What Do the Educators Mean When They Say “Education”?
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What Do the Educators Mean When They Say “Education”?
One word. Two different worlds. No wonder so little genuine communication–or progress–occurs in education…
I had been writing about education for more than 20 years when I finally realized the divide, the scam, the silent sophistry, call it what you will, that renders so many discussions about education close to pointless.
When most people say the word “education,” they mean something very specific, and almost everyone knows exactly what it is: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, to be followed by history, science, literature, and the arts.
Now, if everyone in the discussion has this meaning in mind, they might build better schools together.
Unfortunately, the people who control public education and shape most of the debate have another meaning in their minds, and they know exactly what it is: social engineering, indoctrination, political correctness, and left-wing politics.
Now you see the problem and the point at which the game begins. Parents want one thing, i.e., Education! The Education Establishment wants to provide something else entirely, i.e., Education!
In truth, almost no genuine communication or negotiations can occur. The parents don’t know this. But the Education Establishment knows it very well, and must try to seduce and sedate the public without any intention of revealing what is really going on or what the stakes are.
Throughout the 20th century, the definitive rule that philosophers insisted on was: define your terms. But somehow in the perverse province of education, virtually nobody was encouraged to define their terms. So what we seem to have had was millions of words exchanged in a sort of semantic whiteout. Language and logic were soft and shapeless. As a result, the Education Establishment could promise to deliver what the public wanted, without ever intending to deliver it.
Parents heard all this high-minded talk about Education with a capital E, the worth of Education, the glory of Education, the urgent need to spend untold billions on Education. Who could guess that all this pretty verbiage was actually saying: we would like to control your children and make them behave as we think best; that’s what we mean by “education.”
It’s only when you finally grasp that the Education Establishment lives in an alternative universe, both verbally and philosophically, indeed, a generally hostile universe, that all their counter-productive strategies and bad results begin to make a strange kind of sense.
Make a list of the pedagogical fads of the 20th century. This list will run to more than 50 items, for example, Constructivism, Multiculturalism, Bilingual Education, Open Classroom, Self-Esteem, Child Centered Education, etc., etc…Typically, each of these ideas is vigorously praised and promoted for a number of years; and then discovered to be a failure. The key point is, they were not intended to teach a particular subject, i.e., the service that parents wanted. Instead, they were designed more as marketing ploys, as Bold New Ideas, that the public would find appealing (compare today’s 21st Century Skills). But the closer we look at the actual results, the more it’s clear that each one was, all along, a device, a strategy, that serves the wrong kind of “education.”
There is the crux of the matter. These methods and gimmicks do “good” only in that alternative universe focused on indoctrination and political correctness. They are not designed to do good in the world that most people live in.
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