A: Born in Norfolk, lived 30 years in the middle of Manhattan, and am now back in Virginia Beach.
I have always been primarily a novelist and artist. But along the way I became fascinated by our public schools and how they seemed incapable of doing a good job. That perspective led to the new book “Saving K-12 — What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?”
So this is non-fiction, and I’m an education reformer. I’m not writing think-tank analysis. I’m telling the public how to fight back.
Q: At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
A: I knew roughly at 16 I would be a novelist and that’s a dream I still pursue. I’ve always been self-employed in the arts. I work six or seven days a week.
About 30 years ago I wrote my first big article on education. By now I’ve probably written 500 articles. These are intended to explain some anomaly, some weirdness, that I see in K-12 education. We have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. What else does anyone need to know? Our self-appointed experts at the very least are incompetent. They are probably subversive. If education were part of the business world, all the people at the top would be fired.
Read this book to find out all the dirty secrets that the Education Establishment doesn’t want you to know.
Q: Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who inspires you in your writings?
A: Sad to say, I’m busy writing virtually all the time, so I’m not much of a consumer.
In non-fiction I’m inspired by the sense that an author has something to say and expresses it decisively.
I read articles about education where I can hardly figure out what the guy is saying. Blah blah blah. I’m not that kind of writer. It’s time, as a lady doctor once said to me, to kick ass and take names.
Q: Tell us a little about your latest book?
A: Samuel Blumenfeld said that “K-12 education is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.” I understand his analysis completely. The Education Establishment has a responsibility, I feel, to educate each child to that child’s potential. What we have in the US, instead, is millions of children who are under-educated. I think this is shameful and unacceptable.
The latest book is intended as an antidote or counterattack. The title says it all: “Saving K 12.” That’s the job before us, the mission, the challenge. The Education Establishment has created a tangled web indeed. They can’t say out loud what they’re trying to do (mainly, that would be social engineering). Instead, they pile another sophistry on the other ones. I’ll tell you how bad it has gotten. If they tell you that they are going to teach children to do X, you can bet that children won’t know any X.
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Order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.
"EDUCATION REFORMER EXPLAINS HOW PUBLIC SCHOOLS CAN BE BETTER AND CHEAPER" -- press release about "Saving K-12"
Bruce Deitrick Price’s Website
You need to know that K-12 is a convenient blanket term for all of public education from kindergarten to the end of high school.
This huge entity is getting dumber by the month; my book is devoted to saving public education.
I do not address privatizing one way or another. I address the ideologues who have taken over the schools and made them dumber. That they do this is a fascinating story. How they do this is my particular specialty. They teach children to read for many years; at the end of this time the children cannot read. Ditto arithmetic. Ditto history science, etc.
Thanks for commenting.
Bruce Price
I don't think that privatizing schools changes anything. Once you make education a moneymaking business, it only caters to the rich. The current way that public schools are funded, is a disgrace for the very reason that the rich benefit even in public schools with better funded districts.
I do see that the Internet and websites like Khan Academy are rapidly changing the way education is delivered. In the future, the high cost of bricks and mortar, as well as teachers, may be moot.
Ron