The Purpose of Public Schools

EducationViews.org ^ | Sept. 9, 2015 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[berdie]

The next to the last paragraph pretty well covers what schools should be about.

How we save schools from a liberal and political agenda is what baffles me. Not everyone can afford private school or to home teach. But the public schools are supported by tax dollars and should teach what they are intended to. Not propaganda.

[Talisker]

...is all the failure in our schools happening by incompetence or intent?

How about the intentional hiring of the incompetent?

No instructions needed - just tell the teachers and administrators to go out there and be themselves.

[Fiddlstix]

BEARS REPEATING

H. L Mencken famously proclaimed: “Th[e] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” And that was in 1924!

Mencken describes what he had concluded is the real “aim of public education.” It’s low and ignoble, which brings us to the eternal question: is all the failure in our schools happening by incompetence or intent? One has to suspect intent because, starting around 1905, John Dewey and his progressives laid out a blueprint for dumbing down the schools as a way to turn the US into a socialist country.

[Vermont Lt]

Public schools are designed to provide a basic education necessary to operate machinery in the local mills and factories.

Guess what?

There are NO local mills and factories any more. The education of the modern jobs can’t be done by the teachers we have. Nor, is every person “capable” of learning and applying that education.

[Jan_Sobieski]

The reason for Public Schooling...

[RKBA Democrat]

Simpler solution: shut the government schools down. Education is too important to be left to the state.

[43north]

Today’s publik skewls are designed to produce Facebook and Twitter warriors with no critical thinking skills who are completely interchangeable with any of the characters in the movie Idiocracy.

[abb]

Nope. It’s to provide a government jobs program for otherwise unemployable deadheads.

[RKBA Democrat]

The dirty secret of government schools is that parents use them as “free” daycare. Its a welfare entitlement, just not means tested.

Call it what it is: Aid to Families with Dependent Parents.

[berdie]

Perhaps today that is the case. And I despise the people that have co-opted our children.

But I don’t think that started out to be the case. It started out (as most things do) to be a good thing. So we wouldn’t be a nation of illiterates.

[jonathonandjennifer]

I have never understood why so many people say that kids need preschool to teach them the things that they need for elementary school. If a parent can’t teach a three or four year old their alphabet and numbers then they need someone to take care of them.

[berdie]

See my post #11.

It was not intended to be that way in the beginning.

Another program horribly abused and gone wrong.

[sparklite2]

“No instructions needed - just tell the teachers and administrators to go out there and be themselves. “

Hey, don’t knock it. It was good
enough to get Obama a Nobel prize.

[maddogtiger]

only vouchers can remedy the abomination of government schools

[Jan_Sobieski]

If you look at statistics from the 1800s, our literacy rate was higher then, than today. The architects of our public school system, Horace Mann and John Dewey, were socialists progressives committed to creating a social engineering factories. They successfully created a public-school system like the one they admired in Prussia (Germany), replete with goose stepping children committed to following all government instruction. Mann and Dewey considered public education a religion, with a holy mission to mold children and society.

To do this, it was essential to removing parents' influence over their children. Mann put it this way: "We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause." In his "Pedagogic Creed" of 1897, Dewey wrote, "Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth..."

[kearnyirish2]

They were designed for that; at this point they are designed to simply transfer wealth through the teachers’ unions to the Democratic Party. If your children aren’t in “honors classes” (newspeak for the only classes where any learning takes place - about on par with regular classes thirty years ago), then they aren’t getting any education at all. My children have foreign math & science teachers because there are no American teachers that know those subjects (they prefer easier material that has less-obvious performance metrics), and the American teachers will offer increases in grades for cans of food brought in for food drives.

[PGalt]

Great post. Thanks.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism…

32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education…

http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm

[kearnyirish2]

That certainly seems to be the point in urban districts (where free breakfast is provided in addition to free lunch); the state regards the homes of those children as the most damaging place they could be (and in most cases I’d agree; years ago children would have been rightfully seized from those homes where they were bred only for benefits, with no parenting going on at all). Outside of those districts, the children simply don’t spend enough time in school (180-182 days here in NJ, and kindergarten isn’t required), and whatever mush they are trying to insert in the students doesn’t take. I suspect Prussian teachers worked much longer hours than our part-timers today (and were quickly replaced if they were ineffective).

[berdie]

That’s very interesting.

I wasn’t alive in the 1800’s (although my body often feels like it was, lol) but I will say that when I was in school it was all about learning the basics. There were no politics involved...as far as indoctrination goes. I read a different sentiment into Dewey’s statement. A teacher absolutely has the power to set social order. Correct behavior and aspiring to excellence.

That has changed in the present world. Much to do with personal agendas and much to do with politics and the insane laws they deal with.