Posted on 04/18/2020 8:22:18 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
Were Sam Blumenfeld (AlphaPhonics) & Alex Newman (Crimes of the Educators) wrong that miseducation was deliberate, just because they were John Birchers (New American)?
I know a duplicitous guy who writes for the New American (John Birch Society). I looked up his articles; they were transparently manipulative, clumsily so. But not Blumenfeld or Newman. (My John Birch acquaintance is a real stinker, he divorced and remarried, on the pretext that his Catholic marriage to his wife was performed by a priest of "schismatic" Catholic group SSPX. But SSPX has been rehabilitated and now has full sacramental faculties. So where does that leave his first wife and their outstanding kids?)
The proof that Blumenfeld and Newman are truth tellers is in many other places--try "Why Johnny Can't Read?" (1955) It's all here in black & white: The Crusade Against Knowledge: THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST MEMORY Before the public wised up and the socialists started smuggling their real intentions with phony phrases, in their use, like "democracy" and "progressive", they revealed their real intentions to wreck education by dumbing it down, so working people once-impervious to propaganda would become pliable thralls. Here are some quotes from improve-education.org:
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.”
In this time when everything about K-12 education is up in the air and up for grabs, we should consider that the default educational context in the period before 1880 was one room schools controlled by working parents and local boards, which rewarded diligence and merit in the educational enterprise, was oriented toward biblical and civic literacy, and inculcated high regard for the Christian acceptance of the classics and good, modest literature (the good vs. the great books) among children of families of modest means, children who had time-limitations on their school career because of the need to go to work early.
Developments which cloud our vision of that, to us idyllic time, admittedly subject to "the good-old-days syndrome", the time with a proper educational hierarchical order, include the following issues which we have trouble seeing beyond. This is a list of descending chronology, in which the older issues are of greater importance.
The Hall of Shame of the 19th-20th Century of Mis-Education Saboteurs
Consideration of a bullet list of the historical architects of failure can help homeschoolers now to sidestep the futile outreach of the school hierarchy.
Ideology From the Ivory Tower Down to the Normal Schools. Intellectuals spin etherial theories about how the little people must live, but don’t pick up the tab. John Dewey destroyed primary 1-6 education between 1920 and 1940, from Columbia Teacher’s College for “trainers of trainers”, to mis-educate generations of teachers at Normal Schools across America, effectively jettisoning of the Western civilization legacy of Good and Great Books from America’s schools across the board.
By the first quarter of the 20th century, broad public awareness of socialist mis-educators' destructive plans caused them to veil their actual intentions in smuggled phrases like "democracy" and "progressivism".
At the beginning of the 20th century, education was subjected to the broad action of monopolization of all institutions, cartelizing the educational enterprise that had been the natural domain of families and local towns.
Instead of senior students of the One Room School assuming Headmaster and Headmistress roles at the local level, Teachers must be mass-processed through Normal Schools (Horace Mann). Mega High Schools with thousands of anonymous students must replace the intimate, home and local educational enterprise. School Districts must be combined into larger and larger districts, so that the NEA could dictate Federal Educational policy.
(Please read the whole reply before calling me names!)
They/you are misquoting John Dewey.
In the context of everything, he said Dewey was arguing for a pedagogy where every child learns in the way their brain naturally learn. Thus, math through manipulatives (i.e. two sets of two oranges equal 4 oranges) rather than simple route memory. There isn’t anything wrong with that though I believe there is a place for route learning.
He was talking about pedagogy, not the content of pedagogy. He believed that educational pedagogy should be based on science, not just tradition or as in the case of 19th-century schools, brute punishment, and memorization. The problem was AND IS that the thinkers he based his ideas on were often wrong. Maslow was wrong and has been proven wrong There is no “Self-Actualization” pyramid. Henry James was wrong about how the brain works. John Locke was wrong, children’s minds are not blank slates, Herbert Spenser was almost a literal NAZI. This means that whatever good was in Dewey’s educational thought is perverted by the bad ideas of the men he chose to build his pedagogical reforms around.
He was neither the Saint some on the left want him to be or the devil that many on the right portray him as. You have to separate Dewey’s ideas about pedagogy from his political and phycological ideas which were so flawed as to be comical if not actually evil.
If you want to see where and how John Dewey was actually wrong I’ve provided a link to a book by Kerian Egan.
The problem with US education is not the pedagogy, it’s the educational philosophy that drives the pedagogy.
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