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The Crusade Against Knowledge and Memorization

This is a tragic story but with some comic overtones. Starting more than a century ago, this country’s Education Establishment embarked on a schizophrenic quest to praise and promote education while making sure that not much of it occurred.

I said schizophrenic but you might prefer the words disingenuous, hypocritical, deceitful, double-dealing, unscrupulous, mendacious, shifty, or perfidious.

As a practical matter, educators couldn’t very well announce that they wanted students to possess as little knowledge as possible, with only enough reading and writing to be workers or serfs. Some subtlety was required, and some misdirection.

So educators did not praise ignorance. Instead, they praised policies and attitudes that would invariably lead to ignorance. Ingenious, huh? One might say diabolical.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Dumbing-down was certainly not on any citizen’s Wish List. If we got dumbing-down, that has to be because our top educators decided among themselves that dumber was what they desired America to be. And why would they decide that? For ideological reasons. Then, as now, the “enlightened” people tended to be socialists.

In schools, this tendency favored cooperative children, minimal competition, and as much leveling as could be managed. Our educators were concerned with creating peas in a pod.

All the things traditionally esteemed in education became irrelevant, even a nuisance.

Have I exaggerated? Not at all. This crusade against knowledge, this campaign against memory, this devotion to ignorance, can be told via endless quotes from the top minds in the field of education.

When reading these quotes, imagine you are a teacher. Imagine these injunctions come down to you from Teachers College or your state superintendent. You can probably imagine the damaging changes you would have to make to conform. (There are 8 quotes; skip ahead if you are already familiar with them.)

In 1897 John Dewey wrote: “The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, not literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activity.” In 1899 he added: “The mere absorbing of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat.” So there go facts, truths, and learning.

In 1911 Professor Stanley Hall made the case for illiteracy: “The knowledge which illiterates acquire is probably a much larger proportion of it practical. Moreover, they escape much eyestrain and mental excitement, and, other things being equal, are probably more active and less sedentary. 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.”

In 1929 Edward Thorndike and Arthur Gates, in their textbook about education, zeroed in on the real problems: “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 NEA Journal summed up the guiding philosophy: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children acquire] but rather in terms of growing."

In 1942 three education professors wrote “Adventures in American Education,” which describes a curriculum under which seventh-grade pupils would devote six weeks to “orientation to school” and 30 weeks to “home and family life.” There is a section on the care of clothing, on jobs, on relationships with parents, brothers and sisters, but no references to reading, writing, or arithmetic.

Professor William H. Kilpatrick, who has been hailed as the “Grand Master” of the cult, tended to lump mathematics with Latin and physics, and concluded at about this time, “There is little practical value to warrant the time spent on them.” What Kilpatrick could write purple prose about was practical stuff, which he called “real needs.” Filling out forms, learning to drive, and decorating a house in the suburbs. That’s real!

About 1950 educator Wilbur Yauch wrote: “More than 90% of the arithmetic...taught at the typical old-style schools has no future practical value to the average child...[T]he emphasis in these [new] schools is on problems that are down to earth, such as accounting for the school lunch money.”

In 1951 A. H. Lauchner, principal of a junior high school, famously said: “Through the years, we've built a sort of halo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We've said they were for everybody....When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure and spell...then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum.”