Here’s What Happened to American Education–The Really Short Version
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Here’s What Happened to American Education–The Really Short Version
I asked my doctor what he thought of President Obama’s proposals for health insurance.
The doctor shrugged with annoyance. Evidently he didn’t like the president’s approach.
The doctor remarked: “Obama’s saying, this is what’s good for you — whether you like it or not.”
Hold that thought! It’s everything you need to know about American education for the past one hundred years.
John Dewey, universally acknowledged as the founder of American education, knew what was good for Americans. He and his colleagues, all progressives and socialists, devised a plan for using the teachers colleges to indoctrinate upcoming teachers, and then sending them out to the countryside to indoctrinate the children. Dewey hated the idea of the competitive child, the independent or self-directed child. He wanted all children to be similar and interdependent, to work and play well together, to be — and this is the key word — cooperative. In short, he wanted to create the new Socialist child. Such children were what the US needed, whether the US liked it or not.
Dewey and his successors, i.e., the present Education Establishment, thought the way Obama thinks. Don’t ask the people what they want. Tell them what they need. And then make them accept it.
All during the last hundred years, parents have been demanding that their children be genuinely educated, by which they typically mean reading, writing, arithmetic, science, history, literature, and the arts. The Education Establishment responded by saying, sure, we’ll educate your kids, by which they meant indoctrinate, brainwash, socially engineer, and collectivize. Naturally the schools declined into mediocrity. They were no longer primarily in the education business. They were in the socialism business.
Socialists, Marxists, and totalitarians tend to work out the answers for humanity’s problems on a blackboard. Then they want to enforce those answers at the point of a gun. Never forget the Pol Pot Paradigm. A Communist living in Paris, Pol Pot worked out the answers for Cambodia’s problems, went back to his home country, and in time killed more than a million of his fellow citizens. Almost a quarter of the population. Why did he do that? In order to make a more perfect Cambodia, whether the Cambodians liked it or not.
One can debate all these issues in highfalutin, metaphysical or ideological ways. Those arguments will drag on for weeks and months. The resulting intellectual confusion tends to favor the wannabe dictators. It has often been noted that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others. Likewise, capitalism is arguably the worst economic system except for all the others. The bad ideas might appear rational and tidy. But so does a cemetery.
Let’s cut to the chase. The sin–the initial, fundamental and crucial sin– is contempt. Everything bad emanates from the contempt of leaders for their people. The leaders think they have all the good answers; simultaneously, they regard the people as ignorant or irrelevant. In either case, the people can be ignored.
The essence of American democracy is to say to people, what do you think about this? Let’s discuss. Let’s vote. The far-left doesn’t like discussions and voting. John Dewey brought this contempt into American education. That’s what happened to us. Indeed, it’s still happening.
(Article summary: The far-left likes to devise abstract answers, and then force them on the public. That sensibility is at odds with American democracy. It certainly wasn’t common in American education…until John Dewey and his progressive educators cracked open a nasty can of worms.)
More elaborate discussions of this thesis can be found in “41: Educators, O. J. Simpson, and Guilt” and “45: The Crusade Against Knowledge” on Improve-Education.org. Bruce Price is an author, artist, poet and education activist.
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