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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.".................

.........Emile outlines the assumptions under which young boys, especially, should be educated. 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."....