When most people say the word “education,” they mean something very specific, and almost everyone knows exactly what it is: reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, to be followed by history, science, literature, and the arts.
Now, if everyone in the discussion has this meaning in mind, they can make progress.
Unfortunately, the people who control the public schools and shape most of the debate have another meaning in their minds, and they know exactly what it is: social engineering, indoctrination, political correctness, and left-wing politics.
Parents want one thing, i.e., Education! The Education Establishment wants to provide something else entirely, i.e., Education!
Now you see the problem and the point at which the game begins. Parents want one thing, i.e., Education! The Education Establishment wants to provide something else entirely, i.e., Education!
In truth, almost no genuine communication or negotiations can occur. The parents don’t know this. But the Education Establishment knows it very well, and must try to seduce and sedate the public without any intention of revealing what is really going on or what the stakes are.
Throughout the 20th century, the definitive instruction that philosophers insisted on making was: define your terms. But somehow in the strange province of education, virtually nobody was encouraged to define their terms. So what we seem to have had was millions of words exchanged in a sort of semantic whiteout.
There was all this high-minded talk about Education with a capital E, the worth of Education, the glory of Education, the need to spend untold billions on Education, but what all the pretty verbiage was saying was: we want to control your kids and make them behave as we prescribe.
Here’s a way to rephrase all of this: the Education Establishment has set up an elaborate and expensive machinery to provide lots of products and services that the public never asked for. If you wish to improve the public schools, first, disable or ignore this machinery. Second, stand firmly in the semantic divide and tell these people: don’t talk about “education” because for you this is just a propaganda term, a cover-up word. Instead, tell us what you are going to do specifically about reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, science, literature, and the arts.
It’s only when you grasp that the Education Establishment lives in an alternative universe, both verbally and philosophically, indeed, a generally hostile universe, that all their bad ideas begin to make a strange kind of sense. You’ll have one ah-ha moment after another. Well, of course, if someone is plotting to murder the guy next door, of course, that someone will need to go out and buy some sort of weapon or poison. Of course.
Make a list of the pedagogical breakthroughs of the 20th century. This list will easily run to 100 items. Each of these methods is purported to be an All-Purpose Perfect Pedagogy that works for everyone all the time. So you hear names like Constructivism, Multiculturalism, Bilingual Education, Open Classroom, Self-Esteem, Child Centered Education, etc., etc...The point is, these methods are not intended to help with the teaching of a particular subject that parents want their children to know. Rather, each of these gimmicks is made to sound appealing in a general way; you almost believe it could do good in the world. But the closer you look at the actual results, the more you will realize that each one is a weapon, a poison, that serves to dumb-down children. Ah-ha!
There is the crux of the matter. These gimmicks do “good” only in that alternative universe focused on indoctrination and political correctness. They are not designed to do good in the world that most of us live in.
I think it’s a lot like dealing with people who are addicts. They have a lot of trouble stopping, and they have a lot of trouble telling the truth about whether they stopped. Left to their own devices, our Education Establishment will continually concoct new gimmicks whose only purpose is to shelter them from criticism and allow them to go on providing social engineering disguised as “education.” We have to cut them off at the semantic pass.
When the Education Establishment means by “education” what we the people mean by “education,” then we’ll get somewhere.
(For examples of what has been accomplished behind this semantic smokescreen, see “46: Public Schools Seem To Be Designed To Fail” on Improve-Education.org.)
