Many critics say our public schools are a train
wreck. In Charlotte Iserbyt's memorable phrase, we are all victims
of "the deliberate dumbing down of America." Is there any
escape? Perhaps, but only if we're candid about what has been done
to us throughout the past century.
Here's
how bad things are now. Camille Paglia, popular professor and author, declares:
"What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no
sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No
world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of
history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like
this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get
orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes
out. ... They know nothing!"
Professor Patrick Deneen at Notre Dame says, "My students
are know-nothings. ... Their brains are largely empty. ... They are the
culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly
everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect
indifference to its own culture."
Let's
jump farther back to 1983 and the famous "Nation at Risk" report produced by a
congressional investigation, which concluded: "The educational foundations
of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that
threatens our very future as a Nation and a people." Then came
the wonderful deadpan crescendo: "If an unfriendly foreign power had
attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists
today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Please
savor this. Our schools are so bad that the Russians are probably in
charge – that is, the communists.
This
shocking statement merely reveals the obvious. A decade earlier,
celebrated communist author Herbert Marcuse, in Counterrevolution and Revolt, applauded
"the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against
the established institutions while working within them ... by 'doing the job',
learning how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of
education, how to use the mass media[.]"
Such
strategies have long been commonplace. After the Russian Revolution
was consolidated in 1920, the Communist International proposed that the same
methods be pursued around the world. The Long March, the Deliberate Dumbing
Down – all proceeded simultaneously in every part of our
society. The communists wanted to influence print media,
broadcast networks, magazines, publishing businesses, universities, the
foundations – and they pretty much expropriated control of everything. That's
why they could do to education whatever they wanted and reduce public schools
to ignorance factories.
The
central fact of this whole story is that the USSR was a police state (and
probably better described as a slave state). Khrushchev
announced to the world circa 1956 that he intended to bury us –
i.e., make us part of his evil empire. The communists assumed
this outcome until after 1990 and probably do so today. So
throughout the 20th century, these subversives was merely preparing us for
our proper place in the world: enslaved. Slaves
don't need to read or think.
Decades
earlier, John Dewey and his Fabian socialists proposed the strategy that would
be endlessly replicated: infiltrate and conquer. And
never tell the truth. The New Republic tied together the main threads:
Finally,
Dewey arguably did more than any other reformer to repackage progressive social
theory in a way that obscured just how radically its principles departed from
those of the American founding[.] ... Dewey initially embraced the term
"socialism" to describe his social theory. Only after
realizing how damaging the name was to the socialist cause did he, like other
progressives, begin to avoid it. In the early 1930s, accordingly,
Dewey begged the Socialist party, of which he was a longtime member, to change
its name. "The greatest handicap from which special measures
favored by the Socialists suffer," Dewey declared, "is that they are
advanced by the Socialist party as Socialism. The prejudice against
the name may be a regrettable prejudice but its influence is so powerful that
it is much more reasonable to imagine all but the most dogmatic Socialists
joining a new party than to imagine any considerable part of the American
people going over to them."
Our
secret socialists faced endless packaging and marketing
problems. The education commissars had to provide a clever cover
story for every excrescence. If professors of education could
justify claiming that non-reading is reading, then they could use Whole Word to make children into functional
illiterates. If they could claim that garbled, nearly useless
arithmetic is as good as real arithmetic, they could make kids learn Common Core Math. If they could create
bogus research to prove that Constructivism is a superior way to teach content,
they could make sure everyone knew almost nothing, exactly as professors Paglia
and Deneen described.
America
became a large beetle with a nasty parasite consuming it from the
inside. Nineteen fifty-three is roughly the midpoint of our long
march to defeat. That year, Hilda Neatby, a world-class professor,
published her book So Little for the Mind. Neatby was the
first female president of the Canadian Historical Association. Her
book provides a shrewd exposition of what happens to a civilization when a parasite is inside. It's easy to
fall in love with Neatby's beautiful mind:
It
is well, however, to skirt Dewey's philosophy lightly, not through irreverence,
but rather through godly fear. He has been looked upon as the
fountain at which every novice must drink; in truth he is no fountain, he is
rather a marsh, a bog where armies of school teachers have sunk, and, one might
add, many of them have never risen, but speak with muffled accents from the
depths.
Although
[the expert] says he wants children to think, when driven into a corner he
betrays an uneasy conviction that most children cannot think and he therefore
accuses his critics of planning an 'academic' education suited to the few.
The
faith of our experts is not faith in the ability of all to solve problems but
the reverse. The material which would enable the individual to work
out his own salvation is practically withheld in order that he may be more
receptive to the ready-made solutions that are handed out. Few
experts in education show any appreciation of the rewards of disinterested
scholarship. And this is not surprising; few indeed have experienced
them.
Neatby
tells us what happens when communists are loose in the world. Hardly
40 years into the war against these subversives, we were largely
pacified. We had 100% literacy in 1915, but it declined steadily thereafter.
This
historical review points to an unexpected and unpleasant
conclusion. Many of our most important institutions lied to us
continually. I suspect that nothing preached by our Education
Establishment was ever true, was ever intended to work, was ever intended to
help children, was ever intended to be genuinely educational. We're
looking back at a century of lies and subterfuge. The commies, if we
may call them that, out-schemed us and out-plotted us. These
indefatigable enemies, these expert assassins, knew our kill
spots. Education was the biggest and softest.
Education,
which should elevate a society, was used to devastate ours.
Everybody
should acknowledge this shameful acquiescence. Look in a mirror and
grin sheepishly: yeah, we were easy, so, so, so easy.
Basically,
our socialists and Education Establishment did all the things we accused King
George of doing: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent
hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance. ...
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their
Acts of pretended Legislation."
We
stopped King George. Now we need to stop King Ed or, if you prefer,
Red Ed.
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.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/10/k12_why_so_little_for_the_mind.html