1) What is motivating these educators?
2) While I agree totally with your education philosophy, you will not see these reforms in the government schools until there is competition in the form of school choice.
Yes, what is motivating them? More and more, I am convinced they know exactly what they’re doing. They want leveling. They want enforced equality, we can put it that way. I believe that John Dewey and all of his gang are best described as Fabian Socialists, carefully undermining things but never talking about it. I’m convinced that the top people are pursuing a brave new world where everybody will be happy and equal and more or less like everyone else. So they’re perfectly willing to sacrifice individualism and individual academic success, in order to create what they consider a more fair society. This is more or less standard socialist thinking. But the dirty trick that occurred in America was that no one was allowed to vote on these matters. The Education Establishment simply schemed in the dark of night and gave us the crummy schools that we now have.