Episode 132: The One Book About Education Everyone Should Read (Wed., Jan. 10, 2024)
A very unexpected and enjoyable book.
The lowdown about 20th century education developments written by a smart insider.
World War II was not the first time Germany tried to conquer the United States. The first time was circa 1890 when prestigious German universities sent hundreds of newly minted PhD’s back to their home country where they could conduct Pavlov-style experiments on American children.
Goal: to create in America the ideal socialist state.
John Dewey called this invisible invasion Progressivism.
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Bruce Deitrick Price
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION --- by --- Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 132 --- Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024
The One Book About Eduction Everyone Should Read.
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The Leipzig Connection is a slender, inexpensive paperback that tells you in a few hours all the fantastical personalities and theories that transformed education in America.
Nobody can explain the steady collapse of American K-12 unless they know that clever people were constructing the reasons and means for causing this collapse. Here's the whole story, short version: all the big shots involved in the transformation of American education earned their graduate degrees from a small number of elite German universities during the years 1875 to 1900. The world view at these universities was remarkably uniform, being a witches’ brew of Hegelian, Marxist, Socialist and Communist ideas.
According to the write-up on Amazon, John Dewey, the "Father of American education,” took the new radical German redefinition of education to mean “the reprograming of young brains, and applied it to his self-appointed task of creating in America the ideal socialist state.” John D. Rockefeller, hoping to reshape his public image from robber baron to education benefactor, bankrolled what was in effect a hostile take-over of our educational establishment. The Leipzig Connection lays out the story of the development of the educational malaise “which we have unknowingly dropped our children into, explaining not only declining SAT scores and the phenomenon of high school graduates who are barely literate, but also symptoms even more sinister: violence, prostitution and drug dealing in the schools, the self-mutilation of tattooing and body piercing, and teenage suicide.”
I read this book with great enthusiasm 17 years ago and placed my review on Amazon, titled Where American Education Went Wrong:
“Basically, this is a great place to start if you want to understand how American education got so messed up…. The book contains many quotations by all the heavy hitters (from Wilhelm Wundt to Rockefeller), with a footnote on almost every page, plus a dozen photographs and a long bibliography. The book definitely has a case to make, but does so in a scholarly way.
“Here's one of John Dewey's quotations: ‘The ultimate problem of all education is to coordinate the psychological and social factors.’ From there it's all downhill. Note that there's no mention of anything academic or scholarly. Note that Dewey could solve this ultimate problem to his immense satisfaction and students could still end up ignorant. Which is pretty much what he achieved for us.
“Don't suppose that these long ago manias have somehow moved on. They have not. In one of the weirdest pairings in history, far-left academics used Rockefeller's guilty millions to fund and shape Teachers College (and many others) with the express purpose of churning out indoctrinated teachers who would then be sent out into the countryside to indoctrinate the young.”
The young brains who went to Leipzig and other German cities saw themselves as brave warriors for a better future. They were creating three new fields, Psychology, Sociology, and Education. They were taking their new gospel to a backward hinterland, a.k.a. the USA.. They returned home festooned with glory, a PhD from a German capital. Naturally they had a very high opinion of themselves. But along with their erudition, they also showed a fascination with control and indoctrination. They had all the right answers so it was their duty to make sure every American accepted them.
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(ADDENDUM: My own book, Saving K-12 is a very different book but coincidentally picks up where the Leipzig book stops, mid-20th century. Both books were written by outsiders about developments they considered dubious and dangerous. Pretty much all the information published by the Socialist plotters and their admirers doesn’t see the danger. And that's the curse we live with. )