What do School Libraries Support
1) The Tragic Libraries of Education: 'They're just books'
2) For an Education to be meaningful, its books must be more than 'just books'
3) Our Founder's wrong turn towards Education today - The New Normal
4) Remove this dangerous technology from the classroom: Textbooks
5) Foundations & Compasses - Books are never 'Just books'
6) Disorienting America - the modern thinking behind abandoning True North
7) Never forget that 'Education Reform' is about reforming you
8) Accepting the 'Science!' of Education Reform
9) The 1st lesson from the dark wood of School Reform: Good intentions make a map to Hell unnecessary
10) Pragmatically shifting us off of our Foundations
11) Experimentally reading ourselves into illiteracy
12) The Power of Ignorance: 'Back to Basics' Reform
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Thursday, February 10, 2022
The Tragic Libraries of Education: 'They're just books'
What should, and should not be, in a school library? Who decides that? Do school libraries serve different purposes than public libraries? Is removing books from a school library the same thing as banning or censoring books? Questions like these have been swirling around and heating up the controversy between parents, librarians, educators (and trolls), in our schooling debates, though the first one is usually the only one that's asked openly (and answered as superficially as possible). While dealing with some trolls recently, it struck me as interesting, and not a little bit concerning, that there are similarities in how both trolls and many conservative parents 'pragmatically' approach these questions of what should be done about such books, and I think something needs to be done about that, ASAP.
The trolls had pounced upon a parent's group that dared show an interest in a handful of biographies for kids, from Mark Twain to Ronald Reagan & Justice Scalia, which the trolls - literally judging the books by their covers - condemned as being propaganda, because, obviously, a publisher that'd publish books 'exclusively about right wing figures!' (Mark Twain?), could only be peddling propaganda, and misinformation and that "shouldn't be allowed around inquiring young minds". And of course, being trolls, and *woke* ones at that, they were quick to dismiss any concerns about conservative books being removed, decentered or discarded from school libraries, as being no more than hysterical rants over 'objective truths' that do not apply or exist, because, after all:
'They're just books'Naturally, if those books concerned leftist themes and heroes (one troll had helpfully suggested a nice bio of Ruth Bader Ginsberg would be more appropriate for students than one on Scalia), or even porn, well then... obviously, as 'every librarian, and educator' (and troll) understands all too well, 'every student needs to have free and unfettered access to all such materials', and it's nothing short of a fascistic assault upon liberty itself, for any such books to be withheld from those same inquiring young minds. That completely ignores, of course, the Left's recent efforts (and successes) to have Dr. Suess books and 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn', and more, removed from school libraries... but focusing too much on their inconsistency, leads you to assume that they care about either reality, truth, or consistency between the two (that'd be 'epistemic adequacy'), which in fact is what they not only fundamentally deny, but is the central focus of all of the *Woke*'s attacks (their efforts to replace 'epistemic adequacy' with 'social epistemology', amounts to replacing objective truth with polling those who know best). Don't let yourself get sidetracked by that, you only aid them. Worry about your own inconsistencies, which is what I want to focus on here.
Clearly the actions of such trolls, librarians, and educators, show that they are fully aware that books are much more than 'just books', and that they understand that there's a larger issue involved here, than only the particular books that are present in, or purposefully absent from, a school's library. What is concerning to me though, is that too many conservative parents act towards those books as if they do believe that:
'They're just books'What I mean by that is that although parents are rightly appalled that their children are being exposed to overly crude, age inappropriate, and even pornographic materials (from bizarre fetishes, to rape, and incest) in their school libraries, they rarely pursue matters beyond having those particular books physically removed, as if the only problem is the physical or virtual presence of those objects, which will somehow be resolved by removing them, but how and why those books got there in the first place too often gets no more than a 'tsk-tsk' of attention (if a baby-sitter in your neighborhood left porn out for your kids and began chatting them up about it, would you send your kids back to be watched by them if they promised to remove it? Hello?). Such pragmatic behavior by parents is a tacit admission that in their minds,
'They're just books'If you don't see the issue here, you may rest assured that the trolls, librarians, and educators who selected the books you despise, and rejected the books you love, do, because how those particular books 'somehow got there', wasn't due to any one person's error in judgement, they were chosen, and chosen for a purpose, and chosen to further that purpose. Parents and anyone else with an interest in how students are educated at their expense (that'd be everyone), need to learn to push a bit past the superficial thinking which those same schools once taught them to settle for, and begin recognizing that such books as those are there for a purpose, and that purpose actively guides what is stocked in their library, it informs your schools' lesson plans, assemblies, activities, and even the posters that are put up (or not) on classroom walls. That purpose is actively driving those messages which your child's thinking is expected to conform to, and those who believe in it will fight tooth and nail to see to it that those ideas and messages - which the particular books in question are only the more visible carriers of - will continue to be felt in as many student's heads as possible, through every meaningful aspect of their school.
Having spent a few decades digging into the ideas and intentions behind those purposes, I'm no longer surprised by the actions and comments of such trolls, librarians, and educators, but it baffles the hell out of me that the parents who in fact do love their children, and do want the best for them, behave as if removing a few particular books, is somehow going to sanitize and neutralize the ideology which is using that school to occupy its students thoughts with.
IOW: The books found in the school's library are an effect of what causes them to be selected. Removing some effects (the books) isn't going to alter or remove their cause (the ideology that drives such choices).
Which brings me to the question that usually goes unasked: Do school libraries serve different purposes than public libraries? Short answer: Yes. Do most school libraries understand (or admit) that? As 'mission statements' of school libraries typically say:
"to learn and appreciate the power of information ", and the fact that the attitude typically expressed by most school libraries is that
'it doesn't matter what you read, as long as you read!', which is as inexcusable as a dietician saying 'It doesn't matter what you eat, so long as you eat - veggies, or twinkies, or sweetened carcinogens, makes no difference, just eat and keep on eating!', I think it's safe to say that the answer to that is: No.
But the reality is that a public library provides the widest possible selection of materials to serve whatever purposes that its patrons might seek to pursue. A school's library, OTOH, has, or should have, a very different purpose:
It is neither banning nor censoring, to remove books that do not align with, or support, or that runs contrary to the education which that a school library is there to support, but it is negligence, at best, to add or retain books that run contrary to the education which that library's school is supposed to be providing.
- To serve and support the education which that school is providing to its students.
The real question to be asked is what is the nature of the education which that school is providing, and how one book or another helps with that (and very likely reveals it), because whether they admit that to be their mission or not, a school library's books are not selected (or rejected) haphazardly on the basis of,
'They're just books', but because their meaning and presence (or absence) is serving and supporting what that school wants its students to learn, value, and become.
Rumor has it that a local school district is about to overrule parents' objections to books they consider to be inappropriate because there are no psychological studies proving that they're harmful. Is that the standard of what books your kids can be exposed to in school?
Make no mistake: Students are receiving exactly the education that these educators, librarians and trolls want them to receive, and those who treat effects as causes, and expect that removing a book will lead to fewer effects, without dealing with what caused it to be chosen, are being just as foolish as those who think that:
'They're just books'Worse, such deflections and evasions help those making such choices, to achieve their 'Brave New World'. Books about incest, rape, are not in conflict with their ideals, and those ideals are what students are being educated to value; those are the ideas and ideals that they hope will occupy your child's thoughts, because 'children are the future', and the future they are seeking, is the kind of future that can be more easily imposed upon those who dwell upon such ideas and activities. Who is surprised by this, and why? The trolls, librarians, and 'educators' who clearly understand the lie behind:
'They're just books', are not surprised by the lies they're telling or promoting, while too many parents still seemingly presume their deceptions to be but errors, or carelessness, and nothing more. That's a problem.
It's also a problem that the nature of the lessons which are taught (or ignored) in a school, are taught in order to affect the nature of what your future family, friends and community leaders will be shaped into - that is what drives what books will and won't be in its libraries. That purpose, that mindset, that 'Critical Pedagogy', not only preceded the placement of crude and pornographic books in their schools' libraries, but it is what led those who staff them to calculate that they could and should attempt to get away with slipping porn into students reading materials without parents noticing it, just as it has led thousands of trolls, librarians and educators to "Vow To Defy State Bans on Critical Race Theory" (hey, haven't we been told that defying 'democratic government' endangers 'democracy!'? Huh.) in support of the communist Howard Zinn Project, and it is emblematic of the thinking that will continue to operate upon those students' minds - such as encouraging students to think about their sexual preferences by comparing those to which pizza toppings they might prefer - despite any momentary inconveniences that might be encountered by the removal of a few particular books, or personnel, or classes, due to the parental complaints or legislative mandates of the moment.
A Serious Question
How compatible is the 'education' which our school systems are providing, with who you want your kids, your future family, friends and community leaders, to be? Parents, and everyone else, need to begin taking education seriously, which means realizing, as the *Woke* do, that 'getting an education' is about more than school mascots, sports, and kids marking time by memorizing facts & getting good grades to get a diploma and prove they picked up enough useful skills to get a good job (not even businesses trust in that anymore).
Rest assured that a school, especially a *Woke* one, doesn't see any book as being 'Just a book', or itself as "Just a school", or what it is delivering into students minds as being "Just an education", but they very much appreciate the lack of thought that so very many of us have given to the matter, so that they can continue doing what they've devoted their lives to doing to your kids minds, and society as a whole, which is what they believe the schools are there for.
A good education is something rather than nothing, and meaning something rather than anything, it can't be supported by just anything at all, and such efforts must make it a lesser thing. The act of teaching implies that there is a destination which the student does not yet know how to navigate to, and does not know which false trails and pitfalls to steer clear of. Once they do know the way, once they've reached adulthood, then they can go their own way and explore what, where, and how they will, but not until then, and I seriously question the wisdom and intentions of any adult who'd allow the student to make their own choices about which road to go down and how fast to travel upon them without parental supervision. If you understand that books are more than 'just books', and that discrimination and discretion are required in providing students an education, then we should give more consideration to the question of 'What do you mean by an education?', and what role it is that books play in getting one - which is what we'll start looking into in the next post.
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Wednesday, February 23, 2022
For an Education to be meaningful, its books must be more than 'just books'
"...As for literature--to introduce children to literature is to install them in a very rich and glorious kingdom, to bring a continual holiday to their doors, to lay before them a feast exquisitely served. But they must learn to know literature by being familiar with it from the very first. A child's intercourse must always be with good books, the best that we can find..."
-- Charlotte Mason - CHAPTER III - The Good and Evil Nature of a Child
"Instruction in the science or art of right living is the chief lesson in education, to which all others ought to be rendered subservient, and what this science is, and what may justly be called false learning.", he'd surely see such materials as those to be in conflict with the 'art of right living' and would be more likely to view them as the stuff of false learning, than as somehow being able to contribute to an actual education. But as we'll see, we don't have to travel all the way back to the 1700s to find that treating the nature, quality and content of books as if 'They're just books', as far too many librarians, educators and trolls do today, would have gotten you laughed out of school, and out of any & all polite conversations about them.
Unfortunately, that common sensibility began to change for far too many of us, as the understanding which our Founders' era had benefitted from, began to change, and changed further still, until ever more radical changes have brought us into such a state of flux that many community leaders and parents today, are eager to expose young children to the detritus of every momentary fad... for 'the greater good'... or at least to make a politically woke point.
The changes to how Americans educate themselves have taken us from being one of, if not the most literate and educated people at the opening of the 19th Century (with no official educational system); a people for whom Thomas Jefferson had earlier written the Declaration of Independence less as a means to instigate a revolution than to briefly state what was "...an expression of the American mind...", whose,
"... authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..."; a people for whom a couple of decades later The Federalist Papers would be written to inform and persuade the common farmer and 'man in the street' on the finer points of applying political philosophy and law to their own lives and to that of their posterity... to a people whose 'graduates' since the 20th Century have been mostly unwilling or unable to comprehend, or even to read, those works and ideas that were once the common fund of American thought, and many of whom are unaware of who our Founders even were, or have an understanding of what America is.
All over the course of little more than a century - now that's revolutionary.
Because pulling weeds is a waste of time if you don't get at the roots, it's important to note that this didn't happen as a result of CRT or SEL, or Common Core, or the 1960s, and the fact that its roots run much deeper than that becomes self-evident with a comment made by Albert Jay Nock in the lectures he gave in 1931 at the University of Virginia ("The Theory of Education in the United States"), in relating what an Italian nobleman had told him of "a curious experience" that he had in our country, that:
Facts aren't the issue... but facts alone and without a story to understand them within, might be
Those textbooks we utilize today may have fewer facts than those of a century ago, but facts aren't the issue with textbooks, though as facts alone are soon forgotten, that gets a bit closer to it (the details of that in the next post). Those textbooks which are our educational poison of choice today, may be less diluted with 'facts' than those of a century ago, but their function and form are the very same poison, and if we want to escape its ill effects, what we need is not a less potent form of the same poison that we're already poisoning ourselves with, but something that's different enough to actually contribute to our health, rather than assail it.
The questions we should be asking ourselves, are what it is that we mean by Education, and how to tell it from its counterfeit, and how an educated people permitted that revolution to be waged upon themselves? Answer those, and we'll begin to see how to rectify matters. Don't however, allow yourself to be misled by the answers that are typically given, that we needed to create an educational system (and political controls over the public) so that 'all Americans would have the same understanding of America' - that was and is more of a useful pretext, than a true reason for them. After all, if that had been their true motivation, then they would have simply used the public trough to fund teachers and the materials they preferred to teach from, so that they could continue to teach what they had been teaching so successfully, to any of the public that was missing out on being taught.
That could easily have been accomplished without having to change everything about how Americans had already made America the most literate nation in history.
But where's the fun in that, eh?
In this post I want to focus on what is meant by an Education, so I'll leave the details of who, how, and why we ended up with the educational system we have for the next post, but as it did help redefine what we mean by getting an education, two points need to be noted about the new system:
What was not pointed out, except by those who were mostly ignored, was that the integrated understanding of self and society which had for so long been understood as a central purpose of education, was being abandoned for the economic 'greater good', though with the very best of intentions, of course.
And of course, the answer to whether or not our new system of education, was successful at educating either students or teachers, or if it achieved anything like 'a greater good', was, IMHO, best given by Knock's Italian nobleman. But answering the question well for us today, requires considering not just what is meant by getting a good education, but about what an education - good, bad or indifferent - is, and then how to know if one has one, or not.
What do you mean by an Education?
If we look to our dictionaries for help in defining 'Education', they are helpful only in pointing out the differences that it seems we're already aware of and divided over. Webster's Dictionary of 1828 (the irony will be noticeable in the next post) defined 'Education' as:
Our word 'Education' comes to us by way of several Latin words: educere, educare, and educatus, meaning “to learn”, “to know” and “bring out, lead forth”. That is what Frederick Douglass was speaking of in 1894 as being the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", noting that those who lacked an education, learning only those skills that were useful to their masters, lived "... within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope...", but that:
Because pulling weeds is a waste of time if you don't get at the roots, it's important to note that this didn't happen as a result of CRT or SEL, or Common Core, or the 1960s, and the fact that its roots run much deeper than that becomes self-evident with a comment made by Albert Jay Nock in the lectures he gave in 1931 at the University of Virginia ("The Theory of Education in the United States"), in relating what an Italian nobleman had told him of "a curious experience" that he had in our country, that:
"...He said he had been in America several times, and had met some very well-educated men, as an Italian would understand the term; but they were all in the neighborhood of sixty years old. Under that age, he said, he had happened upon no one who impressed him as at all well-educated...", in other words, whatever the ingredients that were used or how they were prepared, or how highly rated their educational baked goods were, when he sampled the results of our new educational recipe, he found it wanting and wondered what on earth had happened in our kitchens. Knock replied to him dryly, that the reason why was,
"... that our educational system had been thoroughly reorganized, both in spirit and structure, about thirty-five years ago, and that his well-educated men of sixty or so were merely holdovers from what we now put down, by general consent, as the times of ignorance..."Two points to make on that:
- First, the time period of 'thirty-five years ago' which Knock mentioned, roughly 1895, was the height of the era of 'Progressive Education' sweeping through the classrooms of America, and while it may have taken decades more to complete the counter-revolution, the outcome of it was by 1931 already beyond question.
- The second point is that most of those concerned about our schools today, would look at my grandpa's social studies textbook of 1902, and find it to be admirably full of facts to be memorized, 'rigorous' even, and would probably gladly trade my daughter's vapid and graphics laden social studies textbook of 2017 which also contains facts to be memorized, for it - and yet those of my grandfather's day were what had produced those which Knock's Italian friend had found to be so educationally wanting, and both of which led to the 1619 Project textbook which also contains facts to be memorized.
Those textbooks we utilize today may have fewer facts than those of a century ago, but facts aren't the issue with textbooks, though as facts alone are soon forgotten, that gets a bit closer to it (the details of that in the next post). Those textbooks which are our educational poison of choice today, may be less diluted with 'facts' than those of a century ago, but their function and form are the very same poison, and if we want to escape its ill effects, what we need is not a less potent form of the same poison that we're already poisoning ourselves with, but something that's different enough to actually contribute to our health, rather than assail it.
The questions we should be asking ourselves, are what it is that we mean by Education, and how to tell it from its counterfeit, and how an educated people permitted that revolution to be waged upon themselves? Answer those, and we'll begin to see how to rectify matters. Don't however, allow yourself to be misled by the answers that are typically given, that we needed to create an educational system (and political controls over the public) so that 'all Americans would have the same understanding of America' - that was and is more of a useful pretext, than a true reason for them. After all, if that had been their true motivation, then they would have simply used the public trough to fund teachers and the materials they preferred to teach from, so that they could continue to teach what they had been teaching so successfully, to any of the public that was missing out on being taught.
That could easily have been accomplished without having to change everything about how Americans had already made America the most literate nation in history.
But where's the fun in that, eh?
In this post I want to focus on what is meant by an Education, so I'll leave the details of who, how, and why we ended up with the educational system we have for the next post, but as it did help redefine what we mean by getting an education, two points need to be noted about the new system:
- First, that the new system's signature intention was to focus students on learning more 'practical' skills - accounting skills, agricultural skills, etc. - as useful for more quickly entering into the economy (the 19th Century version of "gotta learn the skills of the 21st century!"), which progressively took more & more attention off of those 'harmonizing sentiments' which had earlier been generated by the integrated focus of a traditional education.
- Second, the new system was sold as being more efficient and was to be proven effective through 'measurable testing' of how many facts a student retained within their head, which was to both enable schools to scientifically certify a student's 'level of education', and to help businesses with picking its employees, and improving the economy (ever wonder where quizzes, tests and grades came from?). Doing that required our dis-integrating the materials of education into discrete subjects that would be taught and measured separately - mathematics taught without relation to Music; something called 'English' to be taught separately from History; History to be replaced by the new 'science' of 'Social Studies', and so on - for both students and teachers.
And of course, the answer to whether or not our new system of education, was successful at educating either students or teachers, or if it achieved anything like 'a greater good', was, IMHO, best given by Knock's Italian nobleman. But answering the question well for us today, requires considering not just what is meant by getting a good education, but about what an education - good, bad or indifferent - is, and then how to know if one has one, or not.
What do you mean by an Education?
If we look to our dictionaries for help in defining 'Education', they are helpful only in pointing out the differences that it seems we're already aware of and divided over. Webster's Dictionary of 1828 (the irony will be noticeable in the next post) defined 'Education' as:
EDUCA'TION, noun [Latin educatio.] The bringing up, as of a child, instruction; formation of manners. education comprehends all that series of instruction and discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the temper, and form the manners and habits of youth, and fit them for usefulness in their future stations. To give children a good education in manners, arts and science, is important; to give them a religious education is indispensable; and an immense responsibility rests on parents and guardians who neglect these duties., while Merriam-Webster's definition today, is more reflective of... today:
1a: the action or process of educating or of being educatedSo we need to dig a little deeper.
b: the knowledge and development resulting from the process of being educated
2: the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools
Our word 'Education' comes to us by way of several Latin words: educere, educare, and educatus, meaning “to learn”, “to know” and “bring out, lead forth”. That is what Frederick Douglass was speaking of in 1894 as being the "Blessings of Liberty and Education", noting that those who lacked an education, learning only those skills that were useful to their masters, lived "... within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope...", but that:
"...Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being..."For clarity's sake, we should first separate what an Education is, from its quality - good, bad, or indifferent - and that is to inform and lead students into paths and patterns of thought and behavior for life. One implication of this is that what paths and patterns of thought and behavior that a school exposes a student to, whether in the classroom, or library, playground, etc., is educating them - and of course what the student engages in outside of school, also contributes to the education that they are receiving.
An indifferent education will differ from a good one, by having no definite purpose or attention in its actions and probably makes little distinction between the materials it uses or provides (very much like the 'read any books, they're just books' attitude that satisfies so many of our librarians, educators and trolls today) to lead its students' thinking, behavior, and lives with; less interested in dispelling the dark, than in compensating for it by focusing on external conditions and pleasures. Very likely it also employs teachers and staff whose character fails to reinforce, or even undermines, what goals it may claim to have for their learning.
And a bad education, whether out of ignorance or deliberate design, will use those materials that treat the light of truth as being a threat to those shadows it prizes above all else (hello '1619 Project'), leaving its students in the dark about their own nature, and of any reality that conflicts with the pursuit of power over others and the trappings of that (hello SEL & CRT).
The materials that Frederick Douglass used to become one of America's greatest essayists and orators (and he was largely self-taught), was a collection of plays, speeches, poems, and other examples of quality literature, called 'The Columbian Orator', which Douglass called his 'rich treasure' and 'noble acquisition'.
What Douglass himself valued, was a product of a couple of thousand years of educational experience in the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, had shown that a good education was best provided to students by leading them through the best stories, inquiries (History), and orderly thought in action (geometry, music, poetry, philosophy, science,) - which broadly speaking all falls under the heading of Literature - and that guiding students through that literature had been the primary means of putting the student's thoughts and actions on the path towards becoming what Frederick Douglass spoke of and became, a person whose knowledge of what is true and worth knowing for living a good life, ran at least as deep as it did wide; someone marked by orderly thinking that was reflected in their admirable manners and actions; someone far seeing in their thoughts across time, and able to organize and express them clearly and persuasively.
Such a person as that, showed themselves in their manner and speech to be free - or at least freer - of the shadow of unexamined thoughts, ignorance and prejudice about them, which, as Knock's Italian Nobleman noted, is detectable from meeting with them. One question for us is, how likely is it that those qualities of purpose, wisdom, and virtue, can be detected by having them fill out a multiple-choice test?
What the Italian Nobleman's 60+ yr old acquaintances knew, that we've forgotten
Someone who still had one foot firmly enough in that older ideal of education, to be alarmed by the steps he could see being taken into that ideological future which has become our present day, was an essayist I first ran across about a decade ago, named Charles Dudley Warner, who, BTW, would have been roughly amongst those over 60 yr old educated gentlemen which Knock's Italian nobleman was speaking of. Warner is someone who had a good deal of sense to say upon the subject of education, and especially about the use/misuse of Textbooks, which today are questioned only in terms of whether a particular one is, euphemistically speaking, 'good' or 'bad', while few bother questioning whether or not that very modern technology known as 'Textbooks', are a value at all, or an insidious danger, to a good education.
One particular essay which Warner wrote in 1890, "The Novel and the Common School", conveyed the alarm he felt over the direction that education was heading in, and there's one particular paragraph of it which I think gives the gist of the problem he saw and tried to warn his fellows about, that I want to walk us through in this post, noting the landmarks and paying attention to the lay of the land that we are in the midst of today.
What I take to be Warner's key paragraph, begins:
"The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education..."One thing to note about that, is that the notion that an education can be had without the works and stories - literature - which convey it, is a novel and foolish practice that's barely a century old... and it has become the norm today. Another, is that the notion that what a literature transmits can be thought of as being only a 'branch' of education, rather than the soil, root and trunk of what an education is developed through, is, and was once widely understood to be, absurd. And that has absolutely become the norm today.
Of course if that's true, as noted, then the answer to the question of 'What do you mean by an education?', was once understood to be very different from our claim today that it can be defined by the memorization of facts & algorithms and certified by taking standardized tests upon them - and not just a little different, but entirely different - and why that is, is worth thinking about.
Warner expands on that in the next line of his essay:
" It is only matched in absurdity by the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge. Here is the whole body of accumulated thought and experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and explains it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely in books; and most teachers think, and most pupils are led to believe, that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook!"However alien it might seem to us today, and whether or not it results in a good, bad, or indifferent education, the stories, inquiries, and scientific observations which make up the literature that a child is 'exposed to' (or that is absent from it), are what forms the basis of their education. An exceptional British teacher of Warner's time, Charlotte Mason (whose works reflected what was once good teaching and has shaped homeschooling for a century), held a view of education which I very much like, as 'The science of relations', which an examined reading of discloses to the student the interrelatedness of grammar, history, rhetoric, science, in all of literature, and that is exactly what our segmented class & course structure of modern education was designed to explode. Deliberately or not, and no matter what quality or coherence those stories may or may not have, and whether engaged through books, movies or tweet-streams - that 'literature' forms the nature of the education which those students' hearts and minds are being led through, and whether of mountains or molehills, that shapes the perspective from which they view our world through. For more on that, I highly recommend 'The Story Killers', by former Marine, classical school founder, and Hillsdale College Professor, Terrence O. Moore.
If you take a look at the quote by Charlotte Mason at the opening of this post, it's clear that what she and Warner were focused on wasn't instilling students with 'skills' or using them as activists to create an ideal new society. An education was to educate, to 'educare', to lead you out, and literature, broadly speaking, provides the mental landscapes that you might otherwise never have imagined or realized were already surrounding you; it orients your thinking towards important landmarks, and reveals those paths that the best minds have found worth travelling upon, and thinking through, and guided by the light of truth's correspondence to reality, it reveals how to separate substance from shadows, and enables a person to live in liberty, no matter their material circumstances or station in life.
Back to Warner's essay, picking back up where we left off:
" Because this is so, young men and young women come up to college almost absolutely ignorant of the history of their race and of the ideas that have made our civilization. Some of them have never read a book, except the text-books on the specialties in which they have prepared themselves for examination."Keep in mind that Warner's not complaining that college students aren't learning these stories in college, but that these stories which once were and should still be familiar to all Americans and Westerners, regardless of their schooling, were unfamiliar to many of those even before entering college (BTW, if you became stuck on the word 'race', you are an example of the failure of modern education. You should learn how to overcome that). Again, this was in 1890, a time where the average college student, even grammar student, had orders of magnitude more familiarity with the 'literature' which Western Civilization was formed through, than we do today. Going back another hundred years would present you with an example of a very different college experience, which was commonly had in our Founders' era, see the “Education of the Founding Fathers of the Republic”, by James J. Walsh, 1933', where one of the things that might catch your attention, is that the college spectator sport of the day, was professors, students, and townspeople gathering to watch students make and support an argument before their professors and peers.
How we went from that understanding, to thinking that test scores and diplomas could certify that a person's useful skills meant that they were educated, is something we'll get into in the next posts. Continuing on with Warner's paragraph:
" We have a saying concerning people whose minds appear to be made up of dry, isolated facts, that they have no atmosphere. Well, literature is the atmosphere. In it we live, and move, and have our being, intellectually."We are suffocating from the absence of that atmosphere today. Take a moment and read Terrence O. Moore's essay on Classical Education, where he notes that Grammar is being taught to students today, the question is why it is being taught as it is, and with the poor materials used to teach it with.
A classical education requires more than functional literacy, however. It teaches students from an early age high standards of grammar, precision in word choice, and an eloquence that can emanate only from a love of the language. Throughout his education, the student will be exposed to the highest examples of eloquence attained by the greatest writers and speakers of the language.Understand that whatever you might think of what Warner is referring to as literature that a child is being 'exposed to' today, the fact is that a child's mind is being formed from, and educated through, whatever 'literature', be it good, bad (or pornographic) - that is happening, the only question is about the nature of what it is that their minds are being formed from.“. . . I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” — ShakespeareThese sentences are entirely grammatical. They could just as easily be used to teach grammar as “Bob is a big boy.” By preferring Shakespeare to an anonymous “See Bob” sentence (usually not well written) we teach three things rather than just one. We teach grammar. We teach cultural literacy. We also teach beauty. Our purpose is to introduce young people to the masters of the language so they themselves learn to employ force and beauty in their deployment of the spoken and written word.
“There is a tide in the affairs of men . . .” — Shakespeare
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” — Shakespeare
“These are the times that try men’s souls.” — Paine
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” — Churchill
It's also worth noting that despite having problematized, decentered or otherwise done away with the stories of the West, even the *Woke* rely upon stories - the ideological fabrications which they call 'lived experiences', are what they view as being central to teaching how Critical Theory, CRT, SEL & DEI will transmit their anti-Western bigotry into the next generation. They know what they're doing. The truth is that our trolls, librarians & educators prefer the worthlessness of worksheets, textbooks, 'lived experiences', pap, sleaze and even porn, for conveying the education which they intend your kids to swallow, digest, and so become reflected in their thinking, manners and actions. Why they choose that, over the literature that Warner referred to... is well worth your giving some serious consideration to.
Elaborating on lessons, Warner continues:
" The first lesson read to, or read by, the child should begin to put him in relation with the world and the thought of the world. This cannot be done except by the living teacher. No text-book, no one reading-book or series of reading-books, will do it. If the teacher is only the text-book orally delivered, the teacher is an uninspired machine."
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Psst! Teachers: They want more than virtual classrooms |
The goal of having teachers as uninformed automatons of a 'reading-book or series of reading-books' was an ideal they dreamed of someday achieving (hey teachers, care to guess why computers have become so popular in our schools today? Or what use that pedagogists will have for living breathing teachers, once they can get away with (you know, like how they 'get away with' porn in the library) programming a bot or avatar to do what you do transmit their material exactly as they intend them, in their 'virtual classes'?). Students are shaped by their lessons, and the shapes that emerge from lessons taken from the better stories of literature, is going to differ greatly from what emerges from lessons taken from textbooks, worksheets, games, movies, twitter threads, etc.,. Add to that the fact that the teachers who teach them, are rarely at liberty to teach as they might choose to teach (policies & program dictate their actions and responses), they are being transformed into that long desired 'content delivery system' for transmitting the school system's approved lesson plans, for what is an unworthy education, into your child, and into our future.
Continuing:
" We must revise our notions of the function of the teacher for the beginners. The teacher is to present evidence of truth, beauty, art. Where will he or she find it? Why, in experimental science, if you please, in history, but, in short, in good literature, using the word in its broadest sense. The object in selecting reading for children is to make it impossible for them to see any evidence except the best. That is the teacher's business, and how few understand their business! How few are educated!"[emphasis mine]How impossibly far away does what Warner is recalling from the vantage point of 1890, seem in comparison with the Nikole Hannah-Jones's 2021 perspectives that we are surrounded with today? What you will not find in today's 'Lived Experiences', is "truth, beauty, art", which is a natural consequence of both the *Woke*'s rejection of 'objective truth', and the moderate's pragmatic indifference to it. Continuing:
" In the best literature we find truth about the world, about human nature; and hence, if children read that, they read what their experience will verify. I am told that publishers are largely at fault for the quality of the reading used in schools—that schools would gladly receive the good literature if they could get it. But I do not know, in this case, how much the demand has to do with the supply."It is critically important to keep in mind that 'the best' (horrific, but popular) pedagogists of today (those who teach your teachers what and how and why to teach your children what they'll learn), openly state that Truth - usually enclosed by them in scare quotes as 'objective truth' - is impossible to attain, and that all 'truths' are subjective, and that power is alone worthy of their grasping for and pursuing. Keeping in line with understanding that purpose, means that lies and lying are sometimes necessary and useful tools for gaining power over others and over society (for 'the greater good', of course), and they have grade-level expectations for transforming it (and your child, and you) into being a means for their ends.
And here, in the last part of Warner's paragraph, we see the action of the would-be defender of Education, from Webster (next post), to Warner, and into our day, in that they step into the error that unknowingly to them has enabled our world to become what it has become today, and that foot which Warner had in the Education which our Founders' generation had formed themselves from, is betrayed and left behind, with the step which he advises (unaware of its implications) our taking into line with our world of today,
"I am certain, however, that educated teachers would use only the best means for forming the minds and enlightening the understanding of their pupils. It must be kept in mind that reading, silent reading done by the scholar, is not learning signs and calling words; it is getting thought. If children are to get thought, they should be served with the best—that which will not only be true, but appeal so naturally to their minds that they will prefer it to all meaner stuff. If it is true that children cannot acquire this taste at home—and it is true for the vast majority of American children—then it must be given in the public schools. To give it is not to interrupt the acquisition of other knowledge; it is literally to open the door to all knowledge...."[emphasis mine]How our understanding of Education became what it is today, began with the good intentions of people who looked into the immediate future, without carefully considering what kind of future might be had from breaking with their own past, and that break resulted in our original Semantic Deception, whereby the same word 'Education', came to mean two very different meanings, one of which was useful in gaining public support, to implement still other very different meanings and purposes, through educational experiments that were to create a system to nudge, ensnare, and conform its student's minds to whatever ideological issue which 'those who know best' had concluded was for the 'greater good'. That latter meaning never had any interest whatsoever in carrying forward the original idea of education which Warner still had one foot in, and instead were and are intent upon first ignoring it, then vilifying and condemning every aspect of it, and eventually eliminating all memory of that understanding, in order to 'remake the world anew', in their own idealized view of how you should be compelled to live, or as Godfather Rousseau put it: "They must be forced to be free. "
What Warner failed to realize, as has nearly everyone who's succeeded him on down to today, is that what was once meant by the word Education, was being gradually altered, from what was taken for granted, such as 'To John Adams from Samuel Adams, Sr., 25 November 1790',
"...Should we not, my friend, bear a gratefull remembrance of our pious and benevolent Ancestors, who early laid plans of Education; by which means Wisdom, Knowledge, and Virtue have been generally diffused among the body of the people, and they have been enabled to form and establish a civil constitution calculated for the preservation of their rights, and liberties...", where Education was understood as a means to the light of truth which set a person free and enabled them to discover how best to live in liberty. That understanding was unintentionally in the process of being reversed - the turn away from an ideal of what is right and true, towards what is useful, had gotten that ball rolling, and from there it became a simple matter of course before it became the political plaything of the 'progressive' educationistas who intended it to be used as a political tool of and means to power to reform the people into the ideal of 'those who know best', as the 'Father of Critical Pedagogy', Henry Giroux, acknowledged in an interview, that:
"...Critical Pedagogy must be seen as a political and moral project and not a technique. Pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the acquisition of agency... illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority, and power... pedagogy is a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations..."The purpose of a mandatory public school system was from the very beginning, to establish political controls over those same people that it would be instructing in what and how to think, the fact that it began with better purposes, in no way deterred it from quickly tending towards worse ones.
To answer how these changes came about, and why, we need to get at the roots so that we aren't surprised by those same weeds growing back yet again, and that requires looking at the role that some of our most respected Founding Fathers played in them. How their good intentions played into the hands of those with the worst of intentions, in the next post.
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Monday, March 14, 2022
Our Founder's wrong turn towards Education today - The New Normal
American's changing understanding of what 'education' is and is for, has changed us from being a people who were literate enough for The Federalist Papers to be written for persuading the common farmer and 'man in the street' on adopting a constitution to secure their liberty, to a people who in far too many cases would rather argue that liberty requires making crude and pornographic materials available to students in the libraries of schools whose graduates are largely unwilling or unable to read The Federalist Papers (see initial post). Such radically different effects are the result of radically different causes, both seen and unseen, and the largest difference that's easiest to see, is that the educational success of early America came without any official educational system to cause it, while its current effects have resulted from a new system of education having been imposed where none had been before, in order to accomplish what had already been accomplished without one.
Can it be fixed simply by ending our public education system? Nope. As much as we do need to end it, and as much as we need to see a Separation of School & State, if what you want is to make education educational again, which I do, then no, that alone isn't going to fix what's been broken. Why? Because the unseen changes behind what our schools do and why they do it, are more significant than those that are so easily seen in which entity runs & funds a school - public, private, charter, or church - and so simply pulling your kid out of one instance, and putting them into another, is no guarantee that they'll get a good or even better, education.
Or maybe you hadn't noticed that our most barbaric antifa & blm activists tend to be the products of (expensive) private education and graduate from, or teach at, the likes of Berkeley and Harvard?
The previous post went into what's changed in what we mean by Education itself, and which content we once knew was best for facilitating it, and that the inadequate new understandings of both had largely been institutionalized, and were self-evident to those who knew better, before the 20th Century even got underway. What enabled those changes to come about, came from a new purpose that had been adopted for education, which led to abandoning its traditional content, and introduced a new normal that has been accepted so completely, that few today even know that there once was an 'old normal', let alone how different the two are. That new normal has ensured that radically different outcomes would begin to follow from what had been the norm in our Founders era, and that shift had essentially been accomplished even before the 19th Century got underway.
Education's 'new normal' was encouraged and promoted by some of our most respected Founding Fathers, such as Noah Webster (yes, the dictionary guy), and it is what is most responsible, IMHO, for why our idea of Education was able to be changed into the worthless sham it has become today, and while Common Core & CRT are the most visible outgrowths of these changes, the new normal is a pervasive but mostly unseen presence in most schools today, *woke* or not, and it is one of the most significant reasons why the more easily seen differences of who it is that runs & funds a school - public, private, charter, or church - is the least telling aspect of what students will be taught in them, because the new norm is incorporated into the purposes and content of the most common understanding of education that students will receive in them today.
What might be the most dangerous aspect of the changes that've been made, is that the reasons for making them seem so sensible on the surface; they certainly seemed sensible enough to many of our Founders era who were far more educated than we are, and knowing nothing of the alternatives they seem entirely sensible to so many who are fighting so hard against what's happening in our schools today, unaware that they are repeating the same disastrous calls for reform that led to what they're fighting against today. See if any of these old calls for school reform sound similar to what we hear urged today:
Those lines for reform began ringing out in our Founders' era, with our Founding Reformers. The one advantage we have over our Founding Fathers, is that, if we look, we can see what has actually resulted from such seemingly sensible ideas and good intentions, and so finally put a stop to repeating the same mistakes of history, it's not enough for us today to simply be upset and demand change, we need to know what we should change to, what changes are most important to make, and we especially need to know what we changed away from, and why they did so - otherwise we'll just continue to pour old wine into new skins.
- to strengthen American's sense of identity,
- to refocus lessons away from 'wasting time' on useless content,
- to prove educational value by testing students on what facts they've successfully *learned* (momentarily memorized) about that content
- teach more useful skills for *today's* workforce to boost the economy!
What is seen, helps to conceal what goes unseen
The visible results of those good intentions are easy to see today in the standardization of schools, lessons, textbooks, and teachers. It's also easy to see that pro-regressive 'Progressive' figures such as Horace Mann played an early role in 'Progressive Education', and that the first mandatory Public School laws of Massachussetts were enacted in the 1840s to manage the public alarm over 'immigrants and other dangerous individuals' flooding into America, by promising that all students would come to have the same understanding of America (or, less charitably, to create a system for imposing conformity to the ideal of 'those who know best'). But those effects were made possible by earlier and more fundamental causes, and while it's true that those were significant turning points, they aren't where the turn towards the education system of today began, those were simply pretexts - easy answers - which capitalized upon, exploited, and repurposed, the changes that had already been put in place.
The radically different effects that we're seeing today, developed out of changes that didn't initially seem as noticeable or radical to them at the time; their progressively more radical nature was slowly revealed in bubbling up through the twists and turns of pursuing and covering for the good intentions that put cracks in the restraints upon power which they encouraged and concealed. It was the unintended consequences which followed from them, that enabled and encouraged still more radical reformers in the likes of Horace Mann, who were later able to take advantage of the good intentions behind mandatory school laws, and through those cracks they infiltrated through various other openings in our existing presumptions, and subverted them towards new ends... and so on, and on. and on,
That progressive process of transformative decay requires and depends upon people settling for easy answers - the more sensible they seem on first glance, the better. And so it's worth it to begin looking at the original good intentions of those good men who were trying to do the right thing with the wrong tools, to see how the results managed to go so very wrong, so that we might avoid yet another round of the endless cycle of sure-to-fail 'school reforms' that've plagued us for the last two centuries.
Although I'm going to focus on Noah Webster, my intention is not to impugn his character, in fact I think that my point becomes stronger, the stronger you think that his character was. Webster was a leading advocate for the importance of seeing to it that all American youth received a 'good education', he saw it as his mission, and he put a great deal of his own time and effort into reminding the public that:
“It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.”But as good as his statement might sound, then as now, it's important that you define and clarify the terms & premises being presumed for you, for instance: what did he mean by 'a good education', and how do you know that? What was it which guided the purpose of he and his fellows education, and how did that differ from what he intended to alter it to?
Webster didn't just advocate for education, he took it as his mission to create a movement in educating and forming a clearer image for Americans of what it means to be an American. As noted (pg 4) in "The Forgotten Founding Father", when George Washington mentioned that he was considering asking a colleague in Scotland for recommendations for a tutor for his step-grandchildren,
"...A stunned Webster shot back, 'What would European nations think of this country if, after the exibition of great talents and achievements in the war for independence, we should send to Europe for men to teach the first rudiments of learning?"Noah Webster's own education had acquainted him with those works which Thomas Jefferson had recommended as an essential reading list for students: Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, The Bible, Virgil, along with a knowledge of Greek & Latin, and yet he was dissatisfied with it, and complained that such literature was "... not necessary for men of business, merchants, mechanics, planters, &c. nor of utility sufficient to indemnify them for the expense...", and that studying them kept them from learning more useful skills. Of the time he himself spent acquiring them himself, he complained:
"...How superficial must be that learning, which is acquired in four years! Severe experience has taught me the errors and defects of what is called a liberal education. I could not read the best Greek and Roman authors while in college, without neglecting the established classical studies ; and after I left college, I found time only to dip into books, that every scholar should be master of; a circumstance that often fills me with the deepest regret...."A couple questions come to mind from reading his opinion of the content, especially with Webster's own confessed failure to fully grasp the material, as well as his assumption that everyone else's ability must be equally as lacking as his own. It's also interesting that his concern for superficiality doesn't seem to extend to those skills that are likely to be taught by teachers who don't depend upon or use them themselves, which is not only itself superficial, but is the reason why apprenticeships were used in his time, and why they are becoming popular again in ours. But Webster wasn't alone in his opinion, being one of several of our Founders, such as Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin, even to some extent Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to 'reform education' to focus upon giving students more utilitarian, practical, and economically useful skills. While not alone in their opinions, they weren't by any means universal, and the reforms they proposed, although largely forgotten today, sparked debates whose sometimes fiery nature we'd recognize something of in our own day, even progressing to public unrest in the mid 1800s.
Yet despite their complaints about the content and purpose for learning it, one thing that didn't yet need to be 'fixed', because the system for learning it had not yet been broken, was that which enables the teaching and learning of everything else: the 3 R's of 'Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmatic. Webster and his fellows knew from their own experience that teaching those basics were an important but nearly trivial feat which was routinely accomplished in a few years at most, through the existing materials, and attention to grammar that they were already using.
Even so, Webster, who himself had been a school teacher, thought that it would be enough that each community:
"...should be furnished with a school, at least four months in a year;...", and beginning with students around eight years of age, their schooling should be,
"...completed by the age of fifteen or sixteen..."Two points on that, first, "furnished" by who, is one of the questions that're typically either avoided, or assumed by the reformers to be their ideal systems that didn't yet exist. And second, take note that the reformers were aware that a sound grasp of the basics of the 3 R's (and substantially more than that) was able to be accomplished within about eight 'years' - consisting of school years that were at least half the length of our own today (how those eight half-years, became our twelve full-years, we'll cover in a post to come) - because it was already resulting in students who in making their way through a great deal of literature and history had actually learned how to read, write, and calculate, and most of whom could be counted upon to pursue a wider and deeper understanding of such works on their own, for the rest of their lives. Even so, what our Founding Reformers wanted to change, was how that was already being accomplished, and why, and who would determine it, and that's where we find the foundational cracks beginning to form, and would soon begin forming a system of them.
What seemed to escape our Founding Reformer's attention, is that learning the 3R's from the materials they did, in the manner they did, was an important factor in how the people of our Founder's era, became the people they were. But such an oversight is not that uncommon, historically, and is one of the causes for why the West has had to re-found itself several times over the last few thousand years. It's encouraging that many, such as this modern day Italian, Angelo Codevilla, are reminding people of what we forget about how much the materials we learn with, makes us into who we are (or are not):
"...Any civilization is the totality of the language, habits and ideas in which people live and move – the human reality that defines their practical limits. To see how grossly unequal to one another civilizations are, it is enough to glance at how much or little understanding of reality the languages they speak contain – what any given language enables, or not. We are accustomed to Greek, Latin, English, French, Italian, German, etc. with their massive dictionaries, full of definitions, pronouns, tenses, moods and concepts, all tied together by grammar that flows from logic. When we speak these languages correctly, we hardly realize that we are wielding powerful tools of reason, developed over thousands of years..."Yet despite the role that traditional literature played in who our Founders became, the general attitude towards literature by those educational reformers amongst them, was akin to what Webster expressed in this complaint, that:
“The minds of youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rome or to Great Britain; boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero, or debates upon some political question in the British Parliment. These are excellent specimens of good sense, polished stile and perfect oratory; but they are not interesting to children. They cannot be very useful, except to young gentlemen who want them as models of reasoning and eloquence, in the pulpit or at the bar.”, so that what the traditional learning consisted of, came to be seen by them as 'elitist' materials that were too fancy for 'working people' who really just needed to know the basics in order to go out and get a good job (which, BTW, is a typically 'elitist' position to take), even as they were employing the knowledge and skills which they themselves derived from those classics, against them. What these reformers thought about the examples of reasoning and eloquence that 'working people ' had no need of, is all the more amazing in its dismissiveness, when you consider that there were innumerable instances, such as that of John Adams, who had intended to become a farmer, but then at some point on being exposed to the writings and speeches of Cicero, became inspired instead to study the law, and through that developed into the ideal of an American patriot... which was one of Webster's primary goals. There are numerous other instances of those who remained in a trade, and yet were themselves known as scholars on a subject, and even more of people who were happy to continue such pursuits for their own personal benefit and enjoyment.
Similarly, while Webster understood the importance of the Bible to a liberal education and to our republic, as he noted here:
"The principles of genuine liberty, and of wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man, therefore, who weakens or destroys the divine authority of that Book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.", he still didn't want that taught in school either (again, 'whose school?'), as he thought that school wasn't the proper place to learn it - a point which Ben Franklin agreed with him upon, and which Dr. Rush disagreed with.
Their attitude towards the classics becomes even more odd when you read what they themselves wrote, as with a speculative paper that Dr. Benjamin Rush wrote on "The influence of physical causes upon the moral faculty", which opens with numerous references to St. Paul, and to Cicero (in Latin, no less), in which he speaks of the "virtues of a Trajan" and "the vices of a Marius", and where in describing the goal of his paper, he says that
"...I feel as Aeneas did, when he was about to enter the gates of Avernus, but without a sybil to instruct me... ", which to any person without a knowledge of those works and languages which he himself described as 'elitist', his own scientific papers would necessarily become meaningless to the very public that he wrote them for.
Odder still, is the fact that Webster & Dr. Rush and the others understood and believed that since 'We The People' were the heads of our government, they therefore needed to know those classic works, and needed to be familiar with the ideas they developed, in order for 'We The People' to be able to 'produce' good public servants, capable of governing themselves with. It's also worth noting that it was in this period that saw the popularity of Adam Smith's views on Natural Liberty, followed by Jean Baptiste Say's works on political economy, which conclusively showed that a booming economy is far more of a side-effect of good and limited governance, than of a people being supplied by the state with a few particular skills. They knew that, they said that, and yet they opposed the means of learning that literature in the way that it had been successfully done for them, in their own revolutionary generation.
I thoroughly enjoy one of John Adams' replies in a letter to Dr. Rush, as he deliberately mocks Rousseau, and tweaks Dr. Rush as well, for that very oversight,
"...What an ingrate was he to employ arts and sciences to abuse them? And are you much better, to use the knowledge and skill you derived from Latin and Greek to slander those divine Languages..."What you begin to notice in their sentiments towards the literature which they themselves were educated from, is what may be best expressed with the truism that 'familiarity breeds contempt', for as much as they wanted those ideas to be understood, they didn't want to associate with them in 'their' schools, as they felt that teaching them was such a 'waste of time'. They seemed to take it for granted that Americans would always simply know and understand those works... somehow, as if the ability to understand those works which they understood that liberty depended upon, would always, somehow, be passed down through the bloodstream, and so they discounted the need to 'take up time' with them in school, when that time could be *better* used, in their humble opinions, for more useful, practical, and expedient purposes.
As noted in the essay by Warner in the previous post, those who gave more than utilitarian thought to the subject of education, understood that attempting to separate out facts from the literature that such facts are the fruit of, is absurd, and that
"...It is only matched in absurdity by the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge..."To try and be as charitable towards them as possible, it seems that they were dazzled by both the nation's newly won independence and by the unfolding advancements in science and technology, and that they, like moths drawn to the flames, began to focus in too closely upon the utilitarian and 'practical' skills (what we know today as "gotta learn the skills of the 21st century!" - same idea, different century) rather than what they themselves had learned, because as Webster put it:
"... young gentlemen are not all designed for the same line of business, and why should they pursue the same studies?...", and,
"... The rules of arithmetic are indispensably requisite. But besides the learning which is of common utility, lads should be directed to pursue those branches which are connected more immediately with the business for which they are destined..."It's tempting to argue over how training such varied gentlemen in a few useful skills would be less wasteful than studying more closely what all of them have in common, but the real key to all of this is in that phrase there, 'should be directed to pursue', that is the beginning of the fateful turn and transformation of their world into ours - it doesn't exactly sound like a show-stopper though, does it?
Making the U-Turn from Progress to Pro-Regress
What that 'should be directed to pursue' is expressing, is an actual turn in the nature, and purpose, and direction, of education. If you don't see the issue, it is important to consider what it is it that you might be missing, and if you do see the issue, its important to realize how easy it is to presume and accept it as being sensible. Even so, it hardly seems on a par with discovering porn in the school library, does it? Yet the destructiveness of its unforeseen consequences have led us to exactly that sort of thing happening today, in much the same way that gravity gives no grace to your not intending to have stepped off of a cliff, if in fact you do leave the ground and step off into the air, down you go. As with the old joke of a fellow jumping from a skyscraper and is heard calling out "So far, so good!" as he hurtles past the floors below, at some point the "So far, so good!" will end in hitting the ground, and if the patterns and behavior your education has habituated you to seeking, are primarily focused on what is useful and satisfying, then over time that will inevitably degrade into the thirst for power, and that is the action of a mind hitting rock bottom (see SEL & CRT for reference).
However 'meh' that may seem to us here in the midst of the 'new normal', in the old normal, you learned the 3R's as a means of developing the habits of attention and reasoning and understanding (particularly through Grammar), so that you could read the jewels of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian literature, and reading and considering them, helped you to come to a better understanding of yourself, of life, and your place in it. An Education was itself a value, rather than simply a requirement imposed for being able to do something else; it mattered to you, and someone who had been educated, understood the importance of looking past appearances to find what is real and true. It was that conceptual turn towards the New Normal, that made it possible to begin referring to the 3R's of 'reading, 'riting, and 'rithmatic, as 'basic skills' to be acquired as a ' common utility' to satisfy other's external expectations, and from that point on, getting an education had been transformed into training in 'basic skills' that were necessary for acquiring other useful skills, for getting ahead in business in order to 'get a good life' ('good'? Or something (anything) else so long as it's useful?), such as accounting skills, and agricultural skills, and the like.
Those who are satisfied with what is useful, are the very ones in Socrates' parable of the cave, who are content to see only the shadows cast upon the cave walls to occupy their attention, and the truth is that for those who are put on, and stay on that path, it doesn't matter if you are slave or master, poor or wealthy, if the only thing you seek to learn are those skills that you are to be employed in performing, or comforting distractions from performing them, then in seeking only what you've been trained to see, you become psychologically enslaved to that. Those who do become aware of the nature of those shadows, but don't seek the light, turning away from it out of a desire to become one of the puppet masters casting the shadows that everyone else is enslaved to, become focused upon Power for power's sake, and they themselves become enslaved to the slaves... and hate them for that fact about themselves.
That was the cave that Frederick Douglass escaped from, first physically, and then mentally, by putting himself upon the 'Old Normal's path through his 'rich treasure' and 'noble acquisition' of classics that had been compiled into ' The Columbian Orator', and that path to 'light and liberty' is what the 3R's were for, not to gain 'basic skills', but so as to enable men such as himself to understand that men are more than animals, and that even when they must work, as we must, they are more than workhorses. As noted in the previous post, Douglass observed that:
"...Education, on the other hand, means emancipation. It means light and liberty. It means the uplifting of the soul of man into the glorious light of truth, the light only by which men can be free. To deny education to any people is one of the greatest crimes against human nature. It is to deny them the means of freedom and the rightful pursuit of happiness, and to defeat the very end of their being..."
"... within the narrow, dark and grimy walls of ignorance. He is a poor prisoner without hope..."Brush aside all protestations of our Founding Reformer's good intentions of "not intended to diminish anything", the fact is that giving educational time and attention to acquiring those later skills, would necessarily entail taking time and understanding away from those materials of Western Civilization that had traditionally been used in the education of Western youth: Homer, The Bible, Thucydides, Cicero, Virgil, etc., not to mention the languages of Greek & Latin, as well as Hebrew, which was studied alongside them in many American colleges in the 1700s. Worse still, seeking to do so not only equates, but elevates, vocation over avocation, skills over wisdom, facts over truth.
It shouldn't need to be said, but of course acquiring vocational skills was and is a value, and there's no shame whatsoever in doing so, but to compare one with the other as equals, let alone trade one for the other, should be seen as not just wrong, but shameful. Far better to send your students to Mike Rowe for training in Dirty Jobs, than to Harvard or Berkeley for a slop of valueless values and supposedly high-paid skills.
That fateful turn towards the New Normal began our transformation from who we were, into who we are, by leaving us mentally & spiritually disarmed of the understanding which the literature of Western Civilization makes possible, and as we became less and less familiar with them, we became more and more vulnerable to, and unable to defend ourselves against its enemies, first in the Pro-Regressive 'Progressives', and then latter the Marxists, and now as those works are being purged from our libraries, we are prone to whatever worse variant is inexorably lowering us down to the level of actually debating whether or not having crude pap and porn available to children in their school's library, is a 'good' idea.
Our Founding Reformers took who they were for granted - taking both the literature itself, and the process that went into learning them and the habitual orientation towards what is true which resulted from that, for granted. The texts themselves were but raw diamonds, and only together with the process of learning them, did they become the polished jewels of Western literature - it takes both for the ideas to take root in heart and mind, and only then could they inspire the imagination of youths like Frederick Douglass, and John Adams before him. Even those less like them and more like Noah Webster, still benefited from the actions of becoming familiar with those ideas, as that was how Jefferson was able to write the Declaration of Independence as briefly stating "...an expression of the American mind...", whose 'harmonizing sentiments' derived from
"... the elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, &c..."Those '... liberal ideas of government...', were only able to enter into the popular mind, because of those 'Elitist' works of literature, works that Webster and his fellows were themselves educated from and thoroughly familiar with... and yet were intent upon turning our education away from.
It is beyond ironic that Noah Webster, who wanted more than anything to establish the sense of an 'American Identity!', turned Americans away from the 'Elitist' works of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian literature that had enabled them to recognize and fight for those self-evident truths which those same Founders had sacrificed so much for - those Elite works (say it with pride and reverence), and not some accident of geography or handiness with skills, are what Americans' true identity sprang from.
Next time someone makes fun of the Indians for trading New York for a bag of Wampum, remind them that they at least traded stuff, for stuff, whereas America has traded away the accumulated wisdom of thousands of years, for a few skills that are useful only for the moment - and you may rest assured that those today who 'learn to code' will soon go the way of yesterday's buggy whip assembler. Our Founding Reformers overlooked the dangers of being misled by their own good intentions into perilous circumstances, and so following in the steps of Essau, in exchanging the harder lessons of "Know Thyself" for the easier path of utilitarian skills and goals, traded our birthright as Westerners and as Americans, for a swiftly coolly bowl of porridge.
It's difficult not to shake your head, when you consider that towards the end of his life forty years later in 1837, Noah Webster was utterly amazed over the general lack of knowledge, principles, and standards, in those who'd largely been educated in accordance with his own advice, as he wrote to Charles Chauncey, that:
“...Principles, Sir, are becoming corrupt, deeply corrupt; & unless the progress of corruption, & perversion of truth can be arrested, neither liberty nor property, will long be secure in this country. And a great evil is, that men of the first distinction seem, to a great extent, to be ignorant of the real, original causes of our public distresses...”Again, my intention here is not to dump on or to portray Webster in a bad light, I'm trying to point out that solid and admirable men like Noah Webster, Dr. Rush, and Benjamin Franklin - men who were truly among the Founding Fathers of America - nevertheless are, then as now, prone to letting their pet assumptions run away with them under the power of their best intentions. And it is up to 'We The People' to question and slow them, but without the knowledge which their 'system of education' had made them less & less familiar with, we've progressively lost our ability to check the notions of 'great men' with good intentions, and one of the results of that, has shown itself as equating Liberty, with 'the right' to have porn in the school library.
By their fruits you shall know them
The truth is that it did not matter that our Founding Reformers intended to help Americans to become more successful, it didn't matter how certain Noah Webster was that he was going to be helping to plant, tend and grow giant Oak trees - the fact of the matter is that the seeds that they were planting, would reduce our forests to an expanse of weeds & thistles, and their 'New Normal' in education has produced ideas and practices that are deadly to the principles which Webster and his fellow Founding Fathers had helped to found America upon. Those weeds have taken root, they are darkening our councils, choking our discourse and spreading progressively further and deeper with each school years fresh crop of dis-educated graduates, as dandelions blown into the ranks of 'We The People'.
What began with the good intentions of an educated people who'd taken the source of their education for granted and attempted to 'add to it' some attention towards practical vocational skills, made enough of a crack in our foundation, for the yearly freeze & thaw of popular opinion to begin the never-ending process of education reform. In a dizzyingly short amount of time, the Pro-Regressive 'Progressive' educationists who followed after our Founders era, transformed Education from being a means to the light of truth which sets a person free from darkness and enabled them to live in liberty - an Elite ideal that America is unsustainable without - into the Power Tool of mandatory public school systems that form unseen political controls over 'We The People' and the thoughts they are led to think, so as to conform them to the ideals of 'those who know best'. In less than a century, that crack of adding 'useful skills' into education, had expanded into such a crevice by 1909 that Woodrow Wilson, while still president of Princeton University, would openly and confidently advise the Federation of High School Teachers that what was critical to what they taught and why, was that:
"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."That was and is the counter revolution that has been waged against America, manned by different factions over the years, factions who've warred even amongst themselves, but always against the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian traditions together, and they all are the fruit of our Founding Reformers 'New Normal', and their fruit is that of SEL & CRT, which they believe now has us in the 'End Game'.
Our Founding Reformer's would've done well to pay closer attention to a quote from Noah's cousin, Daniel Webster:
"...Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of power; but they cannot justify it, even if we were sure that they existed. It is hardly too strong to say, that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intention, real or pretended. When bad intentions are boldly avowed, the people will promptly take care of themselves. On the other hand, they will always be asked why they should resist or question that exercise of power which is so fair in its object, so plausible and patriotic in appearance, and which has the public good alone confessedly in view? Human beings, we may be assured, will generally exercise power when they can get it; and they will exercise it most undoubtedly, in popular governments, under pretences of public safety or high public interest. It may be very possible that good intentions do really sometimes exist when constitutional restraints are disregarded. There are men, in all ages, who mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters. They think there need be but little restraint upon themselves. Their notion of the public interest is apt to be quite closely connected with their own exercise of authority. They may not, indeed, always understand their own motives. The love of power may sink too deep in their own hearts even for their own scrutiny, and may pass with themselves for mere patriotism and benevolence...."From our end of history, their plans should serve as a textbook reminder of the unexpected power which 'new ideas!' can have over the minds of even great men such as Noah Webster, Dr. Rush, and Benjamin Franklin, who are just as often swept up in, and possessed by them, along with everyone else.
In the next post we'll look further into that most dangerous of new technologies which has eased the transformation of Education from what it was in our Founders era, into what it is today: the Textbook.
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Friday, April 01, 2022
Remove this dangerous technology from the classroom: Textbooks
The fact that even with twelve plus years of schooling, many of our students today can't or won't read, or write, or count, says all that should need to be said about the methods of modern schooling in general and of public education in particular. What more does need to be said, is that it's not the students, or even the teachers, who are most to blame for our modern 'educational system', but 'We The People' who've failed them by continuing to perpetuate this phenomenally failed political experiment known primarily as 'public education' (more on that to come). One of the central tools in this process is related to the concerns that many today have about technology in the classroom, but although their concerns tend to focus on technologies that students have some control over, such as smartphones and apps like Instagram and Twitter, their concerns would be better placed if they'd give more thought to the most prevalent tech of all in our schools, that particular piece of modern technology which controls what and how they learn, and which was singled out for condemnation as early as 1893: Textbooks.
I don't mean those technical compendiums of references & standards that you might find in an engineering textbook, but those which digest volumes of literature down into the dense matter which 'Social Studies', 'English', and other such textbooks are formed from. This bit of unassuming tech was one of the earliest products of our endless 'education reforms', and one which Noah Webster particularly helped advance towards its modern format of providing 'brief essays of fact', with the good intentions that students would then begin learning from:
"...A selection of essays, respecting the settlement and geography of America; the history of the late revolution and of the most remarkable characters and events that distinguished it, and a compendium of the principles of the federal and provincial governments, should be the principal school book in the United States. These are interesting objects to every man; they call home the minds of youth and fix them upon the interests of their own country, and they assist in forming attachments to it, as well as in enlarging the understanding..."
Impatient to produce the desired results in students - knowing important facts - he sought the effects of an educated understanding, without attending to its cause: having enough familiarity with the material and the ideas and methods involved within it, so that you would be able to state a brief summary of it along with its key facts. But memorizing the facts without having the understanding which enabled them to be sifted out and cited, was, and is, an empty sham.
Or how about his assumption that a textbook of these essays would or could be interesting to the minds of youths - have you found that youths are typically interested in reading or committing lists of features, names, dates, and rules to memory? Are textbooks what you see people bringing to the beach to read for personal benefit and enjoyment? On the contrary, our experience with such materials is that the 'pre-chewed' information that textbooks provide, are inevitably poorly and unimaginatively written - typically by committee - and are less likely to put down roots of interest in a student's mind, than to turn them away from, and even against, any whiff of such subjects in their future (say hello to: "I just hate history!").
This textbook processing of education shortchanges students of worthy materials, while at the same time giving them the impression that they know something that is important about a subject, thanks to the metrics of quizzes & tests that *prove* that they know what is important to know. But their confidence comes at the price of never having understood what was valuable about the subject which those facts were extracted from,
The textbook can inform the student that "Cicero wrote important texts such as 'On The Laws', 'On Duty', and the 'Philippics'", and can even tell them what they were about, but those students will never gain any sense at all of what it was about his reasoning and eloquence that inspired those, like John Adams, who had their lives not only enriched, but the courses of their lives changed because of the experience they found in their consideration of them.
- Yes, Athens and Sparta defeated the Persians, and then warred with each other. And...?
- Yes, Cicero wrote many legal arguments, speeches and popular essays, and was a Consul... and? He matters... why?
- Yes, the (a) Magna Carta was signed and sealed by King John at Runnymede in 1215. And...? What of it?
Students are not educated through textbooks into an understanding of a subject, they aren't led into developing the habit of considering various perspectives and vantage points to enable them to "See things as they are", the technology of the textbook reduces a mass of literary text to a few condensed facts, and trains the student to mistake the skill of skimming for, recalling, and repeating other people's opinions of what those facts are facts of, as their own understanding, while never actually coming into contact with what was valuable in them, themselves. Absent such active contact, those facts can make no deeper impression upon their minds than the short-term memory needed to pass the next test, and the dimness of their understanding is inversely proportional to the impression of brightness that the student is given of their own abilities via their test scores. The dangerous side of technology has always been that we become distracted by its benefits, and fail to notice that when technology is doing what it does for us, it's at the very same time taking something else away from us, and the textbook is a... well... a textbook example of that. Textbooks, factual or not, are someone else's narratives, scenic postcards given out in lieu of hiking through the actual landscape, and our students are given grades and diplomas as merit badges for having hiked a landscape they've never set foot within.
Less understood is the fact that textbooks efficiently perform their dis-educational effects, no matter what pedagogy or reforms might currently be guiding their use. Whether it's the '1619 Project' textbook, or whatever textbook moderates and conservatives would rather have being used in schools, they all tell students what to think, and keep them from having the experience of actually thinking such matters through - such an education does not part or even thin the shadows, but thickens them, begetting less wisdom & virtue in students, than folly & bravado from the feeling of knowing what they in fact know little to nothing of. The textbook is the modern technology that projects shadows on the walls of The Cave, and blinkers the eyes of those who might have noticed their thinness. The fact is that Textbooks, and the schools which rely upon them, are veritable engines of Dunning-Kruger-ism, whose products are then graduated into our society, year after year, after year.
Putting skills to the test - que bono? Who benefits?
Our Founding Reformers wanted to focus education on more 'useful skills', to benefit the working man and the economy, but they failed to consider what benefit such a focus would actually bring, or who would benefit most from trading those 'elitist works' away for more utilitarian skills. Alexis De Tocqueville noted in his 'Democracy in America' in 1835, in Book One, Introductory Chapter, he notes that once
"... the exercise of the intellect became the source of strength and of wealth, it is impossible not to consider every addition to science, every fresh truth, and every new idea as a germ of power placed within the reach of the people. Poetry, eloquence, and memory, the grace of wit, the glow of imagination, the depth of thought, and all the gifts which are bestowed by Providence with an equal hand....", it was through a liberal education that the people as a whole gained access to the valuable and powerful qualities of mind that had once been the real advantage which the elites had always had over the 'working man', and that education,
"...even when they were in the possession of its adversaries they still served its cause by throwing into relief the natural greatness of man; its conquests spread, therefore, with those of civilization and knowledge, and literature became an arsenal where the poorest and the weakest could always find weapons to their hand....."Far from being 'elitist material' of little worth, that literature is what first alerted and armed the working man against the predatory tendencies of those with more wealth and influence than they had. A person armed with such an education is generally able to not only respect and recognize threats to the quality and maintenance of justice, but is competent enough to learn the skills of most any trade as need arises for whatever time and circumstance they find themselves at in life.
But how easily can someone who's been trained mainly in vocational skills, 'pick up' the ability to free themselves from the darkness of popular opinion, ignorance and prejudice, which are 'skills' that a republican form of governance relies upon 'We The People' having? Those skills are best developed during school age, and can't easily be picked up later in life - not even in college. As reported by those few remaining professors who have something worthwhile to profess, our new educational dark age of useful skills has even elite college students demonstrating their skills along with an utter lack of what an education should have, and should be, providing them:
"...The students in his Shakespeare class undoubtedly boast a median verbal SAT score in the upper 700s (out of 800). The large majority probably received a perfect score of 5 on the AP (Advanced Placement) English exam. If any group of college students should be capable of deciphering complex texts, writing incisive expository prose, and constructing compelling analytic arguments, it is they. But apparently they’re not.Today, when both 'working man' and college elite have spent their valuable school-age years learning 'skills', whether mechanical, narrative, or 'critical', rather than a deeper understanding of the nature of life and reasonings most effective role in it, what happens when the world changes and those 'skills' become less or no longer useful? What happens is what has happened, whether their economic plight comes from those skilled jobs having gone over seas, or from 'anyone but liberal arts degree!' students getting hired, they are left defenseless against the language and designs of demagogues seeking to transform their plight into power over them, for the demagogue's advantage.
To understand how this predicament came to pass, one needs to understand how students manage to get into places like Harvard or the Claremont colleges in the first place. It is not by learning how to read, write, or think. It is by jumping through the endless series of hoops that elite college admissions offices have developed over the decades to winnow down their skyscraper stacks of application folders.
To win a place at such a school, students most receive top grades in a broad range of AP courses, show evidence of participation in a dozen or more extracurricular activities—sports, arts, student government, et al.—demonstrate “leadership”, engage in “service”, and gather experiences, often through purpose-built programs, to write about on their personal essays, statements designed to convince the admissions officer of the existence of an actual human being beneath the credentials. To do all this, they will work without cease for years on end, sleeping little and foregoing the freedoms of adolescence.
This is not a system that’s designed to foster intellectual engagement. Students learn to skip and skim, not just their assigned readings, but everything. Everything is done at maximum speed and with the least possible effort. Curiosity and passion must be actively suppressed. Students become experts, not so much in subjects as in working the system..."[emphasis mine]
Who it is that benefits most from an 'education' of Textbook centered schooling, are those in positions of power, or seeking to gain power over their fellows - they have a vested interest in having 'skilled students' who know little or nothing of what enabled our Founding Fathers to establish this nation, which is the one thing that our schools are successful at producing.
The slow-motion trainwreck of our educational transformation was accomplished by building upon the good intentions of our Founding Reformers 'adding' some useful skills to the educations that they themselves had received, and that turn towards the 'skills & facts' view of education, began a gradual process of eliminating that form of Education which had not only distinguished the West from the rest of the world, but which when properly taught (logic through grammar, the method of reasoning through the consideration of plot and theme, the ability to discover and communicate the essentials through rhetoric, an appreciation of truth and beauty through the contemplation of style, structure and meaning of a story, and the lessons that nature to be commanded must first be logically understood) that form of education is what established the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West, and made it possible for America to be founded in the first place.
Webster's 'brief essays of fact', although a boon for the publishing world and to those 'educators' who write the textbooks that the schools which students are required to attend, require their students to buy, have progressively devolved into the standard form of 'Textbook' used today, which are segmented, often non-sequential (especially in History/'social studies'), poorly written, boring and expensive tomes for testing a fleeting appearance of knowledge of what students actually know very little about - a self-reinforcing system for the mass production of Dunning-Kruger-ism which is one of the deadliest fruits of our modern educational system, and something which the Pro-Regressive Administrative State could not exist without.
Learning to fail the test
But how did a once educated people sell themselves on this course? Why, they followed the 'science!', of course - or at least the scientistic appearance of its methods, quantifications, and statistics of test scores, that frauds in lab-coats use to reassure the unwary that all is well. The wary, OTOH, weren't as easily misled, those like Charles Dudley Warner noted in an earlier post, or as mentioned in the previous post, Albert Jay Knock and the Italian nobleman he spoke of in 1931, who'd wondered why he'd met no educated Americans under 60 years of age. BTW - how do you suppose Knock's Italian nobleman determined that? Do you suppose that he quizzed each person he met on their recall of Social Studies facts & conclusions? As the Positivist 'science' of 'Social Studies' didn't exist at all prior to the 1800's, and didn't become commonly accepted until into the 20th Century, my bet is that Social Studies wasn't the yardstick he used to measure the educations of Americans by.
Or do you imagine that he tested them on their 'Critical Thinking' skills? Well... seeing as their conversation occurred prior to 1931, and 'Critical Thinking' wasn't concocted until 1945 (by a student of John Dewey), I'm going to go with 'no' on that one as well.
How do you tell whether or not someone is educated? More to the point, what if how you test their level of education, doesn't in fact test their level of education... what might be done to students by using false tests to guide them in their education?
To turn the uncomfortable questions towards what might be seen as 'my side' with traditional literature, do you suppose that he buttonholed hapless Americans and quizzed them on their knowledge of the Great Books of the Western World? Tallied up their dismal scores on 'key facts' of Dante & Milton and exclaimed 'Momma Mia are these American's uneducated!'?
While I'm a huge fan and proponent of most of the works typically categorized within GBWW, using those works as a database for quizzing people on what they know of them, runs contrary to the nature of what The Great Conversation which those works are a part of, is - such conversation isn't judged by the facts found in it, but by the depths of understanding confronted and revealed through it. It is a mistake to view what is available to be learned from, as being just as, or more, valuable than what there is to be learned - the evidence of an education is found in indications that a person has left The Cave, not in tallying up how much they've stuffed into their cave!
To put an education to such a quantifiable test as to presume that those who know more facts, are better educated, presumes that the student making a perfect score on an ACT/SAT exam, must be better educated than Shakespeare, or Cicero, or Aristotle, could have been, as they came along before most of the facts known to us were able to be known to them. How would such a view as that, view Plato, who when teaching his young student who was named Aristotle, knew nothing of the works which Aristotle would later go on to write? Or of Cicero who knew nothing of Petrarch, who in turn knew nothing of either Shakespeare, or much else of what we now refer to as 'The Great Books'? And of course though most of them understood Geometry well enough, those past masters could have known nothing of calculus, or even algebra, let alone 'Social Studies' or 'What are the 12 causes of the Civil War?'... are you getting the picture?
So if all of our popular 'Educated Tests' fail the test as a test of a person being educated, how did our Italian nobleman conclude this about our great grand parents? He did it the old fashioned way, he talked to them. It wasn't because they lacked a recall of facts or skills, but because in conversing with them, he witnessed their habits of repeating the statements that others had made, the shallow reasonings they gave for them, and the ineloquent language they used to state them. As they demonstrated their lack of the habit of adequately questioning, assessing those ideas that they mechanically talked about in an unthinking repetition of follow-the-dots talking points, with the flow-chart imitation of logic that ties them together. Through the test of conversation, it became clear to him that they literally didn't know what they were talking about, which is a tell-tale sign of someone who is still dwelling comfortably deep within The Cave, and lacks the ability to see their way out of it (AKA: an education).
It's not just a matter of can they reason, but do they? As a matter of course? It's not just a matter of reciting the virtues, but of working at applying and living them. Getting a good education is not just about checking boxes of facts to know, or passing a test upon this or that collection of them, but on being able to observe, inquire, and relate the new, to the past, looking for what their contrasts can bring to light, and considering how best to go forward in light of both, and perhaps even imagining things anew. It's about the ability to be 'self-directed' by what is in reality true, and being able to do so while living in society with others.
If that's what you want for your child, and I would be amazed to hear the reasons of those who might not want that, the standard establishment schools are not where you're going to find it. Instead, you will find students who are being processed through a textbook education, who will spend more than a decade in them being trained to skim for, and memorize facts for recalling on quizzes and tests so they can get a good job and 'succeed in life!'... with little or no attention given to understanding what a successful life is, and depends upon. They might know about great works, but without actually knowing those great works, their minds will not have been challenged to pursue any depth of knowledge of what life could, and should be, or how and why to seek out and question the depths of their own knowledge - and politically ambitious men are taking note of how useful such minds as theirs will be to their own ambitions.
One of the more astounding things to me about our Founding Reformers, is that despite Webster and his fellows knowing first hand the danger of power having sway over the minds and actions of a people, nearly all of them wanted to empower legislatures in providing their idea of education, to the public. Even as Webster noted that,
"...In despotic states, Education, like religion, is made subservient to government....", as did John Adams with observations such as,
“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”, somehow they managed to square the circle in their minds as they nearly all came together in sentiments similar to Webster's statement, that:
"...Education should therefore be the first care of a Legislature; not merely the institution of schools, but the furnishing of them with the best men for teachers. A good system of Education should be the first article in the code of political regulations;..."Somehow they expected that we'd somehow escape the consequences of putting the process of educating future voters, under the political control of progressively more ambitious and ideological men. And sadly we have not. And as more and more Americans have been raised with progressively less and less familiarity with what had once been commonly understood, we've lost our grip upon what Jefferson had described as the common 'expression of the American mind', which has had profoundly dangerous ramifications to everything that our Founding Fathers had valued, cared about, sacrificed, fought and died for.
To our Founding Fathers' credit, it did take nearly two centuries for their good intentions to bring us down to the level we are at today, while in the birthplace of those endarkened ideas in Europe, those lessons began to bear their horrific fruit of slaughter and terror within just a few decades. But now that we've nearly caught up in the West's race to the bottom, it would be worth it to look at the nature of the education which we're being told will 'take it to the next level' by turning away from truth and towards power; and what a society looks like which condones and supports that - which we'll do in the next post.
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Thursday, June 30, 2022
Foundations & Compasses - Books are never 'Just books'
From John Adams to John Quincy Adams, Philadelphia August 11. 1777:
I wish to turn your Thoughts early to such Studies, as will afford you the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be allotted you to act on the Stage of Life.
There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides, an Author, of whom I hope you will make yourself perfect Master, in original Language, which is Greek, the most perfect of all human Languages. In order to understand him fully in his own Tongue, you must however take Advantage, of every Help you can procure and particularly of Translations of him into your own Mother Tongue..."
The one thing that Americans' ideas of education today have in common with those Americans of the 1830's, are the good intentions of its education reformers. With the very best of intentions of wanting their kids to get a 'good education', they, as we, sent them to school while intending to:
I wish to turn your Thoughts early to such Studies, as will afford you the most solid Instruction and Improvement for the Part which may be allotted you to act on the Stage of Life.
There is no History, perhaps, better adapted to this usefull Purpose than that of Thucidides, an Author, of whom I hope you will make yourself perfect Master, in original Language, which is Greek, the most perfect of all human Languages. In order to understand him fully in his own Tongue, you must however take Advantage, of every Help you can procure and particularly of Translations of him into your own Mother Tongue..."
, and if you share those good intentions, then you too are part of the problem that is our 'educational system' of today.
- ensure students know key facts,
- teach students useful skills to get a good job,
- boost the economy
- track students' progress and test their comprehension,
- give students an understanding of what being an American means,
- solve social issues,
Wait... what? Yep. And the sad truth is that in addition to the Marxist professors we're so eager to heap the blame upon (with good cause), much of your Chamber of Commerce and other well intentioned fellows also share in the blame for why so many students today not only can't read & write, but don't want to.
Sure, it is reasonable to want students to enjoy some or all of those benefits from having gone to school, but while those could be results of having been educated, they are not causes of, or purposes for, becoming educated, and treating them as purposes and causes can even work against that goal.
Our 'well intentioned' pursuit of educational effects without regard for their causes, has played a significant role in turning our schools away from that which the Adams' had enjoyed; turned it away from what Alexis de Tocqueville had praised (see previous post) for finally breaking the elitist's monopoly over education by putting "within the reach of the people" the capacity for conceiving of and striving for liberty; and turned it into one who's answer to how a student is doing in school, will be a transcript certifying how well they've learned what their school district has determined to be those 'key facts' which establish a basic minimum competency, which - good or bad - any competent school administrator is also going to be able to use to influence parents and business leaders to expand their school system further still. The graded pursuit of such easily quantified, tested, and graded facts, as if they could cause what they are but a minor effect of, has transformed our system into one that is educational in name only, and that same system will, when it's discovered that not one in twenty 'straight 'A' students!' can explain what those 'key facts' were key facts of, or why they mattered, will loudly call for new reforms with better textbooks, increased testing, more homework, and of course more stringent teacher accountability.
It should be no surprise that just as our Founding Reformers' good intentions led America down a very different path than that which they'd intended, those same good intentions are likely to lead us and our progeny down more ominous paths than we can imagine. Why do the good intentions we share with them, lead so very far from where they, we, intend them to lead us? Because they reorient the 'N' on their, our, your, educational compass, from True North, as if locked onto a glittering anomaly which wanders increasingly south of where True North truly lies.
Now if you were to ask me how I know that (apart from what this ongoing series of posts has and is still to answer to that), I'd try to resist asking you what it is about our schools that causes you to doubt it, and instead suggest that if we sight between what can be seen of education on the ground, and what it aimed towards before these good intentions became the norm, and where both are and aim towards now, it will at least be clear that they point in two very different directions. Which, if either, is True North, we'll work through in subsequent posts.
For a prime example of what education looked like on the ground in that era, I'll submit the letter linked to at the top of this post, from John Adams' to his son John Quincy.
For the objector's part, I think it's generally accepted that what education aims at today are those bullet points above, which are what most people do answer, Left & Right, when asked why they send their kids off to school to get an education. And we get a prime example of what that sort of education looks like on the ground today, is what this undoubtedly smart student describes in his strategy for efficiently skimming for answers in the 'Grade A!' scavenger hunt:
"...Joe O’Shea was president of the student government at Florida State and a Rhodes Scholar. At a lunchtime gathering for leaders to the university he boasted:Clearly Adams & O'Shea describe two very different approaches to education, and I think it's a safe bet to say that O'Shea is just the type of 'scholar' which caused Albert Jay Knock's visiting Italian nobleman to ask why he'd met no educated people in America born after the 1890s. To skim for 'relevant information' in books, textbooks, and the like, rather than bothering with attentively reading books, is the very thing that Charles Dudley Warner had warned against as the folly of taking literature too lightly, believing that "... this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook!...". Warner's essay from the 1880s, "The Novel and the Common School", foresaw that the (then) new idea of 'progressive education' would transform 'education' into what it is today:I don’t read books per se. I go to Google and I can absorb relevant information quickly. Some of this comes from books. But sitting down and going through a book from cover to cover doesn’t make sense. It’s not a good use of my time as I can get all the information I need faster through the web. (As quoted in Jacobs 72)Professor Jacobs comments that Joe O’Shea was “obviously a very smart guy” and “has an excellent strategy”; however, his viewpoint suffers from thinking of reading simply “as a means of uploading data.
That said, the ability to upload data is often precisely what the educational world wants students to do. This can be indicated by the nature of the tests that are given at the end of a unit. If students have successfully uploaded the relevant information, they will pass these tests, no matter how they did so...”
"...The notion that literature can be taken up as a branch of education, and learned at the proper time and when studies permit, is one of the most farcical in our scheme of education. It is only matched in absurdity by the other current idea, that literature is something separate and apart from general knowledge. Here is the whole body of accumulated thought and experience of all the ages, which indeed forms our present life and explains it, existing partly in tradition and training, but more largely in books; and most teachers think, and most pupils are led to believe, that this most important former of the mind, maker of character, and guide to action can be acquired in a certain number of lessons out of a textbook!..."Along those lines, it's worth noting that while understanding does require information, simply recalling information does not require understanding, and equating the two will lead you down two very different paths. In what way does our schools path of educational good intentions, as exemplified by O'Shea's hunter-gatherer approach to information, have something in common with the approach of either Warner's or Adams' day? I think it's painfully clear that these two paths are oriented towards very different ideas of where True North lies, and they do so because they have very different destinations in mind.
When those who value information over understanding run the schools (such as these so-called 'English teachers' who aren't interested in reading books), the educational path that they're going to want to lead students down, is one that tells them which 'key facts' they are to accept as acceptable answers, and which ones to reject, without ever fully understanding why - which is a system that info hunter-gatherers such as O'Shea will likely thrive in. OTOH, students who've learned to habitually root their knowledge in what they understand to be true, are going to notice when those in authority give them information that doesn't 'add up'. Of those two, those who're in charge of selecting the information they teach because they see it as being useful for 'the greater good' of the society that they're so intent upon reforming, are not spending millions of our tax dollars on building and expanding our school systems so that they'll produce more of the latter types of students who'll question them on what doesn't 'add up', what they do want, are the former types of students who'll seek and accept the approved information as being useful, and there are few better ways of encouraging more of those types of students, than by tying bullet points from textbooks, to grades, and test scores, and diplomas.
As Hannah Arendt put it:
"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."[The Origins of Totalitarianism], that ability to destroy the capacity to form convictions, is what has transformed modern educational systems into the power tool of choice for those seeking the power to say what is, and is not, for 'the greater good' of a more stable State (with themselves in power over it).
The process of moving an educational system away from the pole star of what is good and true, is accomplished through having school reformers selling ever more 'useful answers!' which gradually nudge its lessons further into the orbit of utility until that society's educational system is no longer providing the form of education (that of developing the reasoning for judging '...rightly between truth and error, good and evil.'), which sound convictions can be formed through. Possibly the most important lesson to be learned from the history of school reform in America, is that the very first reforms of our Founding Reformers, whose good intentions we still share in today, began altering our understanding of what Education is, and is for, which began fracturing the foundations which America was understood to be founded upon. The subsequent cycle of school reforms that have each promised to 'fix' whatever was visibly seeping in through the cracks that could be seen, drove those unseen fractures ever deeper into the foundation, and each new reform, each built upon the last, layer after layer after layer, has studiously built it up into a veritable leaning ivory Tower of Babel.
No further reforms - leftist or conservative - added onto that fractured foundation, can hope to steady its structure or prevent its inevitable collapse. It's not possible to 'fix' the swaying of a tower built upon a fractured foundation, without first fixing the foundation, but such an obvious fact is too easy to ignore, as is ignoring the fact that ignoring that will also increase its instability and hasten its ultimate collapse. No further educational reforms - no, not even 'educational choice' (how can either choosing a private school that more effectively teaches the same errors, or insinuating govt oversight into what had been sound schools, be helpful?) - can help, unless first its foundation are fixed and its lessons are realigned with True North.
The choice we need to face up to making today, is to discard those good intentions which cause more harm than good, and restore the proper purpose and content of education - then, with a stable foundation to stand upon, we can look at reclaiming what we can of what has been built upon it. If we don't do that first, the relentless pull of intellectual gravity will eventually succeed in collapsing our educational system, and how such a colossal structure as that can avoid collapsing into a black hole from which no light can escape, is hard to imagine.
To succeed in repairing that foundation, we need to inspect its cracks and determine what caused (and still causes) them, and the reorienting of our educational compass, which we'll begin looking closer at in the coming posts.
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Friday, July 01, 2022
Disorienting America - the modern thinking behind abandoning True North
We've already noted the abundance of good intentions that patriots like Noah Webster, Dr. Rush, and Ben Franklin had when urging a 'New!' system of education upon us as a means to improve people and fit them to secure their new Republic, much of which sounded a lot like what 'conservatives' often say today. But were you aware that they also expressed some intentions which many would find to be not just at odds with the more liberty oriented ideals of our Founding Fathers, but which sounded more than a little bit like what we'd expect to hear from a Hillary Clinton or a (former) Gov McAuliffe?
I've picked on Noah Webster enough already, here're two quotes off the top from another one of our Founding Reformers, Dr. Rush:
"...Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property...", or of education for political and ideological purposes:
"...From the observations that have been made it is plain that I consider it as possible to convert men into republican machines. This must be done if we expect them to perform their parts properly in the great machine of the government of the state...", and similar statements can be found from Noah Webster, and Ben Franklin, though in their defense, it doesn't take much reading of the rest of what they had to say to realize that they didn't intend those statements to be as alarming as they are to anyone who knows the history that has followed in the wake of such statements, but the more important thing to note is how easily their good intentions concealed even from themselves, the radical nature of the unstated assumptions that are inherent in what they'd proposed. We, OTOH, don't have their excuse, as their theoretically potential future is our actually documented past (and present), and we should know that, and we should know its effects on our past, and present, and how it is likely to affect our future.
The fact is that despite the very American sentiments that were 'in the air' at the end of the 18th century, there was something else in the air that was exerting a more southerly pull upon the compass arrows of those who came within its influence, and though it had many sources, where they all first came together most prominently at, was through the celebrated scribblings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Despite the glowing captions you'll undoubtedly find around his smiling face in most of your kids Social Studies textbooks, where he's usually portrayed as a champion of 'Rights!' and a leader in 'The Age of Reason', it was Rousseau who infamously described the man who engages in the process of reasoning as being 'a depraved animal' (which should raise some questions about the rest of those textbooks as well).
"...a state of reflection is a state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal..." Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Jean-Jacques Rousseau
What textbooks should instead be making known to students about Rousseau, is that he was one of, if not the first, major figure to denounce Western Civilization as being a mistake, and to glorify the primitivism of the 'noble savage' as being superior to it; and to deride property and property rights as mistakes that were the root of all evil, and to condemn the institutions of marriage and the family, and to promote a modern sense of Fascism wherein those who thought and spoke in disagreement with the General Will of the state - that they "...will be forced to be free..." (hence The Terror and the Guillotine of Robespierre & Marat in the French Revolution), and he was one of the first to seek to radically reform the purpose and means of educating the young ('Emile; or, On Education') so that they'd better fit into his ideal mold for them. In short, he was more Marxist than Marx, before Marx was even born, and it is no stretch at all to say that without Rousseau, there would have been no Marx, as the German philosophers who Marx learned from, were rooted in the ill-reasoning mind of Rousseau.
Rousseau's darker intentions fed the roots of German philosophy via the likes of Immanuel Kant, who idolized him, and it was Kant's convoluted philosophy that declared that the problem with philosophy was that reality, 'the thing itself', was ultimately unknowable to man, and so Reason had to be destroyed to save appearances (more on that in coming posts). Another was Johan Gotleib Fichte, an influential follower of Kant's, who said that it wasn't really a problem that we couldn't know reality, because our own thoughts were the only reality that really mattered. And then there's his density himself, GWF Hegel, who scoffed at both reality and traditional philosophy's concerns over 'mere Aristotelian contradictions', as he claimed that the only 'reality' that really mattered was what emerged from his form of the 'Dialectic' begun by Kant & Fichte, for 'resolving' contradictions, a process that was popularized (by Fichte) as "Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis".
That 'new reality' of the German Method filled the philosophically charged atmosphere of the early 1800s, and young American scholars breathed it in deep while taking the popular 'European tour',
"...The impact of German university scholarship upon nineteenth-century American higher education is one of the most significant themes in modem intellectual history..." Higher education in transition: a history of American colleges and universitiesand its innovations were everywhere, from the University of Berlin's (re)introduction of 'Phd' certifications, to the fashion of giving everything a more scientific air as men in lab coats were going about subjecting everything from poetry to history, and the classroom as well, to laboratory experimentation. Those results were compiled and quantified and analyzed into claims of having accurately measured people's thoughts and behavior (see Wilhelm Wundt) well enough, to be able to 'improve them' by 'scientifically' managing and improving every aspect of society (hello 'Social Science' and "...Social studies emerged as an attempt to use education as a vehicle to promote social welfare..."). Age-old wisdom, such as Aristotle's observation that:
"...it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs...", were shrugged off as 'old fashioned' fears whose contradictions to their new ideas, were being resolved through their Dialectical process, and synthesized into new more useful terminologies & practices (what Nietzsche's line has quipped into "They muddy the water, to make it seem deep.").
Few works will give you a clearer sense of the practical nature of these new ideas than a series of popular lectures that Fichte had given on education in 1810, his 'Addresses to the German People', in which he urged that schools be used to create a stronger and more secure state through a more scientific application of education, affirming that a:
"... new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will, the opposite being impossible..."Fichte wanted to establish a compulsory system of education that would destroy its student's free will, not because he intended to form the German nation into a people who would be the perfect tools for the rise of national socialism (though of course, it did help to do that), but as his solution to what he saw as the cause behind the recent humiliating defeats of the German states and Prussian army & society by Napoleon. He believed that students who were given a liberal education thought too much, and so were too likely to 'choose wrong' in the face of threatening situations. Fichte's solution to ensure that would happen never again, was to prevent them from 'thinking too much' by scientifically controlling what materials students were exposed to and forcefully filling their heads with what experts had pre-determined to be 'the right' ideas, answers, and responses, and testing and re-testing those results into habits of mind, so that they would not be able to make wrong choices in the future.
Fichte's ideas were more than simply new educational reforms, they were emblematic of those who were expert in the new ideas of a more malleable reality, one in which the modern man, the new man, had recast Metaphysics from the old Aristotelian study of what reality is, into convoluted assertions of modernity, that we cannot ever really know what is, or if anything really exists at all. Such views hammered away at reforming our understanding of how we know what is true, forming into competing epistemologies which, in the end, tend to conclude that ultimately we can know nothing beyond our own subjective opinions (if the relevance escapes you, pay attention to the footnotes, CRT would not, could not, exist as it does today without that as its foundation).
It should surprise no one that those who want to feel freed from the constraints of reality and its requirements for reasonable proof, will latch onto whatever 'reason' seems to justify demanding that other people accept their subjective whims as facts. For those who respect reality and value what is objectively true, the person making such claims as 'because it's true for you, doesn't mean it's true for me' reveal themselves to be unwise, and those seriously making such assertions can have no love for wisdom. But then again those willing to accept that reality can't really be known, are not concerned with wisdom, and aren't in the habit of questioning whether or not what they want to believe is actually true, and so when presented with arguments and evidence for what is 'objectively true', they'll wave if off with 'that's just like your opinion, man'.
They aren't interested in reality or conforming to it, they are interested in change, and you are the reality that they want to see changed, not themselves, and certainly not what they so want to believe as being *true*. Modernity's new North is that what is valid is not measured by 'truth', but by having sufficient quantities of likeminded people to force others to change; that's the only measure of 'respect' for 'truth' they have (oh, hello political polling), and they'd do so without concern for whether or not 'the Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return' - maybe they will return, but in the meantime they're eating cookies.
Under such influences as those in the minds of 'those who know best' in society, the end of 'The Age of Enlightenment' brought an end to philosophy as 'the love of wisdom', as Hegel put it in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit,
“To help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title of ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowledge — that is what I have set before me”, whatever 'good' his intentions aimed at, he and his fellows transformed philosophy into a 'misosophy', the hatred of wisdom, and as society's compass needle wandered steadily further from True North, the ethical compasses of the well intentioned reformers of the period wandered right along with them, pleased to begin taking their own good intentions as newly fixed stars to steer by, and thrilled to teach their new stars as being reliable guides for generations yet unborn to use in navigating their lives by.
As the saying goes: "Thar be dragons".
How the new maps were made to reorient around their new more southerly (and sulphureous) headings, is what we'll begin looking more closely at next.
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Never forget that 'Education Reform' is about reforming you
As noted previously, the good intentions that our Founding Reformers had in mind when they began the movement towards reforming education in the late 1790s, had a lot in common with our own good intentions today, but those good intentions are just about the only point to be found in common between their time and ours in regard to the what, how, and why, of the content being taught, and how long it took to teach it. That the content and methods of teaching have changed between then and now is unlikely to raise any eyebrows, but shouldn't it be surprising for us to learn that their students spent far less time in school learning far more than we do, today? At the time when our education reform process first began, Noah Webster, who'd been a teacher, thought schools should need no more than "...four months in a year...", beginning with students no younger than eight years of age, and "...completed by the age of fifteen or sixteen...", meaning that they successfully taught the 3R's (and substantially more than that) in half as many months per year, and did so in at most only eight of those half-length years. Our educational system has shaped our peoples' thinking across a sizable stretch of time - we should be paying closer attention to what shape it's being reformed into.
For a very different approach to mathematics, here's John Adams' personal copy of "Cocker's decimal arithmetick",
and for everything else there's Thomas Jefferson's suggested reading list
Learning their 3R's as was once done through actual works of literature and history (from the Bible, to Thucydides, Livy, Cicero, Plutarch, Shakespeare, etc.), meant that those eight or so years would invest them with not only the ability to read, write, and calculate, but would also orient themselves within the landscape of a history whose landmark places, names and dates, were more meaningful for them than any number of 'key facts' memorized for a quiz, ever could be. Learning meaningful lessons, rather than focusing primarily on skills based exercises, gave students a sense of what the men & women populating their historical landscape had accomplished, and under what conditions, and in identifying where their behavior was admirable, or despicable (or both), they developed an appreciation for the good, the beautiful, and the true, a revulsion for the lie and the ugliness of evil, and an understanding of why it was important to distinguish between them. And to point out a sometimes startling bit of obviousness, that ability to discern and understand such matters, was something which the student did not have within them before being taught them, IOW: students are changed by their education.and for everything else there's Thomas Jefferson's suggested reading list
More than homework strategies, test scores, job skills and what facts students might be able to repeat on demand, prior to the modern reform era, learning the 3R's often involved committing to memory various passages from significant and meaningful works and poems so as to furnish their minds with valuables that would inform their thinking and provide them with something worth reflecting upon at timely moments for the rest of their lives, and there is nothing trivial about that - it both anchored and added something of permanent substance into their very selves. My grandmother caught the tail-end of that practice when she was in grammar school, around 1910, and just before her death at 103, she recited one of those poems to me from memory, Thanatopsis, and though she could barely see at the time, her eyes lit up with what she was seeing within her as she recited it to me. Contrast that to the little that students commit to long-term memory today, which typically is trivial, and is less likely to come from school than from the Top 40 songs and movie tag lines of pop-culture - a good measure of just how empty and impoverished we have been made by the 'good intentions' of our educational reforms, can be had by comparing what you or your child can recite from memory today, to even a single poem like Thanatopsis.
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| A rendering of 'Thanatopsis' |
Don't neglect the obvious here: an education involves nothing less than terraforming the student's interior as well as building structures upon it - will the resulting mental and spiritual landscapes be barren, or fertile? Will their inner landscape be dotted with soaring structures, or a shambles of scattered sheds and rusting machinery? Will the foundations of those structures be set in solidly reasoned ground, or shifting about upon the sands of popular opinion?
Am I being overly dramatic? Dramatic, yes, but overly? Given the stakes? No. Those who're being educated with Social Studies, DEI, CRT, etc., - their education is forming the nature of the mind which their thoughts will inhabit from then on, will that be an inviting place for them to explore, will it map a correspondence between what is within them, to what is real and true outside them - will it help them come to 'Know thyself', or will it shunt them off to wander about aimlessly lost within themselves for the rest of their lives (see woke activists for reference)? The reason why an education used to involve the finest examples of our culture's history, literature, religion, folklore, music, was to help in forming that inner landscape, familiarizing and equipping the student with the means to navigate through life, shorn up by, illuminated by, and adorned with, what were known to be the priceless jewels of the highest and best of the Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian West. Is your child's education helping to form their mindscape into a hospitable place for living a good life, or one which they'll be desperately seeking to escape from for the rest of their lives?
A Missouri high school is creating a “gender-affirming closet” so students can cross-dress at school without their parents knowing. https://t.co/eHrk0LDRaO
— Schools Unhinged (@SchoolsUnhinged) July 14, 2022
Past is prologue
Sometimes I'm asked why I dwell so much on past reforms instead of focusing on the latest ones (Common Core? CRT? DEI? SEL? 'School Choice'?), and my reaction is to wonder why ya'll are dwelling upon the distractions and ignoring the underlying substance that they are distracting you from? I'll give you two points to illustrate what I mean. Firstly, with parents today who are being bullied by the woke scolds of CRT & DEI 'toleration' in the media and establishment, and feel as if this is something that's never happened before, allow me to take you back to the beginning of the experiment in using school for purposes other than education, to when Lyman Beecher was leading an effort to reform the newest school reforms in the 1820s:
"... the press belched and bellowed, and all of the mud in the streets was flying at us... There was an intense, malignant enragement for a time. Showers of lies were rained about us every day. The Unitarians, with all their principles of toleration, were as persecuting a power, while they had the ascendancy, as ever existed...", parents, do those 'principles of toleration' sound familiar? Sure, the details and perhaps the intensity might be different today, but the form is the same, and nearly two hundred years later I think we can safely say that his efforts to reform the details of the latest reforms, failed to 'fix' the schools, as has every effort since then - so why would you want me to repeat the same error? Where is the wisdom in focusing on the latest details of the moment, when the underlying substance of them has persisted through to the present day by shrugging through one guise of details after another, year in and year out, since the 1820s!? The details are distractions that come and go, the devil isn't in them, but in what conveys and is concealed by them.
The second point comes from my own experience, from when we were challenging DESE during their attempt to roll out Common Core back in 2013, and there was a young father there who was astonished at my opposition to Common Core's claims to promote 'skills for the 21st century!', and he actually said to me:
"But I want my child to be able to decode informational text, and to learn the skills she'll need to succeed in the 21st century!", and as we spoke it became obvious (to both of us) that he had little or no understanding of what he meant by that - he couldn't tell me what he meant by 'informational text' or how 21st century 'thinking skills' differed from those of the 18th century, but he'd heard from people he trusted at his child's school that they were important, and so he wanted his child to have them, so that she could succeed in life. His concern was an example of the very first reform of our Founding Reformers - which took no law to put into place - in action; that belief that education could and should be for some other purpose than the child's education, that is what birthed the beast, and most people today still nurture it along. That unthought-through 'oh!' is how the reformers gather political power to their reform by coupling the parent's sense of their own ignorance, together with their hopes & fears for their child's future, to secure the support needed for reforms which will make very real changes in their child's life and future. Whether those changes will prove to be for better or worse, is an unknown variable of each reform's experimental nature, which is something that most reformers know all too well, and few parents even suspect.
Here's some 'informational text' which that dad would've done better to consider: Slave masters did not severely punish people for teaching slaves to read because they worried that their slaves might read the informational text of instructions on how to operate and maintain their master's machinery or learn better recipes for baking their master's bread, but to ensure that they didn't get a hold of the ideas that Fredrich Douglass found contained within books like 'The Columbian Orator', which helped in his becoming the pillar of fire that helped burn their tyranny to the ground. Alexis de Tocqueville wasn't awed at the prospect of education no longer being the sole province of the rich & powerful because he thought that the public might learn how to become as proficient at buying, selling, and bargaining as those who'd acquired their educations at great expense, but because he knew that a liberal education was the key to living lives worth living and the best way to escape from being the pawns of those who had wealth and power. Neither King Alfred the Great nor Emperor Charlemagne had expended massive amounts of time, effort, and wealth, on establishing schools that recovered and taught the classic works of the West, so that they could maintain a technological edge over the Vikings, but to reclaim and re-establish a civilization's wisdom wherein a person's life could amount to more than a bitter fight for survival.
The sad fact is that this dad's focus on 'informational text' was enabling his school to trade away what little still remained of the old lessons that aimed at helping to develop a child's ability to reason by identifying theme, plot, and character development in a story, in exchange for the hunter-gatherer skills of ferreting out information such as the number of grams of iron noted in a breakfast cereal's nutrition label to support its claims for being 'more nutritious!'. It is that persistent approach of going to school for *reasons* other than the students education which shapes 'education reform' and provides it with the camouflage of the latest in popular distractions - from 'values!' to 'informational text' to securing the 'skills of the 21st Century!' - various skills & benefits do of course result from educating our youth, but they are effects of an education, and not the causes or purposes of one, and that attempt to reverse cause & effect is what has led to the disastrous state of our schools today, where somehow losing still more ground is an ever present feeling of Deja-vu all over again.
I continue to point out the mistakes of the past, because it's those mistakes that we keep repeating under differing guises in the present, over and over again, and that battling the many-headed hydra of popular
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| Battling the many-headed hydra |
The current system which increasingly focuses on inflaming passions and feelings, with open hostility to substance and merit, brings to mind two comments from Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, who, though they differed on many things, especially as the French Revolution got underway, they were in agreement upon at least one sound and salient theme, in which Edmund Burke said that:
"...It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free; their passions forge their fetters..."
'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be'
... is the definition of insanity
How anyone expects our youths today to demonstrate an education's important secondary effects: civility, manners and morality, without their cause: an understanding of what those are and the knowledge of how and why they should be central to your life, is beyond me, but that - seeking effects without causes - is a hallmark of modernist pro-regressive thinking, and you should not forget that the effects of past education reforms are all around us today. When we encounter rude, uncivil, even brutally violent behavior, that is the harvest of past school reforms that we're reaping. Those are the ideals that 'decolonizing' our libraries have been aiming at - people who've never learned what civilized behavior entails are not going to behave in a civilized manner when it matters, let alone as Westerners or as Americans - and what kind of mind expects accomplishments such as that to come from nothing?
The answer to that, of course, is that they are the kind of minds and ideals who, since Rousseau, have extolled the 'noble savage' to us because they don't think of The West, or of America, as being worthwhile accomplishments. While that is (or at least should be) sickening and disturbing, it shouldn't be all that surprising, but what should be at least as surprising and even more disturbing, is how any of us ever imagined that some other outcome than the anti-Western and anti-American beliefs and behaviors that we are facing today, would follow from educating our youths minds, with such ideals as those from those minds? It should be no surprise that savage behavior follows from those who've been taught to revere the 'noble savage' - it's only natural - and yet we do behave as if we are surprised by it. Whether through tuition or taxes, we pay, and even go into debt in order to teach our students wrongs as rights, we fund 'scholarly efforts' to portray pure ugliness as a nuanced form of literary appreciation (such as this paper on a barbaric poet of hate, by my current troll, a he/him/his 'gradual student' who teaches Drama to students at the University of Washington), which is taught to our K-12 & college students as being worthy of their admiration, and then we are somehow shocked that our colleges graduate wave after wave of students who are sympathetically aligned with Antifa & BLM rioting in our streets, and who help to spread the mentally and spiritually twisted messaging of groomers in our classrooms.
What is truly unnatural, is our expecting that a course of training which ridicules the idea of objective truth, exalts utilitarian thinking skills, derides wisdom, and holds up tyranny as an ideological ideal, could lead to something other than cleverer devils for us to contend with when societal frictions bring us face to face with the inner barbarian that we've awarded them diplomas and degrees for cultivating. Such 'scholarly' cleverness is in some ways worse than enslavement, as a slave can still recognize, admire, and yearn for what is good, beautiful, and true, while those who've been 'educated' into appreciating such a state of lies are unlikely to even attempt to escape the ideas that bind them. The barbarians outside our gates have become less of a concern to our life, liberty, and happiness, than the native-born barbarian hordes that we're going into debt to 'educate!' alongside us within those gates.
Because of the good intentions of the past 200 years of education reforms, many of our kids today fail to learn even their 3Rs in the establishment schools (public, private, and church) which take charge of their lives for twice as long per year, and for four more years than pre-reform schools thought necessary. Additionally, most of those students graduate with a barren internal landscape, and even as the popularity of Marvel, DC, and Star Wars 'universes' demonstrate their thirst for meaningful stories in their lives, the cultural stories that arguably form much of an education's greatest value - the knowledge of how to find your place in, and successfully navigate through life - play little or no part in their 'education' (see 'The Story Killers'). As a result of the modern progressive education's 'hunter-gatherer' approach to cramming 'key facts' & skills into short-term memory, the lives and minds of our leading people today truly lack a worldview within them that's worth viewing anything from - it adds little or nothing to their inner life to make their lives more endurable, enjoyable, and meaningful, and provides them with no worthwhile perspective for understanding the world and their place within it.
One thing we can say for sure about education reform is that it has undoubtedly worked - it is how we've come to accomplish so much less, with so much more. Unfortunately, of course, saying that has been a good thing, would be an especially ugly lie - our education today alienates us from both who we are, and from who we should be. Amazingly, we continue to employ it, even today, while expecting different results - how does repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting different results, differ from what they say is the definition of insanity? On the bright side, our history provides us with enough examples of these reforms that their pattern is easy enough to spot, and if we can do so before our own good intentions are turned against us once again, that'd be one lesson of history that a brighter future could come from learning. We'll take a closer look at that, in the next post.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2022
Accepting the 'Science!' of Education Reform
How we came to accomplish so much less, with so much more, involves several popular buy-ins, first and foremost being the 'good intentions' we still share with our Founding Reformers (i.e.'go to school to get a good job'), which fundamentally changed education's purpose from being the development of the student, into its being a means to other 'more useful' ends, as determined by 'those who know best' (which, BTW, also transforms the students into being but a means to other more useful ends, AKA: '♫♪♬ just another brick in the wall ♬♪♫'). But as disastrous as that fundamental change was to how we think about education, and as popular as that was with those who saw themselves as being 'those who know best (who, BTW, are just as likely to be your neighbor, as some distant 'elite')', before 'education reform!' was able to proceed successfully step by pro-regressive step down the path of good intentions, it required a couple other buy-ins from us: First, the will to publicly propose forcing reforms upon society, Second, the willingness to actually impose such reforms upon others, and Third - toughest of all - popular acceptance of such reforms being imposed upon others and upon themselves.
Those immediately following our Founders' era at the opening of the 1800s were not lacking in the 'will' to call for forcing sometimes intrusive reforms upon their fellows, which comes as a bit of a shock to those of us who imagine that time to be predominantly populated with pure liberty loving patriots; nevertheless, there was no lack of people willing to force their views upon the public, in the name of liberty. You can get the sense of this from the do-gooders themselves, such as this popular set of essays of the time, from a moralist, Dr. James G. Carter, writing in 'Essays on Popular Education' (1826), that to preserve the republic:
"...The ignorant must be allured to learn, by every motive which can be offered to them, And if they will not thus be allured, they must be taken by the strong arm of government and brought out, willing or unwilling, and made to learn, at least, enough to make them peaceable and good citizens...", and forcing the ignorant/stupid people into doing what was best for them, was something that many considered to be an acceptable and necessary thing for 'those who know best' to do (and who doesn't like to imagine that they are members in good standing with that group?).
. and,
"...The free schools of Massachusetts, as the most efficient means of accomplishing that object, should therefore be the property and the peculiar care of government..."
With the popularity of utilitarian thinking growing significantly, peoples' various good intentions to 'save the republic!', 'improve citizenry!', 'improve morals!', 'achieve economic success!', 'save religion!', for the greater good of ____[insert your preferred pretext here]___", were easily used to justify acting (whether openly or out of sight) for 'the greatest good of the greatest number', because they'd come to believe that their ends really did justify the means. Even so, it took a couple decades for their thinking to make it into law. Why? While they had an abundant supply of the will to propose and implement reforms upon the ignorant and stupid people, they typically saw someone else as being the problem, not themselves; and if a reform involved them, well, that was clearly a reform that was misguided and unjustified - good 'for thee, but not for me', which added to the noise of the day, but not so much to the laws on the books. Yet.
Up until at least the 1820s, most such reforms were seen as but thinly veiled calls for using the power of government to impose one particular reformer's own religious views, over what they deemed to be the 'inferior' views being taught to the rest of the public (or like Horace Mann's branch of Unitarians, demanding that all doctrine be excluded... which *surprisingly* meant looking very much like Unitarian doctrine), or on the other hand, those reformers claiming that popular understanding of virtue and morality didn't measure up to their own secular expectations, should be banished from the public square - either one of those reformers stood a good chance of getting themselves run out of town by those who didn't want to be reformed by them. In fact, both such reforms would soon be imposed, but something else would need to fall into place first, before all sides of the issue would support imposing them upon each other and themselves.
The acceptability of imposing such reforms upon others and upon themselves as well, began to spread more rapidly as American scholars began returning home from their European tours, and began dressing up their good intentions for the greater good as a more modern and scientific approach to education (remember Fichte). 'The Myth of the Common School' gives a detailed account of the period, and pg. 98 has one of the new 'science!' of education appeals that had begun taking shape, with Brown University President Francis Wayland, stating:
It wasn't so much that they were proposing to dress education up in lab coats & microscopes (that was still a few decades in the future), but that no matter whether their calls for 'education reform!' were outwardly focused upon religion, morals, the weakness of government, or the need to strengthen the economy, each of their reforms intended to use education as an experimental means of affecting the 'output' behaviors of graduating students as a fix for whatever was seen as being the popular societal failure of the moment. IOW, schools were coming to be seen as a technology which looked upon teachers as levers and students as cogs and textbooks as fuel, in a machine for producing a cure-all for the problems of both 'the people' and society. It may not have been apparent to most people at the time, but this form of 'school reform!' wasn't simply 'improving' various features in our schools, it completely transformed our view of what education is, what schools are for, and of who we are and should be, and whatever good intentions had initially unleashed it, would be undermined and undone by it, the more they 'succeeded' in applying it. One clear eyed professor at Princeton, Samuel Miller(1769-1850), hit the nail on the head in sounding an early warning of this in 1805, in his "A brief retrospect of the eighteenth century","...We have assembled today, not to proclaim how well our fathers have done, but to inquire how we may enable their sons to do better.... we, at this day, are, in a manner, the pioneers of this work in this country. Education, as a science, has scarcely yet been naturalized among us. Radical improvement in the means of education is an idea that seems but just to have entered into men's minds.... God helping us, then, let us make our mark on the rising generation."Wayland was asserting, it should be noted, not that education itself was unavailable or in short supply - he knew perfectly well that almost universal literacy was the rule in New England - but that the science of education was undeveloped; this led to limited capacity to make an impact on the next generation..."
"...This doctrine of the omnipotence of education, and the perfectibility of man, seems liable, among many others, to the following strong objections : — First. It is contrary to the nature and condition of man...."I'll come back to more of what he had to say shortly, but the truth is that the condition of our schools today has less to do with the laws that have been passed, than with the altered state of mind that led us to pass them, and taken as we were with the promises of 'school reform!', we'd failed to question what was actually being accomplished with it - the condition of our schools today is simply the predictable effect which could not not result from those causes which we are still reaffirming today.
Had We The People kept in mind what education actually was, and what its purpose was, we might have seen far enough into the likely future to see that the promises of those initial reforms and goals would soon be forced out by what they were helping to unleash, but, with nearly everyone eagerly using education as a means to their own ends, be those economics, religiosity, morality, or assimilating immigrants, they were unable to foresee any effects beyond their own rhetoric. Despite their best intentions, as noted in a 1958 study by William Kailor Dunn, they soon saw "...religious themes increasingly replaced by moral ones...", and while the 'Morals!' side briefly surged in the 'key facts' being taught, both soon vanished almost completely from the textbooks and classrooms, as new 'key facts' & skills of the next wave of newly reformed reformers, took their place:
| Textbook Content | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | Religion vs Morals | |
| 1775: | 85%-8% | |
| 1775-1825: | 22%-28% | |
| 1825-1875: | 7%-23% | |
| 1875-1915: | 1.5%-7% | |
Note: This wasn't a result of 'separation of church and state' challenges - that was still a century in the offing - these were the results of overtly religious and moralistic efforts, while trying to avoid contentious sectarian issues of doctrine, in service to the 'scientific!' mindset of using the schools to produce results other than the education of its students. By the time the contenders noticed that they were all being run out of town, it was too late. The famous 'free schools' run by protestant, catholic, or secular interests, had brought about the greatest literacy rate in history by educating students as they saw fit, but because the government run 'Common Schools' could only teach what no side objected to, and what all sides could agree upon in common was sadly lacking is educational worth, that meant that the only winners under those conditions were the economic and/or ideological interests which, following one form or another from Fichte, had an interest in eliminating educated people from the common mass of humanity - for the greater good and security of the state. The popular 'good intentions' of the moment had been transformed into the motive force of 'the ends' which justified whatever means seemed necessary, and, knowingly or not, produced the outcome that was noted by Albert Jay Knock's visiting Italian nobleman, as being the end of newly educated Americans, in America, by the 1890s.
There were other voices at the time beside Prof. Miller, trying to sound the alarm that:
"Doing right by wrong means, is worse than doing wrong", but unavoidably, as an educational form of Gresham's Law applied ('Bad money drives out good'), and with scientism (the dressing up of 'science!' in the robes of philosophy) leading the way, truth and virtue were forced out of what students were educated in. Good intentions abounded however, and when the reformers reforms were even vaguely associated with supporting 'science!', few wanted to be seen in even their own eyes as denying the science, enabling both the reformers and 'the stupid people' to see themselves as one of 'those who know best' which helped secure broad public acceptance for all manner of reform efforts - be they for helping the economy, making better citizens, strengthening the culture, or getting the better of foreign competitors.
The promises of 'school reform!' were of course launched with the very best of intentions by our Founding Reformers such as Noah Webster, Dr. Rush, and Dr. Franklin, who thought of their new education reforms, more as providing something 'in addition to' the betterment of the student, rather than as a tool for achieving something other than an education, and yet... their reforms intended to... use students... to ... resolve whichever issue beyond the student was the concern of the moment - be that Dr. Rush's '...to convert men into republican machines...', or Webster's 'create an American identity' and develop 'economic engines', or still others' call to 'improve the public's morals and virtues' - so that all that We The People needed to do next, was to prioritize which complaint the student's minds & lives should be adapted to fix first. However the particular 'sizzle' they were selling a reform with was dressed up as, it was the coupling of 'education reform!' with the appearances of a 'science!' of society, and the promise of more 'modern' and 'efficient' methods for achieving 'measurably improved results' through education, that was the spin that began to 'play in Peoria', and few seemed willing to consider any dangers that might be inherent in it.
Yes, our Founding Reformers would've recognized our good intentions today, but they wouldn't recognize what those good intentions have transformed our schools, or America, into, today.
When you keep in mind that accepting the utilitarian change to the purpose of Education, was the change of mind that ensured all of the disastrous reforms that would follow, it becomes much easier to see how we got from there, to here, through the pivoting and misdirection's inherent in implementing the reform template. The most obviously successful of those who first led the way in applying the 'reform!' template, was Horace Mann, a radical reformer with a knack for diverting the footsteps of our Founding Reformers into such unforeseen paths as would effectively conceal much of Fichte's Prussian System of education, under an Americanized veneer. His most significant 'achievement' in going down that path, was helping to bring about Massachusetts' first laws for establishing a mandatory public school system under a state board of education. It didn't take long for the people of Massachusetts to begin realizing what the semantics of 'a more democratic education!' had deceived them into establishing as law:
"...After all that has been said about the French and Prussian systems, they appear to your Committee to be much more admirable, as a means of political influence, and of strengthening the hands of the government, than as a mere means for the diffusion of knowledge. For the latter purpose, the system of public Common Schools, under the control of persons most interested in their flourishing condition, who pay taxes to support them, appears to your Committee much superior. The establishment of the Board of Education seems to be the commencement of a system of centralization and of monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary, in every respect, to the true spirit of our democratical institutions; and which, unless speedily checked, may lead to unlooked-for and dangerous results..."[emphasis added], but the deed was done, and they weren't successful in undoing it, as at each turn in the process, the objections of those with eyes to see, were brushed away as being over reactions, and those listening were given assurances of "Oh I'm sure they don't mean that!". The problem was (and is) that such a system as that, had to mean exactly "that!", and no matter how good the intentions of 'fitting youth to the machinery of government' might have been to begin with, such ideals as those are fundamentally incompatible with the 'old' pursuit of enabling students to develop an educated grasp of, and love for, what is real and true. Then, as now, the point of 'school reform!' was to reform the collective population into the image the reformers had in mind for them, and then as now, data and data collection were key to how a bureaucracy gains power over those it's supposed to serve. From pg. 123 of "The Myth of the Common School':
"...Virtually the only power that Mann and the board possessed was that of requiring annual school returns of statistics and othe information, and Mann had used this aggressively to collect the information that he then used with great effect in his celebrated annual reports (Complaints about such data-collection activities have not abated over the years!)Mann helped spur that progressive reorientation further onwards through another European innovation that he championed, that of replacing the traditional oral examinations between a teacher and each one of their students, with identical written tests given to the entire class at the same time. In oral examinations, teachers would ask each individual student questions, which they'd answer in their own words, which led to more questions, and answers, and so on, giving the teacher a solid understanding of how well that student understood the material they'd been covering in class, and how best to approach what they would be covering in class next, or next year.
Mann's requests for information, and use of the information he received, were in some respects the key elements of his influence over the development of the common school...
... Mann also was in the habit of sending out questions that sought information of a more subjective nature, generally in anticipation of basing policy recommendations on responses whose tenor he anticipated; there are no instances in which such responses appear to have caused him to change his mind about an issue!...."
That was not what Horace Mann was interested in, it was too individual, and contributed nothing towards using education to bring about the changes he wanted to see made in students, teachers, and the public. The answer he saw as being more of what he was looking for, lay in written tests,.
"... after visiting schools in Europe in 1843, returned convinced that written exams were superior. He wrote: “When the oral method is adopted, none but those personally present at the examination can have any accurate or valuable idea of appearance of the school…Not so, however, when the examination is by printed questions and written answers. A transcript, a sort of Daguerreotype likeness, as it were, of the state and condition of the pupils’ minds, is taken and carried away, for general inspection...", with written tests, Mann could replace the individual process of oral exams, a process that was itself educational, with printed tests, whose generic questions required students to recall similar (and eventually identical) answers that were pre-determined 'by those who know best' to fit the 'answer key', and which all of the other students would be trained to answer with as well. Tests such as those could be mass produced, and their scores tabulated (another form of data-collection) to give 'exact measurements' of what students knew, and which teachers were or weren't 'being helpful' (to the student, or the reformers?), so as to use the 'progress measured' to further their reforms by goading public opinion into line with it.
It should be no surprise to anyone that pursuing results without regard to their causes, leads to unforeseen consequences, and as historian William J. Reese, author of 'Testing Wars in the Public Schools: A Forgotten History', wrote in a New York Times essay,
"...What can we learn from the advent of what we learned to call “high-stakes testing”? What transpired then still sounds eerily familiar: cheating scandals, poor performance by minority groups, the narrowing of the curriculum, the public shaming of teachers, the appeal of more sophisticated measures of assessment, the superior scores in other nations, all amounting to a constant drumbeat about school failure....”Do you see the seeds of a familiar pattern in that? The promised panacea, accusations of fault over related failures, calls to increase and expand their efforts, and so on? Still more benefits found with testing, was the ability to use both the tests, and their results, to target those teachers, parents, and students, who hadn't yet been reformed into Mann's ideal image for them. The community wasn't blind to what he was doing, there was controversy and outrage over what he did, and over his pressing for still more and more reforms, efforts that clearly came at the expense of those students and teachers that his test results had unfairly targeted. As matters heated up, he temporarily scaled back his efforts, before soon pushing for still more. Eventually the public did tire of Mann and he lost his re-election - but the tests, and their uses, and the data-collection, remained, expanded, and grew to the point that they are now everywhere.
The reform pattern is difficult to miss in that description of how written tests were introduced with 'proven value' from European uses, followed by the 'unforeseen consequences' of students cheating on tests, followed by the need for progressively more tests, which then led to standardized tests, then state testing, and finally to nationwide testing standards. Once you notice it, it becomes hard to miss, is even a little bit fractal in its nature, in what's presented in all educational reform:
And when some portion of the 'that!' which opponents warned about actually occurs, or an even worse side-effect follows from it, simply rinse and repeat as you double-down with the same three steps as necessary, until the 'that!' which people were originally concerned with, gradually becomes what is in fact normalized and implemented everywhere.
- Propose a goal from the latest educational experiment to be 'given a shot' at training kids in far more useful answers and skills,
- Trot out experts from state and commerce to brush away concerns with 'oh, they don't mean 'that!', while assuring the public that they're needed for 'the greater good' of society and its workforce.
- That reform - whether it succeeds or fails - justifies calling for still more radical reforms to follow and be normalized into our educational system,
Step 1 in the pattern, despite its lofty sounding goals always involves providing students with less and less of substance, such as worthwhile literature, to think with, under the cover of providing 'more rigor' that drills students in 'key facts' & 'new skills' which support whichever ideological issues the 'greater good' requires them to serve. The pattern as a whole is something of an Americanized version of Fichte's methods for using schools to destroy free will and socializing conformity in a manner that effectively prevents 'wrong think'. And whether the goal of the moment has been to produce a 'new man', or economic utility, or governmental cogs, or more activists, the new ideal of going to school to 'get good grades and get a good job!', gradually forced out the original True North ideal of equipping a person to be a knowledgeable and moral individual who is capable of insightful thought and self-governance, as it had to - the two are incompatible contradictions that no amount of dialectical thinking could resolve.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the schooling spectrum, one of those enthusiastic students who'd taken the European Tour, Charles W. Elliott, had since become a professor at Harvard, gained his own PhD, and graduated to being the president of Harvard, at which point he introduced the radical new notion of 'elective classes'.
"...Contending that higher learning in the United States needed to be “broadened, deepened, and invigorated,” Eliot demanded a place for the sciences as well as the humanities in any sound program of liberal education. To counter the rigidity of the Harvard curriculum—which, following what was then general practice, was then almost totally prescribed—Eliot eliminated required courses. Under his successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, a balance was struck between required and elective courses..."That 'reform', in and of itself, was both an expression and a consequence of the transformation of Education - under the old view, those with something meaningful to teach, knew what they needed to teach to those who did not yet know it, and so students came to learn that from them. Under the new form, the students came to learn what they'd already decided would be useful for them to know, and they chose what classes seemed most interesting or useful for that, while grudgingly enduring 'that other stuff' they had to sit through to get their degree. That of course required not only adding more 'interesting classes' to the school curriculum to keep student's attention (and their parents $) on task, but also soon developed into budgeting 'uninteresting' classes out of the courses that the college offered, a cycle which within a century would see those classes which had originally been the central purpose of that college, entirely dropped from being taught in those colleges.
Now that's education reform.
In the end, all of 'school reform!' is about reforming you into something useful to something else
Earlier in this post I mentioned a review of significant developments of the 1700s, given at the opening of the 1800s, by a professor from Princeton, Samuel Miller. One issue he mentioned in that review, was two pages of concerns he had over innovations in education that were developing in the late 1700s, that were intending to use education as a means towards 'the perfectibility of man', which Prof. Miller saw as being '...contrary to the nature and condition of man...'. His concerns are well worth reading and thinking through, even today, particularly as he identified that what those new theories:
"... depicted in philosophic dreams is an absurd portrait of knowledge without real wisdom, of benevolence without piety, and of purity and happiness without genuine virtue...", and at the close of his comments on education, he sadly concludes, accurately, that:
"...The doctrine of human perfectibility however, is too flattering to the pride of man not to have considerable currency among certain classes of society. Accordingly, the effects of this doctrine may be distinctly traced in many parts of the civilised world, from its influence in seminaries of learning, on the general interests of education, and on many social institutions. That this influence is unfavourable, will not be questioned for a moment by those who consider truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected...", and while I disagree with at least one of his points (having to do with Malthus), that last point above, the folly of failing to view "... truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected..." - that is a truth that for the most part is not only no longer recognized by us today, but if you tell someone that today, it's likely that they'll be surprised that you'd say such a thing. That shouldn't be surprising, because when someone is saying we need to be 'practical', or 'pragmatic', or that we should 'pay less attention to worrying about what's right and focus on what's useful!', they are declaring their own implicit belief that Truth and Utility have no intrinsic connection, that they have no real relation to each other. Behaving as if Truth and Utility are separable, is what our Founding Reformers first 'reform' helped make into a norm for us, as their promises of prosperity which helped 'school reform!' to become a thing 200 years ago, nudged us into ignoring the fact that we were attempting to reverse cause and effect, and it's that assumption, and our willingness to look at what we're being promised, and not at what is being assumed and done in the name of that promise, which has led to the unending stream of dis-educational policies and laws that we've been imposed upon ourselves, since then.
The denial that "... truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected...", is a tenet of 'Utilitarian' belief, which is something, IMHO, that is not only unwise for individuals to accept, it is disastrous for a society to adhere to - the world we're dealing with today is a result of attempting to treat it as an idea that 'works' - how does that seem to be working to you? It doesn't work, of course. But naively believing it will, causes us to redouble our efforts when we see that the policies that we've enacted on its promises, are failing - we think it's us that've failed, rather than suspecting that the 'truth' of it is a lie.
But point out to people today - whether Left, Right or Center - that "... truth and utility as inseparably and eternally connected...", and you'll typically be met with an exaggerated eye-roll and muttering about the need to be practical and get 'results!'. How many of those on 'The Right' who are upset over the state of our schools today, realize that 'Common Core' and SEL originated in the 'school reform!'s called for by the Right in the late 80s and 90s, which were capitalizing on exactly that reaction? And yet most of us today - Left, Right or Center - still think that we can pass laws to 'restore our schools', completely unaware that they are actively engaged in the very same pro-regressive effort to reverse cause and effect, that brought us to where we are.
Before we go demanding yet another 'school reform!', we need to realize that our past 'school reform!'s have reformed us into a people who don't even think twice about how divorced our good intentions are from reality, and until we fix that, 'school reform!' will continue doing what 'school reform!' has always done - reforming 'We The People' away from who we once were, into who we are becoming today.
And that's school reform.
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Thursday, October 06, 2022
The 1st lesson from the dark wood of School Reform: Good intentions make a map to Hell unnecessary
“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.
But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road....
Dante - Inferno , Canto I The Dark Wood
It is true that politics is downstream of culture, but there's something that's upstream of both - Education - and when educators acquire the power to not just transmit, but to alter and 'reform' the nature and content of that culture as they see fit, it becomes an unhealthy process, metastasizing into something cancerous to both culture and politics, and to the people themselves. When those I've termed our Founding Reformers, Noah Webster, Dr. Rush, Ben Franklin, and likeminded others, first began reforming the nature and purpose of getting an education (disastrously, IMHO), they unquestionably did so with the very best of intentions for America and its people. The same cannot be said of all of those who've followed in their footsteps, but nevertheless, both sets of intentions ultimately stray into the midst of the same dark wood, the straightforward pathway having been lost.
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.
Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more;
But of the good to treat, which there I found,
Speak will I of the other things I saw there.
I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment
In which I had abandoned the true way.
But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated,
Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders,
Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road....
Dante - Inferno , Canto I The Dark Wood
Just how lost our educational system has become - not simply inept, but willfully misleading us - began to become apparent to many during the covid pandemic's remote learning, when parents, grandparents, and the public at large were shocked to hear for themselves how their student's daily lessons were implementing the bizarre sounding theories of CRT & SEL. But it wasn't until after having seen that those were formulated by Marxist ideologues, and then seeing how adamantly that their own school districts, school boards, media, politicians, and even the FBI, were opposing their efforts to remove those lessons and materials from their schools, that people might finally have begun realizing just how far we've all wandered off into the deep dark of the ideological woods.
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| Blumenfeld's Hillsdale College address |
But simply realizing that we're lost, as we've periodically done since as early as 1920, is not enough to put us back on the right path. Neither will our pointing out how radical this person or that policy is, get us any less lost. The truth is that such people and policies didn't simply 'get in' to our educational system, they are themselves the effects of it - political ideologies, artistic sensibilities, economic beliefs, Marxist or otherwise, are not themselves causes, they are the downstream effects of what is taught in our educational systems, and that has been under the guidance of philosophies that are hostile to the Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian culture of Western Civilization, and just as effects don't precede causes, focusing on effects won't make their causes go away.
Keep in mind that for every one person who comes out and identifies as being a Socialist, Marxist, Woke, etc., there are far more 'moderates' who'll pragmatically nod along with their positions as 'having a good point', and it's that pragmatic slumber which has become the unconscious norm in our society, and that, even more so than the more radical ideologies, is what has enabled us to stray so far from the straightforward path. IOW, there's something else that precedes, enables, and encourages the views of the Socialist, Marxist, and the Woke, and to be blunt, what's caused us to become so lost, is us. We The People. Our carelessness towards the nature and consequences of our own thoughts, and those philosophies that we've permitted to guide the development of our educational systems, is the root cause to blame - the radicals couldn't have gotten into our schools without our assent and neglect - and until we get back on the right path, how can we not remain lost?
Effects don't precede causes - if we want to make anything great again, we need to learn to recognize the wrong paths of thinking that have led us astray, stop using their shortcuts, stop excusing those who'd deliberately lead us down them, and start making the effort to retrace our steps so that we can find our way back to the straightforward pathway. Retracing our steps is what we've been doing in this series of posts, which so far has been showing where we unwittingly began straying from the right path, and what we're going to begin looking at more closely in this and following posts, is where and how we began deliberately abandoning the true path of education, for a very different path, with very different purposes for those educated through it.
Retracing our steps
The first significant figure in education reform to come along after the Founders, as noted previously, was Horace Mann, who in the name of helping people become better Americans, had begun working to put them under a political system of state boards of education that was based upon the Prussian model (conceived of by Fichte & others with the intention of destroying Free Will and instilling obedience to the state), which was and is alien to America's founding ideals.
Why would he choose and commit to reforming our form of education, in that direction? I think a clue lies in a comment that Horace Mann wrote to a friend, where Mann noted that
"...Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron; but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former...", the ugliness of which is made clearer when echoed in a comment attributed to Vladimir Lenin a century later:
“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted”I'm less interested in comparing Mann to Lenin, than in noting the similarity in how their personal ends justified their public means, and however much their personal aspirations & character may have differed, their intentions were more alike than different, as both were seeking the power to reform the world into their own image for it, and to use other peoples' children to accomplish that. Both of them realized that while adults were more difficult to impose their will upon, those same adults could be manipulated by their own best intentions for their children, into allowing those same reformers to literally reform their own children - for the greater good... and good things do not follow from such actions, no matter how good their intentions. It should come as no surprise that figures as varied as Robespierre, Noah Webster, and Rousseau, had made essentially similar statements in varying states of civil undress, as have countless other reformers from before their time, on up to ours, and no matter how their 'best intentions' might vary, the usual means by which those intentions naturally progress, paves a rather wide highway to the same hellish destination that all such good intentions naturally lead to.
The next and most significant school reform figure to follow after Horace Mann, was John Dewey, who, convinced that his own newly concocted and adopted ideals were superior to the traditional American & Western understandings that were developed over a few millennia of history, began to actively and deliberately exit the true path - no doubt with the best of intentions - which included purposefully turning popular opinion against the traditional ideals of education and wisdom, against principled thinking (the quip that Dewey's philosophy of Pragmatism 'is opposed to Principle, on principle', is spot on), against America's founding ideals, and against the very nature of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian Civilization itself. Although Dewey's name may be the most recognizable to us today, he was far from being alone in his goals and efforts, and we'll work through some of the reasons for making that charge in the posts to follow this, but as you can see from Samuel Blumenfeld's address to Hillsdale College back in 1985, I'm far from the first or only one to make it:
"...Dewey’s joining Cattell and Thorndike at Columbia brought together the lethal trio who were literally to wipe out traditional education and kill academic excellence in America. It would not be accomplished overnight, for an army of new teachers and superintendents had to be trained and an army of old teachers and superintendents had to retire or die off..."Wiping out traditional education and killing academic excellence is no idle charge; the efforts of those two fellow reformers of Dewey's, James McKeen Cattell and Edward Thorndike, were central to disabling American's ability to read (more on that to come as well), and those new Superintendents he notes, one of whom I've mentioned here before, Elwood P. Cubberley, were instrumental in spreading that disability far and wide. Cubberley was a leading figure in redefining what those new school superintendents were expected to do, and what their school systems were expected to become, and how those schools were to be redesigned (reformed) to operate under innovations such as classes segregated by age groups, rung in and out by periodic alarms, as well as the nature of the textbooks and tests to be used within such schools.
"...To respond to those changes a political movement grew. The historian’s shorthand term for this movement is progressivism. If Horace Mann set out education’s goals, then John Dewey provided the progressive methodology. The following comes from an admirer and contemporary of Dewey’s:Those changes which they brought to education, swept across the nation, both in and out of school, not only because of how they'd altered the lessons taught in our classrooms, but what with our Founding Reformers having altered the nature and purpose of education itself, the efforts of those who'd previously led in educational matters, the community's religious and/or moralist leaders, were unwittingly led into factional battles against each other, unaware that they were both aiding and abetting a new amoral player in the contest, 'Progress', who'd soon see each of them escorted off the field altogether.The foremost interpreter, in educational terms, of the great social and industrial changes through which we have passed, and the one who has done more since 1895 to think out and state for us an educational philosophy suited to the changing conditions in our national life, is John Dewey…. Believing that the public school is the chief remedy for the ills of society, he has tried to change the work of the school so as to make it a miniature of society itself.[1]
Understanding how our schools have gotten into the dark wood we find them in today - and I don't think you can succeed in putting matters right if you don't - requires some familiarity with how we became so lost in the first place, not just so that we can recognize the names and faces of which particular false guides have been misdirecting us, but in order to prevent ourselves from being led down such paths again. That'll be the focus of the next several posts, in hopes that we'll finally 'learn from the lessons of history' and find our way out of the dark wood that we have, with the very best of intentions, wandered ourselves into... and learn how to stay out of them.
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Friday, October 14, 2022
Pragmatically shifting us off of our Foundations
When you're not sure whether or not you're lost, you check your position and visible landmarks against a map. If your educational map doesn't show an expected landmark of low graduation numbers with graduates who can't or won't read, or read only for information & amusement and rarely if ever for knowledge, wisdom, and fulfillment, then you know you're lost. We're lost. The key to our getting back on track, is retracing our steps to see where we took a wrong turn, and not stopping at the most recent wrong turn (CRT & SEL), or the one before that (Common Core), or the one before that (Outcome/Competency Based Education), but going all the way back to where we left the correct path, carefully noting how to recognize those wrong turns so that we don't make the mistake of following them again. That retracing of our steps is what we're doing in this series of posts.
We've seen that our wrong turns began innocently enough with misguided calls for education reform amongst our Founders era, and became progressively worse with each new generation of reformers, but it wasn't until that point in time where we began taking directions from the exponent of pragmatism, and 'progressive education', John Dewey, that we entered into the dark wood we find ourselves in today, having lost sight of all recognizable landmarks. If we're to find our way back, it's important to recognize that how we got here has to do with a great deal more than simply having had particular teaching methods, textbooks, and class offerings introduced into our schools - we need to learn to recognize the real foundational shifts that were made in the direction of what we believe and how we think, which were introduced into our entire society, and are actively being followed to this day, and that simply attempting to go back to before this or that change in the direction of our educational policies, will be too little to put even our schools back on track, let alone our society. We've got to zoom out and see the entire landscape, if we're to have a chance of undoing all of the missteps needed before getting back on track once again.
Mistaken Landmarks
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| The Pragmatic big three: James, Dewey, Peirce |
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| 'What Happened to Religious Education?' William Kailer Dunn |
For those naive enough to think that it's a positive development that textbooks were no longer filled with traditional religious and moralist views within a shared philosophy of Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture, you're likely laboring under a misconception that NO religious, moralist, philosophic, or cultural views were then being used to mold the content of students minds and character, and it would be difficult to be more consequentially wrong than that. No human being, no matter how savage or tenured, can live without religious, moral, and philosophic views to guide their lives - their only choice is whether those views are to be consciously held or not, and whether they will be clearly upheld and understood and reinforced in alignment with their culture, or to follow the conflicting urges and feelings of the moment down into a confused muddle of virtue-less virtue signaling. While their textbook's content was no longer being guided by views which reflected the more widely held beliefs of the public, they were swiftly being replaced by the philosophies of those who either disagreed with, dismissed, or opposed the religious and moral views commonly held by the public they 'served' ('medium-rare or well-done?'), so that the new lesson plans, textbooks, and classes, were increasingly conveying the anti-religious and amoral beliefs which were then being popularized in what we now know of as 'Progressive' politics, and together they marched arm in arm through the wider societal turmoil of the time, predominantly fed by the 'new!' philosophy of Pragmatism.
Pragmatism is a philosophy that was devised in America primarily by C. S. Peirce, William James, and then John Dewey, in the late 1800s, but although it solidified views that had been circulating in America for decades, it would, IMHO, be a mistake to call it an American Philosophy, as its core premises undermine or oppose the very ideas and culture that America was formed from and founded upon. The first to formulate it in print, and the most technically minded of the three, was Peirce (who, BTW, was a dissatisfied student of Professor Charles W. Elliott, mentioned here previously, and who'd later bring the (disastrous) idea of 'Elective Classes' to American colleges through his work as president of Harvard), followed by Peirce's classmate at Harvard, William James, who would become America's first Psychologist, and whose lectures lured in the thinking of progressive educational reformer, John Dewey, and drew him away from Hegel, and into their new philosophy of Pragmatism. Through their private and public conversations, commentary, lectures given and published, and the involvement of a number of others,
Sidebar: modern 'Economics' should not be confused with the Political Economy of Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, and Fredrick Bastiat - Political Economy investigates how an economy grows in relation to liberty and a Free Market, modern Economics is interested in how best to expertly manage a society for the benefit of the state by legislative and economic means... permitting whatever liberties might be useful in doing so, if necessary (see 'Illiberal Reformers').
such as the future 'Progressive' Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and historian George "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" Santayana, their speculations put Pragmatism prominently into the current of the academic and popular press of the day, where it fit in well with that new positivist 'science' for managing society under the advisement of experts, Economics.
Now, especially if you've become accustomed to thinking pragmatically, you might be thinking to yourself: 'Does any of this really matter?', and the answer, as you'll see shortly, is 'Oh Hell yes this matters!', but we'll need a brief review of the basics first, for that to be able to become as obvious as it should be.
Pragmatic Blindness
Pragmatism came about, because its three primary founders had become uncomfortable with the philosophies of the German Idealists of the day, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, which they had initially been big fans of (Dewey published his first philosophical paper with the St. Louis Hegelian Society). The reasons for that was only partly related to Nietzsche's criticism of the idealists, that 'they muddy the waters to make them appear deep', in that for the pragmatists, muddying still (evidently) had some appeal, but it was what 'deep' referred to, that they disliked; impenetrable reasoning wrapped up in convoluted language that couldn't easily be explained or passed over, and so wasn't suited to justifying the quick, pragmatic actions which they desired to use in reforming society with. And so, while:
In addition to these problems with the German Idealists, Peirce also saw the folly in Descartes's criteria for determining what is true as being what you '...very clearly and distinctly conceive...' to be true, so long as you yourself felt no doubts about what you yourself had cooked up in your own mind, and as the entire Cartesian "Method of Doubt" depended upon the same likelihood of self-deception, he dismissed that as well (which is one conclusion of his that I agree with). But rather than then taking a closer look at those earlier views which both Descartes and the German Idealists had led Modernity away from, Peirce used Descartes' attempt to find 'reality' through individual introspection, as cause enough to dismiss individualism, and to justify turning a blind eye to all of what had come before him by broad brushing it all away with the cartoonish charge that since the 'schoolmen'/scholastics accepted the authority of the Church to say what the Truth was, then all of what earlier metaphysics had shown to be timelessly true (such as Aristotle's 1st law of thought concerning contradictions, that nothing can both be true, and not be true, in the same context) could be dismissed as well, narrowing the boundaries of our thoughts to the immediate experiences of the moment - in what was essentially denying 'the forest for the trees'.
- ...they were fine with Kant declaring that what is real and true - 'Ding an sich' (“Thing-in-itself”) - is beyond our ability to ever really know (sorry, how do you know that (or anything else) is right, if you can't know what is? I know, shhh...), but the elaborately convoluted reasoning he justified it with, they were less fine with.
- ...they were fine with Fichte's idea of reducing 'reality' to little more than a sandbox to be shaped by a philosophers ideals and used in service to the state, but they were less fine with the extensive depths of impenetrable language that he used to justify those ideals with.
- ...they were fine with Hegel's view that traditional Philosophy's 'love of wisdom' had become unnecessary, and that his History had enabled philosophers to attain 'Absolute Knowledge' for them to reorder and perfect society with (summed up by Glenn Magee as: "...Hegel is not a philosopher. He is no lover or seeker of wisdom — he believes he has found it..."), but they were less fine with the long and winding road of quasi-mystical formulations that his Phenomenology justified them with.
- ...they were fine with Marx's belief that where heretofore "...The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it...", but they were less fine with Marx's absolute materialism - if only because it left no room for them to use their own ideas to redefine society's relationship to material reality with.
The alternative approach that Peirce devised was partly inspired by the Darwinian theory of evolution that had been taking the academic world by storm, with which he evolved a 'new conception of truth' that necessitated taking what we chance to experience in the moment, as a more material basis for "positive observation", and taking a cue from from Kant, he established that starting point as being:
"The central insight of pragmatism is that in philosophy we must start from where we find ourselves", and on that basis, the pragmatists were able to keep what they liked about what the German Idealists' had developed in their Dialectical Process - that of formally structured equivocation which used doubt to tear down existing arguments, and to fabricate new positions on the basis of their doubts (perhaps not how they'd put it, but accurate) - but where the idealists' approach had been to ignore (or deny) what was in reality true by muddying the waters to make them seem unfathomably deep, the pragmatists flipped the script by muddying the waters to make them appear to be so shallow as to be safe enough to experimentally splash about through, without concern for the metaphysical issues of reality, truth, the danger of contradictions, or for any other aspect of that 'old fashioned' Aristotelian logic which refused to permit substituting muddied waters - shallow or deep - for having a reasonable understanding of what actually lay beneath the water's surface.
In short, by accepting the conceptually blinkered observations experienced in the moment as a standpoint that's 'true enough' to start philosophizing from, they were able to sidestep both strict Idealism, and pure Materialism, while also turning a blind eye to the Platonic & Aristotelian traditions of metaphysically rooting our knowledge in what was known to be in reality timelessly true, for being 'old fashioned' concepts that were irrelevant to the needs of modernity, which was scientifically justified on Darwinian grounds. And so having pragmatically freed themselves from worrying about what actually is true, good, and wise, they were now able to focus on bringing about those changes they desired to see (in you), and upon that standpoint, William James' summarized the new Pragmatic conception of 'Truth' as being but one of many tools which needn't be fussed with overmuch, while at the same time keeping it handy for resorting to whenever it might seem useful:
"Whenever such an extra truth becomes practically relevant to one of our emergencies, it passes from cold-storage to do work in the world, and our belief in it grows active. You can say of it then either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful.’"With what is metaphysically real and true out of their way, the pragmatists proceeded to refashion Philosophy in Science's image, ignoring the fact that they were reversing cause & effect yet again - Science follows from Philosophy, not the other way around (philosophy tells you that something exists which may be measurable, science tells you the details about what it has or hasn't been able to measure), but that's only apparent when concerning yourself with what is real and true across time, which is a perspective that pragmatism's focus upon the experience of the instant, closes its eyes to.
The danger of pragmatism for the unsuspecting then, is that under the cover of the 'common sense' it purports to value, once you accept pragmatism's premises (such as believing that what actually is real and true, is irrelevant, so long as the immediate appearances 'work' for your current purposes), how are you then going to argue against its conclusions, from within that 'understanding'? Are you going to say 'But... that's not really True!'? You see the problem there? Once you accept its premises, your every thought is formed through its lens, and is moving you further away from what is real and true, and wise.
Sidebar: There's a fascinatingly un-self-aware dialog that pragmatist intellectual Susan Haack imagines taking place between herself, C.S. Peirce, and 20th Century pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty, which illustrates exactly that, in how Peirce was blind to the fact that his own ideas, would inevitably lead to the insane radicalism of Rorty's - see below
Such views soon began to be felt in education, in business, and in entertainment, enabling the views of 'Progressive Education' reformers to 'go viral'. As the radical (but no-longer radical enough) leftist Princeton Professor of philosophy, Cornel West, puts it in his 'The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism' (1989), pg. 69:
“To put it crudely, if Emerson is the American Vico, and James and Peirce our John Stuart Mill and Immanuel Kant, then Dewey is the American Hegel and Marx.” (currently available online here, it's awful, but worth being aware of)Dewey rode that popularity to become one of the most influential of 'Progressive' reformers - both in and out of school, and the consequences of that have been dire, for America, and indeed for the entire Western world, and it's from this point that I think you'll begin seeing the 'Oh Hell yes this matters!', mentioned above. Let's start taking a look.
Metaphysical Truth or Consequences
Many other theorists of the time argued for different conclusions and aspirations of course, but the premises of the Positivists, Marxists, and even the German Idealists, fell largely within the same standpoint shared by Pragmatism(that thought precedes reality, and so shapes it), but the pragmatic vision and 'practical' experimentalist approach to improving society through modernity's 'scientific method' was catchier and seemingly safer and less radical (though it establishes a launching pad for the most extreme radicalism), fueled the pragmatists rise into academic respectability. Leading universities began setting up experimental teaching labs under Dewey's guidance, first at the University of Chicago, and then to Columbia College in New York City in 1905, which were emulated in the Teachers Colleges that sprang up across the nation, to satisfy the newly legislated requirements for 'accreditation' of teachers, all of which naturally led to the traditional approaches to education being first sidelined, then discarded, under the dreaded label of 'old fashioned'.
At the time of our Founding Reformers such approaches would almost certainly have been opposed, perhaps even violently (as some efforts to establish industrial & agricultural schools were opposed in 1850s), but in less than a century later, and with decades of the good intentions which our Founding Reformers had helped to legitimize, American schools had become fertile ground for the new reformers reassurances to the public that they would be efficiently and scientifically teaching their students those 'key facts' & 'useful skills' which experts had determined would boost the economy and their kid's place in it, while also giving the immigrants among them a new understanding of what being an American meant, and so forth, and so on, rinse and repeat.
Battle for the American Mind - Gary Plan discussed at 17:50
Those aren't idle questions, as one side effect of following such a philosophy as pragmatism, is that having no principles or truths that a person needs to understand, respect, or follow, the thinking of the 'new man' is transformed into being their own authority and rightful center of the universe (to everyone else), and there are very few theories and desires that people will find themselves unable to be justify with 'I'll bet this'll work!', so long as in their mind it's for 'the greater good'. One of Pragmatism's leading thinkers of the latter 20th Century, mentioned briefly above, was Richard Rorty, who summed that understanding up as:
- What happens if the experiment fails?
- What if millions lose their way in life because of that failure?
- What if millions die because of that failure?
"...To know your desires is to know the criterion of truth..."And while that may have felt freeing for the pragmatically minded, for the rest of us, experimentally 'freeing' yourself from reality, tends to enslave you to the shallowest of appearances that are not actually true - and that doesn't end well, because, well, it 'Kant' end well. They have no Good ends in mind, only many 'ends', ends which are always shifting and changing in order to make things 'work' (this time), for the moment, and with no other concern for the next moment, except in dealing with that in the same way when it comes. As Rorty summed it up in his "Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (1979), p. 176:
“...the truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with...”The deadly reality of what blooms from such pragmatic seeds such as what Dewey sewed here, and in the USSR, and in China, was expressed much earlier in the 20th Century than Rorty, by Chairman Mao:
"Only social practice can be the criterion of truth. The standpoint of practice is the primary and basic standpoint in the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge.", which is a 'truth' Mao utilized in bringing about the deaths of 60 million people in his experimental Cultural Revolution. His understanding was reasserted later in the deaths of thousands in the Tiananmen Square massacre, in what one of his successors, Deng Xiaoping, expressed with:
"Deng Xiaoping said that "practice is the sole criterion of truth," and believed that only by experimenting with alternative forms of production and entrepreneurial activity would China find the best path for economic development."All of these sentiments have very real roots in the 'American' philosophy of Pragmatism of the 20th Century. As such, it shouldn't be surprising to discover that Pragmatism, and John Dewey, and William James in particular, were highly influential upon the thinking of those whose ideas were behind the founding of Fascism in Italy, such as Georges Sorel, Giovanni Gentile, and Benito Mussolini, as noted by the Encyclopedia Britanica:
"...Another French thinker, Georges Sorel, reformulated Jamesian pragmatism and its emphasis on action into a “useful” doctrine of social criticism. The Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini later cited Sorel and James as two of his philosophical mentors. ...", for 'political philosophers' such as those, who were looking for a means of justifying a political strongman's designs with: 'What the Leader wills is the criterion of truth!', how could Pragmatism not be their favorite 'philosophy'?!
In the 1920s Dewey had spoken quite favorably of the USSR, and the USSR had endorsed and employed his ideas in their educational system (Dewey's 'Democracy and Education' was very popular in the early USSR), and he spoke well of them in his 'Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World', and of their use of their schools:
"...The schools are, in current phrase, the “ideological arm of the Revolution.” In consequence, the activities of the schools dovetail in the most extraordinary way, both in administrative organization and in aim and spirit, into all other social agencies and interests...", while excusing their 'excesses' as being understandable in light of the 'realities' they faced.
As the blood bath that was the USSR became more difficult to deny, and in response to its subjecting Leon Trotsky to a show-trial, Dewey convened the 'Dewey Commission' to investigate the USSR's show trial (ironically, his own commission was stuffed with Trotsky supporters), and concluded that it had been rigged and couldn't be trusted to reach the 'truth' - one can imagine Stalin replying back "Hey, it worked!". Undaunted, Dewey continued to support "little 'c' communism", no doubt convinced that it'd work better next time the experiment is tried.
You might think that when such 'experiments' as those have failed as catastrophically as those have, 'Oops! Keep experimenting and make it work next time!", would seem unwise, but I suspect Dewey would have much the same reply even if he lived to learn about the tens of millions of people murdered by Stalin, Mao, and all the others who've engaged in such experiments, after all, what is there in Pragmatism, that would lead to anything but continuing to tweak the experiment?
Yes, 'this stuff' really does matter, and it does because ideas do have consequences, and we've only begun to see those consequences here. What's more, the consequences become worse, when we turn a blind eye to their causes.
Even without the carnage, it should of course go without saying that taking what you want to see, as being the criterion of truth, is not only unwise, but a thoroughly anti-scientific form of thinking. But to have such concerns, first requires your being concerned with what is true, but that is the standpoint that pragmatism was designed to free the pragmatic thinker from, and so, what had once been a commonplace lesson in grammar school, goes without ever being either said or considered in academia, or by its graduates outside of it. Wisdom involves respecting what is real and true and seeking to understand how best to act in accordance with that, but Pragmatism is not concerned with wisdom, and for the pragmatically minded, having no independent reality to worry about acting unwisely in, why bother learning what the meaning of 'is', is, or how we can know that something is right and true, when wisdom isn't the goal?
Somehow this seems appropriate here:
15 Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.In the next post we'll return to the names mentioned in the previous post of Cattell and Thorndike, from Samuel Blumenfeld's address to Hillsdale College, and their tie, together with Dewey, to America's disastrously pragmatic experiment with the usefulness of teaching illiteracy and ignorance.
16 Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?
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Saturday, October 22, 2022
Experimentally reading ourselves into illiteracy
“...They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be...”
T.S. Eliot, The Rock
While walking through the problematic nature of Pragmatism's focus on 'what works' rather than on what is true (and right to do) in the previous post, I mentioned Samuel Blumenfeld's 1985 Hillsdale College address 'Who Killed Excellence', which goes into the educational disaster that followed when a co-founder and leading exponent of Pragmatism, John Dewey, became the leading voice in education reform. Dewey didn't kill it alone of course, and even though much of this took place a century ago, we need to pay attention to who else was involved and what they did, because their 'work' is so deeply embedded into the foundations of not only our schools, but through them into all of our society today, that attempting to fix the outrageous policies we see on the surface, inevitably results in new and more vicious weeds sprouting back up in its place, as CRT & SEL soon followed our attempts to remove Common Core, and as Common Core soon followed earlier attempts to remove Outcome Based Education before that, and so on, and so on, on back to their day, a century and more ago.
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be...”
T.S. Eliot, The Rock
That issue of 'fixing it just makes matters worse' is a feature that's built into the nature of the 'school reform' cycle; to escape that cycle we need to pull the whole process out by its roots, but we can't do that, if we aren't able to identify those roots for what they are, and wherever they are. You'll soon see what I mean by that, as we take a closer look at a few of the other key names that Blumenfeld raised in his address, as having played a significant role in 'killing excellence' in education, those being Edward Thorndike, James McKeen Cattell, and Wilhelm Wundt, the last of whom was the father of experimental psychology in Leipzig Germany. Wundt was a radical materialist, a proponent of the 'scientific'/deterministic view which sees human beings as being little more than animated meat-sacks, and he held that the scientific expert's duty was to conduct experiments that prodded those meat-sacks through the trial and error of stimulus-response, so as to discover more efficient and useful behaviors which they could be made to perform, for the benefit of society.
For at least the first half of the 1800s, it'd been popular amongst American intellectuals to 'take the European tour' which centered on the new German universities (see this post), James McKeen Cattell did that, then studied for a couple years in Germany, and returned again to become not only one of Wundt's star pupils, but his first assistant.
During that time he'd taken an interest in some recent fads in learning words by memorizing their appearance rather than by reading their letters, and so he began conducting experiments in the field of reading - not with what to read, mind you, or why to read it, but with how it was that accomplished readers read - typically by recognizing the whole word, rather than sounding it out - to see if new readers could be trained to read in the same way. The fact that even experienced readers do sound out unfamiliar words, did not concern him, nor that they are able to gain an understanding of a new word's meaning through its prefixes, suffixes, etc., as well as the grammatical structures which authors use to convey their meaning through the words they use. Cattell wasn't seeking a new way of learning to read because there was any evidence that reading phonetically limited a person's ability to read and understand what they read, far from it. But if new readers could be trained to 'read' words by sight and shape without having to 'waste time' on learning to understand the phonetic basis of the letters which words are formed from, and the nature and rules and logic of reading - such a 'thoughtless' approach to reading would greatly advance Cattell's materialist ideals (which included Eugenics), and not surprisingly he found that his experiments 'proved' his expectation that students could be trained to guess a word from its shape and contextual clues alone, faster, more efficiently, and was therefore 'better' than 'old fashioned' phonics & grammar.
On the basis of those intentions and experiments, the initial 'scientific' reading method of 'Look-And-Say' (or 'Whole Word') was developed, which would quickly be proclaimed as being a more modern and efficient method for learning to read from, than that 'old fashioned' phonics (a 'flat-earth view', as a later 'expert' would put it).
As it turns out, this 'new!' scientific method for teaching students to read, wasn't actually effective in teaching students to read - which was something they knew fully well, as Blumenfeld notes:
"...What is astounding is that by 1908 Cattell and his colleagues were very well aware that the look-say method produced inaccurate readers. In fact, Huey argued in favor of inaccuracy as a virtue!...", but that didn't dissuade Cattell or his fellows from continuing to promote the 'Look-And-Say' method, and as Blumenfeld mentions, his colleague Huey, and many others, even viewed those readers difficulties as a plus! At the very least, this should give you a huge clue that the education, and system for delivering one which they were fashioning, was not pursuing - in either results or purpose - what most people still assume it is (Blumenfeld's book (available online) 'Trojan Horse in American Education' has a great deal more information on that).
Not to read but to follow
These 'educators' weren't concerned that a student might not understand and learn how to read with 'Look-And-Say', because having a student understand what they were reading was not their goal, training them to follow instructions, was - remember Fichte - what excited them was that if 'most people' could be trained into attaining a functional (il)literacy of understanding those words that were most useful for following instructions with, then that would serve their educational and societal purposes just fine (the most useful 220 words for that would become known as 'The Dolch List', which, by the way, nearly all schools still use today).
It was with those same purposes in mind that Cattell, who became head of Columbia's Dept of Psychology in 1890, and was involved in its Teachers College, had helped to recruit one of the co-founders of Pragmatism, John Dewey, away from the University of Chicago's Teachers College in 1905, to help spread their new views of education through the flagship Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City, and while how to teach students to become literate was a focus of theirs, having students actually become literate was not, as Dewey wrote in 1898:
"The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school-life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion.", which was a perspective that went well with his view of Knowledge, which was that unless it served 'social utility', it was a problematic waste of time. As he explained it:
"...The mere absorption of facts and truths is so exclusively individual an affair that it tends very naturally to pass into selfishness. There is no obvious social motive for the acquirement of mere learning, there is no clear social gain in success thereat....", meaning that they saw no social gain in having knowledgeable individuals, and our schools systems have been fashioned accordingly.
Follow the Social Science
The new, 'modern!' view of education that they were spreading did not see the schools' primary purpose as being to develop the student so as to be a benefit to their own lives; the modern, pragmatic, 'progressive' pro-regressive purpose of school, as designed, is to pragmatically develop students to take socially useful actions in society - they are in short: 'following the social science', or as Dewey put it in his "My Pedagogic Creed":
"I believe that education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and that the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction."[BTW, if you don't see the foundations of 'SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) in that, you need some new philosophical lenses)]Helping them to implement that process, was a student of Cattell's at Columbia, Edward Thorndike, who was also a former student of Wilhelm Wundt's, as well as a former star pupil of another of the co-founders of Pragmatism, William James. Reflecting those same shared views, Thorndike further developed them into 'teaching strategies' which aimed at the same new purposes of education (conforming to the group, over individual learning), an approach that's clear in what Blumenfeld quotes of him here:
"Thorndike wrote: “The best way with children may often be, in the pompous words of an animal trainer, ‘to arrange everything in connection with the trick so that the animal will be compelled by the laws of its own nature to perform it.'”, and in his 'Elementary Principles of Education (1906)' Thorndike applied that approach to dismissing those subjects traditionally taught as the 3R's,
"...Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school is too narrow and academic in character. Traditionally the elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R's, and closely related disciplines. In representative schools to-day, more than half of the time is spent on reading, writing, spelling, and other language arts and arithmetic. These subjects are taught, moreover, in a too restricted and formal fashion. Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness. ...", and together through their flagship Teachers College, they exerted their influence over the lesser Teachers Colleges across the nation (greatly aided by most states having passed progressive legislation requiring teachers to graduate from them, in order to be certified to teach), injecting their new 'progressive!' methods of reading and thinking into each new generation of teachers and through them, the new 'key facts' focus of the modern and scientific-ish method of 'progressive education' spread out across the nation (with additional help from a few millionaires like Rockefeller's "...General Education Board (GEB), in encouraging vocationalism in education..."). As Blumenfeld notes in his address, concerning Dewey, Thorndike, and Cattell:
"...By 1908 the trio had produced three books of paramount importance to the progressive movement. Thorndike published Animal Intelligence in 1898; Dewey published School and Society in 1899; and in 1908 Cattell produced, through a surrogate by the name of Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading.Surprising? Really?...!
Dewey provided the social philosophy of the movement, Thorndike the teaching theories and techniques, and Cattell the organizing energy. There was among all of them, disciples and colleagues, a missionary zeal to rebuild American education on a foundation of science, evolution, humanism, and behaviorism. But it was Dewey who identified high literacy as the culprit in traditional education, the sustaining force behind individualism. He wrote in 1898:My proposition is, that conditions—social, industrial, and intellectual—have undergone such a radical change, that the time has come for a thoroughgoing examination of the emphasis put upon linguistic work in elementary instruction….
The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school-life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to me a perversion."[emphasis mine]
If you're at all shocked to learn that your educational leaders would promote a 'scientific!' method for learning to read, that not only wasn't effective at training students to read, but was actually harmful to their doing so, it's because you still think of education's purpose as being for the benefit of the child, and you're assuming that those running our schools think so too, but they were and still are using education as a means of accomplishing what they believe is for 'the greater good', that being putting society under the power of experts. There is no reason to be surprised that the 'thinkers' of education reform would promote methods that would ruin their students ability to read, that's long been their stated goal! The fact is that we have been continually, repeatedly, 'discovering' that the 'scientific' reading method of 'Look-And-Say' (and all of its related versions) doesn't actually work, and yet over a century later it's still being used today. How do we dare claim to be surprised by this?
C'mon man! Rudolf Flesch's 'Why Johnny Can’t Read' came out in the 1950s, and 'Why Johnny Still Can’t Read' came out in the 1980s! In Chp. 3 of that, Flesch notes:
"...When I wrote my book Why Johnny Can't Read in 1955, I [29] listed eleven studies that had been done up to that time. All of them gave results in favor of phonics-first; not a single one favored look-and-say. The scientific proof was complete and overwhelming..."[emphasis mine]Even recently, just a few years ago, NPR (again) noticed that the 'scientific' method of reading had been scientifically shown to be making our student lab rats functionally illiterate:
"...And yet, "this ill-conceived contextual guessing approach to word recognition is enshrined in materials and handbooks used by teachers," wrote Louisa Moats, a prominent reading expert, in a 2017 article...."Cattell's role in devising 'Look-And-Say' should earn him the right to justly be called the father of Illiteracy and dyslexia (a title he should share with his colleague Huey, who, as Blumenfeld notes, seems to have done most of 'the work'), but it hasn't, and it says a lot about our schools and the educational reforms that they fostered, that it hasn't. What should make that even more, is that if you do a quick search today (one of the 1st links to pop up for me on typing 'kindergarten' into my browser), you'll find far more hits for current programs that are teaching your kids to learn to read with the 'whole word' 'Look-And-Say' method that was designed with illiteracy in mind (and although most pepper their programs with the word 'phonics', few do so with any seriousness).
If you want to ask yourself why that is, first ask yourself, what happens when parents and community leaders become aware of their child's lack of reading skills. They demand that schools 'do something!' about falling grades, right? There are at least two things to notice in their response to that problem:
Are you starting to see the problem here? If you aren't aware of the forgotten names and aims of those who reformed our educational system, then you cannot escape from being caught up in their webs, and even help in spreading them, because being ignorant of them blinds you to their dangers and ensures that you're own efforts to do what you think is right, will actually bring about more of what was designed to undermine and eliminate everything that you think of as being right. See your local 'Reading is Fundamental!' school library for reference.
- They aren't asking why their students are unable to read and benefit from what is right and true - what they want is for their schools "to 'make it work' so that their students will get good grades and get a good job!" Well... surprise - that response is 100% Pragmatic Progressivism - so why the surprise when we get more of what we asked for?
- As those parents and community leaders demand more effort be made to teach students how to read, the administrators reply that 'Well, if you can get us the budget (maybe pass a funding measure, larger libraries, etc.,) then we can ramp up reading programs...' and... you guessed it... the reading programs they provide to boost literacy, are the very same programs and 'strategies', that destroyed literacy in America.
What they mean by educating your children, is harming your children
Remember that in Pragmatism, 'truth' is nothing more than what works, and it can only be determined at the end of the process being worked out. What that means in practice, is that failure and 'falsehood' are not indications that the process is headed in the wrong direction, but only that it has not yet reached the expected completion. Take another look at the previous post for what mainstreaming that notion into popular thinking, has done to the world, let alone to education. Remember the 20th Century's pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty's comment mentioned in that post, that "...To know your desires is to know the criterion of truth..." and that “...the truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with...”, coupled with Dewey's own view that 'there is no clear social gain' in turning your students into knowledgeable individuals, what more could be expected, than what we have today?
For the pragmatic progressives, turning the process of reading into a burdensome effort for students that leaves them mostly illiterate, was always a feature, never a bug, in the process of developing their goal for social unity. Illiteracy is a pragmatic value in pursuing what they see as being the purpose of school, and what works is 'true', right? As long as we let them get away with making our children into less than knowledgeable individuals, they will continue using our schools to do exactly that, for our own good, of course.
The Progressives (rightly) believed that the ability to read, coupled with a thirst for quality literature, produces intelligent individuals who value living in society with their fellows in liberty, which is what Cattell, Dewey, and Thorndike, recognized as being threats to the progressive revolution they were instigating to replace our society with, often complaining that:
"The last stand of oligarchical and anti-social seclusion is perpetuation of this purely individualistic notion of intelligence."They fully understood what they were doing, and what their purpose for doing it was, and they very deliberately designed the nature of our modern educational system so that it would be mistaken for an institution that was doing what parents would assume it would - to better their children's lives, while all the while it was deliberately eradicating every aspect of the knowledge and understanding - philosophically, socially, and morally - that is required for that.
"...The whole temper of this philosophy is individualistic in the sense in which individualism is opposed to organized social action. It held to the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority. It defined the individual in terms of liberties of thought and action already possessed by him in some mysterious ready-made fashion, and which it was the sole business of the state to safeguard. Reason was also made an inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another, but not sustained and developed because of these relations. It followed that the great enemy of individual liberty was thought to be government because of its tendency to encroach upon the innate liberties of individuals. Later liberalism inherited this conception of a natural antagonism between the individual and organized society. There still lingers in the minds of some the notion that there are two different “spheres” of action and of rightful claims; that of political society and that of the individual, and that in the interest of the latter the former must be as contracted as possible...."Of course those inalienable truths which he is mocking and deriding in that passage, individualism and liberty, are the ideas they wanted (and want) to leave behind and have be forgotten, so as to eliminate them from society. They desire that, because he, they, pragmatically, have an entirely different view of what 'individualism' is and should be, rejecting the 'idea' that an individual person can be thought of as an individual person - in their view an 'individual' is only a part of the societal matrix. From Dewey's 'Individualism old and new':
"...When the patterns that form individuality of thought and desire are in line with actuating social forces, that individuality will be released for creative effort...", meaning that it's only when the 'individual' is reflecting what the group believes (got any 'project learning' activities going on in your schools?), that they can become 'one' with, or an individual aspect of, the collective, and only then do they have a useful value in taking those actions which the experts have deemed necessary and worthy. In the pragmatic view the individual can only experience 'liberty' once they've merged into the expectations and realities of their collective society, as he ends his book with,
"...To gain an integrated individuality, each of us needs to cultivate his own garden. But there is no fence about this garden: it is no sharply marked- off enclosure. Our garden is the world, in the angle at which it touches our own manner of being. By accepting the corporate and industrial world in which we live, and by thus fulfilling the precondition for interaction with it, we, who are also parts of the moving present, create ourselves as we create an unknown future.", or IOW you are only 'you' as a result of them, or 'Students of the world unite!'. That is what the reformers mean by reform. And whereas the True North that guided the founding of America was that liberty led to deeper and more meaningful societies filled with a wealth of social interactions, what Dewey meant by 'organized social action' was actions that followed & abided by the collective plans of experts such as himself. America's orientation towards True North is what Dewey was expressly opposed to, and the old promise for an education and the benefits - knowledge, virtue, wisdom - to be expected from one, ran and still runs contrary to their every pro-regressive ideal, which is why they were so deliberately replacing every aspect of the old True North understanding of Education, because those maps wouldn't lead to where they intend us all to travel to.
Lessons not yet learned, which we very much need to learn
The truth is that illiteracy is a feature in progressive education, not a bug, as people who no longer can read, or who dislike reading, or read only to retrieve what experts have deemed to be 'key facts' or useful 'informational text', are unlikely to have any regard for, or use for, those self-evident truths and inalienable rights that America was founded upon, and which our Greco-Roman/Judeo-Christian civilization values and depends upon. And that is the educational direction that the maps of Dewey & Co. have been leading us by.
However good their intentions initially were, what we are dealing with today, is the logical progression of events that were sure to follow from the initial reforms begun by our Founding Reformers. While it may not have been obvious that the changes they initiated would lead to where we are, they started the process rolling downhill when they unwittingly reformed the purpose of education, from that of benefiting the student, to benefiting society, and from gaining wisdom, to being useful. And catastrophically, they did this at the same time that Philosophy was being transformed by Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Peirce, James, and Dewey, from the love of wisdom, to being how smart people can change the world for 'the greater good'. From those two very different pursuits,
, two very different views of people, and of society, must follow. Our schools today are deliberately less educational, than informational, and the innovations that were introduced into it over the 19th century, were less concerned with any one student's education, than with the political process that their educations could be used towards. That outlook was carefully tended to over the course of the 1800s, until it exploded into the 20th Century with the creation and expansion of school districts, and the consolidating of them into ever larger systems, adding new superintendents and ever more staff to more efficiently manage them as a means of producing a 'new man' within the 'old fashioned' constitutional system which America was founded upon.
- Wisdom respects, values, and acts upon what is timelessly true.
- Pragmatism values what has the power to further the experts immediate interests - that defines something as 'being true.
Dewey's admirer and educational Field Marshal, Elwood P. Cubberley, described their vision for public schools, in his 'Public School Administration' (1916) as being:
“...Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down...”, and the leading products which rolled off of that production line, were designed to be ever more illiterate students, to help in slowly, progressively, transforming our society into something it is deliberately not; a process which was solidified by Horace Mann, and radically perfected by John Dewey, and which made it possible for, and still sustains, the radical Marxist programs (SEL, CRT, DEI) of today. That is our system of education in America. What 'school reform' do you suppose can 'fix' that problem when most of your neighbors are sending their kids to school to study hard and get a good job? If you think that School Choice will, you need to re-read the two-step scenario I sketched out above. Choosing your own poison, doesn't make it any less poisonous.
What you can do about this today, is to get involved in your schools and school boards to slow down the harm that they are doing through your political representation and tax dollars, but first and foremost, get your kids out of the establishment minded schools, and just as importantly, make sure that the alternative form of education you choose for them is truly educational.
Our educational system has been reformed to inject a stimulus of illiteracy into our society (not jsut the inability to read, but the lack of interest in doing so), and the only logical response (outcome) to be expected from that, is ignorance. It seems to me that you have to fight pretty hard to avoid coming to the conclusion that the reason for doing so, is that an ignorant populace is especially useful to those who attain power over them, which is what we'll begin looking at next.
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Monday, October 31, 2022
The Power of Ignorance: 'Back to Basics' Reform
As the reform pattern of 'reform, endorse, excuse and reform again' was busily churning out one new 'plan' after another over the course of the 19th Century and into the 20th - from the Boston Public School Plan, on up to the St. Louis plan, the Cincinatti plan, etc., - individual complaints about their graduates' level of knowledge and competence, would periodically garner an uncomfortable amount of negative public attention. When that happened a little something extra was needed to reassure the public that their schools would 'get back to basics!', and justify doubling down with still larger reform efforts. During one of those peak periods of complaints, the NEA approached Harvard's longest serving president in 1892, the education reformer Charles W. Eliot, to head up a task force of scholars for their recommendations on how best to go about 'fixing secondary education'.
Sidebar: If that 'old and outmoded' thing seems to make some sense to you, keep these points in mind:
1) our Founders Era was closer in time by several decades to the Progressive Era, than the Progressive Era is to us today,
2) the Hi-Tech of the pre-manned-flight age (the Wright Brothers 1st flight was in 1903, Dewey & Co began making this idiotic 'argument' in the 1890s) being the telegraph & mechanical processes of the Industrial Age, would have been far less mysterious to any of our Founders, than the internet, and digital Tech, and commercial space flight of our day would be to someone like Dewey
3) So given that these 'progressive' ideas are older and more outmoded to us, than the Founders were to them, how do you justify treating such 'old and outmoded' ideas as Dewey's, as having any credibility today?
Hmmm?
It's an argument without an argument, and you should distance yourself from it
The 'Committee of Ten', as it came to be called, dutifully convened, and deliberated, and studied, sent many letters back and forth over the need for more centralizing of power (some of that captured here), as well as trivializing traditional literature into factually identifiable trivia which he promised would strengthen 'traditional scholarship', while also raising the profile of the new methods (elective classes, textbooks, testing, etc.), which, echoing the rhetoric of Pro-Regressives such as Teddy Roosevelt & Woodrow Wilson, was just the sort of thing that helped folks to feel very modern in comparison to our bewigged Founding Fathers of 'a century ago!'. The report they returned, was full of what once would've been considered an insult to any self-respecting school teacher, that "...The principal end of all education is training....". He added several other such efficient observations, as:
1) our Founders Era was closer in time by several decades to the Progressive Era, than the Progressive Era is to us today,
2) the Hi-Tech of the pre-manned-flight age (the Wright Brothers 1st flight was in 1903, Dewey & Co began making this idiotic 'argument' in the 1890s) being the telegraph & mechanical processes of the Industrial Age, would have been far less mysterious to any of our Founders, than the internet, and digital Tech, and commercial space flight of our day would be to someone like Dewey
3) So given that these 'progressive' ideas are older and more outmoded to us, than the Founders were to them, how do you justify treating such 'old and outmoded' ideas as Dewey's, as having any credibility today?
Hmmm?
It's an argument without an argument, and you should distance yourself from it
"...As studies in language and in the natural sciences are best adapted to cultivate the habits of observation; as mathematics are the traditional training of the reasoning faculties; so history and its allied branches are better adapted than any other studies to promote the invaluable mental power which we call judgment...", and so on. As comparatively good as that passage might sound to us today, a closer look reveals how far the shift away from True North had already gone - notice that the statement doesn't mention anything about truth or understanding; instead, it aligns more with the belief that 'knowledge is power', which was Thomas 'life is nasty, brutish and short' Hobbes' summary of the views of his master, Sir Francis Bacon. Interestingly, Elliott was the one who first promoted the pre-cursor of a 'Great Books Program', with his famous 'five foot shelf of books', but his purpose in both was not to promote or revive the traditional understanding that 'knowledge serves understanding and deepens virtue and wisdom', but that 'knowledge is power' in everything from being useful cocktail party banter, to technical knowhow, to acquiring rhetorically 'useful things to know', which came to be seen as the uses of 'The Classics', views which would later be easily made to serve postmodern & critical studies attacks upon them as 'meaningless knowledge' - not because Elliott would have agreed with the post-modernists, but because the absence of truth & virtue that he promoted, reinforced the vacuum that would become most useful to them.
As far as the NEA was concerned at that point though (Samuel Blumenfeld's book 'NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education' is an eye-opener (available online here)), what the Committee of Ten had proposed was old news which they'd already normalized, and what they wanted was not more of the same 'our new methods help promote traditional scholarship', but something much more 'New! Progressive!'. And so, as with our periodic 'rediscovery' that Phonics works better than 'look-and-say' which prompts new studies that divert public attention and are soon forgotten, the NEA first promoted the Elliot Commission's recommendations, then let them fade from memory with no action taken. In just a few years though, in that fateful year of 1913, they organized yet another new effort in the 'Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education', a.k.a. The Gang of Twenty-seven. The new commission no longer felt the need to bother too much with the stodgy 'traditional scholarship' of scholars like Charles W. Eliot, who still pretended to value education in the old sense, and instead loaded itself up with mostly educational bureaucrats who were after 'progress!', at all costs. Emphasizing their break with the past, as The Gang of Twenty-seven looked upon 'The Committee of Ten', and, in Richard Mitchell's words in The Graves of Academe, they had:
"... found that proposal an elitist's dream. They concluded, in other words, that precious few schoolchildren were capable of the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of the mind in the cause of judgment. That, of course, turned out to be the most momentous self-fulfilling prophecy of our century. It is also a splendid example of the muddled thought out of which established educational practice derives its theories. The proposals of the Eliot report are deemed elitist because they presume that most schoolchildren are generally capable of the mastery of subject matter and intellectual skill; the proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education, on the other hand, are ``democratic'' in presuming that most schoolchildren are not capable of such things and should stick to homemaking and the manual arts...." [BTW, if you noticed how that last line sounds a lot like Equity in action, good for you, 2 points to Hufflepuff], and so rather than fussing on about 'rigorous training of the mind in college', their final report, issued in 1918 as 'Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education', Mitchell observed:
"... It rejected the elitist and undemocratic education of the dark past and provided in its place ``preparation for effective living...", where 'effective living' meant keeping your mind free of 'elitist' notions of 'inalienable truths', 'individual rights', and those stuffy 'old & outmoded' works of literature that might put such notions in your head, so that 'we' could focus instead on more useful skills to 'get a good job!', and helped to usher in ever more 'useful classes' to further edge out those paths to an actual education which still remained (such as Latin and Logic which were still common classes at the opening of the 20th Century), while expanding the power of those who know best, to keep those who don't, comfortably ignorant. Doing so also ushered in important new "...objectives of education...", which began with... Health.
When they say the silent part out loud - listen
Funny how the 'progressives' always had an inkling that 'health' would help in building a royal road to power. Elwood P. Cubberley, again, was a leader in proposing schools to wield 'Health' with official authority in the community,
"...The work of health supervision in our schools is as yet, generally speaking, only in its beginnings, but that the service will be very materially extended in the future seems practically certain. The argument that it invades the rights of the home is on a par with the arguments against compulsory school attendance and prescribed courses of study. A generation ago compulsory school attendance was regarded as a meddlesome interference with the rights of parents to do with their children as they saw fit, and a million illiterate adults among us today stand as a witness to the value of such a theory...", which prepared the foundational assumptions that would prepare the way for SEL (Social and Emotional Learning) being written into federal law in the 1990s.
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| Today's 'norms', are old 'Progressive' reforms |
“Each year the child is coming to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent.”That is the education reformer's primary goal, and we wouldn't be so surprised by it today if we'd pay closer attention to what reformers - from Rousseau, to Marx, to Dewey, to today's gender bending mutilators - have been reforming us towards along, as when Horace Mann said as much sixty some years earlier in 1848, in his 'Lectures on education', that:
"...We, then, who are engaged in the sacred cause of education, are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause;..."Neither should we be surprised to learn that additional health based powers are beginning to be realized through our schools by way of 'Trauma-Informed SEL'. As described by leading SEL survey data-miner Panorama Ed, and as implemented in Washington State K-12 (I highly recommend listening to New Discourses Bullets: 'Systemic Trauma and Harm'), it began with promoting the idea that 'microaggressions' can be considered a form of violence, perhaps even warranting educators to facilitate government intervention, or, saying the quiet part out loud: Helping the child to come to belong more to the State and less and less to the parent. .
The reformers of education have always fervently believed that their 'good intentions' are just the ends they need to justify whatever means they deem as being necessary 'for the greater good' as they see it. And though they occasionally do say the silent part out loud, there's another aspect of their purposes that we've been deafened to, and that needs to be stated as loudly as possible today, that these reformers who delight in the child coming to belong more and more to the state, are people who increasingly have no fondness or desire for anyone reasoning well in a state of liberty, preferring instead to instill in their students a zeal for 'organized social action' under the auspices of the state - same goal, different path.
“[The] erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.”
— H.L. MENCKEN, The American Mercury, 1924
The wise person who desires the liberty of living a good life in society with others, is who traditional education's methods of learning grammar and studying literature through identifying plot, theme, etc., were designed to benefit. But, as seen in the previous post, valuing liberty and the individual choices that lead to a life worth living, are what Dewey & Co. saw, and his successors today still see, as being 'anti-social', and so they used our educational systems to progressively eliminate the thinking and behavior that concerned itself with liberty and individual rights, by developing an Americanized form of Fichte's scientific method for preventing 'too much thinking'.
The purpose of the educational system reforms which began to be developed here in the early 1800s, was (and is) to prevent, or at least reduce, occasions of 'wrong think' (AKA: consideration of timeless truths) in students' lives in and after graduating from school. Doing so required 'installing' the 'answer that killed the question' into student's thinking through uninteresting materials and tests which students would find answers to that were satisfying enough that they wouldn't feel the need to give such matters further consideration for themselves. To do that required reversing what had been our school's primary task of introducing students to that literature which led them past easy answers and into questioning their way out of those caves of ignorance that are otherwise too easily imposed upon us, and instead it became priority #1 of the schools to gradually, progressively, sideline all vestiges of Homer, The Bible, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Cicero, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, etc., as being 'elitist', boring, and useless to 'the greater good', while quietly removing them from the curriculum and the school library (what remains in yours?), while simultaneously promoting counter-literate schemes such as the 'Look-And-Say' method of reading, which lamed their students' ability to read such literature in a thoughtful manner on their own (detailed in the previous post).
Accordingly, the curriculums that schools replaced the jewels of Western Civilization with, were an uninteresting assemblage of issues, key facts, names and dates, presented in the mediocre and stultifying language of textbooks written by committees of experts, whose pre-chewed answers and 'right responses' are what are installed by training students to memorize them for answers to tests, rather than bothering to come to their own conclusions about them. Answers and attitudes that are reinforced through successive quizzes, tests, and standardized testing ranging from the local varieties, to the state, and national level, with ACTs & SATs of today. Elwood P. Cubberley, again, was one of the founders and earliest promotors of national Standardized Testing, and I assure you, he did so with the conviction that it would serve his and the State's purposes for your child coming to belong more to the state, than to their parents.
The reformers were and are very much aware that the 'Straight A!' students which their educational system seeks to produce are not what our 'anti-social' Founders would've regarded as being educated, neither would Albert Jay Knock's visiting Italian nobleman (who'd asked why he'd met no educated Americans, who were educated after 1895). Of those most successful in our schools today, it is becoming expected that the
"... “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries . . . they typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”...", as the grades and test scores of 'Straight A!' students, SAT/ACT stars, and Valedictorians, incline them towards 'organized social-action' by being the most malleable and conformist to those 'key facts' required for benefitting 'the greater good'. Our 'best and brightest' are smoothly enter into the approved ranks of power and influence, unlikely to rise too high within them, while efficiently continuing to promote the organized social actions of those who know best.
In just three generational steps away from our Founding Reformers in Webster & Dr. Rush, their good intentions of 'Go to school, get good grades to get a good job!', had enabled first Horace Mann, then Dr. Elliot, then John Dewey & Cubberley, to implement enough 'practical' changes that our schools key lessons teach us to forego wisdom and truth for apparent utility, which led to the mistaking of information for understanding, data for principles, quantity for quality, and to mistake the recalling of other people's answers, as being the same as understanding the questions which they were answers to, so as to persist whatever seemed most useful upon society for 'the greater good'.
Those three generations of reformers took us from being the people that Jefferson presumed to be so familiar with Aristotle, Cicero, and other classics that the Declaration of Independence needed only to evoke the '...harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in the elementary books of public right...' for them to recognize what the gathering threat that tyranny poses to the liberty they valued, into being a people for whom it had become common to speak of 'Educators' as being the active hand of 'democratic government' in every home and association in your community (see Dewey's 'Democracy and Education' which was adored in the early USSR), and in that context, the knowledge, content, and individuality which the original Founding Reformers had intended their reforms to strengthen, were summarily dismissed by the new reformers, using the very means - education - that our Founders had trusted their preservation to. Dewey expressed that sentiment with:
"...Each generation is inclined to educate its young so as to get along in the present world instead of with a view to the proper end of education: the promotion of the best possible realization of humanity as humanity. Parents educate their children so that they may get on; princes educate their subjects as instruments of their own purposes..."The new reformers - and whether they're Progressive, Socialist, Marxist, Crony-Capitalists of the Left and Right, are distinctions without a meaningful difference here, which is why I use Pro-Regressive for short - saw 'We The People' as creatures in need of their expertise, and used lowly parents & powerful princes desire for their kids to 'succeed' and be useful, as a means for experts such as themselves to shape 'We The People's lives to fit within their vision for them. Reason and history both show that only inhumanity can follow from that, but that's something which pragmatic materialists who deride principles and truth, are unlikely and unwilling to grasp.
Similar ideals and interests drove what Woodrow Wilson was promoting when still president of Princeton University in 1909, when he told the Federation of High School Teachers, that critical to the purpose of teaching:
"...We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks..."My Troll and I both agree that that speech should be read carefully, but where we disagree, is in taking his words at face value. He'd like you to go no further than the seemingly sensible, even conservative sounding lines, whereas I think you should refuse to sever those phrases from their roots in his wider views and writings, and if you pay attention to how the oft repeated theme of 'we want' pervades this speech and his wider writings, you'll begin to notice what it is that those who view themselves as being 'those who know best', desired (for you, who don't know enough). They have always intended to decide who to staff the nation with, because, as Wilson repeatedly points out in his speeches and books, the 'people' cannot be trusted to decide what to do with their own lives (and people thinking of their 'own lives', is something that he, and Dewey, and the rest, viewed as being 'anti-social' by nature), but lucky for us he knew that they were just the right people to 'help' determine who of us should go where, do what, and how and when they might permit our doing it, 'for the greater good' they had in mind for us.
In classic reformer manner, the 'innovative' classes of 'Home Economics', 'Shop Class', 'Automotive', which they'd added into the course schedules in the early 1900s, in order to force out still more of the 'useless' classes in literature, history, and Latin, from the schools' schedules, until decades later those same classes, which were at least of some practical reality based utility in themselves, have themselves been forced from the course schedules in favor of more activist oriented classes on 'life skills', or STEM offerings to raise test scores, which has not only contributed to the current crop of illiterate social justice warriors that we're contending with today, but to a backlash of calls for 'back to basics!' with Home Ec. and Shop Classes, which is but the rinse & repeat of the school reform cycle.
Neither should it be surprising that our Founding Reformer's paths of good intentions have led to such a very different destination than they'd intended, for knowingly or not they attempted to reverse cause & effect, and so introduced the pursuit of power where the love of wisdom should have been. The logical progression of effects to those causes led directly to the point where someone like James E. Russell (another weasel extraordinaire), when as head of Columbia University Teachers College, used his 1905 address, "The Trend in American Education", to tout the European, and particularly the Prussian and German methods of public education, as he fretted about what might result in our 'Social Democracy' from 'the wrong' sort of students being 'led out' (educare, educate, 'to lead out') of the cave (where he thought they belonged), and into the ability to know their own minds and make their own choices (*gasp* - what if they 'choose wrong!?') and interfere with the ordered society which he, they, were using education to create amongst us. Pay attention:
"...How can a nation endure that deliberately seeks to rouse ambitions and aspirations in the oncoming generations which in the nature of events cannot possibly be fulfilled? If the chief object of government be to promote civil order and social stability, how can we justify our practice in schooling the masses in precisely the same manner as we do those who are to be our leaders?..."Again, as with Wilson's speech, if you read past the sensible sounding distractions and pay attention to what the sum of it must mean in practice, you'll find that they - Wilson, Russell, Dewey, along with the many more once famous names & plans of Lester Ward, Cubberley, and on back to Fichte before them - although they're mostly forgotten now, it is still their ideas that are aiding their successors today in determining who should be permitted to have hopes & dreams, and what they should and should not be. The sum of those 'fogotten ideas' are actively orienting us towards a very different star than the 'True North' of what is right and true which America was founded upon and through, orienting us away from liberty, and towards that sulphureous destination of good intentions which is incompatible with the ideals that American society, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, depend upon, and cannot continue for long without.
Knowledge, Power, and Corruption
"...Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely..."Where that phrase comes from, is a letter that the historian Lord Acton wrote to his friend Bishop Mandell Creighton, who was the editor of the English Historical Review, and its warning against the corrupting nature of power wasn't confined to only those who'd amassed political power. The reason for the letter that Acton wrote, was to criticize how Creighton had treated the abuses & crimes of popes & kings less harshly than those of other men, and Acton was adamantly opposed to his doing so. The passage the phrase comes from, is:
"...Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it..."While Acton explicitly referred to the corruption of popes and kings through using the power & influence of their office for improper ends, he was also implicitly warning the Bishop against using the power & influence of his own office as editor, to affect the judgement of the readers of the English Historical Review - not so much because its readers might be getting historic facts wrong, but because what Creighton found pleasing to impart to his readers was historically irresponsible (as Knowledge, with some of its truth deliberately removed, always is) and could negatively influence their present and future thoughts and actions by presenting that misrepresentation as a valid lesson of history, and that lesson of history is one that is still very applicable to our day.
There are plenty of political figures today who deserve to be condemned for abusing their power and influence, but we should be at least as much if not more concerned with how our mostly anonymous academic men with pens are abusing their power and influence by deliberately omitting or altering the content and context of our school's textbooks & lessons, as they've done in everything from the 1619 Project, to the malicious stocking of school libraries bookshelves, to the mind altering lessons of social & emotional 'competencies' and math that doesn't add up, in order to ideologically influence how students will think and behave when living their lives out in the real world.
These 'education professionals' who wield a power of influence that's no longer limited by either a regard for what is true, or the preferences of the community they supposedly represent, have cast off western civilization's history & literature so as to fill our schools' textbooks & lessons with only those 'key facts' that they've deemed to be worthy of being known, while making degrees and diplomas subject to testing that shows how well their narrative has been ingested, in a process that corrupts not only themselves (absolutely), but also their hapless students, and our society at large. Doubtless it's the most clever and attentive of our students that are most at risk of becoming corrupted in how they go about their thinking - how many of those who listened to their parent's advice to 'study hard in school to get a good job!', are the ones today who condemn those speaking out about our schools' hostility to freedom of speech and hyper-focus on race & sex, as being the actions of violent and terroristic extremists, while excusing and even promoting the physical violence of their likeminded fellows when rioting in the streets, as being a protected form of 'speech' which everyone else must be forced to accept and endure?
We need to look past the headline making distractions of lies and crudities that are present in our schools and their libraries, and give greater consideration to why those lies and crudities are there - and what isn't there because they are. Ignorance of Western Civilizations' means of thinking upon and being guided by timeless truths, is the logical and intended outcome of an 'education' that does not educate - the issue is less about what they are being exposed to, than what they are not, and why.
What purpose does education serve? Unless we correct our answer to that 'Why', nothing will meaningfully change, because it cannot. Unfortunately, the relationship between the 'what', the 'how', and the 'why', is usually lost on us today, Left & Right, as can be seen in most peoples' enthusiastic 'thumbs up👍!' to a phrase often attributed to John Dewey (his actually went further & was much worse), or Margaret Mead, but regardless of who first said it, it's made it into common wizdumb:
'Schools should teach children not what to think but how to think!', not noticing that what a student is taught, is a means to teaching the student how to think - and both 'what' and 'how' are chosen to serve a purpose, and unless the correct 'why' is also supplied, we'll only fool ourselves into thinking that the problems of our educational system have actually been 'fixed', and as we congratulate ourselves and return our attention to other matters, that guiding purpose will quickly reassert itself and new 'what's and 'how's will begin being taught in service to it, as it has, over and over and over again, over the course of over two hundred years of 'education reform!'. You might think the folly of that would have been demonstrated to us by now, but that is the power of ignorance - not simply error, but the absence of understanding - and that power too, corrupts absolutely.
No matter how pragmatically sensible that "...teach not what to think but how to think..." might appear ("...Memorization of facts is pointless in a world where everyone carries around the entire knowledge base of the human species on their person..."), the activist pro-regressive agenda is installed into students' minds by making a muddle of how they think; crude and pornographic materials are made available to underage kids in order to affect how they think; and the fewer accurate facts and clear principles that they are given to think with, the more easily manipulated by unsound and emotionally targeted propaganda, they will become - our schools are focusing on how to think, and that's a big part of the problem!
The 'why' that's structured behind that 'how', is what we'll begin taking a closer look at in the next post.
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