The Purpose of Public Schools

The traditional view is simply stated: the purpose of public education is to take each child as far as each child can be taken. Who can disagree with that?

If a school is aiming for less, that school would seem to me to be guilty of malpractice or false advertising. Doesn’t the word “education” imply a striving for excellence? At the end of each school year, children are presumed to know more than at the start. Isn’t that a reasonable presumption?

Somewhat bizarrely, given what’s going on in our public schools, the Education Establishment might claim they agree. Oh yes, of course, that’s exactly what we want to do.

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.

A recent book called “Credentialed to Destroy” argues that this dumbing down is not just a conspiracy, but a conspiracy organized in much greater detail than most people could imagine. Robin Eubanks, the author and a lawyer, argues that all “reforms” and all agencies have the same goal: creating a passive citizenry.

The basic strategy is to remove facts and knowledge from the classroom, using whatever pretext is handy. The point is to keep the kids engaged in empty discussions, empty projects, empty testing. At the end of each school year, astonishingly enough, many students know hardly more than at the beginning of the school year.

Samuel Blumenfeld, in a book published just before his death earlier this year, concluded: “K-12 education is a criminal enterprise from top to bottom.”

First, teach a lot more facts. Start in K and teach the things that all citizens need to know. Surely every child can learn one new fact each day. But if schools are at all serious, they can easily teach a new fact each hour. Then we would have a reformation.

Second, understand how our phony educators accomplish so little. Here is a quick explanation of the top 10 worst ideas in the schools. When you understand the gimmicks, you can fight the gimmicks.

My impression is that there are three groups of victims in our public schools: children, parents, and teachers. To help one group of victims, you have to help all three.

As long as the children are taught with silly methods, the parents will be frustrated because they cannot help. Children will be frustrated because they are not learning and they know that. Meanwhile, teachers have to sense that much more could be accomplished if only they were allowed to use the optimal methods.

QED: don’t give the Education Establishment any more money or power. Roll back Common Core. Reclaim the educational high ground that has been given up to make room for a galaxy of gimmicks.

The correct formula is used in every serious school. First, you teach the basics, that is, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Then you teach as much factual information as children can reasonably absorb about geography, history, science, the arts, etc. Then you teach children to think shrewdly about this information. That’s real critical thinking, when you can compare and contrast one fact against another.

Here are two facts to compare and contrast. So-called progressives have been in charge of our public schools for a hundred years. We have had a perpetual decline in those public schools. What conclusions can you draw?

Well, I was inclined to believe that you could disabuse of my notion that our forbears were not illiterate with some facts. That was not to be, it seems, only an opinion was offered to rebut my opinion.

So I did some quick checking with Google, and guess what, it appears that all the research seems to support my contention that our forbears were quite literate, in fact more so than today. I submit one of the first three links I found, it is a fairly quick read, and quite fascinating.

Another link puts the rate of illiteracy, as defined then, as about 20% of the white population. With tongue partially in cheek, I suggest that illiteracy as defined then is our typical high school graduate of today.

Do take the time to read this. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Now we both know.

Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?

In 1776, one book, written in complex language, sold over 120,000 copies in Colonial America. That number does seem large on its own. However, to give it even more meaning, I like to convert it to an equivalent number today. This conversion is a task for proportional reasoning—one of my favorite tools for finding meaning in the numbers that surround us. First convert 120,000 into a fraction of the U.S. population in 1776: compared to the population at the time of 2.5 million, 120,000 is roughly 1 in 20, or 5%. Today’s U.S. population is about 300 million—of which 5% is 15 million.

Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.

Today’s equivalent is 60 million copies. On Wikipedia’s list of bestselling books, all books that have sold that many or more copies have done so over a much longer time. The shortest time is 8 years, for The Da Vinci Code; several others, such as Heidi, were published in the 19th century.

Another surprise arrives upon opening Common Sense: the sophistication of the writing and reasoning. Here are a few sentences:

As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his Own Right, to support the Parliament in what he calls Theirs, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpations of either.

The laying of a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is The Author.

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries By a Government, which we might expect in a country Without Government, our calamity is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer.

Each sentence is longer than a whole soundbite of today. Furthermore, in 1776 literacy was not universal. Therefore, many colonial Americans had the book read to them. The sales figure of 500,000 copies thus underestimates the number of people who attended to its message.

And what a message! Can you imagine a book with such a complex style today selling 60 million copies in one year? To ask the question is to answer it. To make the comparison concrete, here are data from the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), which measures the English literacy of adults across the United States. Prose literacy, defined in the study as the ability to “search, comprehend, and use information from continuous texts,” is categorized into four levels: below basic, basic, intermediate, and proficient. Proficient, the highest level, is defined as “reading lengthy, complex, abstract prose texts as well as synthesizing information and making complex inferences.” As an example of this level of performance, they cite comparing the viewpoints in two texts. This level seems to be roughly the level required to read Common Sense.

In the extensive NAAL survey, only 13% of adults attained this level. Thus, the proportion of Americans today who are able to understand Common Sense (13%) is smaller than the proportion that bought Common Sense in 1776 (20%). Are we a nation in decline?

(I am indebted to John Taylor Gatto’s article “The seven-lesson schoolteacher” for the idea of measuring colonial literacy using Common Sense.)

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