Whenever we recall Book VII of
Plato's Republic, the "Allegory of the Cave" that many of
us studied in college, we remember that the chained population in the cave was
always looking at shadows on the wall of the cave and mistakenly believed that
those shadows were reality. Shadows of unreality are being reflected
today by the policies and practices of many school systems. Vague talk
about improving our schools, becoming more competitive globally, and opening
doors of opportunity becomes rubrics that express "shadows" of the
reality that managers of education are in fact implementing progressive – i.e.,
totalitarian – social engineering.
The implementation of this social
engineering is closely tied to getting non-educators and inexperienced
educators into the schools as teachers and administrators and getting older,
experienced teachers and administrators out.
These younger individuals
will not have the deep inculcation of educational values, those values of
learning and of relationship established at the nexus of humanism and
Judeo-Christian values. They are persons who do not see and do not wish
to see that curricular innovation, creativity, knowledge, teacher morale,
school tone, the family of man, student character building, and caring and love
of all for all (said list can be summed up as "the pursuit of happiness")
are in direct opposition to and are the antidote for the social engineering
agenda now sweeping the country.
The emphasis on bringing in and promoting
"change agents" is supposedly to refresh the profession that has been
too insulated from accountability and new ideas for too long. For
example, New York City has a "Teaching Fellows" program to recruit
new teachers from other occupations. One can find people coming into
education from facilities management, the petroleum industry, pharmaceutical
sales, and lobster wholesaling and delivery backgrounds. They are
"career change" types who have decided they want to make a buck in
education that had eluded them in the private sector or, in some cases, follow
an easier path (but education actually isn't easier). They soon learn the
realities of life in the schools, and many leave. Many teaching fellows
are also brilliant and idealistic and come into education to make a difference
in the lives of individuals and society as a whole.
However, they find
that they not only have to deal with incredibly complex and difficult classroom
and building situations, but many times are badgered by clueless administrators
who are "new breed" social engineers, not educators.
The new breed of educational leadership
believe that they are eminently qualified to make great decisions. Guess
why they have this belief. First, they believe this lie because some are
willing to hire them to manage schools. Pure ego satisfaction.
Second, they are convinced they are not weighed down with all that trashy
experience of educational failure that those with educational experience have
as baggage. The new generation of change agents taking over the public
schools look down on the former generations of teachers, those who loved
education, cared about kids, made a lifetime commitment to serve in the
schools, looked for security instead of stock options and bonuses – these
people brought with them, secretly (assumed by the change agents), the baggage
of failure. They were messing up kids and their futures – and they didn't
even know it. Generations of complex and engaging board work is being
debunked with wholesale contempt as "chalk and talk."
These agents of change are implementing an
agenda driven by statistics (scores), savings (money), and systems (depersonalized
bureaucratic mechanisms and rules).
What reforms do
the new generation of administrators and teachers seek to implement? They
are driving toward the six- or seven-class-a-day high school teaching load, the
9-5 schedule for the schools (or longer), school provided free and compulsory
for ages 2 to 22 (or 26), the six- or seven-day school week, and the longer
school year (with two- or three-week vacation breaks scattered
throughout), all controlled by a vast bureaucracy nationwide and justified by
the implementation of "national standards." Thus, the schools
become the "big brother," and instead of reinforcing parental
standards and values (in loco parentis), schools are substituted for the
nurturing home (fast disappearing from the USA).
Under the new system, adopt-a-school programs increasingly
will be put in place, where school-to-work programs ready students for college
and employment in a particular large company (multinational or national chain),
which has "adopted" the school. Also,
programs are being developed where students study on their own on
computers, and teachers are the backup facilitators to answer questions the
computer cannot resolve.
Under this new vision, the individual and
small group daily contacts between teachers and students will of necessity
(because of the scale of the changes) be de-emphasized in favor of systems that
manage administrators, teachers, and students in a more holistic way.
Each employee and student will be pigeonholed with certain limited and defined
functions and directives. Attempts have already been made to have written
scripts for classes, promoting uniformity across numerous classes with the
exact same exams being given on the same days on a large scale as students
uniformly finish units of study at the same time. Also, the ubiquitous
insistence on "rubrics" today (they were not used in education on a
large scale 25 or more years ago) is a forerunner of a more exact and fine
tuned manipulation of every educational activity (lessons, units, tests, and
even personal interactions).
The public is being softened up to accept
these changes. On the one hand, with greater numbers of families where
both parents are working, compulsory pre-K and pre-pre-K and longer school days
and school years will be an attractive cost-saver for young parents and
unmarried moms. Also, there is a perennial drumbeat of public statements
about the U.S. lack of educational competitiveness with China, Korea, Singapore,
Japan, and even Finland. We are repeatedly told how poorly American
students fare on international tests of math and science as a way of gradually
justifying more and more control over our children by the public schools.
Truthfully, despite being in education for decades, this writer has never
met one student or one adult who has ever taken one of these international
tests in math and science that show us to be "non-competitive"!
We can also see that independence of
student thought is being undermined as increased numbers of students are asking
teachers mind-numbing questions about minutiae of classroom practice and
protocol. For example, how many students, if an essay question includes
three parts labeled as (A), (B), and (C), will ask the teacher if the answer to
the question should be presented as a list or in paragraph form?
Or, outside English classes, students may
be heard asking, "Will I lose points for a grammatical error?"
Going back a few decades, this kind of student question did not exist on the
large scale of today. Students were more decisive and wrote the answers
as best as they could. Often these questions are mistakenly believed to
reflect the young person's need for structure. But what is really being
expressed by them is fear and acquiescence to bondage, a bondage of minutiae
and imposed indecision created by the puppeteers of education and
society. (Just observe the administration of AP and SAT exams, and one
will notice the lengthy mind-numbing script that students must listen to and
follow. Pure, unadulterated bondage.)
There are elements of hope in this
seemingly dismal picture. Many parent groups are resisting the prevailing
progressive-oppressive vision. Also, there are those in minority
communities who increasingly realize that the public schools are walking down a
path not of democratic unity as originally conceived by John Dewey, but of
totalitarian control. Donald Trump's Department of Education appointee,
Elizabeth "Betsy" DeVos, a believer in school choice, is a light
shining into an otherwise dismal picture. Further, we have ever
increasing numbers of parents homeschooling their
children, and the private school option continues to be attractive, yet the
costs can be prohibitive. Also, we have some great online videos exposing
the idiocy
of certain Common Core strategies, especially in math problem solving.
Importantly, we have the consistent
Socratic challenge to the educational establishment, both in print and online,
being presented by such wonderful educational analysts as E.B. Hirsch,
Charlotte Iserbyt, and American Thinker contributors and authors Robert
Weissberg and Bruce Deitrick Price. They have been alerting us to the
problems in education for a long time, but with our new president, we may
now have the will to challenge the drift of the last three decades and reverse
course.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/12/public_schools_not_education_but_social_engineering.html#ixzz4SMSrlA6N