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Education
Monday, April 22, 2013
Letters From A Former Progressive
Mike Adams’s distillation of liberal-progressive, secular religion on college campuses.
Quote:
…the main problem in higher education is not that we don’t teach religion at the university. The problem is that we teach false religion.
We teach kids that they may define the unborn as property if it will facilitate their sexual lifestyle or their economic well-being.
We teach kids that both their conduct and idea of right and wrong are determine by society and culture respectively.
We teach kids that man has the capacity to construct a utopian society so long as he is freed from the constraining idea that he is broken by sin and separation from God.
All of this is dangerous because it amounts to self-worship. That is dangerous because it requires a rejection of God, not just a rejection of tradition. Somewhere in the process, the idea of inalienable rights gets lost. Rights suddenly come from man. And that means man can take them away. These ideas have consequences.
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Withered Fruit Of Progressive Education
While liberal-progressive educators preen themselves about teaching students “to think,” knowledge gained in public schools has declined dangerously since student activist days in the 1960s. Along with the diminished breadth and depth of subject knowledge has come a reduced ability to reason systematically and to understand the nature of the degradation of society wrought by liberal-progressivism.
Declining educational quality in our public schools is egregious in two aspects: what is taught and shrunken vocabularies. Today’s textbooks present falsified versions of history, economics, and political science. Students read too little and thus acquire inadequate vocabularies. Words are the essential tools of the mind for understanding and analyzing concepts and processes.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr. analyzes the vocabulary problem on the City Journal website. Read A Wealth of Words: The key to increasing upward mobility is expanding vocabulary.
I haves written extensively in The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution about what is taught as opposed to teaching methodology.
If students don’t know the facts of American history and don’t understand the complex political, philosophical, and religious issues that produced that history, it is absolutely impossible for them to form meaningful judgments about the politically-correct, multi-cultural doctrine they are given in the classroom.
Even Derek Bok, a vigorous defender of social-justice touchstones such as affirmative action and multi-cultural, PC education, has been compelled to confront the shortcomings of “learning how to think.” Fomerly president of Harvard University, Mr. Bok was called back to that post after Lawrence Summers was forced out in 2006 for offending feminists.
Mr. Bok wrote: “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”
John Dewey, during the first half of the 20th century, was the single most influential voice in corrupting American education. His philosophical pragmatism used Darwinian evolution as a pseudo-intellectual rationalization that everything is in constant flux, so there could be no such thing as timeless and universal principles of morality. In Dewey’s pragmatism, there are only actions that work or do not work; there is no right or wrong; the end justifies the means.
An earlier version of Dewey’s pragmatic sophistry, according to Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle, corrupted public morality and led to the political and economic downfall of Periclean Athens in the BC 5th century Peloponnesian War.
Much has been written about the disintegration of American education. Among the many are three that you should make a point to read: Thomas Sowell’s Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas; Alan Charles Kors’s and Harvey A. Silverglate’s The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses and Diane Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms.
Professor Ravitch catalogs the ideologies that began to take over American education around 1910. Professor Sowell describes the effects of those ideologies on present-day school curricula. And Professor Kors, collaborating with ACLU attorney Silverglate, describes the Big Brother enforcement methods of liberal-progressive-socialists to foreclose all classroom or campus dissent against the radical socialism that is taught as the uniquely scientific truth.
Today in the United States education is a cross between trade school and Socialist Youth indoctrination. The end product is a confused mush of “self esteem” with little solid content, coupled with a rabid desire to punish the United States for it purported crimes against humanity.
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Friday, December 14, 2012
Unexpected Aspect Of Education Cost
See Three Cheers for Emory University, by Joseph Salerno on The Circle Bastiat website.
Mr. Salerno’s article highlights the strong connection between graduate education and the social sciences (a concept invented by French socialists in the late 18th and early 19th centuries). Since the ending decades of the 19th century in the United States, graduate study in social sciences understandably has been driven by the ideology of socialism. This led to creation of the eastern liberal establishment, notably Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and our present-day liberal-progressive-socialist, Barack Obama.
The underlying precept of social sciences is the scientistic belief that only the intelligentsia understands what is wrong with society. Only the intelligentsia, our self-appointed guardians, have the special knowledge to create social and political structures to compel the rest of us to conform to behavioral modes that the socialist intelligentsia find acceptable.
For more extensive background, read The Corruption of Public Education: How It Happened.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Teachers’ Unions Promote Anti-American Socialism
Teachers Fill Marxism Conference to Map Future Indoctrination of School Kids
Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Another Reader Reaction To Education Reform
Regarding Reform Education If The Constitution Is To Survive, Frank Madarasz emailed the following:
I have been preaching to my friends for sometime about how the progressive/socialists have taken over our educational system. Johnson formalized the take over as you point out in the article, but the progressives have been at it since the turn of the 19th century.
I have often told my friends about the Frankfurt School, an institute of Jewish Communists, headed by Herbert Marcuse. They taught that Communism as practiced the Soviet Union was wrong; it should not be done through economic reform but through education and social engineering. They brought their ideas to topflight American universities when they were forced to leave Germany in the late 1930s. Here they imbedded themselves in departments of Social Studies, Education and Journalism. By the 1960s their protégés had infested the university educational system and Johnson’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act opened the gates for them to get into grade and high schools.
And to think I was made to study Eric Fromm in my English class at Alfred.
As your article points out, it will take a “long-term” strategy to reclaim education from the liberal-progressive-socialists. My question is, just who will do this? Certainly not the Republican Party.
Response To A Critique Of Education Reform
A thoughtful reader, with whom I usually disagree, commented in response to Reform Education If The Constitution Is To Survive:
Thomas,
I find it interesting that you hold up pre-Christian Greek theories of education as a model for inculcating religious teaching into the schools to save us from the clutches of the evil liberals. The Greeks did not espouse Christian ideals, because, of course, they predated the Christian era.
One could turn your argument around and ask why the Greeks did OK without Christianity if religious teaching in the schools is so necessary to hold on to our culture.
My response:
Yes, the age of Plato and Aristotle pre-dated Christianity. But it was contemporaneous with the age of the Old Testament prophets. Both Plato, et al, and the prophets envisioned the same new ordering principle for society: the individual human soul opened to God and individually responsible for his actions.
It was this ordering principle, universally taken for granted in our nation’s founding era, the ordering principle that underlay our unwritten constitution, of which John Adams said, “We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.
Liberal-progressivism is a severely retrograde movement, reverting to the pre-Greek, pre-prophetic era of the Pharaohs of Egypt and the oriental despots of the Babylonian, Assyrian, and Persian empires. In those societies the individual counted for nothing. All flowed from the ruler, usually worshipped as divine, and, in all cases, the only conduit between the gods and the masses. While all of them had legal codes and rules of societal conduct, those rules were whatever the sovereign political state saw fit to impose.
This is an accurate description of the essential nature of a liberal-progressive-socialistic political state in which the relentless thrust is to reduce all citizens to dependence upon the collectivized welfare state. The liberal-progressive-socialistic state tends inherently toward tyranny, as in Lenin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s National Socialist Germany.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Reform Education If The Constitution Is To Survive
Traditionalists (conservatives who wish to preserve our original constitutional ethos) need to create a long-term strategy to reclaim education from the liberal-progressive-socialists.
Most parents want their children to become sufficiently proficient in the 3Rs to get a personally rewarding and well-paid job when they leave the educational system.
Equally important, transmitting the ideals of religious morality via education is society’s only effective defense against political tyranny.
In his “Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture” (1933), Werner Jaeger capsules the classical Greek conception of education, a standard against which we can measure present-day secular education ideas. He wrote:
“The ancients were persuaded that education and culture are not a formal art or an abstract theory, distinct from the objective historical structure of a nation’s spiritual life. They held them to be embodied in literature, which is the real expression of all higher culture.”
Professor Jaeger continues: “...Education is the process by which a community preserves and transmits its physical and intellectual character…. men can transmit their social and intellectual nature only by exercising the qualities through which they created it: reason and conscious will. Through the exercise of these qualities man commands a freedom of development which is impossible to other living creatures, if we disregard the theory of prehistoric mutations in species and confine ourselves to the world of experience.”
Contrast this to the liberal-progressive-socialistic practice of multi-cultural education, designed expressly to degrade and erase the foundational traditions of Western civilization, particularly Judeo-Christian morality.
The concept of moral and cultural Ideals and their transmission through education is a distinctly Greek contribution to the Western world.
The Greek term that comprehensively embodied the spoken and written Ideals of their culture is paideia, of which the Wikipedia says: “Paideia” is found in the word “Encyclo paedia .” The Greeks considered Paideia to be formed by the aristocratic class, who were said to have intellectualized their culture and their ideas. The culture and the youth are then ‘moulded’ to the ideal. The aristocratic ideal is the Kalos Kagathos ; “The Beautiful and the Good.” This idea is similar to medieval knights, their culture and the English word gentleman.”
This classical ideal is not even on the radar of present-day liberal-progressives.
Like Soviet Communists (see Milan Kundera, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”), our present-day public educators wish to obliterate the inconvenient, two-hundred-eighty-year-old traditions of American political society.
In Kundera’s novels (which are based on historical experience), Czech youth grew up under Soviet-controlled education believing that Czechoslovakia always had been part of the Soviet Comintern. They were entirely ignorant of the real history and traditions of their homeland. Kundera’s characters in the novels muse about retouched official photos from which now out-of-favor, but formerly important, Czech socialist party leaders had been erased; how their names were removed from all news archives, text books, and official records, making them “non-persons.”
Rather the same process has been applied to our text books by the liberal-socialist committees of educators who slithered into the tent of education after President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society began, for the first time, to fund local schools under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The founding fathers are more or less marginalized as hypocritical slave owners, while obscure women and people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds are more prominently featured. Such people, of course, deserve credit for the real contributions they made to the survival and growth of the United States. But without the founding fathers, the United States simply would not exist today.
Without knowledge of them and of the Western European, and especially English, historical background, it is literally impossible to understand the United States. Thus today we get Ivy League cum laude graduates who are ignorant of American history, have no idea where Omaha, Nebraska, is to be found, nor have the slightest understanding of international capital flows. All they “know” is that the United States is a greedy, capitalistic, racist, and imperialistic nation that is responsible for all the world’s troubles. They freely denounce people as Nazis or Fascists without the slightest specific knowledge of the socialistic political systems described by those terms.
Small wonder that Americans have near the lowest level of personal savings in the world and some of the highest rates of illegitimate birth ever recorded. Such markers of social disintegration can be correlated directly with the capture of our educational system by liberal-socialists intent upon indoctrinating students with secular materialism. Liberal-socialists regard high cultural ideals as unacceptably elitist; theirs is the vision of reducing everyone to the lowest common denominator of economic, social, and political rank, which they call social justice.
And, in the midst of the hedonistic orgy, at the very time when national politics has assumed more the characteristics of a holy war than of a debate, we confront a rising tide of immigration, much of it from Latin or Asian societies with cultural traditions very different from ours, traditions that encompass no experience of democratic self-rule comparable to ours.
Returning to high educational standards and the late-19th century “melting pot” conception of education is almost our only hope if the United States is to remain united. When education ceases to preserve traditions of morality and civic virtue, societies begin to fracture into warring camps. In such disorder, a tyrannical leader like Napoleon, Franklin Roosevelt, or Adolph Hitler always steps forward to restore order at the expense of political liberty.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Big Brother Is Watching Over You
Education’s inculcation of liberal-progressivism has become the vanguard of socialism’s assault on the Constitution. In addition to that, some public schools are subjecting students and parents to police-state terror.
All for your own good, of course.
Monday, October 15, 2012
Liberal-Progressive Education For A Socialist Society
To undermine the Constitution and institute socialism, liberal-progressives in the 1920s switched from assassination with dynamite and pistols to radicalizing the judiciary. In the 1960s they began to radicalize students using taxpayers’ funds.
The Radicalization of Teacher Education
College students are presented visions of radicalism and mob action to throw existing society into chaos. A substantial percentage of “respected” college professors today were mob-action student radicals in the 1960s and 1970s who were intent upon “bringing the Vietnam War home and killing the pigs.” Notable among them are Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, prominent educators and the close friends and counselors of President Obama. They were also founding leaders of Weatherman, the most radical and murderous of the student anarchist groups in the 1960s and 70s.
The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution
Chapter Four – Religion of The Liberal Jihad
The liberal-progressive jihad has been most dangerously consequential in education. Radicalized young students fan out across the country and, in turn, radicalize hundreds more when they become teachers. Hitler knew what he was doing when he created the Hitler Youth corps. Brain-wash them when they’re young, and they’re warped forever.
Liberals adopted the prescription of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and transformed education from a method of developing character and preserving the traditions of society into a value-free methodology. Teaching history was abandoned, or history was re-written under multi-cultural education, so that students could be radicalized to believe that the United States is an evil nation with a sordid past.
John Dewey was the single most influential voice in corrupting American education. His philosophical pragmatism used Darwinian evolution as a pseudo-intellectual rationalization that everything is in constant flux, so there could be no such thing as timeless and universal principles of morality. In Dewey’s pragmatism, there are only actions that work or do not work; there is no right or wrong; the end justifies the means. From this has come a generation of chicanery and deceit, glaringly exemplified in the corporate scandals of companies like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom during the 1990s dot.com boom, and the 2008 meltdown of the banking system, not to mention President Clinton’s marital infidelity and lying under oath to obstruct justice in Federal judicial proceedings.
The Liberal Jihad - The Hundred-Year War Against the Constitution
Chapter Thirteen – Radicalized Education in the Liberal-Progressive Madrassas; Chapter Summary
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Friday, September 14, 2012
Liberal-Progressive Education For Socialism
Obama’s now notorious dismissal of individual effort in building our economy captures a principal aspect of John Dewey’s early 20th century ideas about progressive education. What Dewey called “education for democracy” was intended to steer educators away from teaching hard subjects. They were instead to spend their time on group projects emphasizing collective effort rather than individual excellence.
What David Riesman later in The Lonely Crowd called the inner-directed, individualistic personality was to give way to the outer-directed, go-with-the crowd personality beginning to appear in the 1950s. Group-think was to prepare unsophisticated young students for life in the “good socialist society” that liberal-progressives confidently anticipated in the 1920s and 30s, the socialized society that liberal-progressive Franklin Roosevelt imposed upon us during his 1930s Great Depression.
I’m indebted to Frank Madarasz for the link to Honey, You Didn’t Build That, a film clip that depicts the education goals of liberal-progressive-socialism.
