Replies

John Dewey was the most famous American educator then and now. He wrote: “We violate the child’s nature and render difficult the best ethical results by introducing the child too abruptly to a number of special studies, of reading, writing, geography, etc.” (1897) “The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.” (1898)

Edmund Burke Huey in his 1908 textbook wrote: “It is not indeed necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell or write all the new words that he hears spoken....And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests.”

G. Stanley Hall (Huey’s mentor) spelled it out in 1911: “The knowledge which illiterates acquire is probably a much larger proportion of it practical....It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well educated in many other ways.”

Edward Thorndike and Arthur I. Gates in their 1929 textbook: “Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language and history include content that is intrinsically of little value...”

In 1936 the Journal of the National Education Association summed up the broader philosophy: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing."

These recommendations are anti-intellecual and anti-academic. The American blueprint called for people to learn all they can, and rise as far as they are able. Educators with kind words for illiteracy are clearly serving some other blueprint. How casually they toss aside “reading,” “writing,” “learning to read,” “phonetics,” “language,” and the notion of accuracy in reading. Why bother, they suggest, with history, geography and arithmetic? Years later this philosophy would be correctly labeled “dumbing down.” Perhaps you feel that "educators" couldn't be engaged in "dumbing down." Genuine educators could not, but social engineers masquerading as educators could.

Nicola Tesla didn’t have anything to do with expensive, inefficient cars with a tent-spike logo, but he did beat Thomas Edison by discovering alternating current that went much, much further than Edison’s direct current.

Tesla submitted his patents to George Westinghouse. They had a no-lose system.

J.P. Morgan, pirate of multiple industries, set his sights on Westinghouse & Tesla’s operation.

Morgan told Westinghouse if he didn’t sell out, Morgan would crush him with lawyers.

Westinghouse folder, and General Electric was born.

ANOTHER REASON TO HOMESCHOOL

This ping list is for the other articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)

The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.

So much, then, my friends, is done, in the common and established course of nature, for the welfare of our children. Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause; and, just as soon as we can make them see the true relation in which they and their children stand to this cause, they will become advocates for its advancement, more ardent and devoted than ourselves. We hold every parent by a bond more strong and faithful than promises or oaths, - by a Heaven-established relationship, which no power on earth can dissolve. Would parents furnish us with a record of their secret consciousness, how large a portion of those solemn thoughts and emotions, which throng the mind in the solitude of the night-watches, and fill up their hours of anxious contemplation, would be found to relate to the welfare of their offspring!

Horace Mann, Page 210.

John Dewey described Mann as "the patron saint of progressive education."

http://books.google.com/books?id=EgcNAQAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=lectures+and+annual+reports+on+education+1867&hl=en&ei=CB1QTtiEB5C3tgeP7qg6&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=hostages&f=false

https://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2011/08/reformers-in-education-your-children.html

Probably also want to read these two:

(1) Bending the twig; the revolution in education and its effect on our children

(2) Making socialists out of college students; a story of professors and other collegians who hobnob with radicals.

Do not think that this campaign among professors is confined to America; it is distinctly international, as are all of the other active branches of the radical movement. At the last meeting of the International Congress of Socialist Students and Graduates, Professor Enrico Ferri, of the University of Palermo, in addressing the delegates, said:
"We should introduce socialism into the student's mind as a part of science, as a logical and necessary culmination of the biological and sociological science. No need of making a direct propaganda which would frighten many of the listeners. Without pronouncing the word 'Socialism' once a year, I make two-thirds of our students socialists."

(Nineteenth century common people were oriented toward self-employment, guarantor with property ownership of independence. They generally enjoyed a fine, middlebrow culture with high aspirations. Ordinary, common people often with little formal, institutional education, commonly only a few grades in school, were nevertheless possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level, based on primary education that looked for its model to the Christian acceptance of the classics of Western civilization, the good if not the great books. Their basic educational needs could easily be met in homeschools and one-room schools, by 40 hours literacy instruction and 42 hours for basic numeracy.)

Thanks for posting this. (Emphasis added in bold.)

It reminds me of this earlier thread

https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3794354/posts

which linked to this article

https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics