Posted on 07/22/2003 6:33:50 PM PDT by em2vn
McGuffey Readers were used widely in America until just after World War I. During this time, John Dewey, head of the Teachers College at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930, and his disciples began an all-out assault on traditional American education. Dewey was a humanist, a socialist, a statist, and an atheist who believed that "the State can do no wrong, for right is determined by what the State does." He looked with contempt at the 19th-century American educational system, because it stressed traditional values such as patriotism and reverence to God. Dewey believed that a public school should be "more than a school." He argued that the public education system should become "the new secular State established church." He viewed the public school as the vehicle of social salvation. Toward this end, Dewey wrote that "the teacher is always the prophet of the true God, and the usherer in of the true kingdom of God." The purpose of public education in the Deweyist scheme was to create a new faith, a new socialist man, a member in a single one-world family.
Since a primary goal of progressive education is to stamp out individuality and to foster "absorption into the collective mass," McGuffey Readers and the one-room schoolhouse became the chief targets of the movement. Reformers allied with Dewey's new faith attacked the McGuffey Readers, calling them "old-fashioned" and "outmoded." By the mid-1920s they had succeeded in their efforts, and American public education began its present decline.
(Excerpt) Read more at aobs-store.com ...
Looks like she was right.
The article does raise a lot of questions though. Just how bad where the New England primers mentioned? Were they really all the same thing? Were they really "endlessly haranguing" on the social issues of the time?
Where did McGuffey come down on the issues of the day? I don't think anyone would take the stories mentioned about freedom as particularly concerned with slavery and abolition. How patriotic was McGuffey? I wonder if some of those most inclined to return to McGuffey might find 19th century Americanism too "statist" for their taste.
The French version?
I got the McGuffey series for my own kids homeschooling. They really demonstrate how far literacy has fallen. The Fourth Reader would be considered challenging by most college students.
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