You got that dead to rights, dear brother in Christ! We apparently agree on this: there are no principles of mass behavior applicable to humans conceived of as abstract "particles" getting pinged about in the force field of society. Such a concept reduces human experience and human history to near-total irrelevance.
Or to put it another way, what is commonly understood as "science" nowadays all too often "simplifies" its increasingly daunting problems by eradicating all intractable, non-compliant evidence into irrelevancy in principle, from the get-go. Both God and man get eradicated in this process....
I do agree with Norm Lenhart's statement [hi Norm!!!]:
If you gut our current [educational] system and replace it with actual teachers, America would return in a generation or two. As long as the schools remain under communist control, no chance.Still, questions remain: (1) Can we expect the luxury of two more generations will be available to restore the American cultural order, such that it may again thrive and prosper? (2) What sort of educational theory would be required to facilitate that objective?
As to question (1), I have no idea. As to question (2), I hope the following thoughts might prove helpful.
The classical understanding of education of the young was that it was the prime transmission belt of the common culture, well-grounded in human experience and tradition, to the rising generation.
In America, this understanding was best exemplified by the McGuffey's Reader series. Not only did this series teach reading, writing, and mathematics, but it often referred to sources from the classical world at the root of American culture and civilizational order; e.g., the fable of "Andronicus and the Lion."
A fable never tells a pupil what to think. It can only show the pupil where to look. Then, it's up to the pupil to go and look or not. (And if he looks, to tell the rest of us what he's seen, if he's up to it.)
In short, classical educational theory is premised in the Socratic Method, which was not at all about "telling," but "showing" the pupil how to find out for himself. And in classical Athens — the first experiment with republicanism — every citizen was expected to be competent as a public figure who, with his fellow citizens, would determine the future course of the State.
The McGuffey's Reader conformed to that classical understanding: It cared about building competent citizens.
All that started to change, in American pedagogy, roughly a hundred years ago; and the main facilitator of that change was John Dewey, esteemed educationist and political Progressive.
Perhaps needless to say, Dewey didn't construct his innovations out of whole cloth all by himself. It turns out that he was charmed by/under the influence of the Prussian model of educationist theory, under the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) .
Humboldt was "a prominent German philologist, diplomat, and man of letters" [according to Eric Voegelin, "The German University and German Society," footnote #24; in Collected Letters of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 12, 1990], "who did much to stamp the character of German nineteenth-century higher education." The footnote goes on: "[Humboldt's] educational philosophy is attacked here by Voegelin as a form of narcissistic self-absorption that seeks to turn man away from the transcendent."
Which sounds like a mouthful, but I won't go into the gory details here. On the subject of classical vs. progressive education theory, I'll just let Humboldt speak for himself:
The ancients concerned themselves with the strength and development of man as man; the moderns with his material well-being, his property, and his earning capacity. The ancients sought virtue, the moderns happiness.... The highest ideal of human beings living together, I believe, would be that in which each develops out of himself and for his own sake.Talk about a human being as if he were an atomized particle! With no connection to anything outside of himself, not to nature, not to his fellow human beings in social community.
But what this EDUCATIONIST MODEL does achieve is the purported economic well-being and advancement of an abstracted, isolated man, who under this regime will thus be a reliable taxpayer to the State. This is a deal with the devil: The citizen is being prompted to look after his own personal development and interests, with the trade-off being that he is no longer required to contribute anything as a citizen to his political community.
Indeed, that seems to be the entire point of Humboldt's educationist enterprise: It is the State that is sovereign, not the people who constitute the State. Basic considerations of "division of labor" urge that an expert class emerge to "govern." This saves a whole lot of time and bother on the part of "ordinary" people — who nonetheless end up paying for the entire freight of the bad, top-down policies being imposed on them by an elite which has no basic sympathy with/for them.
Must close, but first, in short: The problem with American public education nowadays cannot be laid at the doorstep of the teachers unions and teachers colleges exclusively. They are only the late developments of "bad seed" laid down nearly a century ago. From such premises, they are merely the chickens that have come home to roost....
Suffice it to say: I am all for charter schools, private schools (especially if they are religiously affiliated), and homeschooling.
The public schools are utterly corrupt nowadays.
Thank you so very much for writing, dear brother in Christ, and for your kind words.
Just a quick comment: “Common Core” is an initiative by the elite to consolidate their hold over the education sector. I suspect they fear internet, private, and home schools, and hope to parlay those ‘federal standards’ into requirements even for those types of schooling.
I'm also for charter schools, private schools and homeschooling - and of course for the teaching method of "showing" instead of "telling."
Betty; someone made a movie about Humbolts and Deweys tact in/on education....
It’s called “Logan’s Run”... nice movie.. disturbing but interesting..
Disturbing because the Federal school system is become just like that..
They already kill old people in a few European country’s...
SO whats old?.... thats pretty much the point..
Old is just a number.. Hitler, Stalin and Mao also had problems with useless eaters...
They had “Sandmen” as well.. under different titles..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ9AdSVmAZc
There aren’t many colleges presenting a classic education. There are a few though. They teach the “classics”, true, but that isn’t the point. They provide a classical education in the sense you mean, teaching people how to think, and leading them to think about the big issues of life.
There are others. For some reason they tend to be catholic colleges, though not all.