Posted on 02/26/2020 9:35:22 AM PST by Kaslin
The leftist propaganda taught in schools is no accident. It is the logical conclusion of the prevalent educational philosophy that favors skills over content and engagement over rigor.
School choice is finally having its moment in the national conversation, to the joy of those interested in school reform. While some states have adopted various school choice initiatives in small doses, most have not. This may change after President Donald Trump publicly brought up school choice in his recent State of the Union address, and Republican lawmakers have introduced a series of bills that would increase federal funding for vouchers.
If school choice were adopted nationwide on the proposed scale, public education would change significantly, mostly for the better. Using a government-issued voucher, parents would finally have greater freedom in choosing whether to send their children to public school, private school, or a charter school. So many public schools that currently enjoy a monopoly would no longer benefit from automatic funding that comes regardless of their performance; they would have to compete with other schools for students.
With public schools no longer the only option for parents who can’t afford anything else, these schools would need to maximize their performance, efficiency, and attractiveness. Above all, however, schools would need to ensure their teachers use high-quality curriculum.
Currently, it can be difficult for parents to know what is in the curriculum of a typical public school. After all, there is little reason to be transparent when funding is assured. As Matt Beienburg writes in National Review, this situation has led to schools adopting questionable content that seems to promote an ideological agenda over serious learning. In particular, he mentions the nationwide adoption of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” for history class, along with Seattle’s math ethnic studies framework.
Although these represent the more extreme curriculum offerings, most public schools in both red and blue states routinely use left-leaning or “woke” materials while quietly doing away with older materials that encourage American patriotism, Western civilization, and Judeo-Christian values. In English class, this means replacing “Hamlet” and “The Scarlet Letter” with “The Hate U Give,” a novel based on themes from the Black Lives Matter movement, and “Symptoms of Being Human,” a novel about a gender-fluid punk rocker who blogs about his insecurities.
In social studies, this means incorporating Howard Zinn’s anti-American interpretations of history. In science, this means teaching Darwinism as an unquestionable fact and sexual differences as subjective opinion. In math, this means conscientiously applying social justice values in word problems and learning goals.
To make matters worse, many public schools never bother to tell anyone about these changes. Because of this, Beienburg argues for school choice as a remedy to this secret propaganda effort. If schools had to compete, they would be more open and less partisan in what they teach their students.
Nevertheless, while school choice will indeed rein in some of the objectionable practices of public schools, it is important to understand why these practices occur in the first place, to treat the disease and not only the symptoms. The leftist propaganda taught in schools is no accident. It is the logical conclusion of the prevalent educational philosophy that favors skills over content and engagement over rigor. The choice of a novel or textbook often comes down to how well it aligns with this philosophy. Therefore, unless educators change how they teach, it really won’t matter what they teach.
The first step in the proliferation of woke materials has been the explicit deemphasis of content altogether. In a collective effort to combat rote learning and encourage critical thinking, the writers of Common Core and other leftist educational reformers made a point to first separate content from skills and solely focus on skills. The idea was that students who were memorizing things such as Shakespeare’s soliloquies, state capitals, and multiplication tables were not truly thinking about these things and what they meant. These reformers believed this commitment to traditional content was preventing analysis and creativity.
Rather, they thought, skills should drive content, not the other way around. In practical terms, this meant teachers should find texts and activities that were more relevant and easier to do. If students learned the same skill of discussing a literary theme with Maya Angelou’s short story “New Directions” as they would with Charles Dickens’s classic novel “Great Expectations,” the teacher should give them the former instead of the latter. If someone learned the reasoning behind balancing equations when she used a calculator versus doing the work on paper, then she should use a calculator. It’s all about the skills; content is largely irrelevant.
It turns out this thinking led to skills being irrelevant too. By trying to divorce skills from content — when content is what defines these skills in the first place — these leftist reformers ended up misunderstanding both. Instead of reflecting actual processes that the mind would perform when processing complex information, “skills” really meant jargon-laden scripts that students would recite at the right times. For example, if a student used the right terminology and illustrations when interpreting a text or solving a math problem, then he was doing critical thinking, even if that student really had no clue what the text or math problem was actually about.
This is why many district curriculum documents and textbooks expound upon the use of “academic vocabulary,” “metacognition,” and “analytical processes,” and why many curriculum creators push for technology in the classroom. All of it seems to indicate deeper thinking, even when no such deeper thinking is actually happening.
But if content is irrelevant, and anything can be viewed as teaching a skill, why does it necessarily have to be leftist? To understand this, one must understand the other strand of modern education philosophy: student engagement. According to education experts, students learn more when they are engaged and less when they are bored. Combined with skill-driven curriculum, this means teachers must find the most engaging content that somehow teaches academic skills.
It just so happens that the most engaging content that appears to teach academic skills is the woke stuff. The texts and materials all look high-level and mature, but they’re actually fairly simple, short, and easy to consume. They are heavy on identity and empowerment, making students — and teachers —feel good, and light on actual rigor and imagination, making students feel even better.
Students are thus theoretically far more engaged in English with a book like “All-American Boys,” another popular novel discussing Black Lives Matter themes, than they are with “The Great Gatsby.” They are also more engaged in history when they learn how the Founding Fathers and founding documents — which they now don’t need to read — are racist and how slavery was the cause of every social development for the past four centuries.
For this reason, educators who insist on teaching the classics and avoiding leftist agendas put themselves at an extreme disadvantage. The students simply won’t like it. Learning the truth in all its complexity requires more work, more thinking, and more humility. And if all the experts agreed that content was irrelevant, then the teacher must be choosing non-leftist materials for nefarious reasons. It will never occur to anyone that he or she picked these books because they are the most educationally effective.
Unfortunately, when bad pedagogy hijacks the methods of teaching, which is too often the case today, content will inevitably degenerate into pandering drivel. Fortunately, school choice can reverse this by letting parents reward those educators who resist these trends and uphold the tried-and-true. Parents just need to be careful when picking the right school and rewarding the right kind of learning.
If the school prides itself on “student engagement,” “21st-century skills,” and “innovative teaching,” parents may want to look elsewhere. If the school focuses on learning the great texts, cultivating virtue, and allowing the teacher to be a sage on the stage instead of a guide on the side, parents will have found the right school.
See #32. Teachers unions have no affect on curriculum.
No, they are not. The faults in education lie solely with county, state, and Federal curriculum and pedagogy designers. They are influenced strongly by education departments at the universities. If you want to help finding a solution, shift your fire.
Zinn and Ayers might possibly have inflicted more damage on this country than any other two people who were not elected.
No, it is the people who establish the curriculum and the rules for presenting that material. Change your aim to the administrators at county, state, and Federal levels. Those administrators are listening to the education departments of universities.
My grandpa WAS in politics. A high-ranking Democrat party official who was a pretty significant player at the local level.
Privately he agreed with your grandpa.
He eventually left the party and voted for Reagan in 1980.
“Schools were bad back in the 1890s, when I walked uphill....”
> There is a MAJOR disconnect between the administrators of public education and the real world. <
I couldn’t agree more. Here’s an old saying that I just made up: Engineers try something new because it works. Schools try something new because it’s different.
Example: Awhile back some idiot professor at some university somewhere decided that students need a full day to think problems over. So we were told to not correct any mistakes when they were made. We had to wait a day.
Can you imagine how insane that was! If a student in my physics class said, say, E=mc cubed, I was just supposed to write that equation on the board as if it were correct, then correct it on the following day.
That would have lead to intense confusion in the class. So I refused to do it. Luckily I wasn’t fired before the school board decided to drop the whole idea.
I saw that method summed up nicely here on Free Republic: They are trying to create knowledge by pooling ignorance.
The universities share a big part of the blame. University of Minnesota college of education has the dogma that if a student there has the view that a kid in any kind of inner city etc whatever can achieve academically, the student will NOT get a degree from the University of Minnesota.
Can you say institutionalized liberal racism? This is the kind of crap that gets a rant from Thomas Sowell.
My daughter is deaf in her left ear due to a nerve damage she got when she came down with Meningitis when she was seven month old. She had the kind that affects the lining of the brain. She was a very sick child, but she had a good doctor. When she went to school we always requested that she be allowed to sit close to the teacher and that the teacher talk to her from the right. Later on when she went to high school the kids didn’t like it that she was always sitting up front close to the teacher’s desk. So she ended up hating school. She does have trouble now hearing with her right ear and requires a hearing aid, especially when she is on her phone.
Take a look at this: Georgia Principles of Computer Science
Find the computer science in there. It is a lot of social sciences and plenty of gibberish as well. That is the standards document for teaching the second computer course in high school.
The leading to confusion I think is intentional. Make the students feel stupid.
Deliberate confusion I also see in common core math. To get to the right answer one must also go through the right gyrations. The meaningless gyrations turn out to be more important.
Are people on the school boards idiots?
> Are people on the school boards idiots? <
That’s a good question. At a minimum, they are easily swayed by liberal arguments. Do it for the children!
Anyway, I taught for many years with a certain lady. She taught a trades course. She was very practical, and very realistic.
Well, she got elected to the school board after she retired. I was initially happy to hear that. But now she is a reliable vote with the liberal majority there. She votes for the dumbest of things.
I’ve thought about calling her to try to change her mind. But that would probably just cause both of our blood pressures to spike.
I guess they have the “script” so people who aren’t qualified to teach physics can teach physics.
I find that very hard to believe. Unions get their hands into everything. I know this first hand by being in a trade Union at one time.
> I guess they have the “script” so people who aren’t qualified to teach physics can teach physics. <
I’m still scratching my head on why they felt a script was so necessary. In my state anyway, you’ve got to pass a certification test to teach physics. So you’ve really have to know a lot of physics.
If I had to guess, I’d guess it’s another way to micromanage. The beaurocrats just can’t help themselves. They know everything. The folks in the trenches know nothing.
People who are employed in Public Sector (taxpayer funded) jobs should NOT be allowed or permitted to belong to any Labor Union at all. There is nothing that can be said that will change my thinking on this matter.
I don’t know about the trade unions. But before becoming a teacher, I worked for a number of years in a union steel mill. The union constantly whined about work conditions, pay, etc. But they never once tried to interfere with how the steel was actually being made.
I saw the same thing with teachers unions. Sometimes at a union meeting a teacher would complain about the curriculum. Sometimes they would complain that the curriculum was not liberal enough! The union president would always shut down those complaints, fast.
It’s none of our business, he’d say.
This is what I have seen.
Unions have strong connections to the university Ed departments. Teachers either striking or threatening to strike, the unions will get Ed students to demonstrate & do walkouts at universities\colleges in support. Someone in state legislature sponsor a bill to allow say retired engineers or scientists to teach STEM in jr high\high school. Ed unions immediately put pressure on the legislature & university\college Ed Department Educrats help by appearing in from of committees with “oh-so-learned” lectures on why is a bad idea. Also they do PSAs on the radio & TV on why its a bad idea.
Teachers unions may not care one whit about the curriculum but they’re ready to fight tooth and nail to protect the teaching union rice bowl whenever the educrat establishment status quo is threatened. They both share the same space.
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