Posted on 10/09/2024 4:02:41 AM PDT by karpov
One often hears liberal-arts professors, as well as college and K-12 administrators, advocating two ideas about academics in America: (a) the importance of a broad, well-rounded, liberal-arts education and (b) the equating of that education solely with the head, not the heart. In 1931, John Dewey chaired a national curriculum conference that declared the liberal arts important for “the organization, transmission, extension and application of knowledge” (emphasis added). That concept has given us the educational system we have today, and it is not what was promised.
A “Well-Rounded” Education
Don’t misunderstand my point; there is great value in a broad, liberal-arts education. It is just that, today, we do it in a way that is ineffective; time is wasted, and so is a lot of money. College should not be the venue where liberal-arts education begins. Instead, college is where students should start to specialize in a course of study, having already acquired general knowledge in K-12. The “12” does represent years, you know.
According to Dorothy Sayers, a noted 20th-century advocate of the liberal arts (and especially the classical liberal arts), much of modern education involves an “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence.” It used to be that a well-educated person was deemed fit for higher education at about the age of 16 and specialization (either in the form of apprenticed work or more advanced learning) by the age of 18. With the advent of the modern era, however, the West moved away from serious education to the point that it has now collapsed.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
With K-12 failure, however...
bttt
No sh-t
BTTT
School Choice seems like such a winning topic for the Republicans.
Just let people avoid government schools, teachers unions, phony mandated standards. Allow people to find serious schools that don’t tolerate trouble-makers. Hire teachers who actually know stuff.
Open up the system. Allow people to do it differently. Let the money flow to where the consumers want it to flow.
They’re not doing education “badly”; they’re simply not doing education. Indoctrination isn’t education.
“Universities Are Doing Education Badly”
Not news
“ It used to be that a well-educated person was deemed fit for higher education at about the age of 16 and specialization (either in the form of apprenticed work or more advanced learning) by the age of 18”
The reason for that, is that if a student WASN’T able to maintain that pace, then he was told his education was over. Not everyone went to high school.
A hundred years, only the most prepared went to college, or even high school.
“In 1900, relatively few students ever attended high school or college. Of the 17.1 million students in 1900, only about 0.6 million, 4 percent of students, were enrolled in grades 9 through 12 and 0.2 million, 1 percent of students, were enrolled in postsecondary education. “
https://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/celebrating-150-years-of-education-data#
Red states do a better job. My 6 year old K granddaughter, was promoted to the 3rd grade as she was listed as high grades. Which was a mistake, as she struggles with math, spelling and reading, a 2 grade jump, over 1 grade is feasible.
Yes.
No, they are doing it like they want to.
These institutions were never furthering education. That's just part of their marketing campaigns.
And a higher ed failure, we have an opening for education reform you could drive a Milton size hurricane thru.
What was started by the states as a program to give a decent education to all, has become a governmental monopoly of education by teachers unions, administrators and government bureaucrats. All of those entities believe they are necessary. They are not. Good education is, but they are not giving it.
Good luck making it through that trillion-dollar educational bureaucracy. I don’t think even Milty will be able to get that to budge.
Actually, my dear FRiend MayflowerMadam, the education methodology relying on a system of in-DOCTRINE-ation is very efficient and economical when the doctrines involved are the embodiment of physical and spiritual truths and is the methodology that God uses to train His children into useful maturity of thought, character, and spiritual commitment.
It is the method Jesus used to prepare His chosen disciples for the tasks ahead of them. Even Paul was greatly aided first by his training under ben Gamaliel, then for about six or seven years in college at the university complex in Tarsus, a Hellenistic/Roman colony that fostered the welfare of Jewish intellectuals.
And so do we in the USA, one example of its implementation being the United States Marine Corps at Quantico, Parris Island, and San Diego (once Pendleton). Out of them have come some of the finest evangelists for the Lord, when they apply their disciplines to preaching the Apostles' doctrines and genuine fellowship.
But with that in mind, and looking at the tattered, battered state of American cultural values, how did we get into this state of decadence? My estimate is that is has resulted from the failure of our self-centered schooling philosophies and the unbiblical "gospels" currently endorsed by our denominational churches.
Leaning on my experience with them, and as a Methodist preacher's kid, I ruminate on the journey through them, to wit:
When I took education courses at Syracuse U in the mid-1950s, the NEA was then an organization of professionals, no unionists in the schools. The main issue occupying the full attention of the university community was whether to continue with the classical education approach to train for a career (that involves morality with some painful disciplinary experiences to achieve excellence), or to replace it with a progressive Spockian "let-them-find-their-own-way" humanistic approach (that has produced firstly the "don't-spankist" culture, then the Marxist "gimme" allocation plan, then finally illogical unreal "wokeist" mindset of society's "victims") under which we now live in a very fractured dystopian irreversibly indebtedness society.
Our Dewey-dominant (click here) progressive high-level "educators" (Jill Biden?) have overwhelmed several generations by this time, and failed to listen to the men like Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (click here), a classicist and trainer of operators of such deadly war machinery ever invented, to do it with accomplished lovers of liberty, through the in the interests of a sane, moral, beneficial control of disciplined individual freedoms.
John Dewey's Spockian cultists have utterly failed. Look at what happened when our liberal arts educated parents took Dr. Benjamin Spock seriously. Look what has happened when our liberal Supreme Court ejected the source of godliness from out schools, prompted by University intellectuals and their sycophants.
A large p[art of their inclinations came from the "social gospel" promoted by Brooke Foss Westcott (synthesizer of a 'critical' NT Greek text) and adopted by the seminaries of our leading religious denominations as well as his novel text. Etc.
Writing this with respect to you and your many helpful observations!
Jill ain’t no “high-level ‘educator’”.
She has a doctorate. That’s not high enough for you?
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