Posted on 08/08/2020 10:43:06 AM PDT by CharlesOConnell
We know why the deliberate dumbing down process was planned and implemented by "Educationists" in the period of 1880 to 1900, at the founding of mandatory, universal public education–with an unannounced agenda of propagating students’ educational failure–a design calculated to “crush the imagination” of school children. The complete set of base institutional features of public education–bells, attendance, location controls, memorization of facts irrelevant to any vocational path but only as fodder for standardized testing, an arbitrary regime granting conditional esteem–were all designed from the outset simply to regiment children, and not to foster their individual development.
(Nineteenth century common people were oriented toward self-employment, guarantor with property ownership of independence. They generally enjoyed a fine, middlebrow culture with high aspirations. Ordinary, common people often with little formal, institutional education, commonly only a few grades in school, were nevertheless possessed of a surprisingly high average culture level, based on primary education that looked for its model to the Christian acceptance of the classics of Western civilization, the good if not the great books. Their basic educational needs could easily be met in homeschools and one-room schools, by 40 hours literacy instruction and 42 hours for basic numeracy.)
It was for the purposes of handicapping the ordinary populations of Europe and America, to render them helpless, to ensure easy control, to regiment them for mass military service and factory employment, to eliminate competition for the accumulation of investment money, competition posed to the great financial families by average farmers, practical engineers and small entrepreneurs.
John Taylor Gatto documents this very long term process of deprecating curricula–colloquially termed “dumbing-down“–planned over an unimaginably long stretch of time, hundreds, indeed, thousands of years, beginning with of philosophical writings of Plato, Baruch Spinoza and the Kantian, Prussian philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Queues to 1:09:40
John Taylor Gatto: The Ultimate History Lesson
Edmund Burke Huey in his 1908 textbook wrote: “It is not indeed necessary that the child should be able to pronounce correctly or pronounce at all, at first, the new words that appear in his reading, any more than that he should spell or write all the new words that he hears spoken....And even if the child substitutes words of his own for some that are on the page, provided that these express the meaning, it is an encouraging sign that the reading has been real, and recognition of details will come as it is needed. The shock that such a statement will give to many a practical teacher of reading is but an accurate measure of the hold that a false ideal has taken of us, viz., that to read is to say just what is upon the page, instead of to think, each in his own way, the meaning that the page suggests.”
G. Stanley Hall (Huey’s mentor) spelled it out in 1911: “The knowledge which illiterates acquire is probably a much larger proportion of it practical....It is possible, despite the stigma our bepedagogued age puts upon this disability, for those who are under it not only to lead a useful, happy, virtuous life, but to be really well educated in many other ways.”
Edward Thorndike and Arthur I. Gates in their 1929 textbook: “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...”
In 1936 the Journal of the National Education Association summed up the broader philosophy: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing."
These recommendations are anti-intellecual and anti-academic. The American blueprint called for people to learn all they can, and rise as far as they are able. Educators with kind words for illiteracy are clearly serving some other blueprint. How casually they toss aside “reading,” “writing,” “learning to read,” “phonetics,” “language,” and the notion of accuracy in reading. Why bother, they suggest, with history, geography and arithmetic? Years later this philosophy would be correctly labeled “dumbing down.” Perhaps you feel that "educators" couldn't be engaged in "dumbing down." Genuine educators could not, but social engineers masquerading as educators could.
“Subjects such as arithmetic, language and history include content that is intrinsically of little value...”
Egads!
Nicola Tesla didn’t have anything to do with expensive, inefficient cars with a tent-spike logo, but he did beat Thomas Edison by discovering alternating current that went much, much further than Edison’s direct current.
Tesla submitted his patents to George Westinghouse. They had a no-lose system.
J.P. Morgan, pirate of multiple industries, set his sights on Westinghouse & Tesla’s operation.
Morgan told Westinghouse if he didn’t sell out, Morgan would crush him with lawyers.
Westinghouse folder, and General Electric was born.
Disgusting!
History and the arts that promote reason and analysis such as English and reading are regarded as disvalues because children who grow up with knowledge of history and the ability to think about it are less amenable to social experimentation and fanciful ideologies.
knowledge is power
Power is control
My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge
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Edison was a dirty dog, especially to Tesla.
So much, then, my friends, is done, in the common and established course of nature, for the welfare of our children. Nature supplies a perennial force, unexhausted, inexhaustible, re-appearing whenever and wherever the parental relation exists. 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; and, just as soon as we can make them see the true relation in which they and their children stand to this cause, they will become advocates for its advancement, more ardent and devoted than ourselves. We hold every parent by a bond more strong and faithful than promises or oaths, - by a Heaven-established relationship, which no power on earth can dissolve. Would parents furnish us with a record of their secret consciousness, how large a portion of those solemn thoughts and emotions, which throng the mind in the solitude of the night-watches, and fill up their hours of anxious contemplation, would be found to relate to the welfare of their offspring!
Horace Mann, Page 210.
John Dewey described Mann as "the patron saint of progressive education."
https://progressingamerica.blogspot.com/2011/08/reformers-in-education-your-children.html
(1) Bending the twig; the revolution in education and its effect on our children
Do not think that this campaign among professors is confined to America; it is distinctly international, as are all of the other active branches of the radical movement. At the last meeting of the International Congress of Socialist Students and Graduates, Professor Enrico Ferri, of the University of Palermo, in addressing the delegates, said:"We should introduce socialism into the student's mind as a part of science, as a logical and necessary culmination of the biological and sociological science. No need of making a direct propaganda which would frighten many of the listeners. Without pronouncing the word 'Socialism' once a year, I make two-thirds of our students socialists."
If you really want to grasp the idiocy of Dewey et al., teach yourself to speak, read, and write Japanese, then conduct your life in that language. Run a business, run a home, do your taxes...
I guess there are other languages that would serve as well. It’s just that, compared to Japanese, English, German, and Spanish are practically the same language.
If the goal of writing is to clearly convey an idea in the clearest terms, Horace Mann was a piss poor writer.
Thanks for posting this. (Emphasis added in bold.)
It reminds me of this earlier thread
https://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3794354/posts
which linked to this article
https://aeon.co/essays/why-working-class-britons-loved-reading-and-debating-the-classics
Very recently, anyone even mildly educated would respect learning, education, and our great store of literature. Of course, we all know that when this happy state was with us, people would pretend to read, would pretend respect for learning. But it is on record that working men and women longed for books, and this is evidenced by the founding of working men’s libraries and institutes, the colleges of the 18th and 19th centuries. Reading, books, used to be part of a general education. Older people, talking to young ones, must understand just how much of an education reading was, because the young ones know so much less. And if children cannot read, it is because they have not read. Doris Lessing – Nobel Lecture “On not winning the Nobel Prize” December 7, 2007
If you look closely German and English are very similar languages.
Yes, English is a Germanic language.
Ever read Mark Twain on the German language?
No. Can you provide a link? Thanks.
https:
//drive.google.com/file/d/0B4xHZbr3vgOmYm5teGlsSzQ4a28/view
For some reason I don’t seem to be able to make this a live link, but if you copy it into a browser it should work.
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