A Socialist’s Dream: Education and Planned Failure

Saving Our Future ^ | April 2, 2015 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

During the 1950s the world became familiar with the phrase “planned obsolescence.” The basic idea was that manufacturers change the appearance of products in order to sell more products. Customers are encouraged to want a new look, and to disdain the old look.

A similar concept is called “intentional product failure.” If you design products to wear out quickly, customers will need more replacements. There have always been rumors that lightbulbs could last almost forever. Apparently it’s true.

No question, both techniques increase sales and raise a country’s GDP. You probably need cynicism and maybe some criminality to practice these techniques. When businesses are trying to make a lot of money, they are likely to cut corners. Rightly or wrongly, most people probably don't expect the highest ethical standards in a capitalist environment.

Ah, but what about a socialist environment? Wouldn’t it be more enlightened? Can we feel confident that we would not run into anything so corrupt as planned obsolescence and intentional product failure?

Not at all. In the context of K-12 education, we see a phenomenon best called "planned failure.” Blunt translation: schools use methods known not to work. How corrupt is that? Here is what’s going on:

Progressives emphasize students becoming one big happy family. Cooperation and harmony are primary goals, for the classroom and the whole society. Academic success is not a top priority. Indeed, from a socialist perspective, academic excellence is actually a threat to the desired harmony. John Dewey identified this threat more than a century ago and discussed it in his many publications. If the broadest ideological goal is to eliminate social classes, the last thing you want in your classroom is different classes of students, A students, B students, D students, and so forth. Clearly, it would be better if all students were C students. That’s the inevitable logic of the socialist mentality. When Bill Ayers talks about “social justice,” he is talking about this sort of leveling.

Anyone who wants to understand the mess in our public schools simply has to meditate on this phrase: academic excellence is actually a threat. Isn’t that a shocking insight? In practice it means that our Education Establishment will find ways to undermine anything that raises educational outcomes.

Now, everyone please imagine that you are a socialist commissar in charge of K-12 education. What would be the one simplest thing you could do to create “equality” in the school?

That’s an easy question. You would put off teaching children to read as long as you can get away with it. Keep them wallowing at the same level, singing songs and going on nature walks. But what if parents demand that children in elementary school be taught to read? Then you would have to be cunning. You’ll adopt reading programs that don’t work. For example, you would ignore the alphabet and the sounds of letters. Instead, you tell parents that children need to memorize all the common words as graphic designs that can be recognized on sight. Endless research has established that this is a tedious, virtually impossible way to learn to read. But the kids don’t know this; and parents are lied to. This whole-word approach was introduced around 1930 and has remained the two-ton raptor in the classroom ever since. It’s the most effective way to create “planned failure”

But don't focus on a particular disaster. Focus instead on the collectivist mindset. Socialists, confronted by methods that work, will feel compelled to ignore or sabotage them. These people want ideological success, not educational success.

Let's look at arithmetic. New Math around 1965, Reform Math around 1985, and Common Core Math today, all have this central gimmick: make the children work on advanced problems. The official propaganda is that the children will learn faster. But we know from millions of actual cases that children become confused and defeated. They learn to hate math. Really, it doesn’t matter what age you are or what subject you are learning, if the instruction makes you feel inadequate, you will probably lose interest in the subject.

Once you start thinking like a socialist, you can easily understand how so-called self-esteem can be used to “plan failure.” (Anything that harms a student’s self-esteem must be banished, So there goes most of what used to be considered essential content.) Think like a socialist and you understand why Constructivism is a wonderful method. (Children are encouraged, in effect, to teach themselves, so even the simplest batches of knowledge take forever to acquire.) Socialist thinkers understand immediately that they must get rid of cursive writing, by claiming it’s old-fashioned and unnecessary. (Cursive writing reinforces the acquisition of reading and is an essential tool in any context where educational excellence is pursued.).

It’s the same story in every theory and method embraced by our Education Establishment. The gimmicks are sold to the community with lavish praise and propaganda. Hurray; we’ve finally arrived at a brave new world of educational excellence. But it always turns out to be the same old hokum with the same tragic results. Children are kept frozen at a level below their potential.

Their failure is planned, and then it is achieved.

Unfortunately for those who actually want better schools, our Education Establishment functions like an occupying government. It controls the schools of education, the credentialing of teachers, and the teachers unions. Through an interlocking web of front groups (such as the National Council of Teachers of Reading), it controls almost everything going on in the school. But the Education Establishment does not know when to stop so now they want Common Core, which appears to be a way to lock in all the bad ideas forever. We’ll have more mediocrity and more sameness. That will result in more planned failure.

[Bruce Deitrick Price explains educational theories and methods on his site Improve-Education.org.]

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IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: Samuel Blumenfeld has published a new book called “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children.” Blumenfeld explores historically some of the same themes you see in this article. His book is available on Amazon. BTW, there are only a few people you can trust in American education and Blumenfeld is definitely one of them.

http://www.amazon.com/Crimes-Educators-Utopians-Government-Americas/dp/1938067126/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428614677&sr=8-1&keywords=the+crimes+of+the+educators

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[BruceDeitrickPrice]

It’s a straight line from the goofiness of New Math to the goofiness of Common Core. Here is a short, somewhat amusing example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxJ4nbqx8CY

(More and more, I think that Common Core Math should be renamed ObamaMath. People will look back at this boondoggle as one of his signature moments.)

[arthurus]

I believe the father of Common Core was the Democrat Congress and HWB was the midwife.