Ergonomic Education[1] teaches the most information with the least effort.

Our K-12 today, in contrast, has made an art form of teaching very little in a long time with stupefying difficulty and shocking expense. Most theories and methods embedded in our public schools are wasteful frauds. Step away from these bad ideas. We will find better ones.

I invented the phrase ergonomic education 25 years ago. I thought it was original, but soon found it was used in education but not with the meaning I had in mind. Apparently, our top educators are deeply concerned with having the right room temperature, good lighting, comfortable chairs and desks, and so on. These are important considerations, but certainly not primary.

Ergonomic Education is not a science, but an art. It can’t be reduced to formulas, math, and rules that are followed mechanically. It's more like achieving sustainability or trying to live in harmony with nature or a particular philosophy. It's a matter of positive attitudes and constant effort. To paraphrase Janis Joplin, You know you’ve got it if your students feel good.

They are learning; they are happy and optimistic. In contrast, public schools today are often grim, boring places. Almost everybody is miserable. which tells you the people in charge are the wrong people. You want people who 1) love knowledge and 2) love seeing students learn a lot of it.

Ergonomic Education views the world as an endless matrix of connected knowledge. Every bit of information is a simple way to reach and teach other bits of information. (If you teach each fact as an isolated thing, you will stagnate at the level of ignorance we have now.)

You don't stop with one bit, or two or three. You keep pushing on, as creatively and cleverly as possible. You want a sort of blitzkrieg. You're always moving slightly ahead of your students and then coming back to make sure they're OK.

Here is a prescription that has been around for centuries. Tell them what you will teach them. Teach them. And then tell them what you told them. This increases understanding exponentially.

You're always asking this question, how do we achieve immediate clarity? How do we teach the students so they will remember the content next year?

We want to put knowledge in the hearts and minds of the students so it's part of their life, no matter how. (In college, I took a chemistry course taught by a professor who was famous for blowing things up. I can still see one of his spectacular surprises.)

Ergonomic Education is almost automatically in the entertainment business. You want the customers happy and eager to return.

Appealing to all the senses is a good general principle. If a picture is worth 1000 words, surely a video is worth 2000 words. Then we might add a digital reconstruction of the subject. We encourage the students to debate and argue. Maybe there's a field trip that would help. Maybe someone with special knowledge could come by for a short lecture. Usually there is an episode in a movie or TV series that exactly deals with your topic.

There is another general truth. Don't remain in one arena or sensibility. Teach a bit of information as an historical event, as psychology, as philosophy, as military strategy, as Americana, as geography, as literature, and maybe even as finance or raising children. However students might experience something, use it.

Another general rule is to move constantly from close-up to long shot. We could also call this looking at the forest, and then looking at the trees. In Hollywood, they say zoom in and zoom out. Explain everything as you go. Give examples.

Finally, the thing I see most abused in courses is sequence. There is an ideal sequence for teaching anything. Try to find it. What is the piece of information that they will most surely need to truly understand what you're telling them. Start there! Then the next most important piece of information. Then the next. (The evil genius of "sight words" is that you never teach kids the alphabet. Criminally stupid—but that's how the professors create so much illiteracy.)

Read the previous paragraph a second time. Think of how it might be applied to some subject you like or have taught. Talk to older people who attended a different type of school. Talk to the people running the best private schools or classical academy. Ask yourself this question: if you could NOT use any of the ideas you’ve seen before, what would you do?

I think we could run any subject or any curriculum through this array of recommendations and make it work.

I asked myself, what is something that every classroom has to include? Let's experiment now with just one item.

Part 2: Ergonomic Education meets Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg

The Gettysburg Address is taught in almost every public school. Typically, the words are printed in a textbook. Students half-read these words as part of homework; and all they want to know about the speech is what they have to know for a test. Education is stillborn.

If you ask students to memorize the speech, then Progressive educators will say that memorization is bad and doesn't work. Typically, they hate any method that helps children remember things. OK, let's run through what would happen when Ergonomic Education meets Abraham Lincoln:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure…."

Be dramatic. A few sentences at a time. Show Abraham Lincoln, our 16th president, age 54, delivering the most famous of all speeches in November 1863, several months after the great battle.

Use maps like this one showing where Gettysburg is in relation to Washington DC. The battlefield is roughly 80 miles north of the nation’s capital. One of the most momentous battles in American Civil War history—which occurred in mid-July 1863 and lasted three days—thus occurred far north of Washington DC and was very hot. Keep in mind that the people on every side, every position, were terrified. Soldiers knew they could be wounded or killed at any time. But the citizens of Washington DC were also terrified that General Lee would win at Gettysburg and march his army down Pennsylvania Avenue in DC. (The Confederate master plan was to scare the Union leaders into giving up their prior gains near the Mississippi River in order to hold on to the capital.)

Of course, scan YouTube, etc., for other great visuals, no matter what your subject is. Especially, show a graphic of Lincoln on the edge of the stage, close to the audience. He has to speak very loudly so his voice will carry 50 yards.

Note that there are no cars or trucks, nothing with a gasoline engine in it, nothing with a chip in it. There's no Internet, no computers. The only technology that day is the telegraph—then in its infancy. Words can be sent over telephone wire, using Morse Code, that's where dit-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit means "SOS."

"We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

The battle itself was horrific. General Lee decided on a frontal attack against well-defended Yankee positions. His intel was faulty, as we say today. Artillery officers aimed too high. The Yankees were entrenched and hidden. Pickett’s charge probably didn't have a chance. Thousands of people died that day.

Show a minute or two of the movie Gettysburg 1863 (Pickett’s charge). Read parts of the speech again as they are looking at the actual events.

"But it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."

Tell student they shouldn't assume there's always one correct attitude. They should learn to think through everything for themselves. It’s fascinating that the two principal newspapers in Chicago reviewed Lincoln’s speech in different ways. The Chicago Times called the speech “silly, flat and dishwatery.” The Chicago Tribune predicted Lincoln's remarks "will live among the annals of man."

Everybody's homework is to come into class the next day with a provocative question.

Ask if there were any students who want to go into sports broadcasting or showbiz. Ask them to deliver a few lines from the speech. Be dramatic.

Finally, if you do this cleverly, most of the kids will memorize much of the famous speech without even knowing it. The point is to keep going through the same material in different ways and different emphasis as if you were looking at a new house from the basement up to the attic, look at the views for a while, and then look at the house from the attic down to the basement

So, what is Ergonomic Education? Here's the essence. Teaching everything to great depth by using every trick in the book. Finally it comes back to greater efficiency throughout the school. Students are learning far more, while teachers have a more pleasant life, and finally the society spends less money.

Centuries back, school was often dull because some teachers had little imagination. But in the last century, the heavy-handed Left made everything worse by deliberately adopting those methods that would stifle education. The goal is to shrug off the tired, inefficient ideas from the past, and to use the best, most productive approaches.

Take good ideas from anywhere you find them. It might be helpful to have a brainstorming session for teachers now and then. A teacher could say, “I have to cover the Spanish conquest of Central America.” Everybody can share their knowledge, anecdotes, books read, and favorite insights.

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[1] Ergonomic Education means teaching the most material to the most people in the least time with the greatest ease for everyone. That's the way great teaching has always been done and should be done again. We might say, for example, that any blockbuster movie exemplifies the goal. A big audience in rapt attention for 90 minutes!! Now ask yourself, has that ever happened in a public school? No, because they don't study how to do it, and they deep down don't want to do it.