Issues Blocking Our View of Proper K-12 Education
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.
- Loss of Meaningful Work to Algorithms, Automation and Globalization
- Federal Government Titles (Various Roman Numerals) and Federal Control of Education Monies
- Consolidation of Once Small, Local School Districts into Massive Districts and Once Small, Local Schools into Mega-Schools
- Supreme Court Decisions Against Religion in Education and the Public Square
- Establishment of the G.I. Bill and Loss of Traditional Blue Collar Industries (highlighted in Cov19 quarantine by resurgence in the importance of food producers and distributors)
- Bias Against Merit in Education, Homogenization ("Dumbing Down") of Basic Primary Level Math and Numeracy (Common Core), Reading Instruction (Whole Word vs. Phonics) and Jettisoning of the Cultural Tradition of Good Books for Children of Common Workers (John Dewey and William Kilpatrick)
- Standardized Testing as the Legacy of Scientific Management in the Schools (Frederick Winslow Taylor)
- Universal Government Education (Horace Mann and King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia).
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.
- Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the prophet of mis-eduation, was the seminal corrupter of the educational enterprise, pushing the delusory mythology of "natural education" to promote fallacious idealism about "happiness, spontaneity, and inquisitiveness", so students' tendency to lose focus could overturn the natural study hierarchy and attain dominance of the educational enterprise.
- Robert Owen (1771-1858), proprietor of the failed, pre-Marxist utopian New Harmony commune, was able to influence Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, to institute mandatory state education, overriding Homeschooling and the One Room School.
- Horace Mann (1796 -1859) succeeded in spreading the false gospel of mandatory state education to all American states and many world countries. Horace Mann promoted whole-word, non-phonetic reading instruction.
- Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) subjected mandatory state schools to the principles of the dark science of scientific management, instituting standardized testing against the interests of students' individual educational attainment and treating them as factory employment industrial products.
- John Dewey, working with William Kilpatrick promoted whole-word reading after the first long-term reaction against Horace Mann's efforts in that regard. (Four the of five sons of John D. Rockefeller Sr. contracted dyslexia at John Dewey's experimental Lincoln School, which Rockefeller endowed.) John Dewey applied the "box-cutter" to the pandora's box of anti-intellectual miseducation, for the expanding class of leftist "education" planners to dumb-down primary education. John Dewey significantly enabled leftist eggheads to dissolve the traditional education enterprise and spin hairbrained pipe-dreams about how to conduct institutionalized "education" policy--"child-centered education"--without ever taking stock of the actual damage being done to millions of people's lives.
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.