Posted on 08/12/2023 4:41:46 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Bottom line, many of my articles conclude that our public schools operate at an unacceptably low level; that this mediocrity is the result of a strategy cunningly pursued by our Education Establishment for ideological purposes; and finally that the techniques employed in this strategy can be singled out, explained, and rejected. Let serious educational reform commence!
Alas, the public is perennially confused and unsure what to believe. They don't want to think badly about the people in the local school. They don't want to feel guilty about letting their children attend an inferior school. They would have no idea how to defend themselves if my conclusions are true. It's a lot to deal with. Besides, many of the gimmicks used in our public schools are like cheap magic tricks – extremely hard to figure out at first.
So it was a startling and pleasant surprise when I encountered a cluster of quotes from H. L. Mencken. This was one smart guy. About 90 years ago, when K-12 education had just begun to crash and burn, he said everything I'm saying, forcefully and aggressively. Obviously he was a super-quick study. Most of our media today have still not figured it out, or so they pretend.
Mencken was a famous celebrity at the time. All the smart people in the country read his columns. So we're left with this disconcerting fact – and you run into this again and again in education – that the top people had to know the gist of the machinations going on. Then, thanks to Mencken, the educrats had to realize that their neighbors also knew their scams. Did they stop? No, they forged ahead totally confident they could keep the public bamboozled and unsure what to believe. Same as it ever was.
H. L. Mencken, master of the olympian put-down, sums up education issues better than anyone else. Enjoy:
"The most erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States..." (1924)
"The notion that they [the public schools] have done and are doing any ponderable good is mainly a delusion. What they have actually done is a lot of harm. They have taken the care and upbringing of children out of the hands of parents, where it belongs, and thrown it upon a gang of irresponsible and unintelligent quacks." (1933)
"I believe that it would be rational to argue that the public school, far from combating this immense increase in stupidity, has been very largely responsible for it. For the true aim and purpose of the pedagogue, and especially of the pedagogue who is also a bureaucrat, is never to awaken his victims to independent and logical thought; it is simply to force them into a mold." (1933)
"The first grand effect of universal free education in the United States was to turn the American people, once so independent and self-reliant, into a race of shameless mendicants, looking to the government, as to some cosmic Santa Claus, for all their needs." (1933)
"To take a Ph.D. in education in most American seminaries, is an enterprise that requires no more real acumen or information than taking a degree in window dressing....Most pedagogues...are simply dull persons who have found it easy to get along by dancing to whatever tune happens to be lined out. At this dancing they have trained themselves to swallow any imaginable fad or folly, and always with enthusiasm. The schools reek with this puerile nonsense. Their programs of study sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane. The teaching of the elements is abandoned for a dreadful mass of useless fol-de-rols... Or examine a dozen or so of the dissertations...turned out by candidates for the doctorate at any eminent penitentiary for pedagogues, say Teachers College, Columbia. What you will find is a state of mind that will shock you. It is so feeble that it is scarcely a state of mind at all." (1928)
"I have maintained for years, sometimes perhaps with undue heat: that pedagogy in the United States is fast descending to the estate of a childish necromancy and that the worst idiots, even among pedagogues, are the teachers of English. It is positively dreadful to think that the young of the American species are exposed day in and day out to the contamination of such dark minds. What can be expected of education that is carried on in the very sewers of the intellect? How can morons teach anything that is worth knowing?" (1925)
ERGO: K-12 is a hazmat zone. Understand what goes on there. Defend your children against its sinister ways. Thomas Jefferson said you can be ignorant or free, not both. Sadly, we have schools suitable for slaves. We need public schools suitable for a free people.
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Bruce Deitrick Price's new book is "Saving K-12 – What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?"
(This article was published on Renew America several years ago. When I googled it, I found that people assume the article is about slaves in the American South. No, I'm ruminating on the public schools in America. They really seem to be focused on creating an ignorant and passive society. Everyone should oppose this evil phenomenon.)
All my writing about K-12 promotes the same thesis, that we should have better schools, and we easily could have better schools. If you want to know more about this project, or to support it, please visit --http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform
...
Available as a PDF download.
Source: https://cdn.mises.org/Road%20to%20serfdom.pdf
Prisons.
101
https://19thcenturyamericaneducation.weebly.com/prussian-model.html
The Prussian education system was designed to indoctrinate children from age 6 to 16 into full compliance with the state and its military leaders. It was born of Prussia's military failings in the Napoleonic Wars.1 The system consisted of tiers, with all education being free for eight years.0 The aim was to keep the ruling elites in power while encouraging the masses to be loyal to the government.3 Today, the Prussian education system is the model for education in many modern nations, including the United States.2
There are lots of different ways to educate children.
The Prussian model is just one, but it seems to be the only one most people will accept, and it was "designed to keep the ruling elites in power."
Yep.
First of all: Our “public schools” ceased to exist in the 1970s...
We have had only “government schools” since then...
Also, the children were the parents’ children but they have been the government’s children since the 1970s...
“Public schools” were controlled by parents in the neighborhoods where the students lived...
It was one of the key factors in the United States having the finest education system on the planet...
“Government schools” are controlled by federal bureaucrats, including the courts...
It was the key factor in the ascension of communist tyranny and the shackles under which we now exist...
In the late 1800s, the Marxist Fabians predicted and planned the takeover of the American education system as the ONLY way to defeat capitalism and impose Marxism in the United States..
They did the job...
To say that our system is like the Prussian is to miss the exciting subtleties. Everyone embraced that method; the government was doing just what it promised to do. We have a situation where the government says it’s gonna do A but the whole system is devoted to B.
I am interested in the dishonesty of our education establishment.
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Thank you for this excellent article.
I find it very interesting that he saw the very thing public education has descended to way back in the early 1900's.
I work with two 40+ guys who had a, “wait, what?” moment a few years ago when I informed them that Abe Lincoln was indeed the first Republican President.
I agree with Mencken. Once you do that you have no alternative than to eliminate government schools. They are filled with idiot teachers and administrators. Either they all need to be replaced or an alternative must be used to teach children. I homeschooled my children as that was the alternative twenty years ago.
The way in which the Democrat Party thinks of Blacks, is no different now than when Lyndon Johnson created the policy.
I think the important truth the kids don’t know is that the more you know, the more you can know. That’s why they should get busy knowing a lot.
Because the converse is true, that the less you know, the less you can know. This is the shameful goal that our professors pursue.
Black guys?
No, white guys raised in Orange County CA. Talking to them it appears there was an effort to obfuscate the fact that Lincoln was a Republican.
20 years ago I quite my career to become a stay at home mom.
Volunteered daily at my kids school and homeschooled them after school. They had Algebra down by the end of the 3rd grade. (Now one is an MD and the other a PhD in AI. Was sooo worth the pay cut!)
Things in public schools have gone down hill major ever since.
Irony? Or is it still possible to self-educate even when handicapped.
In the late 1800s, the Marxist Fabians predicted and planned the takeover of the American education system as the ONLY way to defeat capitalism and impose Marxism in the United States..
/\
And they did it
useing an axiom
from the very same book they
hated ....
Pro 22:6 - Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
.
Volunteered daily at my kids school and homeschooled them after school. They had Algebra down by the end of the 3rd grade. (Now one is an MD and the other a PhD in AI.
/\
The o.p. and that testimony brings to mind something that occurred to me recently
The curiosity of a child knows no bounds ,,, till they attend .gov schools
.gov schools kill curiosity by usurping it.
They don’t teach so much as they leash and bore silly on purpose
Give a child free rein to learn
and it’s like a dog chasing a ball
They never want to stop,
and they pursue it with gusto.
RE: “...and bore silly on purpose.”
I’ve been writing about education more than 30 years and want to say that this is a great summary of everything I keep discovering.
Normal people don’t want to bore others. But our Education Establishment uses it as a weapon, a drug, a killer.
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