Simultaneously, our “progressives”--socialists in everything but name-- wanted docile, cooperative citizens who would follow instructions and not cause trouble. These progressives moved massively into the field of education, with the intent of using the public schools to create children who would grow up to be socialists. Control and manipulation were constant preoccupations. Freedom was hardly part of this picture.
Across the landscape, wherever you might look, the new fields of Sociology, Psychology and Education were allies in a war for control of the rambunctious American population. John Dewey, the father of American education, merely voiced what all these new elites believed: Americans were too individualistic and self-determined. This had to be stopped. John Dewey and his friends were eager to accept the job. Individuality was for these people a dirty word.
As several decades passed, our industrialists became more threatened by what was going on in Europe and Russia than what was going on here politically. Furthermore, jobs increasingly needed smart workers. So this part of the story tended to soften.
However, all the machinations on the socialist side hardened into dogma. I think it’s fair to say that by 1950 the field of education was more a cult than anything else. Nobody questioned the premises embraced at Columbia’s Teachers College. The endless plotting and scheming in the name of control was all part of a day’s work. In a double whammy, many of these so-called educators were doubtless motivated by wanting to help Russia win the Cold War.
When you look at the minimalist academic curricula proposed by the professors circa 1950, you’re struck by how these people had turned completely away from knowledge. They said they wanted to teach children how to get a job, fill out forms, dress for success, ride the subway, decorate a house, and learn to drive. Some leading educators even spoke up against the importance of universal literacy. Reading wasn’t such a big deal, after all. The people pushing this dumbing-down had a clear sense of purpose: they wanted to make little socialists. You can’t say this too often. The classroom was a laboratory for making little socialists. Everything else was secondary. Knowledge and freedom were secondary.
Over the last century, education as higher consciousness lost a duel with education as a new kind of consciousness. Schools today are full of theories and methods designed to lower consciousness. At least, that’s my cynical conclusion.
For me, the most startling thing about the public schools is that people persist in hoping, praying, assuming that the Education Establishment actually means well, despite a track record which shows it doesn’t mean well. The word “conspiracy” is unpleasant for many people; and yet I don’t see how you can discuss John Dewey and his successors without understanding that every time they talked to each other, they were conspiring to control what children learned and what they became.
Once you factor in all of this, you can’t be surprised that we have 50,000,000 functional illiterates, that many college kids don’t know what 5 times 8 is, or that I just received a press release declaring: “The Council on Foreign Relations’ task force sounds the alarm that America’s education crisis is fast becoming a national security threat. Embarrassingly, American students are far worse off than other developed countries, despite the U.S. outspending all developed nations on K-12 education.”
To save ourselves, we have to give up education as social engineering (that is, a tool for control), and return to a respect for knowledge and a love of freedom. Unfortunately, I’m afraid our Education Establishment will fight such proposals with all their strength.
Rick Santorun said that the next election is about freedom. Ronald Reagan knew that every election is about freedom. He promised for that reason to abolish the Department of Education. Many of the Republican candidates have promised to do this. But the thing keeps getting bigger and bigger. Common Core Curriculum is, I’m afraid just another gimmick for enlarging federal power and fattening the Department of Education. Worse still, we’ll have to listen to pious speeches from these architects of dumb that they really do care deeply about knowledge and freedom.
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Bruce Deitrick Price is an author, artist, and outspoken education reformer. (Tom White of VaRight.com called him “one of the nation’s leading authorities on improving education.”) Bruce founded Improve-Education.org in 2005. For further discussion of bogus theories and methods, see “56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.” (http://www.improve-education.org/id83.html)
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Bruce Deitrick Price also writes about himself in the third person, which would tend to indicate
that Bruce Deitrick Price has some kind of megalomania or serious personality disorder.