Posted on 02/11/2014 2:57:38 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
[SUMMARY: Forget all the excuses. Little that happens in education is accidental.]---------Perhaps the most repeated cliché in American education is this: “They mean well. They just can’t get their act together.”
Teachers, parents, politicians, and editorial writers repeat this cliche when they want to forgive the Education Establishment for creating so many destructive policies and dumbed-down schools.
It’s a sweet and hopeful sentiment. Unfortunately, it’s not true.
They don’t mean well.
And they have got their act entirely together. That’s precisely our problem.
A hundred years ago John Dewey and his followers settled on this formula: they would take over the schools of education; they would brainwash future teachers to care more about social engineering than traditional education; and those teachers would go forth into public schools everywhere to brainwash kids and their parents into being comfortable with less education. That, clearly, is having your act together. We see malice aforethought, and a steely dedication to a subversive agenda.
It’s hard for most people to deal with these assertions. The ordinary parent does not want to believe evil about local schools; so there is a built-in disconnect, a willing suspension of distrust. It’s much the same reluctance we would have about local priests, politicians and community leaders. We don’t want to believe bad things about the people who run our lives. It’s painful. Also, we may have helped put those people into positions of power; now we have to confront the fact that we didn’t do our homework and we voted for dangerous extremists. That’s exactly what happened.
If people want to save the schools, they have to become more cynical and astute. In practice that means acknowledging that our Education Establishment has had its act together for a long time.
All the bad policies adopted by our elite educators are premeditated acts. All their bad results are just what they were hoping for.
Hard to confront, isn’t it?
When Charlotte Iserbyt wrote that our public schools were engaged in “the deliberate dumbing down of America,” she didn’t mean "accidental" dumbing down, she meant deliberate. That is, our Education Establishment was conspiring, plotting, scheming, planning, maneuvering, any word you want. These top-level educators are all socialists much like Obama and, no matter what they say to us, their real goal is always the “fundamental transformation” of the country.
When Robin Eubanks titled her excellent new book “Credentialed To Destroy,” she didn’t mean "nurture and sustain." She meant destroy. That’s the goal.
So when bad ideas get bad results, it’s not appropriate to act surprised. The bad results are the whole point. The Education Establishment doesn’t mean well at all; and they got their act together so they could act on their socialist dreams.
The whole reason they came up with Look-say (a.k.a. sight-words is to make sure children wouldn’t learn to read or think at a high level. The reason they came up with New Math (anybody who takes a few minutes to study New Math can see this) was to make sure that most children would probably never master basic arithmetic. The same goal was pursued more subtly in Reform Math.
The whole reason they came up with Constructivism was to take the emphasis away from teaching facts. Instead, they would pretend that kids would discover facts for themselves. This approach virtually guaranteed that at the end of each year there would be a net decline in the amount of information learned. That was the goal. That’s the deliberate dumbing down that Iserbyt wrote about.
Our Education Establishment was secretive and sly, but they never thought small. First, they massively diluted the content part of education. Second, they sabotaged the instructional methods used so everything that kids learned would be garbled. Third, they undermined the character of the students, making them guess, letting them be late, telling them they were wonderful even if they didn’t bother to study or do their homework.
There was almost no detail left out, so completely did these people get their act together, so completely did they mean to start a war against their fellow citizens.
As Robin Eubanks argues in “Credentialed To Destroy”: “The point of Radical Ed Reform anywhere in the world has always been to use education to gain politically unpopular broader transformations and avoid detection until it is too late. By then the transformation would be complete at the level of the consciousness of the individual citizens...Or at least a voting majority of them. It is to be painless supposedly. No one need feel a thing. And if that scenario seems like a bad movie and you want to speed through or click the channels? We wish. This is precisely what happened and it is still going on.”
Fair warning: Eubanks argues that Common Core is simply another reiteration of all the bad ideas the Education Establishment has tried to perpetrate in previous decades.
hear, hear... it is not public school... it stopped being that long ago... it is government school...
And here I thought I was negative about our Educational system (or Government Indoctrination camps). This guy makes me look like a Pollyanna. And he is correct.
ping...
DELIBERATE dumbing down....yep——since john Dewey who implemented the Wundtian psychology——the Pavlovian conditioning.
I am not kidding. Any one who has read anything I have ever typed on FR has known this......this is REALLY serious.
This is about DELIBERATELY destroying the minds of millions of our children with parents too busy (taxes) to even read the textbooks, who allow their vulnerable children (entrusted to them by God) to be “shaped” by useful trained idiots/progressives/Godless and to be programmed into “group think” (emotion over Reason).
It is insidious and SO EVIL. The only way to save the Republic is to SAVE the MINDS of the FUTURE.
This is exactly correct and that is one of the main reasons that the Republicans lose elections. It is the culture stupid
I knew the educational system was becoming unglued decades ago when they said memorization was unimportant. Actually, memorization of basic math, English, history, and other subjects is probably the single most important skill you can teach any elementary student. Teaching kids self-esteem or how to think “critically” is almost worthless.
It’s important for students who attend schools that offer a classical education — public, private, and religious.
They even gave us 80s High School kids a term to mock: ‘rote memorization’.
Where is the MSM on this?
Elite MSM types are cut from the same cloth as elite liberal politicians.
Toxic cultures (like ours) destroy the children. Ours is actually MUCH worse than the vulgar Weimar Republic, was with pornography inside the homes—and Germany was bad.
Toxic cultures are hard to protect children in, and that innocence/awe and mystery is essential for emotionally healthy children who become leaders with character and Courage. They need a childhood like Opie (hopefully, without a mother dying).
Kids do not have a chance unless people throw out TV and raise their children like a Phil Robertson. Teach children how to survive. Don’t baby them. Make them work and do chores which help the family. Make them contribute to the family again for true self esteem. Spend time interacting with them so they understand Reality and have Common Sense.
Homeschool with like minded families. With the internet it can be really cheap compared to private schools. Lots of private schools are not worth the money either, unless they have true Classical Education, which includes the Bible.
It is deliberate-—the MSM is part of the Satanic/Marxist agenda to destroy America.
Memorization is the needed exercise for the brain.
All geniuses, like Ben Carson, had memorized Bible passages as young children.
I have worked with children for decades-—the ones who ended up valedictorian of High Schools and Universities that I worked with in Co-op Nursery schools with my kids were the ones with excellent memories.
The more a child reads the Classics (like Ben Carson) the more they Know and the higher the IQ.
Reading and memory is crucial. Memorization for young children is easy-—because their brain is designed to learn whole languages without effort. The “educators” know this—and IQ in children starts to deviate at one and a half-—because minorities never read to their kids and TV watching doesn’t use the brain and exercise the brain like a mother/father reading/teaching her own children. All day cares (chaos) (away from parents in formative years) create “stress” in children and mistrust, which hurts IQ.
The Valedictorian kid at four years old, had parents who were reading chapter books to him and he could tell you the distance of the Sun from Earth. He was an only child, so basically used adult language by five. Five syllable words gave him absolutely NO problem.
Quote from Beck interview with Ben Carson: “One of the things that I used to do is, I used to love to memorize things. I memorized poems, memorized Bible verses,” he said. “And other people didn’t know those things, and it began to make me feel that there was something special about me, and that I could learn things.”
Knowledge gives TRUE self-esteem. Schools inculcate a false hollow self-esteem for doing nothing and learning nothing now. It destroys Christian Ethics.
Don’t get me wrong...while very important, rote memorization is not everything. But I believe there was ulterior motive in the educrats attempts to denigrate r.m. The less students know about their past, the more likely they are to accept the socialist “brave new world” hogwash. The dismissal of learning dates and names from history has a pernicious effect. Like the saying goes, those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
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