Education Has Been Battered By “Bad Faith”

The easiest way to understand the field of education is to consider a legal concept, bad faith. It’s been around for thousands of years; in Latin, the phrase was mala fides. Any time there’s a split between what is claimed and what is fact, you’ve got bad faith.

If I come to your house with a sincere intention to paint it professionally, I am acting in good faith. I may be negligent and spill paint on your Lexus; but I have not acted in bad faith.

Suppose I come to your house with a scrapbook of photographs showing houses I didn’t paint. I fact, I’ve never painted a house in my life. Maybe I’m desperate to make money. Perhaps the situation is even worse. I’m not there to paint your house but to rob it. I don’t have any paint in my truck. I’m a thief and a con artist. Every aspect of my behavior is bad faith.

Lawyers, judges and juries must wrestle with the subtleties of bad faith. Philosophers find it a fertile field. Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about what it means, existentially, to act in good faith. According to Wikipedia, “we are always aware that we are more than what we are aware of, so we are not whatever we are aware of....Thus, as Sartre often repeated, ‘Human reality is what it is not, and it is not what it is.’" I’d say that Sartre acted in bad faith as he virtually guarantees that no one will understand what he means.

Education is not so murky. This is a field disfigured by counterintuitive failure crying out for explanation and cure. Why are our statistics and test scores so low, why do we have 50 million functional illiterates, why must we import most of our scientists and engineers, and why do we have so many people at the college level who know very little? These are inexplicable mysteries until you factor in bad faith. Then everything makes sense.

Think of young teachers, fresh from ed school, teaching their first year of classes. These teachers have embraced the theories and methods taught to them. No matter how bad these approaches might be, the young teachers believe in them and are therefore acting in good faith.

But what about the professors at the ed schools? They’re probably in their 40s or 50s. They’ve been watching dismal results come back from the public schools for decades. They know (or should know) that many popular fads are disasters. Most of these professors have heard of better ideas used in private schools, homeschooling, or other countries. But they keep promoting the same bad ideas in the schools, with a reckless disregard of the damage caused. We are dealing with failure to fulfill a contract, a preeminent form of bad faith. Free Dictionary says that bad faith is “misleading another, entering into an agreement without the intention or means to fulfill it, or violating basic standards of honesty in dealing with others.” Exactly.

Parents expect that children will be educated to each one’s potential. Instead the children are dumbed-down. Most parents in this country could bring a class-action suit against the top professors at the graduate schools of education. Surely there is a clear expectation throughout the society that elite educators will strive to provide the very best education possible. That they refuse to do this violates basic standards of honesty.

Reading, the essential skill, provides a well-documented, open-and-shut case of bad faith lasting 80 years. In the Roaring Twenties. the Education Establishment conducted research on what would be called Look-say. Dr. Samuel Orton, a neurologist, drifted into a study of reading difficulties. It was not his main field and he was uncomfortable when he found himself at odds with the oncoming orthodoxy. However, in 1929 he published an article (in the Journal of Educational Psychology) titled THE “SIGHT READING” METHOD OF TEACHING READING, AS A SOURCE OF READING DISABILITY, in which he spoke about “a restricted group of children for whom, as I think we can show, this technique is not only not adapted but often proves an actual obstacle to reading progress, and moreover I believe that this group is one of considerable educational importance both because of its size and because here faulty teaching methods may not only prevent the acquisition of academic education by children of average capacity but may also give rise to far reaching damage to their emotional life.”

This famously diffident quote says that Look-say will keep kids from reading and scramble their brains. Everyone in the field of reading at the professorial level would know this article. But in 1931, as the Depression reached its full fury, our left-wing educators jumped at the chance to impose this faulty method on the public schools of America, with disastrous results.

Fast forward 20 years; the illiteracy crisis in the United States is obvious to everyone. This was the context in which Rudolf Flesch published “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in 1955, a book that sold 8 million copies. It explains why we had an illiteracy problem (sight-words) and what to do about it (bring back phonics). Instead, the Education Establishment doubled down on its discredited methods, forming the International Reading Association. This professional association had the tasks of destroying Flesch and imposing sight-words forever. The point is that at two distinct points everyone at the top of American education knew sight-words didn’t work and in both cases they went right on.

Cut to the present when we have 50 million functional illiterates and generally low literacy standards. These professors know their methods hurt children. They know that slowly memorizing hundreds of sight words is a horribly difficult task, which typically leads nowhere. So we have eight decades of bad faith in the field of reading. Had we world enough and time, we can look at math and all the other subjects and you would see the same pattern.

The Educationl Establishment favors the theories and methods that lead to bad results. Bad faith followed by more bad faith. But why? The short answer, I believe, is that John Dewey and his followers were socialists. They thought leveling is a good plan. Progressive educators want to outwit nature and make everybody end up with similar IQ’s. Predictably, our schools will be a bust as schools. As indoctrination centers, they are successful.

But the educators are not calling the schools indoctrination centers; they are calling them places of education. And there is all the bad faith you need to kill a civilization.

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