The Dewey educational revolution in the USA (and here) and what it has wrought. From NRO: Of the many regrettable anomalies unleashed and then institutionalized by John Dewey and his now-vast legion of followers in American K–12 schools and teachers’ colleges (and their worldwide disciples), two have been particularly damaging to the American Republic: first, the emptying out of specific, graduated, cumulative academic content in elementary schools and its replacement by helter-skelter play, experimentation, and uncoordinated, ephemeral “units,” and, second, the related replacement of high-school history with present-minded “social studies” and classic literature with contemporary fads (e.g., the International Baccalaureate’s recent elimination of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons in favor of works such as the comic book/“graphic novel” Persepolis). “The effect of Dewey’s philosophy on the design of curricular systems was devastating,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in 1964 in his Pulitzer Prize–winning Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. “Progressive education” has proved to be the great enemy of real educational progress, bringing about an extraordinary “dumbing down” of the hapless and helpless students subjected to it. The profitable success and low quality of the commercial audio-visual and literary culture that preys on them is a sad commentary on the result. We now have at lest two generations of ignorant (not dumb, just ignorant) students who dont know what they dont know. For example about 20% of young people vote for the same greens who believe that taxing air can stop bushfires.... A proper education would have delivered students with the intellectual skill set to see this for the nonsense and skullduggery that it is,.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 11:02:51 +0000
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