There’s a lot of fine people working in the school reform movement — I just wish they understood and fought in the information war. Here’s Bruce Deitrick Price writing at American Thinker — I’ve highlighted the key sentence:
Perhaps you are an eternal optimist, hoping the Education Establishment will reform itself. I have bad news: the top people in education like what they’re doing just fine. John Dewey and his successors were/are socialists first, educators second. Everything you see in K-12 education is not an aberration, but a fulfillment of Dewey’s “progressive” dream first formulated a century ago.
John Dewey wrote thousands of pages explaining his ideological vision. But if you want a single comment that captures all the counterintuitive goofiness in a few words, listen to G. Stanley Hall. He was Dewey’s mentor and himself one of the early titans of American education. Professor Hall said: “Reading should no longer be a fetish. Little attention should be paid to reading.”
It’s a straight line from that inanity to the latest stats indicating that less than one third of fourth-graders and eighth-graders ever reach proficiency in reading.
And the point is, Professor Hall would be proud of our dumbed down K-12 schools. So please don’t expect the Education Establishment to fix things. It’s up to you.
Here’s the three-point blueprint:
First, understand that you are in a war, and you need to know the strategic situation. The Education Establishment has a largely hidden ideological agenda intended to transform every aspect of the school. Their first concern is not academics or learning, no matter what they say. The real emphasis is on creating cooperative children. In this way, children become accustomed to being on the same level, as socialism requires. Additionally, cooperative children are docile, controllable children. Let’s be realistic: our ideologues will not be able to create their brave new world if students learn to think for themselves. For concerned citizens, the first order of business is resisting this political agenda whenever possible.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: www.mercatornet.com.
