American Thinker Columnist Proposes Five-Point Plan to Dismantle ‘Education Establishment’

American Thinker columnist Bruce Deitrick Price has published a sweeping five-point proposal for overhauling American public education, arguing that the system has been captured by what he calls the “Education Establishment” and that the only remedy is a systematic return to traditional methods.

The September 13 piece, titled “A simple 5-point program for real education reform,” contends that the education establishment “tends to dilute and delete everything that was traditionally in the classroom” while introducing “a stunning amount of jargon, vagueness, and airy dishonesty.” Price’s proposed remedy is a return to “what is real.”

Phonics Over Word-Guessing

The first pillar of Price’s program targets reading instruction. He calls for eliminating Whole Word, Sight Words, and Dolch Words approaches—methods that teach children to identify words by their shapes or through picture clues—arguing that these techniques produce “guessing, picture clues, or functional illiteracy.” Instead, he urges schools to “pick a good phonics program” and combine it with singing and poetry, with the goal that all students read by age seven.

Price, who describes himself as having read and published more than a million words each, frames phonics as a simple, intuitive concept. He compares blending sounds to mixing blue and yellow to get green, and argues that every phonetic language in Western civilization—from Phoenician and Hebrew to Greek, Latin, and English—has relied on this foundational principle. Children, he writes, must start with letter names, then letter sounds, then blends of those sounds. “That’s phonics,” he writes, adding that he remains baffled by whoever decided to eliminate that history.

He points readers toward resources he trusts, including Don Potter—described as “for years the go-to phonics guy”—and BlendPhonics.org, along with Samuel Blumenfeld, whom he calls “another name you can trust 100 percent.”

Banishing ‘Fuzzy’ Math

The second point takes aim at mathematics instruction. Price wants to see the end of New Math, Reform Math, and Standards Math, which he dismisses as having “wrong-headed” standards. He objects to spiraling curricula, “fuzzy guessing,” and the practice of mixing advanced topics into elementary arithmetic, as well as to Constructivism as a pedagogical approach.

His alternative is straightforward: adopt a highly popular, structured program such as Singapore Math or Saxon Math and ensure that children “master arithmetic one step at a time.”

In Defense of Memory and Facts

The third pillar defends rote learning against its critics. Price argues that “demonizing memory” and “scorning facts” has left students without basic information that the brain is naturally designed to want. He is particularly critical of what he calls “so-called critical thinking about things nobody knows anything about,” suggesting that students should first acquire foundational facts—”the easy ones first”—and build upward from there. His justification is succinct: “facts are fun, and knowledge is power.”

Abolishing Social Studies

Perhaps the most contentious proposal is the fourth, which calls for eliminating Social Studies as a subject entirely. Price accuses the field of promoting “propaganda, indoctrination, and political correctness,” as well as “multiculturalism for its own sake.” He argues that history should be taught by people who majored in history, and that students should learn names, dates, places, and events, then understand why things happened as they did. He frames the subject appealingly: “Everybody loves a good story. History is a million good stories.”

No More Games

The fifth point rejects what Price characterizes as play-based learning. He asks rhetorically what goes on at good private schools and the best colleges, and answers that education “is not about what kids feel. It’s about what they know.” There is, in his telling, “no fuzzy, no guessing, no bull.”

Yet Price is careful to distinguish his position from joyless drill. He offers the paradigm of a French course: students actually learn to speak, read, and write French, and at the end of each day they know more than they did at the start. Games, jokes, laughter, field trips, movies, and “sitting in the grass staring at the sky” are all permissible, he writes—the only rule is that students must be learning continuously.

A Charge of Social Engineering

The column’s broader argument accuses public school leadership of prioritizing social engineering over education. Price contends that the establishment tells students “It’s about you,” when in fact it is about “their collectivist politics, their plans for our future.” He goes further, writing that such “faux educators” should “stand aside or stand trial,” and that those who work in public schools ought to possess knowledge, love it, and want to pass it to the next generation. Those people, he says, are the “real educators.”

Price’s conclusion is openly ideological. He asserts that “so-called Progressives never wanted to improve education” but merely used it “to bring about the socialist transformation they did want.” His recommended course is to “systematically eliminate all the modifications introduced by John Dewey and his followers,” because “none of them is real.” For a practical template, he advises readers to look at the best private schools in their area, compile a list of the features and protocols those schools share, and follow that model.

He closes with an anecdote about Marva Collins, the Chicago educator who founded a school accepting every child who applied and pledged that all of them would read by Christmas of their first year—a promise Price presents as a rebuke to what he calls “wretched Progressive pretenders.”

The opinion piece reflects a long-running debate over curriculum and pedagogy in American schooling, and it lands amid continued public argument over reading instruction, math standards, and the role of history and civics in the classroom. Whether Price’s five points gain traction beyond the pages of a conservative outlet remains to be seen, but his prescription is nothing if not unambiguous: strip out the jargon, the guessing, and the social engineering, and return to knowledge.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/a-simple-5-point-program-for-real-education-reform/