Dennis Clayson | Posted: Sunday, July 15, 2007 12:00 am
The American education system is a mess. Actually, it is a disaster.
There are numerous reasons. First of all, education in the U.S. is a state supported monopoly, a situation guaranteed to produce the least output from a maximum input. Parents are no help. Most don't care. They look to schools for baby-sitting services. Politicians and activists have their own agendas, which advance themselves rather than children.
But the major problem has gone largely unrecognized. Ideas have power.
The ideas that drive much of America's education system are not known to many, including lower-level bureaucrats who keep the nuts and bolts of the system oiled.
There is one person who is said to be the "preeminent voice in American educational philosophy." So here is a little quiz. It is multiple-choice so even graduates of an American school can take a shot at it.
Who is the "preeminent voice" of much of American education?
a) Stalin
b) Ben Franklin
c) Mao
d) Jefferson
To help you in your selection, I will use a number of statements made by this person extracted from a book by Henry Edmondson.
The person is famous for advocating liberalism and socialism. For instance, he argued for greater government involvement in society because equality depends upon government intervention. He was passionately opposed to capitalism, and argued against the unregulated possession of private property.
He maintained that all morality is social. A person is moral if their social actions and thoughts are appropriate, irrespective of private behavior.
Character formation in the schools should be discouraged because it victimizes the student by imposing the authority of a teacher, or a textbook on a helpless pupil.
"Belief in the supernatural or any other search for transcendence is futile." This "preeminent voice" of American education did not like religion, and was especially opposed to it being allowed in the schools.
He was particularly hostile towards Christianity. He believed that if a child holds to religion, tradition, or any other inherited values, she is not thinking "intelligently."
He believed that the "impulses" as well as the interests of children should be what molds education. Customary notions of discipline and preconceived courses of study should be removed in favor of the interests of the children.
Adults generally should not "impose" upon students their notion of what is valuable, such as the "classics of literature, painting, music." The teacher should produce an "environment" for learning rather than present a particular subject matter.
Of course, there is a major exception to all this. When it comes to having the correct political thought, then all else becomes mostly irrelevant. Children's interests should be channeled into politically and socially correct attitudes and activities. Education, if nothing else, must be a predominantly social experience.
This may take a lot of time. We must realize that schools may not have enough time to teach students to read, let alone do math, while also training them to change the world. Reading then could be de-emphasized because the highly motivated social reformers produced by the schools will eventually be motivated to read in order to "investigate those things relevant to their activity."
Students with superior potential should not be advanced without bringing along the less capable students, because this would create inequality.
Every person who has ever had a run-in with the education system will recognize the last idea; only educators can evaluate educators.
What if this system fails? No problem. Failure only signals the need for more progressive experimentation. Besides, who is to say that it is failing?
Do the ideas listed above help us to understand why American students are ranked 12th to 19th in standardized scores, compared to other industrialized nations? Does it help to explain why most high school graduates can't name 19 industrialized nations?
A recent survey found that a majority of students from America's top colleges could not pass a multiple choice American history exam. There was no difference between the scores of history majors and other students. A federal survey found that the majority of college graduates can't read with enough comprehension to follow the argument in the editorial next to this article.
So who was this "preeminent voice in American educational philosophy?"
Did you pick Mao? It was a trick question; the correct answer is John Dewey. If you never heard of him, you do not understand why American education has fallen so low.
Ideas do have power.