My kids are all grown now but one thing that really bugged me (and them) during middle and high school was that everything had to be a group project. Which usually ended up meaning my kids did most of the work and the slackers in the group got the same grade (or sometimes better, go figure.) I wish, now that I'm more in the know with all the cr*pola, I'd raised more of a stink with the teachers.
I absolutely detest group projects myself. However, I think they're usually due to laziness on the part of the teacher rather than some sort of collectivist idealism. They only have to grade 6 projects instead of 5. Plus, most of the time while the project is running, it's "break off into your groups and discuss everything while I read the paper."
It's sort of like when the teacher has you pass the test to your neighbor and grade it. Less work for them.
Here's the answer. Read it and weep.
Dewey’s Experimentalism10 represented a new faith which was swallowed whole in Watson’s behaviorism. According to Childs, the unavowed aim of the triumphant psychology was "to abolish thinking, at least for the many; for if thinking were possible the few could do it for the rest." For Dewey as for the behaviorists, the notion of purpose was peculiarly suspect since the concept of conditioning seemed to obsolete the more romantic term. A psychological science born of physics was sufficient to explain everything. The only utopia behaviorism allowed was one in which the gathering of facts, statistical processing, and action based on research was allowed.It is tempting to bash (or worship) Dewey for high crimes (or high saintliness), depending on one’s politics, but a greater insight into the larger social process at work can be gained by considering him as an emblem of a new class of hired gun in America, the university intellectual whose prominence comes from a supposed independence and purity of motives but who simultaneously exists (most often unwittingly) as protégé, mouthpiece, and disguise for more powerful wills than his own. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are prime examples of the type in our own day.
Dewey was determined his experimental subjects would be brought to actively participate in the ongoing experiments, not necessarily with their knowledge. All education was aimed at directing the responses of children. Orwell is really satirizing Deweyists and Fabians in his post-WWII dystopian nightmare, 1984, when Winston Smith’s execution is delayed until he can be brought to denounce the people he loves and to transfer his love to Big Brother. In Dewey’s world this is only bringing Smith into active participation. That it is in his own degradation is final proof that private purposes have been surrendered and the conditioning is complete.
"[We] reject completely the hypothesis of choice. We consider the traditional doctrine of ‘free-will’ to be both intellectually untenable and practically undesirable," is the way Childs translates Dewey. The new systems theorists, experimentalists, and behaviorists are all Wundt’s children in regarding human life as a mechanical phenomenon.11 But they are polemicists, too. Notice Childs’ hint that even if free will were intellectually tenable, it would only cause trouble.
The Underground History of American Education
John Taylor Gatto