Posted on 04/11/2015 5:10:47 PM PDT by 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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Sympathy, Cooperation and harmony are the goals for the classroom and society in general.” And for everyone in general.
Right out of the lyrics of the “Age of Aquarius” from the late 1960’s. Some liberal ideas have a life of their own.
“Sympathy and trust abounding. No more falsehoods or destinations. Golden living dreams and visions. Mystic crystal revelations. And the mind’s true liberation.” Nothing new in 45 years.
Planned failure and planned obsolescence do not increase economic prosperity. At best they increase the producers’ bottom line at the expense of the producers of other things and have a null effect on the size of the real economy. At worst those tactics reduce savings which reduces the future availability of capital for innovation and thus slows the rate of wealth creation and economic growth.
Sounds like a rehash of the old “convoy system”. Just as a ship can only advance at the speed of the slowest ship so a classroom full of kids can only advance at the pace of the slowest kid.
You’re right n point.
Part of the planned failure is the ever increasing number of “resource” teachers. Special remedial mah rooms, remedial reading rooms etc.
The other part is the vaginocracy that is public education. It is overloaded with gynocrats who perpetuate this nonsense.
New Math worked for me. And it didn’t cause me to become a Socialist.
Liberal Oligarchy.
They keep their kids out of public schools they tout for everyone else. Their kids will be properly schooled b/c they know they need intelligence to actually run things.
They tout govt schools for the rest as these are how you dumb everyone down and hook them on sex and drugs and risky crap, give them no skills or know how to learn, in order to keep them dumb, but at the same time tell them how smart they are all the while knowing you’re screwing them over.
Can’t have intelligent proles because they may overthrow the liberal oligarchy. Remove good male teachers from every level of the school, so good male role models for girls and boys are gone. Drug the boys that may be able to be independent and intelligent. Focus everything on the girls to make sure boys’ skills are minimized and can’t be good family leaders and get good jobs.
Insidious liberal socialist alinskyite assholes.
The goal of Common Core is not academic excellence. The goal of Common Core is to bring all of our students to the lowest common denominator, which is academic ignorance.
if risks from crime and government are increased, people stop trying. this is all about slavery
Agree!
False premise. There are always ways to overcome said problems in an actual democracy although that itself has become questionable.
Some people learn math no matter what. For most the various iterations of new math make arithmetic calculation without a calculator something beyond their abilities or even their conception. They tend to have a very weak grasp of logic and of cause and effect. When new math is accompanied by new grammar and new composition most students graduate able to read at a low level and to comprehend not much. These things increase the burdens on universities which must have a whole new level of instruction for remedial just-about-everything. New Math, etc., is why home schooled kids do rather better on entrance exams than do public school kids and graduate in fewer years.
That is why I have long ago reached the conclusion that parents who send their children to public school are ipso facto and prima facie guilty of child abuse.
I was refering specifically to the SMSG math courses. They were not for everybody, but were good for STEM oriented yutes. Common Core sounds horrible, including the math. The US is no longer motivated to fix the Sputnik Gap. Or much of anything else.
The Fifth Dimension is singing this song on YouTube. It is interesting to watch the musicians while they are singing the song. I suspect I am like many people I heard songs like this on the radio while I am driving or doing something else. I heard the message many times without thinking about what they were saying.
In the Parish Hall of a large parish I used to be a member of the teenagers would be the doughnut and coffee sellers after Mass. I must have taught a score of them to count change the old way- the only way by which the clerk and the customer know that the numbers are correct without having to use a calculator, and then one doesn’t really know, one simply accepts the calculator’s word for it. Each one of them was amazed and some said it was like magic. One fellow was reputed to be a straight A math student.
It’s better for one to be the master of the math rather than the other way around. The “New Math” of the 60s allowed one to have a deeper understanding. Of course we also had to learn the superficial common techiniques of yore. The tool kit.
My wife is a primary teacher and I have watched the different versions of the new math come and go. Most abjure rote memory and insist on explaining logically how things work to childrenwho are not yet able to actually reason though they are truly capacioius data banks waiting to be filled with facts with which they later learn to manipulate in calculation when their minds have developed a bit more. Those who never learn the Facts- never memorize multiplication tales, for instance, never learn to use mat and many are crippled in other areas thereby as well. And yes, I have known some whizzes, one of whom was hired out of his senior year in High School by NASA, who taught themselves all that stuff and succeeded very well for which their teachers all took proud credit and for which none of it came from them.
Disagree with your take here and think that you are a bit negative in your ideas about teaching.
All kids, yes even the younger ones yearn for knowledge about why and do not need rote learning (with exceptions - mathematical tables fall into that caratory).
Trying to teach they why is more important than rote learning at all ages. You’d be surprised at how much they really learn if you stop treating them like idiots.
Almost all are not capable of why in the early years. They are capable of immense memorization Small children memorize effortlessly countless advertising jingles. It is much more sensible to fill up those minds with facts so that they don’t miss all that when they are older and don’t memorize so well. It is the modernist tactic to skip all that data infusion so that leftist arguments and reasons (not reasoning) can be added later when kids don’t have that data bank about which to reason. I fed all sorts of things into my four when they were little starting shortly after they were beginning to talk., things like the pythagorean theorem and a whole string of follow ons from that relating to ancient Greeks and their innovations and discoveries. They couldn’t reason about those things. They didn’t understand who those characters were until they were older but when they met folks like Euclid and Pythagoras himself they were way ahead in attitude and facts already on file and were not intimidated by the subjects represented. My grandchildren are getting the same treatment. None of them are geniuses but they slide into academic subjects much more easily than their peers. When they meet something new they feel they already know something about it.
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