Beware the traitor, we are finding out. History
will probably record that high-ranking government officials tried to overturn
the election of Donald Trump. History, I suspect, will use the
word coup and will call these peopletraitors. This
is unpleasant stuff but also clarifying. A small group of people,
well organized and focused on the same goal, can overturn and destroy much
larger organizations.
John
Dewey and his supporters, a century ago, did not think of themselves as
traitors, nor would they use the word coup. But they
organized themselves in exactly that fashion. A few hundred
professors of education took control of Columbia's Teachers College, et
al. with the goal of creating "progressive" teachers who could
be sent out to the public schools of America to create a new kind of citizen,
more cooperative and pliable.
Laurie
Rogers, one of the sharpest critics of our Education Establishment, sees an
abundance of betrayal. Her blog was titled "Betrayed – Why
Public Education Is Failing." Her 2011 book is titled Betrayed: How the Education Establishment has Betrayed
America.
In 2008,
she summed up nearly a century of public school decline:
The
dizzying downward spirals of skills in science, technology, engineering and
math are jeopardizing students' futures and the nation's stability[.] ... Many
of the people who built this failing education system make money off of it as
it crumbles around our ears[.] ... Most of the people in the education
establishment refuse to engage in this conversation (leaving students and
parents to work it out on their own)[.] ... Of the rest, most neatly sidestep
any blame for the tragedy as they foist blame on parents, teachers, money,
legislators, society, hormones (yes, I've actually heard that), and the
students themselves[.] ... Just a handful will try to warn you of this
education apocalypse. Some of those brave souls have been censured,
reprimanded or fired.
Rogers
does not see accident or fad. She sees active betrayal.
Education
in the U.S. is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Just as stockbrokers
can churn an account to create money out of nothing, our Education
Establishment seems to specialize in doing everything two or three
times. First, do it badly. The following year, do it a
different way. The year after that, move the struggling students to
remediation, more assessments, and different kinds of drugs. If a
subject is taught correctly the first time, you would not generate such vast
waste, or profit, depending on where the money ends up. Clearly,
teaching subjects incorrectly and expensively year after year requires a lot of
stealth and betrayal. The society becomes dumber; those responsible
become richer.
Everything
that has happened in K-12 is wonderfully captured in the single word
"insidious," which comes from Latin insidere (to
lie in wait for). Here are some common definitions of
"insidious": intended to entrap or beguile – e.g., an
insidious plan; stealthily treacherous or deceitful – e.g., an
insidious enemy; operating or proceeding in an inconspicuous or seemingly
harmless way but actually with grave effect – e.g., an insidious
disease.
This
word connects us to Rome's almost insanely conspiratorial and murderous
history. Cicero, a distinguished lawyer, scholar, and orator, vastly
influential in Western civilization, was a consul of the Roman Empire, active
in politics and civil intrigues, finally executed in 43 B.C. by Mark Antony's
soldiers. His head and hands were chopped off and displayed in the
Roman Forum. Cicero, a wise and worldly man, warns us: "A
nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot
survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable,
for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves
among those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all
the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the
traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his
victims[.]"
Samuel
Blumenfeld wrote an important book about American K-12 in 1984: NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education. Blumenfeld
argues that education's main labor union is a traitor. It's a giant
fake horse containing enemy soldiers, brought secretly into a
city. Those soldiers overwhelm the guards, and the city is
sacked. It's a fantastic turnaround by a tiny force – the ultimate
inside job. Many would agree that John Dewey and his gang achieved
the same insidious magic, all the while speaking in accents familiar to the
victims.
Julian
Benda wrote a famous book in 1927, La Trahisons
des Clercs. Usually the last word is translated
"intellectuals." A more helpful term might be "public
officials," the people on whom we rely for honest
governance. Recall that the Russian revolution was complete by
1920. Moscow loosed the Communist International on the world, almost
overnight. Many government officials were working no longer for the
people, but for the Comintern. These traitors were busy around the
world trying to take control of everything. Benda had hoped that
traditional Western intellectuals would oppose the Comintern, not join
it. He was bitterly disappointed.
For
many hundreds of years, Catholic intellectuals searched for
God. Secular intellectual searched for Truth. In a
nihilistic new world, communist intellectuals and theorists (better described
as traitors and infiltrators) searched single-mindedly for ways to obtain
totalitarian power. Everything else was irrelevant. Old
values and the traditional approach to governance (and education) were discarded. And
so, already by 1940, there appeared a novel by Arthur Koestler titled Darkness
at Noon, a phrase taken to be an epithet for a society dominated by
communists.
Alain
Finkielkraut, a French philosopher, has continued Benda's chronicle of
intellectual betrayals. His book from 1998 is titled The Undoing of Thought. He reached this
conclusion: "When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the
life of the mind loses all meaning."
Is
that not an elegant description of American K-12, where hatred of culture is
the central problem? Dumbing down is not an abstract
process. It's a systematic elimination of academic and intellectual
content. It is the daily unrelenting practice of hating
culture, or at least continuously tossing it aside.
When
our intellectuals don't value Western civilization, and our elite educrats
don't value the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic, never mind
geography, history, and science, you know that insidious, secret forces are
winning. The fix is in. And the people who should be our
protectors are part of an inside job to destroy us.
Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is Saving
K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them? He deconstructs
educational theories and methods at Improve-Education.org.