Years ago I wrote a sci-fi story in which disease wiped out the thousands of people living in a huge space station. All the technology continued on autopilot; sensors, missiles, and robots perfectly defended the space station. Humans approaching the station were attacked as enemy invaders.
The station became a type of doomsday machine. All the inhabitants had been killed. New arrivals would be killed.
I certainly wasn’t thinking about our public schools at that time but now I see a creepy similarity between what happened to that space station and what happened to this country’s Education Establishment. Both are running on an unintended autopilot and no longer serve the purposes for which they were constructed. Neither can be reasoned with or even approached.
Was this tragedy inevitable? Or an unlikely concatenation of events that should never have been allowed to happen? In any event, we can look back a century and observe our doomsday machine in creation.
History circa 1900 was as turbulent as our own. Intellectual debates raged. Communist and Socialist movements boiled in almost every country. Revolutionaries were trying to transform the governments of Russia, Austria, Germany, etc. Wealth was growing at an extraordinary pace, as were technology and inventions.
The most brilliant people became Doctors of Medicine, Law, and Philosophy. What did the also-rans do? Cynics have suggested that they invented new fields where they could be stars and empire-builders. Education, Psychology and Sociology did not exist much before this time. Once these also-rans had Ph.D. attached to their names, they could build departments at colleges across the country and lay down the law to the next generation. They bestrode new frontiers of knowledge; it was heady stuff. Unfortunately, most of these young stars first studied in Germany where their brains were steeped in a mishmash of Hegelian, Prussian, Marxist, Freudian, and other exotic influences. They returned to America almost as alien invaders.
John Dewey spelled out a new approach to education, where academic pursuits would be devalued and social activity would become the primary purpose. He went further, laying out a scheme whereby his disciples would commandeer Teachers College, and use it to indoctrinate generations of young teachers. These eager propagandists would be sent to the small towns of America to spread Socialism. All this was in full force by 1910.
More and more, I tend to think of Dewey as America’s Favorite Quack. He said a lot of extreme things and he had a messianic belief that he was supposed to push all of them to fruition. Regretfully.
Then history got even weirder. By 1920 the Russians had finished their Revolution and already gone off the deep end. Lenin concluded that Communism must occur in all other countries in order to save the Communist Party in his country. I.e., to save what quickly became Stalin’s lurid dictatorship.
Hundreds of front groups were formed in the US to promote Communism. They meddled big-time, certainly in education. This was bad enough but things got worse in the 1930’s due to the Great Depression. This tragedy pushed our educators entirely over the edge. In their judgment, it had to be clear to everyone that Karl Marx was right, capitalism was finished, and the New World being created by Moscow was clearly the future.
George Counts, perhaps the leading educator in 1932, expressed the mood: "That the teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most of their conquest is my firm conviction." Conquest! Willard Givens, boss of the National Education Association in 1934, stated: “[M]any drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control." Destroy and control! The NEA Journal expressed in 1936 the ultimate goal of all the gimmicks pushed by our Education Establishment from then to now: "Let us not think...in terms of specific facts or skills [that children should acquire] but rather in terms of growing.” No facts or skills!
In 1946 the NEA Journal proclaimed: "At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession." World government! Stalin, who would live until 1953, was that year contemplating whether he could conquer Europe. In that context, “world government’ is code for “do what Uncle Joe wants.” Practical translation: a vastly expanded gulag.
In short, there may have been some big brains in education in the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were some restless empire-builders. But by 1950 the field had shifted far to the left and become fossilized at that point. My impression is that the young people admitted to the field had to be yes-men who would support without questioning all the Received Wisdom. They were on autopilot.
At this point American education had become a machine that could not evolve or rethink its goals. In dumbing down the country, the Education Establishment had dumbed itself down!
American education pursued mediocrity with cunning and tenacity. As fast as one idea didn’t work and was ridiculed by the public, the Education Establishment devised 10 more. The “marketing department” at Teachers College et al has to be one of the great success stories of American history. These people invented Cooperative Learning, Constructivism, Self-Esteem, Reform Math, Open Classroom, Multiculturalism, Authentic Assessment, 21st Century Skills, and fifty others. All these things, I’d argue, were dumb and dangerous; but they sounded good enough that the public would pay more taxes to implement them.
No question, this doomsday machine was fixated on acquiring money, union jobs and power. Huge doses of all three. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of thought left over for the humble tasks of making sure kids can read, write and count. (Significantly, all the good minds appeared outside of the Education Establishment, most especially Rudolf Flesch, Samuel Blumenfeld and Siegfried Engelmann.)
But education was no longer the goal, and no longer the result. Education was the pretend product from a vast machinery whose real goals were ideological in nature. This doomsday machine manufactured education’s demise.
How do we stop the machine? For one thing, refuse to recognize its legitimacy. It’s no more legitimate than the auto-rockets and killer robots up there on my imaginary space station.
[See related article “49: How Do We Learn? How Should We Teach? Why Do The Experts Get Everything Wrong?” on Improve-Education.org.]
