New Site Seeks to Entertain...And to Improve the USA
Improve-Education.org is like having an upscale, entertaining magazine on your monitor. The underlying theme is that our schools must be improved.
Norfolk, VA (Issues Wire / PRWEB) January 11, 2007 -- Readers who enjoy classy publications such as the Smithsonian or the New Yorker will love a brainy new site called Improve-Education.org. This e-magazine presents lively essays on language, art, sophistry, culture, robots, maps, phonics, English usage, birds, poetry, Taoism, creativity, Latin, the novel 1984, dubious education policies and a lot more. Improve-Education.org is the perfect antidote for rainy weekends, boring TV, and dull days at the office.
Novelist and education activist Bruce Deitrick Price explains his goal: "I wanted to create a unique site which a great variety of people will enjoy coming back to. Everything has to be worth reading, and fun to read. There's no news or current events; I try to write essays that will be useful many years from now. This is my boast: anybody who visits Improve-Education.org will find something to like."
Here are some of Price's intriguing titles:
The Plight of Poetry
Birds Like Us
In Praise of Stark Lucidity
Latin Lives On
Philosophy Weeps
Let's Get Serious About Education
MAX Your Creativity
1984--The Cover Up
A Metalinguistic Inquiry Into F
The Quizz (100 facts that high school grads should have learned)
Form, Function Foolishness
"Map" Alert
All the articles on Improve-Education.org grew out of Price's intellectual passions. Typically, he notices that the experts disagree about an issue or that major unanswered questions remain. "That pulls me in," Price explains. "I do some research, find more contradictions. Now I'm really hooked. Finally, and this might take a few years, I come up with my own answers."
The author of four books and a leading digital artist, Price tends to be a contrarian--to assume that if all the authorities agree, they're probably wrong. "It's been like that throughout history," he notes. "Pick a year at random, name a society, make a list of what all the smart people took for granted. Odds are we now dismiss most of it."
In his article on robots ("Understanding Robots"), Price explains why all the predictions made by experts during the last 75 years turned out false. The report on whole word ("A Tribute to Rudolph Flesch") explores why so many educators made a tragic blunder and picked a reading pedagogy that actually causes dyslexia and increases illiteracy.
Improve-Education.org now has 40,000 words of highly original content. Most visitors would probably agree: "Excellent non-fiction.... eclectic...insightful." But this site also has a serious purpose: to offer a critique of flawed education theory. "I'm hopeful," Price states wryly, "that American education can be put back on track. We just have to nudge our educators back on track."
Price has been writing about education for 25 years. "I was first intrigued by educators," he recalls, "because they concocted some of the worst jargon I had seen. I saw this as a betrayal. I believe that intellectuals have a duty to speak clearly and sincerely. Everything on my site could be enjoyed by kids in high school. I also think that educators in particular have a duty, much like doctors, not to make the patient worse. Despite vast expenditures of tax money, our students don't do well against students from other countries. We have millions of functional illiterates. It's sad. It's unnecessary."
Price expects to see improvement in American education, and he hopes Improve-Education.org can be a part of that process. Change will come, he believes, when more people face the uncomfortable fact that a lot of our school problems are not accidents of nature. They are man-made, caused by educators far more interested in social engineering than in reading, writing and arithmetic. "When educators return to what they should be doing," Price says, "this country could become even more productive and creative than it is now. And that is our best defense against the challenges of the future."
Bottom line: Improve-Education.org can be viewed as a brainy entertainment channel; anyone who visits it will find solid intellectual fun. Or it can be viewed as a reformist think tank dedicated to pushing American education toward more successful strategies.
Bruce Deitrick Price can be contacted or interviewed at Word-Wise Educational Services in Norfolk, Va.--757-455-5020.
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