days on stu­dent walk­outs in the Den­ver sub­urbs. The School Board wants to ensure that cer­tain tra­di­tion­al areas are still empha­sized in Amer­i­can his­to­ry, while the stu­dents see the inter­ven­tion as pro­pa­gan­da. The adults involved seem a bit shocked that what they see as facts is […]

Ani­ta B. Hoge While every­one is out there debat­ing Com­mon Core, there is a sys­tem of stan­dard­iza­tion being put in place. And, if you are unaware of this sys­tem, what you don’t know about Com­mon Core, Choice, and Char­ter Schools CAN hurt you. This sto­ry tells a dif­fer­ent Com­mon Core tale with a much dif­fer­ent end­ing […]

Let’s pre­tend for a moment that we are all in the same room mulling over why K‑12 edu­ca­tion is shut­ting down what works and expand­ing every­thing that has ever been con­tro­ver­sial or even trag­ic. We could get out a White Board and pre­tend to be detec­tive Kate Beck­ett on the TV show Cas­tle and cre­ate […]

The End of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Government… …The Begin­ning of Glob­al “Gov­er­nance” Gov­ern­ment of the peo­ple, by the peo­ple, for the peo­ple?! Accord­ing to Reed Hast­ings of Net­flix you only have 20–30 years of free­dom left! Get out to vote now, because you won’t have it in the future. While many con­ser­v­a­tives are out in the polit­i­cal […]