Dreaming Up a New America: Progressive Education and the Perversion of American Democracy

As opposed to the 2008 election, which had many frustrated and emotionally charged voters dreaming up a new America with a historic presidential candidate leading the charge, the 2010 midterms had people doing the exact opposite. In 2010, a majority of Americans stopped dreaming and started to face reality. America was accelerating toward an irreversible and all-encompassing decline. The path envisioned by the president and his supporters for a radically changed United States was starting to look like a dead end. America was breaking down.

The year 2010 was also when essayist Walter Russell Mead began to ascribe many aspects of this breakdown to the failures within what he called the Blue Social Model. His prognostications were based on what he saw as the disintegration of core American institutions and ideas, which developed and flourished under the post-Second World War industrial system. According to Mr. Mead, the model had reached its expiration date; and among other things, what has followed is a stagnant and deeply indebted economy, crumbling social institutions, and controlled yet massive citizen dissent. Our bona fides as an advanced industrial democracy were therefore being challenged both domestically and internationally. He might have been right.

If he was right, then Mr. Mead's argument should have immediately raised some major concerns. If for the past sixty years our core institutions and ideas have, as Mr. Mead had put it, "rested on the commanding heights of a few monopolistic and oligopolistic American firms and a government with runaway entitlement programs," then we should have been asking ourselves more essential questions about the nature of our history and society. One of those questions should have been: when did America stop being a serious democracy?

>> People who are incapable of acting as individuals have no need for constitutions that protect their individual rights.

>>America is not only breaking down; it is breaking apart. Right now, we must find a clear and precise path back to our democratic roots. But this can happen only if our children are properly educated. So let the revolution begin.

Aside from using “democratic” when he means republican, he is spot on.

....."Rousseau's philosophy on education stressed the natural goodness of man and a condemnation of social conventions, most of which he believed were culpable for man's corruptive behavior. To rehabilitate mankind, Emile emphasizes the following for the various stages of a person's initial education:

1. The purpose of education is to develop a child's natural capacities. Natural education should be as far-removed from society as possible.
2. The aim of education should always be child-centered and individualized. Children learn by utilizing their senses; they are guided by natural curiosity.
3. A good teacher is unobtrusive; teachers are not there to enforce doctrine or rigid instruction.
4. Children must never be pushed to acquire information. If they are moved on their own to learn about something, they will.
5. Children will develop a sense of morality through their trials and errors. They do not acquire morals by being punished for bad behavior. Teachers are never to discipline children for perceived wrongdoing.

From such ideas, many American educators were able to promote and systematize a progressive agenda in education that placed a premium on child-centered (as opposed to knowledge-centered) instinctual "learning activities." As progressive teaching models came to have more influence, authoritative, well-informed teachers and traditional textbooks began to be viewed as antediluvian and unnecessary.

Once the progressive education models of the '60s and '70s turned into their present-day postmodern structures, administrators became especially devoted to using the following paradigms to motivate students to learn:

1. Defining a student's intellectual abilities through self-expression activities such as dance, unstructured writing, self-written poetry readings, and various forms of play.
2. A de-emphasizing of the core curriculum subjects of Western civilization in favor of subjects that underscore minority issues and excessive openness towards diversity. 3. Achieving academic equality through non-competitive groupthink projects.
4. Caricaturing and condemning traditional learning methods and devices such as rote memorization, drill, and recitation.
5. "Dumbing down" or avoiding subjects that can be mastered only through ongoing practice and hard work.
6. Grade inflation.

All of these ideas and practices have failed American students by the factory-load and are responsible for creating successive generations of "me, myself, and I" citizens who lack intellectual depth and who are prone, paradoxically, to unproductive mob behavior......

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