Editor’s note about this article titled “K–12: Red Ed”: I first discovered Bruce Deitrick Price’s articles on education about half a dozen years ago and have linked to many since, as well as reviewed his excellent book Saving K-12: A Citizens Guide to Improving Public Education. Buy the book at Amazon by following this link, and read my 2-part review starting here.
Honestly, I admire his stamina. The school reform movement in America is one of the biggest failures in recent decades. They’ve had a slam-dunk case to make and instead not only continue to fail, but unlike Bruce Deitrick Price, they pull their punches and continue to not understand the information war. Yet Price stays in the fight anyway.
Here is his latest:
If you want to understand the mystery of why we spend so many billions of dollars and get crummy schools, here are some options. You can read a hundred books. You can spend many years earning a Ph.D. in history. You can try to bribe the director of the CIA — or consult a psychic. Alas, you probably won’t find the truth.
I suggest you spring for the lazy-man, two-word explanation: Red Ed.
Arguably, that’s what we’ve got.
The almost comical thing about the U.S. is that most people persist in believing that the top educators are harmless, nice, pleasant, typical Americans. But the field of education has been a whirlpool or cesspool of socialist-communist-collectivist thinking for more than 120 years. Throughout that time, these subversives operated covertly but belligerently. They were the tireless termites in our basement.
At first, John Dewey wanted to call himself what he was, a socialist, but he realized that the public wasn’t ready for the S-word. He urged the Socialist Party of America to change its name. Dewey ended up calling himself a Progressive, a Liberal, or a Democrat. Point is, explicating American history is difficult because the Left was always hiding and lying.
Suffice it to say that the far Left was a growing force in America by the late 1890s, years before the Communist Revolution. These “change agents” quietly wormed their way into foundations, newspapers, universities, everything not well defended. The best example of big, fat. and undefended was the public school system.
Read more: American Thinker
