Posted on 05/31/2007 8:02:17 AM PDT by ZGuy
In fact, his philosophy cannot even be described as "education" in any sense of the word -- since one of his goals was to create a large class of Americans whose ignorance made them useful units of labor in a mass-production industrial model.
The monkey in the closet here is the fact that private schools benefit greatly from the fact that they can kick out students they don’t like. How would this play out with public funding of private schools? Would the government regulate private schools who get funds, preventing them from doing this? If so, then the private schools will become less “private” and will probably become less effective. If not, then there will be a whole population of “bad” students who will not be able to find any school who will take them.
bttt - heard Bill Bennett interviewing the author this morning.
That should get rid of all the communist public schools.
I agree wholeheartedly here. Our schools have been poor for so long that I believe most parents are unclear on what a "good" education is; most don't even bother to think about it. As a result the cycle of mediocrity continues.
I have recently done a great deal of substitute teaching, and I have seen this mediocrity and decline in standards firsthand.
I believe that a lot of parents think that "Public schools in the US are in bad shape -- thank goodness the ones in my area are still doing a good job!"
But this view is often held by people who have not been inside, have not done substitute teaching, and have not given themselves a chance to see the decline in standards first hand.
The situation is a lot worse than many people think.
Not necessarily. We have experience with this at the college level. Colleges receive all sorts of government monies, yet private colleges are not any more strangled by regulation than private schools at the elementary and secondary level. I have a conservative relative that was the dean of a law school, and he assured me that this is the case.
Long and short of it is if schools are funded only by those who use them, then most people will not be able to afford to send children there. That'd do away with education dollars completely.
On a practical level, this will not happen in the forseeable future.
On a philosophical level, this isn't a slam dunk. Parents are a child's natural, primary educators. However, there is no principle that prohibits public funding of schooling, as long as parents are the final arbiters of their child's education. Personally, I'm ambivalent to the alternatives of vouchers versus non-funding of schooling by the gov't, but the latter is a practical impossibility. So between the alternatives of the status quo and vouchers, I'll choose the latter.
That is the mission, and always has been. They just weren't familiar with gangbangers back then. The history of compulsory schooling is far more interesting than the textbook whitewash we're all familiar with.
Prussia was prepared to use bayonets on its own people as readily as it wielded them against others, so it’s not all that surprising the human race got its first effective secular compulsion schooling out of Prussia in 1819, the same year Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, set in the darkness of far-off Germany, was published in England. Schule came after more than a decade of deliberations, commissions, testimony, and debate. For a brief, hopeful moment, Humboldt’s brilliant arguments for a high-level no-holds-barred, free-swinging, universal, intellectual course of study for all, full of variety, free debate, rich experience, and personalized curricula almost won the day. What a different world we would have today if Humboldt had won the Prussian debate, but the forces backing Baron vom Stein won instead. And that has made all the difference.The genius of the textbook whitewash is that the the genesis of gov't schooling is presented as boring, when in fact it was anything but. My favorite historical anecdote concerns the Massachusetts county of Barnstable, where students were marched into school, against parental objections, at gunpoint, back in the late 1800s. It was the last county in Massachusetts to surrender to compulsory attendance laws.The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed.
ping
That's quite true. His theorizing was heavily influenced by behavioral psychology, which is simply glorified animal training. Behavioral psychology has dominated schools of ed since well before Skinner's infamous animal experiments. Schooling as animal training goes back to the late 1800s with Wundt and Pavlov, and has dominated educational theory since then.
Have you ever wondered about the origin of school bells? The purpose of the bells was to accustom students to 19th century factory life. It's other purpose is to develop in children an aversion to the in-depth study of any subject. The bells habituate children to depending upon others to provide them with instructions regarding what to learn and when to learn it.
Save for later reading.
I agree. Most parents just don’t know, and are not aware that they should expect anything else.
The local public schools in my town have a good reputation, which I found almost wholly unearned. This reputation, I speculate, is based almost solely on the fact that thie district is very wealthy, so wealthy that they are required by the state to give money away to poorer districts.
But within the school I found serious problems - teachers who keep reducing the amount of work required of their students, sometimes at the urging of their supervisors, in order to reduce dropout rates; an obsession with the standardized test that decides what rating the school receives from the state; rampant disdain for authority among the students; teachers who are treated more like babysitters and caretakers than professionals.
In a fair world, these kids would try to stick up a gas station and catch a bullet between the eye bones.
THis is right on target. In the early '60's "federal aid to education" was a controversial issue which as we know was won by the statists. They of course lied that there would be no strings attached to federal dollars(!) and a still innocent electorate believed it. It was just a matter of time then for the schools to start their slide down the slippery slope, and no coincidence that Galernter cites 1970 as the beginning of the end. I would say it was about five years earler, when the die was actually cast by an LBJ Congress.
Ask any organization that accepts grant money - they all come with strings.
You are living in the far distant past if you think vouchers are better. True they are no worse - but they aren’t “free” either.
Did you notice they didn’t go to school very much at all. Besides, chronologically speaking, they were of school age when public education was just getting started.
Besides, the early public schools did not convene for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Kids were in school at most for half a day.
You should really study the Grove City College and the (I believe it was) Bob Jones University legal cases. Maybe the scales would fall from your eyes.
If you take any kind of government money, including student aid bucks, you must abide by ALL government regulations the same as any public university.
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